Counting Up the Victims of Genocide
By 
The Washington Post attempted to count the number of dead Native children on the grounds of the genocidal Indian Schools. The best number it could come up with is 3,100, which is almost certainly low, but these things are likely to be underestimated due to record keeping lags.
Bone by bone, two archaeologists liftedthe 130-year-old skeletal remains of a Native American girl from the shallow grave in a roadside cemetery. A handbone, a rib, a chunk of vertebrae and, finally, her skull.
Almeda Heavy Hair had been forcibly removed from her family andtheGros Ventretribe when she was 12 and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of hundreds of institutions operated by the U.S. government to eradicate Native Americans’ culture and assimilate them into White society.
She died in 1894, four years after arriving, without ever seeing her family again. Now, 19 of Almeda’s relatives and others from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana— some crying, some prayingas they watched her bones beingexhumed — had come to take Almeda home.
Almeda was one of thousands of children who died in the custody of the U.S. government during a dark chapter in American history that has been long ignored and largely hidden.
A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has documented that 3,104 studentsdied at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970, three times as many deaths as reported by the U.S. Interior Departmentearlier this year. The Post found that more than 800 of those students are buried in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how, in many cases, children’s bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes.
The Post’s investigation found the deaths by drawing on hundreds of thousands of government documents that also revealed how children were beaten and harshly punished if they did not adhere to strict rules in the classroom — and in the fields, laundry rooms, kitchens or workshops where they often were forced to spend half their days.
“These were not schools,” said Judi Gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, whose relatives were sent to Indian boarding schools. “They were prison camps. They were work camps.”
The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition andaccidents, records show. Dozensdied in suspicious circumstances, and in some instances the records provide indicationsof abuse ormistreatment that likely resulted in children’s deaths. A 10-year-old boy was fatally shot in 1912 at an Alaska school, a newspaper reported. A girl in Oregon “fell from a high window there & was brought home a corpse” in 1887, according to ateacher’s diary.
There’s much more to say here and you should read this and then some of the many books on the issue. A good place to start is Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, though it leans a bit too heavily on the settler colonialism construction for my tastes, which is another back of the cocktail napkin idea that people love but really doesn’t explain as much as it claims. Most of your Civil War heroes like Sherman and Sheridan were as bad as Nazis when it came to the Tribes too. Deal with your history. It still frames us today.