‘Allow families to begin to heal’: Past year sees unprecedented federal action surrounding Indian boarding school policies

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - In 2025, the culmination of a years-long effort by the Department of the Interior; multiple formal actions taken by lawmakers, the White House, and others; and Congress being in position to potentially pass unprecedented legislation, are combining in a way many consider marked progress in the aftermath of the federal government’s Indian boarding school system.

“I think the level of awareness that we have placed on this very, very dark period of time is very important,” said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, in a recent interview with Alaska’s News Source. “We have moved, I think, in a strong way.”

Murkowski — who, in December, helped push the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act of 2024 through via a unanimous vote of the Senate — said she is hopeful the new Congress will advance the policy in the new year.

“My hope is that we will be able to advance this working with the House in a new Congress,” she said. “This puts forward a commission to not only do a more fulsome review of what we know was a policy in this country to basically take the Native out of the child, a horrible policy, that was in place for unfortunately far, far too long.”

A 2024 report released by the DOI — the second volume of two — shows Indian boarding school policies backed by the United States' federal government allowed for the consistent abuse, maltreatment and deaths of thousands of Native American children in states and territories across the country.

A few weeks prior to the report’s release, the Catholic Church formally apologized for its role in the boarding school system, and recognized publicly the former policies that stole children from their homes, stripped them of their heritage, and attempted to assimilate Alaska Native, American Indian and Native Hawaiian kids into white American and Christian culture.

The same fall, President Joe Biden also formally apologized — becoming the first president to do so — and called the attempted assimilation of Indigenous minors a “sin on our soul” and “blot on American history.”

Yet, while the DOI’s summer report clearly stated its “information is not complete,” other reports, including one by the Washington Post, show recorded and reported data may only be scratching the surface of the reality suffered by so many within the boarding school system.

“There was a study that was just released that indicates that the number of children who actually died — the Native children who died at these boarding schools — is perhaps three times as many as the federal report had indicated,“ Murkowski said. “So, this is something, again, that deserves review, to allow for and to get us beyond that really tragic policy, and to allow families to begin to heal.”

As of publication time, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act of 2024 has been received by House lawmakers and is currently being held at the desk. You can read the full text of the act by heading here.

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