Native Tribes Sue U.S. Over Abuse and Deaths at Boarding Schools

Two Native American tribes on Thursday filed what they called the first major lawsuit against the U.S. government’s notorious system of Indian boarding schools, which for decades splintered families and stripped Indigenous children of their language and culture.

The tribes argued that the federal government betrayed the promises it made in treaties to provide for the education of tribal youths. Instead, using money set aside for tribes, the government shunted Native children into schools where they were beaten, abused and forced to assimilate.

The class-action lawsuit said the survivors of the schools and their heirs have never been compensated for the “irreparable injuries” they have suffered, and said they are now owed an accounting of how the money was spent.

“Rather than provide what was promised and what was legally owed, the United States forcibly separated Native children from their parents, and systematically sought to erase their cultural identity, killing, torturing, starving and sexually assaulting many in the process,” the lawsuit said.

The suit, against the Department of Interior, its Bureau of Indian Affairs, its Bureau of Indian Education and its current leader, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, was brought by the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma on behalf of Native nations whose children attended boarding schools.

It was filed in federal court in central Pennsylvania, a symbolically significant location that was once home to the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School. There, children were renamed, and were forced to dress in Western clothes and have their hair cut, under the school superintendent’s philosophy of “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”