A new examination of the abuses children suffered at Native American boarding schools in Colorado identified at least 65 students who died more than a century ago at the state’s two most prominent schools, the grim legacy of a federal assimilation program that inflicted intergenerational trauma on Indigenous families.
History Colorado on Tuesday released a 139-page report by State Archaeologist Holly Norton that pieces together local and national archival records, newspaper clippings, letters and archaeological findings to illustrate the experiences of Native children who at times were kidnapped and coerced into the schools. There, they faced neglect and unsanitary conditions, as well as horrors that included forced labor and even sexual abuse.
The report, titled “Federal Indian Boarding Schools in Colorado: 1880-1920,” shows the institutions in this state carried out the same mission as the hundreds of other federal boarding schools across the country: ripping Indigenous children from their families and traditions in an effort to strip their culture and assimilate them into American life.
“The confirmation of abuse, the confirmation of deaths is devastating to hear,” said Heather Shotton, vice president of diversity affairs at Fort Lewis College, the institution of higher education in Durango that evolved out of the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and now serves a large Native American population.
“We needed for this work to be done so we could begin a process of healing and recognition,” said Shotton, a citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendant. “It’s an opportunity to shape a different future and to uphold our responsibilities to communities who have been harmed by the history of our institutions.”
The report made public Tuesday is the result of new research mandated by the state legislature, and it was preceded by the release of the document’s executive summary last month.
That summary revealed more federally supported Native American boarding and day schools had operated in Colorado than previously reported. Though the research identified nine institutions, the final report largely focuses on the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and the Grand Junction Indian Boarding School, also known as the Teller Institute.
The new research, which focused on the years 1880 to 1920, identified 31 Native students who died at the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and 37 people who died at the Grand Junction Indian Boarding School, a number that included 34 students, one teacher, the daughter of a carpenter and a former student, according to the report.
The deceased, whose identities are withheld in the report, ranged in age from 5 years old to the early 20s.
The 31 student deaths at the Fort Lewis school, recorded over an 18-year span, represent “a nearly threefold increase over what appear to have been the deaths officially reported to Washington, D.C., in annual reports,” according to the report.
That still may be an undercount, though.
An archaeological investigation conducted at the former Fort Lewis site in Hesperus located a bygone cemetery where 350 to 400 people may be buried, 46 of whom are believed to be children, with the rest being adults or “adult-sized juveniles,” the report said. About 25 to 50 of the graves are believed to be connected to soldiers who had been stationed at the decommissioned Fort Lewis Army post that predated the school.
Researchers believe there could be “another 30 to 100 burials, or more, associated with the students at the boarding school” in that cemetery, according to the report. (The report notes, though, that the upper limit of that estimate “is not supported by data.”)
That still leaves up to 250 additional graves to be identified, and the report speculates they could be civilians or community members.
The unmarked cemetery was studied with technology that did not penetrate the ground, so the scale and identities of those buried are not exact but estimated based on research.
Norton’s acknowledgment at the end of the report thanking the researchers “who are going to extraordinary lengths to locate the cemetery at Teller” suggests no burial sites have yet been located in connection with the former boarding school in Grand Junction.
“There is no threshold where the death of children at the boarding schools is acceptable,” the report states. “Every single death was a tragedy to the families who lost their loved ones. … No child should ever die at school.”
“How do we move forward?”
The Native American Boarding School Research Program was created by a 2022 House bill directing History Colorado to study the federal Indian boarding schools that operated in the state with an emphasis on the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School.
The research comes amid national efforts to reckon with the country’s government-sanctioned cultural genocide of the Native population through boarding schools, which took root in the late 1870s.
The 2021 discovery of 215 unmarked graves by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia sparked a search among tribes and researchers for marked or unmarked gravesites holding the remains of Indigenous children. That discovery prompted U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet member in American history, to launch a full review of this country’s own legacy of Native American boarding schools.
As many as 1,100 students were estimated to have passed through Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School during its 1892-1909 operation, the report said. To date, students from 20 tribes or tribal groups have been identified including the Cherokee, Southern Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Ouray and Uintah Reservation, Navajo and more.
Native parents were supposed to consent to their children attending boarding schools, the History Colorado report said, but that consent was often coerced or ill-informed. In some cases, school recruiters — many with military backgrounds — resorted to kidnapping or threatening tribes with withholding rations if they didn’t send their children, the report said.
Once they arrived, Native students would be held down by teachers while their hair — often of sacred cultural significance — was chopped off. The children were given militaristic uniforms and stripped of their Indigenous names, the report said.
“We lost all of our land that we used to roam,” Manuel Heart, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, said in reaction to the release of History Colorado’s report. “Now we’ve been reduced to these small reservations. We as Native people lost a lot. One of our most valuable resources we lost was our children. We as Ute Mountain Ute have been thinking, ‘How do we heal from this? How do we move forward?’ It’s going to take time.”
Reports from Fort Lewis and Grand Junction’s Teller Institute indicated students were not receiving proper academic training. Instead, the boys were responsible for farming and agricultural labor to feed their classmates, while girls were expected to scrub the floors, keep up with the students’ laundry, cook and sew.
Some students, particularly at the Teller Institute, would be sent off to white families across the state, where they would work as agricultural or domestic laborers. While wages were supposed to be given to the students, the report said school leadership was known for embezzling the funds.
Intergenerational trauma
The adults in charge of the Native students continually failed them, the report detailed.
Teller Institute’s school physician, Dr. Robertson, prescribed four times the maximum dose of a medicine derived from poisonous plants used to treat nervous disorders and prescribed opium to children. Several affidavits about Robertson were sent to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the report said. In his defense, Robertson wrote support letters under fake names. The school did not remove him from his post.
The report details a 1903 investigation by The Denver Post into allegations that Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School Superintendent Thomas Breen sexually abused women and girls who worked at and attended the school. Breen faced repeated accusations of impregnating students who were then sent away. The Post ran stories about Breen for months, initiating a federal government investigation that resulted in Breen’s removal as superintendent, the report said.
Sometimes parents would write to the boarding schools requesting their children return home, or children would write expressing their displeasure with the school, the report said. Breen would tell the parents their children did not want to go home and tell the children their parents no longer wanted them, the report said.
Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, said the new report put into perspective why he advocates for equity for his community.
“We are always trying to fight for fair treatment, fair funding because we have lost so much over the years, including our young ones,” Nygren said. “I cannot imagine having your kid taken from you to an institution in hopes it will help them make something of themselves, but instead these unimaginable abuses happen, and maybe you never see them again. It breaks my heart.”
Norton, the state archaeologist who authored the report, said the driving force that kept her going throughout the research process was trying to answer the question she knew plagued so many in the Native community.
“For tribes impacted, the burning question is, ‘Where are the children?'” Norton said. “Can I help identify what happened to these kids who didn’t go home?”
Norton said writing the section about student deaths was a delicate balance of providing answers for descendants of the victims while also trying not to sensationalize the news.
“I was trying not to revictimize these students who passed away a century ago by just focusing on their deaths,” Norton said.
While the causes of death for the identified victims were not listed in the report, the research did note how unsafe and unsanitary conditions — including seeping raw sewage, overcrowding, freezing temperatures and scarce food — led to rampant illness. Pneumonia, chicken pox, tuberculosis and trachoma — a highly contagious bacterial eye disease — cost students their sight, their hearing or even their lives, the report said.
The report noted many scholars have studied how the federal education system and separation of children from their parents during the formative years of their lives caused a number of disparities for Native communities.
“These include health disparities and important sociocultural impacts on family dynamics,” the report said. “Collectively, this entire suite of negative impacts is often referred to as intergenerational trauma. This is a widely accepted concept that trauma experienced by an individual can be passed down to subsequent generations, psychologically, emotionally and even physically.”
Native power and resilience
Fort Lewis College is no stranger to its gruesome past. For years, the college’s leaders have committed to recognizing their institution’s ugly history and working with Native students, faculty and tribal partners to reconcile the school’s harms and reimagine its future.
Today, the college awards more degrees to Native American students than any other four-year, baccalaureate-granting institution in the country — about 26% of all degrees awarded.
Tom Stritikus, Fort Lewis College’s president, said learning about the injustices committed by leaders of past iterations of his beloved institution was painful but necessary.
“When you read what federal Indian boarding schools deliberately attempted to take away in essence to Native American culture, it reaffirmed my commitment to ensuring Fort Lewis is always a place where Native identity, language, ways of being are incorporated into what we do daily,” Stritikus said. “If reading this report isn’t your mission moment, you’re in the wrong line of work.”
Tribal leaders and Fort Lewis administrators were given some time to sit with the report before its public release Tuesday. The Durango college intends to use the report as an educational moment for its students and staff while also providing them resources to grapple with the weight of its contents.
“Many of us have a deep and personal connection to the broader history of the federal Indian boarding school system,” Shotton said. “Many of us are descendants of boarding school survivors. The impacts we see from the federal Indian boarding school system, the intergenerational impacts, are ones we live through.”
Native American and Indigenous studies faculty at the college will be available to go over the report with students and help them process it, Shotton said. Expanded counseling center hours will be available. The school will host gatherings at which students can talk through their feelings and practice self-care, Shotton said.
Different students and different tribes are expected to react to the report on their own terms and not as a monolith, Shotton said.
Heart, for example, said the report is just the tip of the iceberg. The Ute Mountain Ute chairman wants more details uncovered. He wants the U.S. government held accountable.
“I want the U.S. government to say they are sorry,” Heart said. “I want to really, truly ask the U.S. government for their accountability in wrongdoing and maybe even their compensation. Building schools to help bring back the language and culture they took away. Do something in return for what they’ve done.”
Now that her report is public, Norton said the next steps are going to be tribally-led.
Conversations about what to do with the Fort Lewis burial grounds are ongoing, she said, and have been leaning toward the creation of a memorial at the site, which is currently fenced off and monitored.
“Some of the future is a little murky,” Norton said. “The funding is up. The project is over… but the work is not done. I’d like to continue doing work on this, although probably a little slower than we have been.”
Shotton recognizes the need to look hard truths in the face, but she said it’s impossible not to watch the Native students on campus pursuing their degrees and achieving their dreams and not feel hopeful for a better future.
“The way that the federal Indian boarding school system was designed, I wasn’t supposed to be here,” Shotton said. “I shouldn’t be in this position. That our students are thriving the way they are today was not what that system was set up to do. When I see them every day walking across our college campus and see the research they’re engaging with and hear them introduce themselves in their tribal language, it’s a reminder to me of the power and resilience of Indigenous communities and the opportunity and hope we have for contributing to better futures as an institution of higher education.
“We have an opportunity to shape a positive educational experience for Indigenous students so they can gain the knowledge and skills necessary to go back to their tribal communities and build those communities and contribute to thriving futures.”
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