How We Can Actually Help Native Americans

In the wake of a recent report on the harms of 19th- and 20th-century Indian boarding schools, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a cross-country tour called The Road to Healing, during which survivors of the boarding-school system could share their stories. If healing is what Ms. Haaland wants, though, this strategy will likely disappoint.

The latest Interior Department report on life in these schools — where many Indian children were sent against their will but where many were also sent by their parents voluntarily — was prompted by news from Canada that hundreds of “unmarked graves” had been found last year at the sites of the boarding schools there. In response, more than 25 churches in western Canada were vandalized or burned. (Most of the schools were church-affiliated.)

Some important questions have been raised about the exact nature of these graves and what they tell us about the experience of the children at the schools. As one columnist for the Toronto Sun has noted: First, the technology being used is very inexact, and there is plenty of reason to believe there were graves (even individual ones) with wooden markers that have since disappeared. Second, some of the sites also have non-Indians buried in them and were used by the whole community. Finally, many of the children died of diseases such as tuberculosis. While one could argue that medical care could and should have been better, these types of deaths were hardly unusual at the time.