More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures
To document deaths at Indian boarding schools and identify burial sites, The Post focused on 417 schools identified by the Interior Department as federally funded as part of the government’s 1819-1969 policy of forced assimilation.
The Post’s findings expand upon the Interior Department’s recent investigation, which documented 973 children who died. Because the agency declined to share names or details, it is unclear which of those students are included in the 3,104 documented by The Post.
Deaths:
To tabulate deaths and find details on students’ names and causes of death, reporters reviewed thousands of reports filed by school officials, enrollment records, death certificates, census records, archived news reports and research by local historians. Official documents included annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Superintendents’ Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, many available online from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The Post included in its tabulation students who died at schools or at nearby hospitals or sanatoriums.
Student identifications are limited by misspellings or variations in how names were recorded. The name of a student’s tribe often referred to a broad tribal affiliation or a geographic area. For some children, only a first name was available. In some cases, students’ ages were listed in records only as estimates or not recorded at all. Many school records are illegible, missing or are in archives that are closed to the public.
A small percentage of the deceased students included by The Post were young adults at the time of their deaths, which aligns with the Interior Department’s methodology for its report. Children in some cases were sent to boarding schools as teenagers and remained there until they were in their 20s.
To identify graveyards at or near former schools, reporters reviewed maps from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, Historic Map Works, Historic Aerials, Ancestry.com, university archives and local historical societies. Reporters compared historic and current maps, including ones from the USGS National Map Corps, and used Earth Point to translate antiquated descriptions to modern coordinates.
The Post then searched for evidence that a student who died was buried at a graveyard located near or at a school. This involved matching enrollment records and the names of deceased students with FindAGrave.com, a crowdsourced database of burial sites, and reviewing student obituaries, local cemetery listings, death certificates and census records. To identify potential burial sites, reporting included children listed in cemeteries who were enrolled as students on or near the date they died.
While the Interior Department found 74 student burial sites at 65 schools, The Post found evidence of 56 burial sites at or near an additional 51 schools. The Post found 10 additional burial sites associated with six of the schools listed in the Interior report. This includes four off-site graveyards where Carlisle students were buried after they died while on school-related work.
The Post is withholding the exact locations of individual graves in response to concerns from some community members about vandalism or looting.
To facilitate additional research, The Post is making available some of the data compiled for its investigation at github.com.
The Post is making available data on students who died at Indian boarding schools – and the cemeteries associated with those schools – to help contribute to and build upon decades of research and work by historians, tribal leaders and the family members of former Indian boarding school students.
We are not releasing all of the information collected, as some of it was shared from private tribal, family or university research collections and not intended for public distribution. In other cases, news reports, birth certificates and documents were found on Ancestry.com or Newspapers.com, sites that require paid memberships. Therefore, we are unable to provide documentation of each student death but are including as much of our research as possible. This approach was taken with the guidance of researchers, historians and tribal members to balance the release of information for future scholarship with respect for tribal customs and wishes, and to discourage vandalism or looting of individual graves.
This collection is a snapshot of our work as of December 2024. There are no plans to update this data, though many researchers continue to gather new information about the deaths of Indian boarding school students.
The Post’s collection includes:
-
A boarding_schools.csv file with the name of each school, state, the count of deceased students from the Interior Department and The Post, the count of cemeteries from the Interior Department and The Post, and additional details about the schools as reported by the Interior.
-
A burial_sites.csv file listing the cemeteries where The Post found evidence that a deceased boarding school student had been buried.
-
A folder for each school that includes:
- A .csv file that lists the names and details of students who died.
- Snapshots of research documenting student deaths at that school, including publicly available news reports, Annual reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (ARCIA reports), Superintendents’ Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports and other school records.
- Enrollment records of these schools within the school folders, if available
-
Most of those enrollment records are in their corresponding school folders but the remaining ones are in this enrollment_records overflow folder because 1) there were multiple schools in one file or 2) a folder did not exist for this file.
-
A data dictionary for the .csv files.
Sometimes you may know where the student was buried but are unsure about which school they attended. Or you may know where the student went to school but not how they died or where they were buried. There are ways to fill in the missing pieces by using one type of information – an enrollment record, a death certificate or a burial site – to find another. In the future, this kind of research will be enhanced as additional records are located and digitized and made available by archivists and volunteers.
- Start by researching the schools where you think the child may have been a student
- Open the boarding_schools.csv file and search for the school name; see what information the Interior Department officially reported for that school and what The Post found.
- Go to the folder for the state where the school was located, and click through to the folder for that specific school.
- See if there are enrollment records in the school’s folder, and search for the student’s name in those files.
- If the enrollment record came from the National Archives, it may have a corresponding number for a student file where there may be additional information. If there is a student file number, search for it at catalog.archives.gov to determine if the file is available online or is located in a regional branch of the archives.
- If the student attended a school run by a religious organization, you’ll want to find out which religious order was involved. Marquette University holds many records for boarding schools that were operated by the Catholic Church or its affiliates. Other religious organizations also have archives – such as the Presbyterian Historical Society – that may be online or require an in-person visit.
- To search for a student’s possible burial site, go to the cemeteries.csv file and look for the list of cemeteries associated with that school. If there is one, follow the link to see if the person you are looking for has been documented on Findagrave.com, a crowdsourced public database of burial plots.
- Confirm details with death certificates (available at Ancestry.com), newspaper clippings (available at Newspapers.com or the Library of Congress) or census records.
- If you are trying to locate additional cemeteries for students who attended schools that The Post and the Interior Department did not identify, first determine the exact location of the school by looking at archival maps of the area. Maps can be found in collections at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Geological Survey, state or county-level websites, universities or local historical societies, or through commercial vendors like Historicmapworks.com and Ancestry.com.
- Once you have located the school on a map, explore the surrounding area for cemetery markers.
- If you find a cemetery noted, it may help to georeference the map, meaning that you use mapping software or a website to overlay and compare the archival map with current maps from Google Maps or other sources. You can then identify the geographic coordinates of the cemetery.
- Check to see if the cemetery is reported on open-source mapping platforms.
- You can also search Findagrave.com for cemeteries in the same area and compare the coordinates for any burial sites listed there with the coordinates of burial sites you may have found from other maps.
- Check to see if there is a cemetery in the vicinity that has been identified by volunteers and reported to the USGS National Map Viewer (Navigate to: Layers > Structures > Features > Landmarks & Government Buildings > Cemeteries).
- Review other authoritative sources of information about cemetery locations, as suggested by USGS: BillionGraves website; USGenWeb Archives; the topoView application; the Churches and Cemeteries website. Check with historical or genealogical societies who may have compiled lists of local, state or regional cemeteries.
- Like Findagrave.com, individual cemeteries sometimes make available lists of people who are buried at their sites. These lists of names can be researched to sometimes identify students.
- Find out which school is near the child’s burial site by using the resources above. Then, see if enrollment records are available for that school for the years that the child may have been a student.
- Open the boarding_schools.csv file and see what the Interior Department officially reported for that school and what The Post found.
- Navigate through the state/school folders to review available enrollment and other records specific to that school; take note of the years for which the records are available to identify potentially missing documentation.
To facilitate research, The Post is also making some complete documents available, including the ARCIA reports from 1825 through 1963, which were obtained from the National Archives and HathiTrust.org, and a list of students who died at Indian boarding schools that was collected as part of the second volume of the Department of the Interior’s investigative report released in July 2024. The Post obtained those lists of deceased students pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, though the agency redacted student names from the documents disclosed.
- Indian Boarding Schools: Annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1825 - 1963
- Department of the Interior list of deceased students obtained via FOIA
The Post has spent more than a year examining the legacy of America’s network of Indian boarding schools. Email our team at boardingschools@washpost.com.
Other work in this series includes:
- A look at the legacy of Indian boarding schools
- The impact the Catholic church had on boarding school students
- Coverage of the church’s and government’s apologies for boarding school policies
- School survivors’ stories
Reporting by Dana Hedgpeth, Sari Horwitz, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Andrew Ba Tran and Nilo Tabrizy. Photography by Jahi Chikwendiu, Marvin Joseph and Salwan Georges.
Additional reporting by Rachel S. Cohen, Alice Crites, Marianne LeVine, Tamilore Oshikanlu, Claire Healy, Susie Webb and Nate Jones.
Design by Natalie Vineberg. Development by Jake Crump.
Editing by David S. Fallis and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Meghan Hoyer, Jenna Pirog, Nadine Ajaka and Jay Wang.
Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Photo research by Troy Witcher. Graphic editing by Emily M. Eng.
Additional support from Peter Wallsten, Cameron Barr, Matthew Callahan, Kathy Baird, Brandon Carter, Matt Clough, Matea Gold, Jenna Lief, Jordan Melendrez, Sarah Murray, Amy Nakamura, Kyley Schultz, Savannah Stephens, Rushawn Walters and Emily Wright.
Reporting also drew on research from the following:
Alaska: Benjamin Jacuk of the Alaska Native Heritage Center; Lamont Hawkins Jr., a historian from Nenana; Coleen Walker Mielke, a historian in Wasilla; Chris Wooley, an archaeologist with the Tangirnaq Tribe.
Arizona: Elaine Shilstut of the Presbyterian Historical Society, who researched the Tucson Indian Training School.
California: Jean Keller of San Diego Mesa College, who researched the Sherman Institute and Perris Indian School.
Colorado: State Archaeologist Holly Norton.
Hawaii: Maile Arvin of the University of Utah, who researched the Industrial and Reformatory School. Indiana: Jeannie Regan-Dinius of the Crown Hill Foundation and Beth McCord of the state Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, who researched the White’s Manual Labor Institute.
Michigan: Shannon Martin, who researched Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School.
Minnesota: Anita Gaul, historian, and Janet Timmerman, researcher, who documented the St. Rose/St. Francis Xavier School; the Rev. Gary Mills, who has researched St. Paul’s Industrial School.
Montana: Janine Pease and James Grant, who researched the St. Labre Indian Mission Boarding School; Ken Robison of the Overholser Historical Research Center, who researched the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian boarding school; Chloe Runs Behind of the Missoula Public Library, who has researched Montana boarding schools.
Nebraska: Shelley Frear, who researched the Genoa Indian Industrial School; Margaret D. Jacobs with the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project.
Oregon: SuAnn Reddick and Eva Guggemos, archivist at Pacific University, who researched the Chemawa Indian Training School.
Pennsylvania: Jim Gerencser, Lily Sweeney, Kate Theimer and Frank Vitale of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center; Louellyn White of Concordia University, who researched the Lincoln Institution and Carlisle.
Oklahoma: Jim Baker, former superintendent of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma; the Oklahoma Cemetery Directory; the Oklahoma Historical Society; the Oklahoma State University Digital Collections library.
South Dakota: attorneys Heather Dawn Thompson, Tatewin Means and Rebecca Kidder, who researched the Rapid City Indian School.
Washington: Linzie Crofoot of Northwestern Indian College, who researched the Cushman Indian School, where her great-grand uncle died.
Other: Preston McBride, Pomona College. Bryan Rindfleisch, Amy Cary and Daniella Goldfarb of Marquette University, who researched boarding schools in records held by Catholic Missions; Joaquin Gallegos; the cartographic records staff at the National Archives, including Amy Edwards and Jared Chamberlin; the cartographic records staff at the Library of Congress; and archivists Cody White and Rose Buchanan of the National Archives and Records Administration.
The data is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Please reach out to boardingschools@washpost.com with any questions or feedback about the data. Please note that we do not accept pull requests on this repository. Before you comment, take a moment to review the Post’s Code of Conduct for GitHub releases.