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Washington Post documents more deaths of Native children in Arizona boarding schools

Students in an art class at Phoenix Indian School in 1900.
Office of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior
Students in an art class at Phoenix Indian School in 1900.

The Washington Post has documented three times as many deaths of Native American children in Indian boarding schools as the U.S. Interior Department has acknowledged.

The newspaper’s investigation found that 3,104 students died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970.

That includes at least 279 in Arizona — nearly double what the federal government reported earlier this year.

Arizona had the second-highest number of schools, behind only Oklahoma.

President Joe Biden declared the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument in Pennsylvania on Monday. It acknowledges the decades of trauma inflicted on tribal communities throughout the U.S. and in Arizona, which had the second-highest number of the schools in the nation.

Many students reportedly died from infectious diseases, malnutrition and accidents. Dozens of other deaths were attributed to "suspicious circumstances" or possible abuse.

Federal officials sometimes forcibly removed Native children from their families to attend the schools designed to assimilate them into white culture.

The Washington Post also determined that more than 800 of those students are buried in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how some children’s bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes.

President Joe Biden issued a formal apology for the practice in October.