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Federal Indian Boarding Schools — the Interior Department's Investigation (2022–2024)

The U.S. Department of the Interior's own accounting of the federal Indian boarding school system: 417 schools, 210 of them operated by religious institutions, at least 973 documented child deaths, and burial sites at 65 schools — every figure stated as the report states it, with its caveats attached.

Issuing office
U.S. Department of the Interior (Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland)
Reports
Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report — Vol. I (2022) and Vol. II (July 2024)
Scope
417 federal Indian boarding schools, 1819–1969, across 37 states or then-territories
Headline figures
210 of 417 schools operated by religious institutions; at least 973 documented child deaths; 74 burial sites at 65 schools; more than $23.3 billion in estimated appropriations made available (1871–1969, inflation-adjusted)
Posture
Official federal investigation. The report documents deaths, burials, and abuse in its own qualitative terms; it publishes no count of abuse victims or accused perpetrators

The investigation

Between 1819 and 1969, the United States ran a system of boarding schools for Native children. In 2021 the Department of the Interior — led by Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary — opened the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to account for it. Its second volume, released July 30, 2024, is the federal government’s fullest accounting of its own system.

A school counts in the report only if it meets four criteria: it provided on-site housing or overnight lodging; it was described in records as providing formal academic or vocational training; it was described in records as receiving U.S. Government funds or other support; and it was operational before 1969. On that definition the system comprised 417 schools — up from the 408 of Volume I, a net change the report itemizes — comprising 451 specific sites across 37 states or then-territories, including 22 schools in Alaska and 7 in Hawaiʻi. The report separately identifies 1,025 “Other Institutions” that did not meet all four criteria but were used to advance similar assimilation goals; they are not part of the 417, and this page does not add them to it.

The report’s own statement of what the system was for is not hedged. Its conclusions state that assimilation of Indian children through the schools “was intentional and part of that broader goal of Indian territorial dispossession,” and that the “intentional targeting, removal, and confinement” of Native children “was both traumatic and violent.” Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland, in the release announcing the report: “federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways.”

The churches’ role

This archive exists because of what religious institutions did inside systems like this one, and the report quantifies that role directly. Of the 417 schools, 210 were operated by a religious institution or organization. The Department concludes that at least 59 religious institutions and organizations received U.S. Government support to operate or support schools in the system — a public-private partnership, the report notes, that “might face constitutional challenges today.” The 210 figure excludes religious schools that received no U.S. Government support.

The report’s breakdown by affiliation (data as of January 1, 2024):

The report attaches a caveat that this page repeats rather than paraphrases away: “Individual religions do not add up to the total Federal Indian boarding schools because, over time, many operated under multiple religious institution or organizational affiliations.” The breakdown sums to 218 — above 210 — because a school that changed operators across eras is counted under each affiliation it had. Both numbers are the report’s, and both are printed here.

The money

The Department estimates that Congress made appropriations available of more than $23.3 billion in FY2023 inflation-adjusted dollars between 1871 and 1969 “for the Federal Indian boarding school system as well as other similar institutions and associated assimilation policies.” Four qualifications travel with that figure, because the report insists on them:

Any use of “$23.3 billion” without those qualifications is not this report’s figure.

The children who died

The report confirms that at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending federal Indian boarding schools. It defines the count carefully — a student who died during a period of enrollment between 1819 and 1969, from available records — and then states its limits in its own words:

"This information is not complete… The Department acknowledges that the actual number of children who died while in Indian boarding schools is greater."

The 973 is a documented floor, not a death toll: the Department did not examine records held by other agencies or by religious institutions, and some records no longer exist. In the same work, the Department identified by name 18,624 Native children who entered the system — expressly not a comprehensive count of all who attended.

Burial sites

The Department confirms 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 different schools: approximately 53 marked and 21 unmarked, on the available records. Here again the report states its own limit: the actual number of burial sites is “likely far greater.” The Department does not publish the sites’ specific locations, to protect them against grave-robbing and vandalism — a restraint this page observes as well.

What the report says about abuse

Volume II documents abuse in the system’s own terms — and it does not publish a count of abuse victims or of accused perpetrators. What it says is this. Its first recommendation asks the United States to acknowledge “that many Indian children suffered physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at these institutions, and that many Indian children died.” Its findings record that the system “deployed militarized and identity-alteration methods” to assimilate Native children, “predominately used the manual labor” of those children, and suppressed Native languages and cultural and religious practices “through punishment, including corporal punishment.” Survivor testimony gathered by the Department’s Road to Healing tour — many participants “shared traumatic experiences of physical or sexual abuse or witnessing physical or sexual abuse occurring to other children” — is reproduced in the report as testimony, and this page presents it the same way.

One boundary matters. Figures in circulation — at least 122 priests, sisters, and brothers at some 22 Catholic boarding schools accused of sexually abusing more than 1,000 children — come from The Washington Post’s separate investigation (May 2024), not from the Interior Department. The Post’s accounting is its own, rests on different records, and is attributed to the Post wherever this archive uses it. It is not a DOI finding, and this page does not present it as one.

The Catholic bishops’ response

On June 14, 2024, at their plenary assembly in Louisville, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved — by a vote of 181 to 2, with 3 abstentions — a pastoral framework, Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise, presented by Bishop Chad Zielinski. The framework’s text apologizes: “We apologize for the failure to nurture, strengthen, honor, recognize, and appreciate those entrusted to our pastoral care,” and again, “our sincere apology for the Church’s failure to respond adequately to those entrusted to our pastoral care.” It states: “The Church recognizes that it has played a part in traumas experienced by Native children,” names boarding schools among “the most significant sources of trauma,” and commits the Church to transparency about boarding-school history and to cooperating with Tribal and government investigations.

Its limits are part of the record too. The bishops’ press release announcing the framework does not itself use the word “apology” — the apology is in the framework’s text. And the framework does not specifically mention sexual abuse at the schools; its language is of trauma, mistreatment, and neglect. The framework also gives a different Catholic school count — 84 Catholic-run boarding schools, over a different period (1819–1979), from a different source — which is not DOI’s figure of 80 and is not merged with it here.

In this archive

The Interior report names institutions, not accused individuals, and this page follows it: no individual is accused here on the report’s authority. The accused clergy of the Catholic boarding schools enter this archive the documented way — through the diocesan lists in the Directory, where the men the Post and the dioceses identified stand at the posture their own records assign them — and the system they served is traced on The Pattern page. What this section adds is the frame the federal government itself has now supplied: the system’s size, its church operators, its money, its dead, and its own words about what it was for.

Sources

THE NETWORK — ONE PUBLISHER, EVERY FRONT

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