PBS News Hour

GEOFF BENNETT: For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were forced to attend boarding schools, many of them supported by the federal government in the name of assimilation and tied to land possession.

Those schools stripped children of their language and culture, and they suffered abuse, neglect, beatings, and forced child labor.

Deaths are estimated to be in the thousands.

Stephanie Sy focuses on new findings about the role of churches and religious groups.

STEPHANIE SY: A federal probe into Native American boarding schools has been under way since 2022, but, recently, a nonprofit group identified even more schools.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has found 523 boarding schools operated across 38 states, including 115 previously unidentified schools that were largely run by Christian churches.

The largest concentration of schools were in Oklahoma and the Four Corners region of the Southwest, home of the Navajo Nation.

The nonprofit's deputy chief executive officer is Samuel Torres, and he joins me now to discuss this new research.

Samuel, thank you so much for joining the "NewsHour."

So, I understand your latest research found dozens more boarding schools that were operated in Hawaii, as well as Oklahoma.

Talk about that and the other significant findings you have uncovered.

SAMUEL TORRES, The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition: Well, we're grateful for the opportunity to continue to work on this type of project.

And building on top of that 408 federally funded or supported schools identified in collaboration between the Department of the Interior and ourselves at the Healing Coalition, we felt it was really important to build off of that and really make sure that we're including the scope of those 115 institutions where evidence has not been shown to connect the federal government to those boarding schools.

It's really important for those institutions that we have identified in Oklahoma, in Alaska and Hawaii, among many other states, where there are an increased number of those institutions, where really we're starting to scratch the surface on how to identify the role of those Christian denominations, of the federal government, of the administrators and the operators of those schools.

STEPHANIE SY: The Christian denominations involved, which include the Roman Catholic Church, have begun their own investigations into the boarding schools they ran.

What do you expect to come of that?

And do we have a full picture of any abuse that occurred at the schools?

SAMUEL TORRES: Well, I think it's important to state initially that, while there's much more known about what happened at those federal Indian boarding schools than the privately controlled ones, I think it's -- this is where those archival records are really profoundly important to be accessed, to be able to understand what the depth of those details looks like.

What we do know, though, is that the treatment and methods for operating Indian boarding schools largely utilized a lot of the same strategies toward a central goal of assimilating Native children by what we have heard so often in our own work,individuals being deprived of the influences and connections of their families, their communities, of their tribal nations often being punished for speaking their own language, practicing their traditions and at times even experiencing severe punishment, sexual abuse, spiritual abuse and even death.

So, we really just are continuing to still asking the same kinds of questions on what has happened at these institutions.

We are told and hear the stories of our relatives, our friends, those that we're connected with at the Healing Coalition about how they were treated in these institutions, whether they be in federally operated institutions or in privately controlled ones.

And, quite honestly, the time is now for us to be able to look into what that treatment was like from those records' source, because we have those stories.

And it's not that these stories haven't been told.

It's that they haven't been listened to.

And if they can be coupled by the access of these documents, we can start looking at, in a more comprehensive effort, a fuller scope of what happened at these Indian boarding schools, whether they be federally controlled or privately run.

STEPHANIE SY: It was back in 1969, from what I understand, that the U.S. Senate issued several hundred pages of a report on the Native American boarding school system, and that did lead to some reforms.

I just wonder, Samuel, what you would like to see happen now, as more and more of this comes to light.

SAMUEL TORRES: Really, what we have never seen to this point is a comprehensive investigation that actually, in a culturally responsive way, bring in boarding school drivers and ask them to share their testimonies.

The Healing Coalition is calling for a truth and Healing Commission on U.S. Indian Boarding School Policies Act, currently passed out of committee and waiting for a Senate floor vote, Senate Bill 1723.

We are hoping for the bill to be introduced and passed out of committee in the House of Representatives as well.

We're looking for a multiyear commission process that does more than just brings these questions to the table.

It asks communities, Native leaders, tribal leaders to come in to help support this process and ultimately will publish a series of calls to action that will provide a blueprint for how do we restore that which was disrupted.

STEPHANIE SY: Samuel Torres with The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, thank you so much.

SAMUEL TORRES: Yes, thank you for your time.