Washington Post reporter explains how they uncovered more Native children deaths at boarding schools

A national investigation of former government-run boarding schools found new data on deaths there of Native students, including at Minnesota schools. The Washington Post reports 3,104 Native American students died at the institutions — triple the number previously reported by the federal government.

The newspaper found at least 76 deaths at Minnesota boarding schools versus a government-documented 10 student deaths. Twenty young people died at Pipestone Indian School in the southwestern part of the state. A recent report from the Interior Department documented 3 deaths. Pipestone Indian School operated between 1894 and 1953.

Reporters also found records of 13 student deaths at Vermilion Lake Indian School, a former federal boarding school on the Bois Forte Reservation. Officially, there was one death. Records show 16 students who died at St. Paul’s Industrial School in Clontarf, a town south of Morris, Minn.

The Post also documented the deaths of 4 students at St. John’s Indian Industrial School in Collegeville, Minn. The source of information for those deaths was MPR News correspondent Dan Gunderson’s story in September. Those records had not been documented as a part of the earlier federal investigation.

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Native News reporter Melissa Olson spoke with Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post, who was part of the newspaper’s investigative team.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Click on the player above to listen to Olson on All Things Considered.

What did your team find?

Dana Hedgpeth: Along with a team of investigative, forensics and data reporters looking into hundreds of thousands of records, and we documented that more than 3,100 Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students died at these Indian boarding schools. These schools were run by the U.S. government, some in partnership with churches and religious groups from the early 1800s until about 1969. Our findings show that we found about three times as many deaths as reported by the Interior Department, which had done its own three-year investigation of the boarding school era. And our team also found nearly twice the number of burial sites than had been documented by the federal government.

We also went into detail of the causes of death on over a thousand of the children. Sadly, many of them died from a range of things that included infectious diseases, malnutrition, accidents. Others died in suspicious circumstances and what likely appeared to be cases of abuse. There were suicides and severe mistreatment.

How did you find the additional deaths?

Hedgpeth: A team of us looked through hundreds of thousands of pages of records at the National Archives. We looked at census rolls, death records, school records, historical maps, and archival newspaper clips. We also used the annual reports to the commissioner of Indian Affairs. When we would find a child's death, we would cross reference that with other resources to see if that child was enrolled and tried to figure out where that person had been buried. So, it was a step-by-step methodology that we used in counting those deaths.

Were there records you couldn’t access?

Hedgpeth: Yes, there is a repository in Kansas that’s actually kept in these climate-controlled limestone walls. They even call it a cave. [We] were not allowed to go through any of the onion skin paper documents at all. They just did a tour of the facility, and we were not allowed to talk to any of the employees, so we couldn't actually search those records.

The National Archives has over 100 million pages of records related to Indian Affairs. And there's many that are still on microfilm.

We are only building on so much of the great and sad, but important, work that's already been done by many Native journalists in Indian country on this subject, sort of just chipping away at the iceberg of learning more about this era that’s been long hidden and mostly ignored.

What were other challenges you had with the research?

Hedgpeth: There was no systematic way that every school was run. So that means you have over 400 schools with different superintendents who all have their own style of managing and keeping records. And they changed over every few years. And so, then a new person comes in and does the record keeping in an entirely different way.

Sometimes you would find a superintendent narrative that's very detailed and tells you of, say, seven deaths, but it doesn't tell you the sex of the children, it doesn't tell you the ages, it doesn't tell you what tribe, where they were from or the cause of the death, or it's very generic. Might tell you two of the kids died of tuberculosis and not mention the other four's cause of death. [They could] say they died of illness, or they ‘passed to the other side.’

What do you think of the federal government’s work on documenting the deaths?

Hedgpeth: You have to put in perspective that Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland is the first Native American cabinet secretary. She turned a spotlight examining her department, which was the very department that created and mandated by law that children be sent to [boarding schools]. Assistant Secretary of Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, who oversaw her reports, took significant steps. They very much say in their report that it's incomplete. This is all a work in progress, of a history that's not been told.

Your story has a link, for example, to documents on Pipestone Indian School which you used for this story. Why did your team decide to do that?

Hedgpeth: So many folks were so generous to us, who had spent decades on doing research on their one school, and they know their school inside and out, and we built upon that again. It shouldn't be hidden, and we want to explain how we did it, and we hope that others will take it a step further and build on it. There were other stacks of documents that I would love to have gone through, but we wanted to publish what we had at this point in time.

Why did you personally want to do this investigation?

Hedgpeth: I'm Native American, we in our community know these stories. And I'm going to steal this line from Haaland and Newland: There is not a Native American in this country who has not been impacted and doesn't know these stories of Indian boarding schools.

They are painful. They are real. And this fall, President Biden's formal apology was the first time that a United States president had acknowledged the wrongdoing and the role of the federal government in forcing children, forcing children — sit with that for a minute — away, from their homes, their families, their tribes, their communities. There is no greater way to hurt a nation of people than to take their children, no matter what color, where we are from, everyone in the world, their children are their pride and joy. And when you take children to places where they have never been and you literally strip them of their native clothing and their language, their customs and their culture in an attempt to assimilate them into a white society, that is so harmful. It makes my voice quiver, as you can tell, we should never forget that.

I feel so strongly that it's our job, especially for Native American journalists, to tell that story. This story hasn't been told in the mainstream enough in the way that it should be. I've gotten so many emails and notes from people who say, ‘I was a I'm a history teacher in the United States, and I omitted this history from my classes because I didn't know.’ Those are the best emails to get, because we are educating folks.