The U.S. Interior Department says it reviewed over a million pages of federal records to produce a two-volume report on Native boarding schools.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the department’s second and final volume on July 30. It acknowledges wrongdoing in federal boarding school policies and also makes recommendations, which include apologies to communities for forcibly taking children from their homes to assimilate them. It also calls for a national memorial and programs that offer healing through language and culture.
Alaska boarding school survivors and their advocates welcome the report, but say it only scratches the surface.
Although government-run boarding schools for Alaska Native children go back to the 1800s and continued into the 1960s, Alaskans have only begun to come to terms with their impact.
The Interior Department’s report counted more than 400 federal Indian boarding schools in the United States and its territories, with 22 in Alaska.
The second volume also estimates the national death toll of Native American children at these schools as about 1,000, with 32 of them in Alaska.
This latest report also includes the personal stories from boarding school survivors like Jim LaBelle.
“They’re pretty shocking really. The hard part has yet to happen, that is to do that really hard research,” LaBelle said.
In April, LaBelle and other Alaska Native survivors were invited to share their stories in private sessions at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Oral historians from the National Native Boarding School Healing Coalition recorded their accounts, as part of a nationwide effort to document boarding school trauma.
LaBelle described the physical and sexual abuse students experienced at the Wrangell Institute in Southeast Alaska, where he and his younger brother were sent when he was 8. LaBelle said his mother didn’t have a choice, because the boys were forcibly taken from her.
LaBelle said the federal report, though extensive, is only part of Alaska’s story.
“It’s only beginning. We need to look at the churches that participated contractually,” he said.
The Interior Department’s report acknowledges that its investigation only addressed federal schools, not other institutions run by churches and religious organizations.
Benjamin Jacuk, director of Indigenous research at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, said those religious schools also played a huge role in damaging the lives of Native children and their families.
“You can’t make healing happen,” Jacuk said, “unless you understand the wound.”
The wound still festers today, Jacuk said, going much deeper than federal reports reveal.
Jacuk has focused his research on church records and correspondence between religious organizations and other institutions. He said they reveal the true motives for running schools.
“It really shows these were not meant to help Alaska Native, American Indian, Native Hawaiian people, but really a means to an end to erase us,” Jacuk said.
Jacuk said the Heritage Center’s research has uncovered a disturbing pattern of collaboration between religious institutions and other entities to exploit Native children for their labor in fisheries, agriculture and mining, as well as a concerted effort to separate them from their land and resources.
“A lot of these institutions did things for money, not for the wellbeing of the people,” Jacuk said.
LaBelle believes he was a victim of exploitation, when at the end of his junior year at Mt. Edgecumbe, he was farmed out for labor. When LaBelle returned home to Fairbanks that summer, he was met at the airport by a family from Creamer’s Dairy, who told him he had to come with them.
“That’s what happened. I just dutifully went along,” he said. “I don’t recall ever getting paid.”
“There’s so much more than we’re learning about, that nobody knows about,” said Selena Ortega-Chiolero, a museum specialist for the Chickaloon Tribe in Southcentral Alaska.
Ortega-Chiolero attended the Heritage Center’s week-long listening and educational sessions in April. She and other tribal members have been looking into boarding school records. She said it’s important to understand that the abuses did not happen in a vacuum.
“All of these different agencies worked together to make it happen,” she said. “It could literally happen again, and until we reveal those truths, we’re just perpetuating really bad behavior.”
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is working on another front. She said she hails the U.S. Interior Department’s report, and is co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill to establish a Truth and Healing Commission to delve deeper into the federal government’s role in operating the schools.
“One of the most profound reasons for Congress to establish this commission is that it is time,” Murkowski said in a speech on the Senate floor on July 24. “It is time the federal government take responsibility for the legacy of its harmful policies.”
Murkowski said that the more truth is understood about this era, the more healing there will be.
