History Colorado will begin its second wave of research into Native American boarding schools next month — this time with help from Indigenous people whose family members survived the horrifying experience.
The three-year project, funded with $1 million from the state legislature, will focus on consultation with Native American communities to foster healing and reconciliation.
“During the first round, they only had a year to do the research and write the report, which was a very narrow timeline,” said state Rep. Barbara McLachlan, co-sponsor of the laws that allocated funding to the research.
“A lot of the research, because of that short timeline, came from papers and reports by a white person involved in all of this,” she said. “With this new law, they’re hoping to talk with tribal members and second generation Native Americans to see how this has affected the next generation that is coming up.”
History Colorado plans to meet with leaders of Native American tribes and Indigenous community members, Alaska Natives and others living on reservations outside of Colorado to help create a plan to care for the people affected by federal boarding schools that existed statewide.
Gina Lopez, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe who lives in Towaoc, said she’s skeptical of the accuracy of the report, which relies on archived government reports that are inconsistent and incomplete and written by school superintendents, who wove their own narratives about the success of the schools and the students’ everyday experiences, according to the paper’s authors.
“If those things aren’t reliable, how will we ever know the truth and achieve any justice in terms of these boarding schools?” Lopez asked.
During the next iteration of research, History Colorado has said it plans to meet privately with representatives from 33 tribal nations twice per year, Alaska Native organizations and students who attended federal boarding schools in Colorado to help provide insights into future recommendations for reconciliation, according to the historical agency’s public recommendations made to the state legislature.
History Colorado raised awareness about the report through social media posts when the paper was published in October 2023, included links to stories about the report in its newsletter for subscribers, created other informational links online and has a webpage on its site dedicated to informing people about boarding schools, Luke Perkins, manager of communications and public relations at History Colorado, wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun.
History Colorado also held a listening session Aug. 16, 2023, with leaders of Native American and Alaska Native community organizations, Perkins told The Sun.
History Colorado plans to travel to reservations outside of Colorado to examine their archives, personal stories and other repositories to help create a fuller story of the impact of the boarding schools.
At the discussions, which may take place at some of the boarding school sites, community members are expected to address and plan for memorialization at former boarding school sites where children are still buried, finding ways to support impacted communities and education opportunities for Native American Coloradans and others statewide.
A tribal communications specialist at History Colorado, who was hired to help complete study requirements during the first round of research, will continue helping with the investigative efforts by managing communications with tribal representatives and descendant communities.
The report identified nine boarding schools in Colorado that were financially supported by the federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, from 1880 to 1920.
Native Americans and other community members have requested additional research into federal, state and local school policies after 1920, when many off-reservation and on-reservation schools were closing as Indigenous kids were integrated into local public schools.
History Colorado must develop recommendations to the Colorado Department of Education, the Colorado Department of Higher Education and the state legislature that aim to address the effects of the boarding school system on Indigenous communities in partnership with the Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs and a steering committee that will include organizations led by and served by Native Americans.
History Colorado must provide preliminary recommendations for care and memorialization at the boarding school sites to the Commission on Indian Affairs no later than Nov. 8, 2025, and should provide final recommendations by May 10, 2027.
Abusing Native children in the name of assimilation
For more than 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were taken away from their communities to attend boarding schools.
More than 500 government-funded Native American boarding schools existed in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, often led by churches.
By 1926, nearly 83% of all Native American children of school age were in boarding schools.
The purpose of the schools was to culturally assimilate Native Americans by forcibly removing children from their homes to far away residential facilities where their identities, beliefs and languages were stripped.
Some students lost their surnames when facility leaders gave them names of famous people, such as presidents, or even school staff members, according to the report.
Families lost their parenting authority and the ability to pass on Native American culture and traditions and the legacy of the schools has caused long-standing intergenerational trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, disappearance of Native American people, mental health issues and substance use disorders in Native communities, lawmakers wrote in the law.
Native children in Colorado’s boarding schools were forced to learn carpentry or blacksmithing to prepare them for jobs as laborers in white families’ homes, according to the report.
Neglect, unsanitary conditions and poor nutrition caused illnesses that frequently swept across the schools and some children were physically and sexually abused, according to the report.
Students were, most often, enrolled in boarding schools after they were kidnapped or recruited, or after their parents were coerced or threatened by Native American agents or school superintendents, according to the History Colorado report.
Once students were physically separated from their parents, they often did not return home for two to five years, the report says.
James Jefferson, a member of the Southern Ute tribe, attended Ute Mountain Boarding School in Towaoc in the late 1930s and the Southern Ute Vocational School near Ignacio in the 1940s.
His parents met in a Towaoc boarding school and recalled the horrors of the experience and tried their best to keep Jefferson and his siblings out of boarding schools.
But boarding school superintendents threatened Jefferson’s parents and said they would be thrown in jail if their kids did not attend.
“If you spoke your language, you were slapped with a ruler,” said Jefferson, 90, who lives in Durango.
“They washed my mouth out because I spoke Ute, they made us march everywhere, kids were thrown in basements, the teachers were mean. It was horrible,” he said.
He did not attend the boarding school for long. His family fled to Denver through a relocation program led by the federal government, soon after he attended boarding school, where he says he got a much better education.
The relocation program encouraged Native American people to move to urban areas where they would merge with white American culture, according to a report by People of the Sacred Land’s Truth, Restoration, and Education Commission of Colorado.
Several of Morning Star Jones’ family members attended boarding schools and she said the original research was well done and presents opportunities for reconciliation.
“This is a report to most, but to me, there’s so much emotion tied to it,” said Jones, a Northern and Southern Cheyenne woman living in Denver. “My great-grandmother, grandparents and cousin went to boarding schools,” she said.
The first step toward reconciliation should include returning the remains of children buried at former boarding school sites to their families, if that is preferred by relatives, she said.
“I fully understand this may not be fully in line with the views of certain tribes. However, as a mother, I would want my child with family members,” Jones said during an emotional interview.
Therapeutic services should be made available to Native Americans who are still affected by the boarding schools to help them heal from generational trauma, Jones said.
All schools in Colorado should teach the history of boarding schools to students, she said. Educating people about how the federal government killed Native people and erased their culture may make Coloradans more understanding of and sensitive to Indigenous people’s needs, Jones said.
Funds should be donated to Native American tribes and the organizations that support them, Jones added. And Colorado should pass a bill that makes it a hate crime to cut the hair of an Indigenous person, she said.
Hair cutting was a standard practice at boarding schools. Newly arrived students were forced to have their hair chopped by teachers, who in some cases, held down children during the process, because long hair was viewed as a “hygiene issue,” according to the report.
“Across North America, I see boys with long hair are being targeted and their hair is being cut off,” Jones said. “The only time that we are to cut our hair is when we are in mourning.”
Poor record keeping by boarding school administrators left yawning gaps in the historical record, challenging efforts to determine how many children ran away under duress, or fell ill and died far from their homes and families. And that makes Lopez wonder if anyone can really know what happened at the schools, she said.
“Justice has always been out of reach for Native people and other communities of color and I think this enforces that reality,” she said.
Lopez attended Sherman Indian High School, a boarding school in Riverside, California, where students learn about the history of the school when they’re enrolled, an effort that provides healing, she said.
“It didn’t feel like there was a lot of outreach to make this report too widely known. I had to go look for it,” Lopez said. “They need to do a marketing campaign to make sure folks have the opportunity to learn about this next report and any other developments.”
History Colorado is accepting comments, questions and suggestions from Native American tribal representatives, community members and organizations and descendants of people who attended boarding schools at h-co.org/HB22-1327.