Now, the search is on for missing children and graves in the US. “In the United States there needs to be a real acknowledgement across the board with critical masses – not only top-down from the government, but how do we get Americans of all walks of life and backgrounds to understand the significance of this?” King said. That was when King said she realised that she exists today because her father and ancestors survived the institutions.
In June, following the discovery of hundreds of Indigenous child graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School in western Canada, US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland ordered a federal task force to investigate graves at the schools. The US operated 25 of these schools and supported hundreds more that were run by churches, most often the Catholic Church. The US government ran at least 367 schools ( PDF) like this one – forced assimilation institutions that aimed to exterminate Indigenous language and culture, according to the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. In The Meriam Report, a survey of the living conditions for Native Americans across the country, Lewis Meriam wrote that the school “was as distressing as any place I have visited”. One-third died of disease and starvation.Īccording to a researcher who visited the Charles H Burke Indian School in 1927 as part of a survey of Indian boarding schools in the US, a Navajo girl died from tuberculosis the morning of his visit. In the 1860s, the ancestors of the Navajo students had been forced to march in what is known as the “Long Walk” to Fort Sumner, where they were confined. In 1927, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal government agency, converted former army buildings at Fort Wingate, about 210km (130 miles) west of Albuquerque, into the school for Navajo and Zuni children.