Joe Biden announced Monday that a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania will be designated a national monument to honor the resilience of Native American tribes whose children were forced to attend the school.
The creation of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument — announced during a White House summit of tribal leaders — is intended to address what Biden called a “dark chapter” in the nation’s history when hundreds of such institutions existed.
“This is not about erasing history. This is about acknowledging history — the good, the bad and the ugly,” Biden said. “I don’t want people to forget 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now and pretend it didn’t happen.”
Thousands of Native American children attended the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe.
The children came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that aimed to erase Native American traditions and “civilize” the children so they would better integrate into white society.
It was the first school of its kind and became a model for a network of government-supported Native American boarding schools that eventually expanded to at least 37 states and territories.
“Some 7,800 children from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlisle — stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands. It was wrong to make the Carlisle Indian School a national model,” Biden said at the White House summit.
Thorpe’s great-grandson, James Thorpe Kossakowski, called Biden’s designation an important and “historic” step in broadening Americans’ understanding of the federal government’s forced assimilation policies.
“It’s very emotional for me to walk around, to look at the area where my great-grandfather went to school, where he met my great-grandmother, where they were married, where he stayed in his dorm, where he drilled and trained,” Kossakowski, 54, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Children were often taken against their parents’ wishes, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaskan children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases.
Efforts are underway to return the remains of the children, who were buried on the school grounds, to their homelands.
“They represent 50 tribal nations from Alaska to New Mexico to New York, and I think that symbolizes the horror that was Carlisle,” said Beth Margaret Wright, an attorney with the Fund for Native American Rights. She has represented tribes trying to get the Army to return their children’s remains, and she is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, which still has children buried there.
In September, the remains of three children who died in Carlisle were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.
At least 973 Native American children died in government-funded boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an investigation by the Interior Department.
During a dozen public hearings in recent years organized by the Interior Department, survivors of the schools recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for using their native languages.
The policy of forced assimilation 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.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were sent to residential schools against their families’ wishes, said no single action would adequately address the harm caused by the schools. But she believes the administration’s efforts have made a difference and that the new monument will provide an opportunity for the American people to learn more about the government’s harmful policies.
“This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new to too many people in our country,” 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 said.
The announcement makes it the seventh national monument created by Biden, who has also changed or expanded several others. In 2021, Biden restored the boundaries of two monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, on lands in southern Utah that are sacred to the tribes after the monuments were scaled back by former President Donald Trump.
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