Children attend the Sheldon Jackson School in Sitka, in a photo dated between 1900 and 1930. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.)
A new national report includes a series of recommendations from the U.S.’s top Indian Affairs official to promote healing from the forced assimilation of American Indian and Alaska Native children.
Twenty-two of the 417 federal Indian boarding schools that operated in the United States in the 1800s were in Alaska, according to an investigative report the U.S. Department of the Interior released on Tuesday.
Local research has found more evidence of boarding schools than the federal report did. Research from the Alaska Native Heritage Center shows there were more than 100 government-funded, church-run Alaska Native boarding schools in Alaska from the late 1800s through the 1960s.
The report documents the U.S. government’s role in operating the federal Indian boarding school system in which American Indian and Alaska Native children were removed from their families and forcibly assimilated from the 1800s through the 1960s.