Bone by bone, two archaeologists lifted the 130-year-old skeletal remains of a Native American girl from the shallow grave in a roadside cemetery. A hand bone, a rib, a chunk of vertebrae and, finally, her skull.
Almeda Heavy Hair had been forcibly removed from her family and the Gros Ventre tribe 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 praying as they watched her bones being exhumed — 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 students died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970, three times as many deaths as reported by the U.S. Interior Department earlier 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 and accidents, records show. Dozens died in suspicious circumstances, and in some instances the records provide indications of abuse or mistreatment 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 a teacher’s diary.
The findings show gaps in the federal government’s official accounting of what happened to Native American children who were wrested from their homes in the name of assimilation. They come as many tribes — long denied the chance to mourn and bury their dead — are seeking to find their ancestors’ remains and return them home.