Boarding School Report: Government should return school lands to tribes (Media Share)

Boarding School Media Share

Media Share from ICT on August 1, 2024
https://ictnews.org/news/boarding-school-report-government-should-return-school-lands-to-tribes

The final report from the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative shines light on South Dakota site that tribes say has a troubled history

The story of Indian boarding schools – children stripped from their homes and forced into foreign lifeways – is a story of brutally disrupted lives, families and cultures that continues “to impact American Indian and Alaska Native individuals and Indian Country,” according to a report released this week by the U.S. Department of Interior.

It’s also a story that, like most every story in Indian Country, eventually comes back to the land.

“The purpose of the Indian boarding school policy was to assimilate American Indians and Alaska Natives and dispossess us of our lands,” said OJ Semans, executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, an advocacy group of more than 20 tribes controlling more than 50 million acres.

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And in a cruel twist, it was often land – appropriated from Native nations – that provided the resources to operate the boarding schools. The federal government granted thousands of acres for hundreds of schools – or sold large tracts at basement prices – to provide building sites, farms and ranches for starting and sustaining the schools.

Now, decades later, the government may launch a boarding school land-back effort. A final report released Tuesday, July 30, by the Department of Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative is recommending that the U.S. government work to return those lands to the tribes from which they were taken.

In the process, the department could bring pressure to bear on land disputes that have been simmering for years over former boarding school sites.

“The department should work to facilitate the return of those Indian boarding school sites to U.S. government or tribal ownership,” according to the just-released Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report Volume II. “Where former boarding school sites revert to U.S. government ownership or remain in U.S. government ownership, the department should engage with Indian tribes in government-to-government consultation when asked, to address the ownership and management of those sites, including the protection of burial sites and cultural resources.”

Semans welcomed the recommendation.

“The lands wrongfully taken from tribal nations in support of Indian boarding schools are valuable and should be returned to help us address the many intergenerational social ills from which we still suffer caused by the Indian boarding schools,” said Semans, Sicangu Lakota.

Unheeded demands

Some ex-boarding school sites, such as the Phoenix Indian School, ended up converted to parks or memorials. Others, like a 462-acre Alaskan property sold to the Catholic Church in 1951 for $1.25 an acre, was re-sold by the church – to the lands’ Indigenous, ancestral stewards – for nearly $2 million just last year.

Untold thousands of acres still remain on the books of various institutions decades after most of the boarding schools closed.

An ICT investigation found that the Catholic Church – the largest non-government operator of Indian boarding schools – may still hold as many as 10,000 acres originally slated for school operations. Many of the former school lands across the country are covered by so-called “reversion clauses,” which stipulate ownership reverts to the federal government if the boarding school closes.

Semans’ organization of large tribes thinks the Department of the Interior should start its land-back work in Rapid City, South Dakota, where Native community members have tried for three-quarters of a century to benefit from some 1,200 acres deeded to the Rapid City Indian Boarding School in the 1800s that has all ended up out of Native hands.

“Restoring our tribal lands is the foundation of our cultural and spiritual healing,” said large tribes coalition Treasurer Lisa White Pipe, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council. “The Rapid City Indian Boarding School is vitally important and would be an ideal first step in land reversion enforcement … and begin the intensive healing our people need.”

The Rapid City Indian School operated between 1898 and 1933 as one of hundreds of boarding schools across the country designed to implement federal assimilation policies. It was then converted to a tuberculosis ward and subsequently to a hospital.

In 1948, seeing that the property was no longer an operating school, Congress decided to parcel out large tracts of school land in what is today West Rapid City. It passed a law spelling out who could take ownership of property — the city of Rapid City for municipal purposes, the local school district for educational purposes, the National Guard, churches or so-called “needy Indians.”

No Indigenous people ever received any land, and repeated redress demands have gone unheeded.

“There have been decades upon decades of community members, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, trying to bring to the forefront the violation of the 1948 statute” regarding the boarding boarding school land, said Tatewin Means, a citizen of and former attorney general for the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

“The acknowledgement phase is done,” Means said. “Now it’s time to right the wrongs. … We need either the City of Rapid City, the Department of Interior, or both, to do the right thing and move forward to get in compliance with the law.”

A search for reconciliation

The generations-long standoff in Rapid City between the Native community and city leaders began shifting about eight years ago when Indigenous leaders distilled broad claims of misdeeds into focused claims of deed violations.

Native legal sleuths uncovered the titles on some of the former boarding school property allocated under the 1948 federal law – much of it covered by a reversion clause that says the Interior Department can reclaim ownership if the parcel is no longer used for the statutorily defined purposes set forth by Congress.

Three titles stood out to the researchers, who concluded the apparent discrepancies warranted reversion to federal ownership. In 2017, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials agreed.

Children with placards bearing the names of students who died at the old Rapid City Indian Boarding School sit in October 2020 in front of a hillside  that researchers determined holds unmarked graves of some of the children. A memorial is planned at the site. (Photo by Stewart Huntington/ICT)

“It appears as if the analysis is correct: three parcels that were deeded originally to the Rapid City School District and the City of Rapid City would now be subject to reversion,” the BIA said in a 2017 memo sent to the city and others. The BIA further directed the city and the community to work together to craft a “creative solution” to the impasse.

City leaders and community members responded with a series of public presentations spelling out the history of the west Rapid City land – how the churches proliferated in that part of town, how a large city park was established, how it came to be that so few Natives reside there. The mayor at the time, Steve Allender, called the revelations “an inconvenient truth.”

Lengthy discussions and negotiations ensued. Willie Bear Shield, a former Rosebud tribal council member, worked with Allender to find a negotiated solution.

“We wanted to try to make things better,” he said. “We have to have some kind of reconciliation.”

The talks and public meetings culminated in a November 2020 city council resolution that stated in part that the council “seeks to find a resolution to the questions surrounding the three parcels” that rectifies “the inequities related to the lack of ‘needy Indian’ receipt of land under the 1948 Act [of Congress] and to honor 70 years of Native community requests for use of the lands.”

The resolution further committed the council to “devise and present a draft plan” to rectify the situation by June 30, 2021.

Then, as so often is the case in the history of Indian interactions with all levels of governments in the United States, everything went sideways.

Voices rose in disagreement. The deadline of June 30, 2021, came and went without a resolution or even a draft plan. When the mayor finally presented a detailed blueprint that December, the council tabled it.

Then, more than two years ago, Native negotiators took a different path and formally asked the Department of Interior to intervene and revert ownership of the three parcels.

Looking ahead

That is where things stand today in Rapid City.

Interior spokespeople have not responded to repeated requests for comment from ICT. Rapid City officials said only that there was “no update to share” and that the city has not “heard anything from the Department of the Interior.”

Means, the former tribal attorney general, echoed the statements from the Coalition of Large Tribes calling for action from Interior Department officials.

“It’s time to enforce the statute,” she said. “It’s time to do what’s right. It’s time to allocate lands specifically to the Indian community in Rapid City so that we can have the spaces that we need to thrive.

“I think a lot of other Indian communities and tribal nations are looking to see what’s happening here so that they could also do the research and look into similar types of situations where there have been statutes and reversion clauses and all of these protections put in place,” Means said.

Details have not yet emerged on how the government might comply with the recommendation from the Federal Boarding School Initiative report. 

The report recommends that the Department of the Interior conduct reviews, upon request of tribes, “of property and title documents for former Indian boarding school sites, including land patents provided to religious institutions and organizations or states, including during territorial status.”

When required by patent, deed, statute, or other law, including reversionary clause activation, the department should work to facilitate the return of those Indian boarding school sites to the U.S. government or tribal ownership. This would include reversionary clauses under the Indian Appropriation Act of 1922.

It’s not yet clear how tribes would be required to request reviews, or if existing procedures could trigger the review. The land issues are among a string of recommendations included in the report as a way toward healing and reconciliation from the generational trauma of Indian boarding schools..

On July 30 during a call with media regarding the release of the Interior’s second boarding school report, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland cited his suggestions for moving forward.

“I recommend that we work to return former Indian boarding school sites to tribes,” said Newland, who is a citizen of the Bay Mills Community (Ojibwe). “These institutions are not just part of our past. Their legacy reaches us today and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the country.”

ICT national correspondent Mary Annette Pember contributed to this report.

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