On Monday, President Biden declared the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument in Pennsylvania. The designation acknowledges the decades of trauma inflicted on tribal communities throughout the U.S. and in Arizona.
That’s according to National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition At the height of the boarding school era in the 19th and 20th centuries, 59 operated in Arizona, the second highest number of any state behind Oklahoma, which had 95. Some were in urban centers like Phoenix and Tucson, but most were scattered across the Navajo and Hopi nations and elsewhere on Indigenous lands in the Four Corners area.
“No single action by the federal government can adequately reconcile the trauma and ongoing harms from the federal Indian boarding school era,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. But, taken together, the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to acknowledge and redress the legacy of the assimilation policy have made an enduring difference for Indian Country. This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation.”
Over more than 100 years, federal officials sometimes forcibly removed Native children from their families to attend the schools designed to assimilate them into white culture. They were often subjected to emotional, physical and even sexual abuse. Almost 1,000 children are known to have died, but the actual number is likely much higher.
Haaland, whose great grandfather and grandparents were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools, began an effort to shed light on the boarding schools in 2021. And in October, President Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community to formally apologize for the federal government’s role in the system.
The Indian boarding school system began in 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act and eventually included more than 400 such facilities across 37 states.
The 24.5-acre Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument will be managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of the Army and is the 432nd site in the national park system.
