President Joe Biden has created a national monument at a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania to honor the resilience of Indigenous tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions.
The monument, named the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument, was announced during a tribal leaders summit at the White House.
Driving the news: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated between 1879 and 1918, during which thousands of Native children from over 140 tribes were subjected to forced assimilation policies, including Olympian Jim Thorpe.
- The school was the first of its kind and served as a template for a network of government-backed Native American boarding schools across at least 37 states and territories.
- Approximately 7,800 children were sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where they were forcibly separated from their families, tribes, and homelands.
- The forced assimilation policy resulted in the death of an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children at the Carlisle institution, with efforts ongoing to repatriate the children’s remains to their homelands.
- The Interior Department investigation has revealed that at least 973 Native American children died at government-funded boarding schools that operated for over 150 years, during which survivors reported experiencing physical abuse and being 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 had never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.
Flashback: In October, President Biden apologized on behalf of the US government for the schools and the policies that supported them.
