U.S. counts Indian boarding school deaths for first time but leaves key questions unanswered

ProfileSectionstvFeaturedMore From NBCFollow NBC NewsAt least 500 Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending Indian boarding schools run or supported by the U.S. government, a highly anticipated Interior Department report said Wednesday. The report is the first step toward understanding what assistance people need to overcome that trauma, she said, including mental health services and language revitalization, since children were abused and forbidden from speaking their native languages at the schools."Even though it’s ceased or stopped in many places, the vestiges of it is still continuing today," said James LaBelle, Sr., who is Inupiaq and a vice president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit that helped compile the report and advocates for survivors of Indian boarding schools. “I think we have a long way to go.”The report notes the investigation will likely "reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”The Interior Department’s investigation located 53 gravesites across the country — a number that is also expected to increase — but did not name the schools to prevent “well-documented grave-robbing, vandalism, and other disturbances to Indian burial sites.”Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to lead the department, announced the investigation last June. It is intended to provide a basis for how the U.S. government will reckon with its troubling history by researching and locating potential gravesites, repatriating children’s remains and offering resources and access to the affected Indigenous communities to address the ongoing impact of the boarding schools.Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, who led the investigation and is a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), said most of the staff who worked on the report for the department are Indigenous.