Biden creates Native American boarding school national monument to mark era of forced assimilation

HARRISBURG, Pa. — (AP) — President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania on Monday to honor the resilience of Indigenous tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions.

The creation of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument — announced during a tribal leaders summit at the White House — is intended to confront what Biden referred to as a “dark chapter” in the nation's history.

“We're not about erasing history. We're about recognizing history — the good, the bad and the ugly,” Biden said. “I don't want people forgetting 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now and pretend it didn't happen.”

Thousands of Native children passed through the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. They came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that were meant to erase Native American traditions and “civilize" the children so they would better fit into white society.

It was the first school of its type and became a template for a network of government-backed Native American boarding schools that ultimately expanded to at least 37 states and territories.

“About 7,800 children from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlisle — stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands. It was wrong making the Carlisle Indian school a national model,” Biden told the White House summit.

Thorpe's great-grandson, James Thorpe Kossakowski, called Biden's designation an important and “historic” step toward broadening Americans' understanding of the federal government's forced assimilation policy.

“It's very emotional for me to walk around, to look at the area where my great-grandfather had gone through school, where he had met my great-grandmother, where they were married, where he stayed in his dorm room, where he worked out and trained,” Kossakowski, 54, of Elburn, Illinois, said in an interview.

The children were often taken against the will of their parents, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases.

There are ongoing efforts to return the children's remains, which were buried on the school's grounds, to their homelands.

"They represent 50 tribal nations from Alaska to New Mexico to New York and I think that symbolizes how horrific Carlisle was," said Beth Margaret Wright, a Native American Rights Fund lawyer. She has represented tribes trying to get the Army to return their children's remains and is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, which has children still buried there.

Carlisle was a model for many other schools that came after it and a huge majority of tribal nations that exist today have stories of their children being sent to Carlisle, Wright said.

In September, the remains of three children who died at Carlisle were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

At least 973 Native American children died at government-funded boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an Interior Department investigation.

During a dozen public listening sessions over the past several years hosted by the Interior Department, survivors of the schools recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for using their native languages.

The forced assimilation policy officially ended with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.

Biden in October apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for the schools and the policies that supported them.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families’ will, said no single action would adequately address the harms caused by the schools. But she said the administration's efforts have made a difference and the new monument would allow the American people to learn more about the government's harmful policies.

“This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation," Haaland said in a statement.

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the assimilation campaign.

Monday's announcement marks the seventh national monument created by Biden, who has also altered or enlarged several others. In 2021, he restored the boundaries of two monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, on land in southern Utah that's sacred to tribes after the monuments were shrunk under former President Donald Trump.

The 25-acre site (10 hectares) in central Pennsylvania will be managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Army. The site is part of the campus of the U.S. Army War College.

For Wright, one of the most powerful places at the Carlisle school are the imprints of since-removed tracks for trains that delivered children there.

“There's no longer train tracks there, but you can see where they might have been and where their children would have arrived for the first time and seen a place so far away and seen a place so horrific,” Wright said.

Native American tribes and conservation groups are pressing for more monument designations before Biden leaves office.

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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.