President Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 includes $7 million for the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a program launched last year by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to review the “troubled legacy” of Indian boarding schools in the United States. The Canadian government launched a similar commission after the discovery of cemeteries and unmarked graves at its own Indian residential schools.

The U.S. government funded hundreds of residential schools for American Indians under the Civilization Fund Act of 1819. About a third were operated by missionaries and religious organizations. Most were closed by the middle of the 20th century, though some were transferred to tribal leadership and remain active. A few are still operated by the Catholic Church.

The federal government’s stated purpose in funding the schools was to provide “against the further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes” by “teaching their children in reading, writing and arithmetic.” In practice, the schools tried to assimilate the students. School administrators believed it their duty to “civilize” the Indian students. The Indians whom they wished to “civilize” were not always keen on the prospect.

Many of the schools were located off of Indian reservations. Some parents sent their children to the schools without issue. Others were understandably reluctant to send their children to faraway schools funded by a government with a history of mistreating the Indians. By the end of the 19th century, federal agents, fed up with lax attendance and low enrollment, pleaded with Congress for the authority to remove children from their homes by force.

“The parents of these Indian children are ignorant, and know nothing of the value of education, and there are no elevating circumstances in the home circle to arouse the ambition of the children,” federal agent John S. Ward wrote to the Secretary of the Interior in 1886.”The agent should be endowed with some kind of authority to enforce attendance.”

Congress gave them that authority in 1887 with its passage of the Compulsory Indian Education Act. Activists and historians often count the forcible removals of Indian children enabled by this statute among the worst abuses of the residential-school program. Considering that the schools were residential and located far from the reservations where students lived, there is no question that the removals of Indian children were uniquely cruel. All compulsory education laws, however, imply the threat of force. Massachusetts passed a compulsory education law in 1852 that gave the government the power to remove children from any home with parents who were “unfit to have the children educated properly.”

By the early 20th century the residential schools were overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. A 1928 Brookings Institution report noted that while the school-operated farms were “sufficiently productive to be a highly important factor in raising the standard of [students’] diet,” many students were malnourished. The schools themselves were “crowded materially beyond their capacities” and were meting out “[p]unishments of the most harmful sort.

“The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate,” the report concluded.

Many of the schools closed by 1940. The ones that remained operational often did so with the support of Indian tribes. Of the 184 schools currently operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, 122 are run by an Indian tribe or tribal council. Seven off-reservation boarding schools remain in operation.

These schools have complicated legacies. Several former students reported sexual and physical abuse. Many children died at the schools and were buried on school grounds. Some schools endured, reformed, and remain operational.

The Interior Department’s press release claimed the commission will “shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past” and promised to “respect families and communities.” It reads a lot like any mass email from a progressive organization—heavy on jargon. With the references to “identities” and “communities” you almost forget that the students in question were real people who went to real schools with real teachers.

I read a reflection from a woman whose relatives went to the Carlisle Indian School. Her description of her visit to the Carlisle cemetery with her father better captures the humanity of these students.

I was so surprised when we got there because you just had to pull over on the grass and walk across the street to a cemetery.  No lines of people, we didn’t need to pay for anything, it was just there. Cars drove by as though there was nothing to see here; we were the only ones who were at the small cemetery. Dad explained that our relatives weren’t in the cemetery but it was important to acknowledge the students who didn’t make it home so he took out his pocket knife, scratched the ground and took a piece of a beaded keychain and lightly buried it so the souls of the children would know we had been there.