Report Finds Deaths of 64 Native American Students at Colorado Boarding Schools

[Judi Lynn]

BY JENNA KUNZE OCTOBER 19, 2023

In Colorado, a new report released this month by the state’s historical society found the death records of at least 64 Native students who died while attending two federal Indian boarding schools in the state between 1880 and 1920.
The 140-page report, researched and prepared over the last year by state archeologist Holly Norton, was commissioned by Colorado lawmakers in a May 2022 House Bill. The legislation recognized that in Colorado, a state that hosted at least nine federal Indian assimilation schools, “...the boarding school policy resulted in long-standing intergenerational trauma.”

In order to heal from that intergenerational trauma, representatives wrote, “we must confront the past and shed light on hidden cruelty.”

Lawmakers directed the state historical society, in consultation with tribal nations, to research the events, physical and emotional abuse, and deaths that occurred at Colorado’s Indian boarding schools, particularly at the two off-reservation boarding schools: The Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, which now operates as Fort Lewis College in Hesperus, Colorado, and Grand Junction Indian Boarding School, or Teller Indian School. Both institutions operated as off-reservation Indian boarding schools until 1911.

State researchers also conducted non-ground-disturbing research at Fort Lewis Indian School to identify potential cemeteries and unmarked graves of children who once attended the school. The results showed that the Fort Lewis’ cemetery “is the final resting place of 350 to 400 individuals,” the report notes. “Of these, 46 are hypothesized to be children, with the remainder either adults or adult-sized juveniles.”

An archival analysis of federal, state and local records found at least 31 students’ deaths over 18 years at Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School. “The number of deaths is a nearly threefold increase over what appear to have been the deaths officially reported to Washington, DC, in annual reports,” Norton wrote in the report.

More:
https://nativenewsonline.net/sovereignty/report-finds-deaths-of-64-native-american-students-at-colorado-boarding-schools

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[blm]

2. 😢

[Stuart G]

3. Thank You for posting this one ...Judi Lynn...

Very Sad...But Necessary...Kick and Recommend

[Bayard]

4. Unmarked graves of children....

Victims of war.

[Igel]

5. They need to say from what, that's the problem.

Child morality now is much, much lower than child mortality in 1890 and 1910.

Or compare, at least, the number of dead children the same age against the childhood death rates for both the settler and the indigenous communities at the time.