The Interior Department identified 973 children who died in the care of the U.S. government during the 150-year federal Indian boarding school era.
But a yearlong investigation by The Washington Post found three times as many deaths and nearly double the burial sites than previously reported by the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, launched by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
Four-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sari Horwitz grew up in Tucson and is part of that reporting team. She described this assignment as the most difficult of her four-decade career.
“We filed three Freedom of Information Act requests,” Horwitz said. “Despite the fact they did this big report, and despite the fact that the president apologized in Phoenix, the Interior Department would not release the names of any children or provide information about how they died.”
The Interior Department cited privacy reasons for not identifying the dead, but the Post named them anyway.
“Since our story published,” Horwitz shared, “we have received so many emails and calls from Native Americans saying, ‘Thank goodness you released these names. You have put a face to a child, and there are still many more names to find.’”
For example, the Post unearthed 46 names from the Phoenix Indian School, while the Interior Department discovered only half of them. Horwitz explained that’s partly because the agency focused on federal government records whereas her reporting team combed through death certificates, boarding school enrollment records, census rolls and cemetery documents.
Still, Horwitz emphasized their investigation doesn’t diminish neither the Interior Department’s effort nor President Joe Biden’s formal apology he uttered during his first trip to the Gila River Indian Community in October.
“[Haaland] shined a light on this for sure,” she added. “We took it further, but there are experts who say ours is an undercount, too. It’s a beginning, really, for researchers to take what we’ve done, what the Interior Department has done, and take it further.”
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