(This is a link to a Washington Post story published today (8.30.23) about the boarding schools, and how more of them have been identified. If you click on the link in the story to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the story, you will be taken to the interactive map, which includes new schools identified in South Dakota.)
From The Washington Post:
By Dana Hedgpeth and Emmanuel Martinez
A nonprofit group has identified 115 more Indian boarding schools than has been previously reported, offering new insight into the role of religious institutions in the long-standing federal policy to eradicate Native Americans’ culture through their children.
For more than a century, generations of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children were forced or coerced from their homes and communities and sent to live at schools where they were beaten, starved and made to abandon their Native languages and culture. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced last year that the federalgovernment ran or supported 408 such schools in 37 states, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaii, from 1819 to 1969.
The new list released Wednesday by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition uses a different criteria, bringing the number of known Indian boarding schools in the country to 523 in 38 states. In addition to the federally supported schools tallied by the Interior Department, the coalition identified 115 more institutions that operated beginning in 1801, most of them run by religious groups and churches.
Read the rest of the story here.