3,100+ Indigenous Students Died at U.S. “Boarding Schools”: WaPo Native American Journalist Dana Hedgpeth

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show with a damning new investigation by The Washington Post, which has determined that more than 3,100 Indigenous students died at boarding schools in the United States between 1828 and 1970. That figure is three times the number of deaths reported earlier this year by the U.S. Interior Department. The _Post_’s yearlong investigation also found more than 800 students were buried in cemeteries at or near the schools, which were designed to crush Native American culture. Many of the children had been forcibly removed from their families and tribes.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by the report’s lead author, Dana Hedgpeth. She’s a Native American journalist who’s been at The Washington Post for 25 years, an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina. She co-authored the new investigation headlined “More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures.” She co-wrote the piece with Sari Horwitz, investigative reporter and author of Justice in Indian Country, and also another piece headlined “They took the children: The hidden legacy of Indian boarding schools in the United States.”

It’s great to have you with us. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dana. Why don’t you lay out all that you found, and this in the year with the first Native American cabinet member? And they also had come out with a report, but your number was three times more, 3,100 dead children at these schools. Explain what these schools were.

DANA HEDGPETH: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

As you mention, we did work here at the Post with an incredible team of journalists. Sari Horwitz, my colleague, is an award-winning journalist here at the Post. We worked with a team of data reporters and visual forensics reporters to do our investigation.

And as you said, we found that 3,100 Native American, Alaskan Native and Hawaiian Native children died at these boarding schools. These are not what folks think of typically when you think of a boarding school. These are schools that were specifically designed, created with the sole purpose by the U.S. government of eradicating Native American culture and languages, for the number one purpose to assimilate them into white society. The schools were started in the 1800s. They ran for a period of about 150 years. And we really dug deep into hundreds of thousands of records to look into what really happened at these schools, what were the conditions, and found that, sadly, many of these children did not make it home and died at these institutions.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Dana, could you explain, you know, what brought you to do this investigation in the first place? And, you know, what did these children, 3,100 — more than 3,100 children — what was the cause of death? How did they in fact die?

DANA HEDGPETH: Very good question, and thank you for asking. First off, for me, I’m Native American. I’m an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe from North Carolina. And as you played in one of your intro pieces, Secretary Haaland has said this many a times. Her assistant secretary, Bryan Newland, has said this many times. There’s not an Indigenous person in this country who doesn’t know the story of Indian boarding schools or who’s not been impacted by this. These are widely known stories in Indian Country. Unfortunately, they are not as known in mainstream press and in society. They’ve largely been ignored and hidden and just not talked about. So we really wanted to shine a light on this history.

As you mentioned, Secretary Haaland, kudos to her, because for the first time, she’s the only interior secretary to shine the light on her own department, who ran these very schools. They were started under what was then called the War Department — we now know it as the Pentagon — and then they were put under Interior. So, she took huge steps to do a three-year-long investigation looking at these schools, and she found that many of these schools did have — mistreat students. They were terribly run.

And we expanded upon that work. Again, the Interior Department looked exclusively at federal records. We expanded beyond that, built upon that and looked at hundreds of thousands of records involving census rolls, school enrollment records, death certificates, historical maps, talking to researchers who had done thesis papers and for years — worked for 20 years on researching specific schools. We talked to dozens of Indian boarding school survivors who are still alive, in their sixties, seventies and eighties, to hear their recollections of these schools.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how was there such a discrepancy? I mean, clearly, she, the first Native American interior secretary, cared deeply about this issue. Why did they come up with 800, you come up with 3,100? And one of the things you looked at were the cemeteries on the grounds. I mean, how many schools in this country are connected to cemeteries?

DANA HEDGPETH: It’s a very good and sad question, exactly. I have two children of my own, and their schools, thankfully, don’t have cemeteries on their grounds. No school should have a cemetery on its ground. It’s a terrible concept to think of.

The Interior Department did spend three years on their investigation. They produced two reports that dug deeply — again, she was the first secretary to look into this. It is a very personal issue for Deb Haaland. Many of her relatives went to these boarding schools, so it’s deeply personal for her. She’s of the Pueblo of Laguna Tribe. She knows this story very well.

We took it a step further. They found 973 documented deaths at these Indian boarding schools. And we took a step further by expanding our base. We looked not just at federal records. We looked at school records. We looked deep into the work that many researchers had already done. The sins of these schools are not unknown in Indian Country. Many great Native American journalists have been writing about this subject for years. We just took upon that work and expanded it to really give it a complete public accounting that it hasn’t had before and to really tell these stories.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Dana, could you tell us one of the stories, the one, for instance, that you begin with, Almeda Heavy Hair?

DANA HEDGPETH: Almeda’s story is incredible. It’s sad and deep. She’s from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 30 miles from the Canadian border in Montana. And we got to know about this tribe through a previous story we had done looking at sexual abuse of about a thousand children at these schools. That story came out earlier this summer, so this was our second investigation. We kept in touch with President Jeff Stiffarm, Mike Black Wolf, their tribal historic preservation officer there. And we knew that they were going to be attending and exhuming three of their students who, sadly, attended Carlisle and died. In 1890, Almeda, John Bishop — John Bull, excuse me, and Bishop Shield were part of 22 students who were taken from their reservation to Carlisle.

It still gives me the shivers to think of how we were so — such an honor to be able to watch their journey as they were exhumed at Carlisle, in a very sterile place with these white marble tombstones. Think of a mini Arlington in a way. We watched as those tribal members and 19 of her relatives stood for two days and watched them to be exhumed. They sat on traditional buffalo robes. They used ceremonial pipes. They sang. They drummed. They spoke in their own tribal language. These are the very things that those children would have been punished for. They would have been beaten, with food withheld. And they, sadly, died. Those three children died within four years of being at Carlisle.

Then, as part of the ceremony of bringing them home, they were put in new pine boxes. Their remains — think about this — from 130 years ago were very carefully exhumed, put in new pine boxes, wrapped in buffalo robes, with traditional items, moccasins, earrings for Almeda, and put in these pine boxes and taken in a caravan for a four-day, 2,000-mile journey back to Montana, where they were buried in their traditional way on a beautiful hillside on their homeland. As John Stiffarm, one of the ceremonial leaders, said, when the Army officials who now are in control of the Carlisle property asked him, “Do you what the dirt?” he said, “No, leave that dirt here. They’re going to their homeland.” You can tell that makes my voice quiver still, because it’s so powerful in meaning. Everyone, across any culture, it’s devastating to have your children taken. Then, to watch them be exhumed 130 years later and brought to their homeland, there’s nothing more powerful than that. We wanted to tell that story. And Almeda was our way to tell that story.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Dana, if you could talk about the young boy in 1970 — it’s not only children, thousands who died at these schools — but those who tried to escape?

DANA HEDGPETH: That’s right. The story of Johnson Kee West, who tried to escape to go back home, there were, sadly, many stories like his, dozens of stories of children who tried to run away from these schools and make it back to their homeland. The thing I’ll never forget about his death, sadly, is that on his death certificate, it was marked as “frozen.” He died trying to get across a mesa, snow-covered hills, a mesa, back to his homeland.

I don’t think any of us can really fathom, A, being taken from your home at a young age. Some of these children were as young as 5. Some of them were older teens who stayed at the school because they wanted them to be part of the forced manual labor that these children were required to do at these schools. One of our sources called these not schools, but, rather, prison camps. They were work camps. They were not meant to educate Native American students to become doctors or lawyers. They were meant to “educate” them — I say “educate” with air quotes — “educate” them in manual labor. Often the students were reported to be two, three years behind academically. Some students who survived these schools talk of coming home and having skills that were completely unusable in their communities, if they managed to survive them, or just not being able to speak their tribal language anymore and really being out of sorts, having been away from their homes for so long.

AMY GOODMAN: Dana Hedgpeth, we only have about a minute left. How has the impact of these schools, closed at the beginning of the ’70s, impacted, what, half a century later?

DANA HEDGPETH: Wow, that’s a good question and a big one. The impact of these schools is still being felt in many ways. As I mentioned, there are several hundred survivors from these schools. They’re dealing with the traumas of having gone through these schools, of having been taken away from their tribe, their communities, their families. That has a generational impact on how they raise their children or how they did not know how to raise their children, of grappling what it means to be away from your home, away from your community, away from your traditions, away from your language. That’s left a huge knowledge gap, as we Native Americans call it, in language and in culture. There is a rebuilding of those languages and of those culture traditions. But still it is very, very hard to deal with that trauma. Many Native American survivors are only now beginning to talk about these traumas from decades ago.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to — 

DANA HEDGPETH: And a lot of that is to do with the reckoning.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us. And unfortunately, we’ve run out of time. But your work is incredible. And we’re going to link to your articles. Dana Hedgpeth, Native American journalist with The Washington Post, member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina, 25 years at The Washington Post. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.