Sari Horwitz learned about the largely hidden era of Indian boarding schools years ago while reporting on criminal justice on tribal lands. Dana Hedgpeth, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Indian tribe in North Carolina, spent several months in 2023 gathering survivors’ accounts of mistreatment at the schools.
Their mutual interest became the impetus for an 18-month investigation that ultimately involved 60 Post staffers.
The result was a revelatory and visually arresting series that harnessed deep, primary-source reporting and novel storytelling to present the fullest public accounting yet of the impact of the U.S. government’s 150-year boarding school program.
The Post documented that 3,104 students died at the schools between 1828 and 1970 — more than three times the number the U.S. Interior Department reported in its own investigation. Children died from disease, from malnutrition and, in some cases, records suggest, as a result of mistreatment or abuse. One student was found hanged at a school in Oklahoma. The local sheriff called the death an accident.
Reporters found that 800 students were buried at or near schools — underscoring how children’s bodies were often not sent home to families or tribes — and documented nearly twice the number of burial sites recorded by the Interior Department.
The Post also revealed that at least 122 priests, sisters and brothers assigned to 22 schools operated by the Catholic Church or its affiliates were later accused of sexually abusing more than 1,000 Indian children. The Interior Department investigation offered no details on the sexual abuse of children.
The investigation provides the most complete public accounting of what happened to children at Indian boarding schools. No media organization or government investigation has documented as comprehensively the widespread sexual abuse of Native American children in the schools, the number of children who died at the schools, their causes of death and their places of burial.
A 1928 investigation commissioned by the federal government called the Meriam Report chastised the schools for the mistreatment and malnourishment of students. A 1969 congressional inquiry condemned the schools for trying to destroy Native American culture. But neither investigation mentioned sexual abuse, and archived documents from the 1969 report contain no evidence that the matter was ever examined.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland also conducted an investigation of boarding schools, and while it acknowledged sexual abuse, her 2022 report did not detail the schools where sexual abuse happened, the number of children raped or molested, or the names of priests or other members of religious groups who abused them.
Haaland’s department reported last year that 973 children died in the schools, but it would not release the names of those children, their causes of death or their places of burial to The Post. The Post’s investigation found more than three times that number of student deaths and chronicled the causes of death for more than half of them. The Post also found nearly twice the number of burial sites reported by the Interior Department at Indian boarding schools.
