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US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland: First Native American woman in Cabinet
Photo: Jim Watson/AP
According to a study, indigenous boarding schools are responsible for the deaths of at least 500 children in the United States.
This is according to a report released by the US Department of the Interior on Wednesday.
The number of dead children is likely to increase with further investigations, it said.
Between 1819 and 1969, the state boarding school system for Native American children consisted of more than 400 schools.
The more than 500 deaths are attributed to 19 of the schools.
More than 50 marked or unmarked burial sites have been identified so far.
Here, too, the Ministry assumes that this number is likely to increase.
Abuse and malnutrition documented
Indigenous children who had been snatched from their families were accommodated in the boarding schools – there they were supposed to be re-educated and forget their own culture.
Many children never returned home.
For example, according to the US Department of the Interior report, the children were renamed, had their hair cut off, or were not allowed to use their language.
“Rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse, disease, malnutrition, overcrowding and lack of medical care” are well documented.
Most recently, the discovery of graves and the remains of children's corpses near former boarding schools in Canada caused horror around the world.
"As the federal government moved the country west, it also set out to exterminate, exterminate and assimilate the Native Americans of Alaska, Hawaii and Hawaii," said US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
For more than a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children have been uprooted from their communities and forced into boarding schools run by the US government.
"I am descended from ancestors who endured the horrors of the assimilation policies of indigenous boarding schools, implemented by the same ministry I now head," Haaland said.
The 61-year-old is the first Native American woman to hold a ministerial post in the US Cabinet.
kfr/dpa