YAKIMA — A federal investigation has found that at least 973 Native American children died while attending boarding schools operated or supported by the U.S. government.
Those deaths included two children from the Yakama Nation. The list doesn’t identify the children, nor does it say at which school they died or their cause of death. And the number of deaths isn’t final, said Jon Olney Shellenberger, a Yakama Nation citizen who is volunteering with others to locate unmarked graves at the Fort Simcoe Indian boarding school site on the Yakama Reservation.
“We’re assuming that those numbers for deceased students are complete, which they’re not. They’re probably way under,” he said.
That becomes clear when checking disparate archives, databases and other sources of information about the two boarding schools for Indigenous children in the Yakima Valley. In March 1892, five boys attending the boarding school for Native children in what is now downtown Yakima died after eating wild parsnips.
It is possible the boys’ tribal affiliation wasn’t reported. The affiliations of 238 students who died are unknown, the list says.
The list was released July 30 as the second part of a study from the U.S. Department of Interior. Shellenberger and Arlen Washines, who is part of a state tribal advisory committee developing recommendations about the boarding schools, said while the effort is valuable, there are missing pieces.
Schools in Yakima County
The Sisters of Providence ran that boarding school for Native children as part of St. Joseph Academy from 1889-96. It primarily included students from the Yakima and Kittitas valleys. The boarding school building for Native students faced Naches Avenue between “C” and “D” streets.
The Fort Simcoe school in the Lower Yakima Valley operated from the fall of 1860 to 1920 and reached its highest enrollment of 180 students in 1904. The school closed after the two-story classroom and assembly building, which stood between the girls’ and boys’ dormitories, burned down in December 1919. The large dormitories were demolished in the 1950s as part of the work to create Fort Simcoe Historical State Park.
Fort Simcoe was the site of the first on-reservation Indian boarding school in the United States. The Yakama Nation owns the land, which it leases to Washington state parks.
Shellenberger thinks the report is a good start, but he is concerned that people will take the report as complete and “this is not at all complete,” he said.
“It’s great work, but it misses the mark in a number of areas,” Shellenberger said. “It’s not pushing the cart (forward) and it’s not interpreting results. It didn’t shed any new light to us.”
The recently released report confirms at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 different school sites. Among its eight recommendations, it says the federal government should help people find the records of their family members who attended federal Indian boarding schools.
It also recommends the federal government should help them find burial sites of relatives who died while at school and repatriate their remains to their homelands if they choose to.
“The difference comes down to … should and shall. There’s a lot of shoulds, not a lot of shalls,” Shellenberger said. “That’s a huge legal difference.”
Recommendations
The report includes an updated list of federal Indian boarding schools to include 417 institutions across 37 states or then-territories. They operated between 1819 and 1969 and included 17 schools in Washington state.
It’s the second and final volume of the investigative report called for as part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland launched the initiative in June 2021.
The second volume builds on the initial volume published in May 2022. It covers deaths, the number of burial sites, participation of religious institutions and organizations, and federal dollars spent to operate these locations, according to a news release.
It also includes policy recommendations for consideration by Congress and the executive branch to work for healing and redress for Indigenous communities.
State efforts
Washines, a Yakama Nation citizen, is working with others on the state level, along with tribes and tribal communities, to address harms caused by Indian boarding schools and other cultural and linguistic termination practices. He is among five members of the Washington State Truth & Reconciliation Tribal Advisory Committee.
Based in the state attorney general’s office, the committee is conducting research and will develop recommendations to guide the state in efforts to redress hurtful policies and practices, according to information online. Members will release their report in June 2025.
Washines went through the recently released federal report.
“It’s progress, I guess. We’re further along than we were,” he said. “We’re a little bit further along, which is good.”
But like Shellenberger, he has questions about who contributed to the report and where the information came from.
“I think more people involved were of a technical background, putting together information,” Washines said. “I think there should have been more selective process of getting more people involved throughout the United States, not just certain areas.”
As for the report’s number of Native American children who died while attending boarding schools operated or supported by the U.S. government, “I know there’s more than that. It’s much higher than that,” he added.
In the process of publishing the two volumes, federal staff and contractors reviewed approximately 103 million pages of federal records, officials said.
“Which we know is a problem because school records aren’t only within federal facilities,” Shellenberger said. And there’s no indication of where the statistics for deaths came from, he added.
He doesn’t know if Fort Simcoe students are included in the list of deaths, Shellenberger said. He also wonders if detailed information about student deaths, including their names, will be provided directly to tribes.
“We want hard data. We don’t want a report, we want hard data and we want to know where you’re getting that” information, he added.
And there’s nothing about empowering the sovereignty of tribes to go out and do their own work” for boarding schools on their reservations, he said.
“That’s a major point. It is going to be very important for tribes to have their own funding and do their own work for boarding schools on their own reservations.”
Among its recommendations, the report says the federal government should acknowledge and apologize for operating and supporting Indian boarding schools, where children’s hair was cut and traditional language, clothing and religious practices were outlawed and punished. Along with those forced assimilation practices, children suffered physical and sexual abuse and other trauma that has reverberated through generations.
The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people is among the legacies of that intergenerational trauma.
The report says the government should fund programs that could help tribes heal from the trauma caused by boarding schools, such as violence prevention and language revitalization.
Another recommendation calls for a memorial to the Native children who died while attending a federal boarding school. Shellenberger feels strongly about that.
“A memorial should only be put up once work to identify all unmarked graves has been completed and should not rest on the initial count of 1,000 children,” he said.
Research and redress
The report recommends working with family members who want to identify other family members who didn’t make it home from boarding schools, “which is totally understandable,” Shellenberger said. “But you also assume that they knew that they were missing and which school they were attending.”
Historic cemeteries present challenges, Shellenberger said. There are gravestones with names that may be spelled differently than what families used. Some gravestones are illegible and graves for poorer families or orphans may have been marked only with a small wooden cross, if at all.
His and other volunteers’ work at the Fort Simcoe school site is at a standstill until the weather cools and smoke from wildfires clears, he said. The heat and smoke impact both human and canine searchers. The cadaver dogs are coming back in the fall for one more visit, he said, but he’d like to start his work before that if possible.
For now, though, the recently released federal report doesn’t make a difference for Shellenberger and his volunteers — and others who are out there searching for their loved ones in school records and on school properties.
“I don’t think this gets us any further down the road,” he said. “We’re still on our own.”
Listening sessions
The federal Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act could help make a difference, though it’s hard to say at this point. The legislation would establish a federal commission that would conduct a full inquiry into the assimilative polices of Indian boarding schools. It’s slowly making its way through Congress.
The state committee continues to focus on learning from boarding school survivors and their relatives through private listening sessions, Washines said. They will be private so those testifying will know any information they share, including any incidents of physical, sexual or mental abuse, won’t be disseminated.
“We still have some tribal members, elders, that were products of the residential boarding school system in our state,” Washines said. “We want to have a series of listening sessions so we can hear their stories and hear what they went through in terms of the treatment and the loss that they suffered because of those experiences.”
Language was one of the most important things students lost, he said. “Even though we’re making strides and steps to get our language back, it’s a very difficult road to progress on.
“That probably was the most devastating part of the system our people went through was the loss of that language. They came home and because of that trauma and suffering they went through, they didn’t want their children or grandchildren to experience that,” he added. “So they didn’t teach the language; they didn’t share it; they didn’t speak it in the household. because they were afraid of how they would be treated.”
The federal report recommends fully funding physical and mental health programs through the Indian Health Services for people and communities to heal, along with safety programs, and Washines appreciates that.
“Even though I’m dealing the past as well, I’m dealing with the future, the progression of our students in postsecondary education,” he said.
“There’s just a misunderstanding of what it has done to our people and the losses that we have suffered because of it,” Washines added. “We’re not going to be able to replenish all of what was lost, but we can replenish some of it and help that healing process for our people.”
