What the Boarding School Reports Confirmed
The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative of 2021–2022 — the Biden administration’s official investigation into the history of the federal boarding school system — confirmed, with the authority of official government investigation, the substance of what Zitkála-Šá had been saying in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 and in her subsequent decades of advocacy.
The investigation identified more than 400 federal Indian boarding schools that had operated between 1819 and 1969. It identified more than 50 burial sites at former school locations — the graves of children who had died far from their families, in conditions of inadequate care, as part of a system that claimed to be serving their interests.
The report’s language was explicit about the nature of what the system had done: it documented the “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report” as a reckoning with a system that had used “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies” to eliminate Indigenous identity, including forced haircuts, suppression of Native languages, forced religious conversion, and the separation of children from their families.
The forced haircut that Zitkála-Šá described in 1900 — the event she hid under a bed to try to prevent — was one of the “systematic methodologies” that the 2022 report identified as characteristic of what the boarding school system had done to children across the country, across multiple generations.
The report was not a legal proceeding with the power to restore what was taken. It was a documentation and an acknowledgment. But the formal acknowledgment, by the government that had run the system, that the system had done what its critics had said it did — this was a specific form of vindication.
It came 122 years after Zitkála-Šá published her account in the Atlantic Monthly.