At least 31 Alaska Native children died in U.S. federal boarding schools: report

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) — At least 31 Alaska Native children died in federal boarding schools, according to the latest investigative report from the U.S. Interior Department.
This information “is not complete,” and the Interior Department acknowledged that the actual number of children who died while in Indian boarding schools “is greater,” said the second volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report.
The report documented 973 Indigenous students who died in such institutions between 1819 and 1969.
According to the authors, as reported by Anchorage Daily News on Sunday, the true number is certainly higher.
Among the dead, the report lists six Aleut/Unangan children, five Tlingit/Tlinkit and 10 “Eskimo.” Another 10 are listed only as “Alaskan,” with no specific tribal or cultural affiliation noted, the report said.
Though investigators reviewed some 103 million pages of U.S. government records, according to a letter from Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, neither volume of the report accounts for children who may have died at institutions outside the scope of the report’s narrow definition of a “Federal Indian Boarding School.”
For example, omitted from the tally are American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children who attended “Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories, and Indian boarding schools operated by religious institutions and organizations that received no U.S. government support.”
One of the appendices for the latest volume lists the tribal affiliations of students known to have died in Federal Indian boarding schools, though the authors intentionally do not make public their names or what institutions they were enrolled in, according to the Anchorage Daily News report.
Investigation finds at least 973 Native American children died in U.S. government boarding schools. During the yearslong investigation, researchers also identified 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at 65 different schools across the Federal Indian boarding school system based on available records.
The investigation report confirms there were 417 government-run schools in 37 states and territories, 22 of which were in Alaska, though there were far more small, typically religious facilities that fell outside the formal definition of a federal Indian boarding school used by investigators.
“I welcome the Interior Department’s second and final investigative report further detailing the U.S. government’s role in operating the federal Indian boarding school system and its impacts on Native children and their families,” said Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, in a statement. ■