Advocates and Murkowski want next steps after report on boarding school for indigenous people

The U.S. Department of the Interior says it reviewed more than a million pages of federal documents to prepare a two-volume report on Indigenous residential schools.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the department’s second and final part on July 30. It acknowledges misconduct in federal boarding school policy and makes recommendations, including apologies to communities for forcibly removing children from their homes to assimilate them. It also calls for a national memorial and programs that offer healing through language and culture.

Alaska boarding school survivors and their advocates welcome the report, but say it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Although government boarding schools for Alaska Native children have existed since the 1800s and continued into the 1960s, Alaskans are only beginning to realize the impact they have.

The Interior Department report counted more than 400 federal residential schools for Native Americans in the United States and its territories, 22 of which are in Alaska.

The second section estimates the number of deaths among Native American children in these schools at about 1,000, 32 of which occurred in Alaska.

This latest report also includes personal stories from boarding school survivors, such as Jim LaBelle.

“They’re really quite shocking. The hardest part is yet to come, which is doing that really hard research,” LaBelle said.

In April, LaBelle and other Alaska Native survivors were invited to share their stories in private sessions at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Oral historians from the National Native Boarding School Healing Coalition recorded their stories, part of a nationwide effort to document boarding school trauma.

LaBelle described the physical and sexual abuse students endured at the Wrangell Institute in southeast Alaska, where he and his younger brother were sent when he was 8. LaBelle said his mother had no choice because the boys were forcibly taken from her.

LaBelle said while the federal report is comprehensive, it only tells part of Alaska’s story.

“It’s just the beginning. We need to look at the churches that have participated contractually,” he said.

The Interior Department report acknowledges that the investigation only covered federal schools and not other institutions run by churches and religious organizations.

Benjamin Jacuk, director of indigenous research at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, said these religious schools also played a major role in devastating the lives of Native children and their families.

“You can’t heal,” Jacuk said, “if you don’t understand the wound.”

The wound is still festering, Jacuk said, and runs much deeper than federal reports indicate.

Jacuk has focused his research on church archives and correspondence between religious organizations and other institutions, which he said reveal the true motives for running schools.

“It really shows that these actions were not intended to help the Native Alaskans, Native Americans, and Native Hawaiians, but were a means to erase us,” Jacuk said.

According to Jacuk, the Heritage Center’s investigation has revealed a disturbing pattern of collaboration between religious institutions and other entities to exploit indigenous children for their labor in fishing, farming, and mining, as well as a concerted effort to separate them from their land and resources.

“Many of these institutions did things for money, not for the well-being of the people,” Jacuk said.

LaBelle believes he was a victim of exploitation when he was sent to labor at Mt. Edgecumbe at the end of his junior year. When LaBelle returned to Fairbanks that summer, he was met at the airport by a family from Creamer’s Dairy, who told him to come with them.

“That’s what happened. I just went along,” he said. “I don’t remember ever getting paid.”

“There’s so much more that we’re learning that no one knows about,” said Selena Ortega-Chiolero, museum specialist for the Chickaloon Tribe of southcentral Alaska.

Ortega-Chiolero attended the Heritage Center’s weeklong listening and education sessions in April. She and other tribal members have been researching boarding school records. She said it’s important to understand that the abuses didn’t happen in a vacuum.

“All these different agencies worked together to make it happen,” she said. “It could literally happen again, and until we expose those truths, we’re just going to continue to perpetuate really bad behavior.”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is working on a different front. She said she commends the U.S. Department of the Interior report and is co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill to create a Truth and Healing Commission that would dig deeper into the federal government’s role in running the schools.

“One of the most profound reasons Congress created this commission is that it is time,” Murkowski said in a speech on the Senate floor on July 24. “It is time for the federal government to take responsibility for the legacy of its harmful policies.”

Murkowski said that the more the truth about this era is understood, the more healing will take place.