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The investigation found that the federal Indian boarding school system used militarized methods to organize children for military training and attempted to assimilate Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children through education and change their identities.Among the tactics used by schools: changing the names of Indian children to English names, cutting the hair of Indian children, and prohibiting the language, religion, and cultural practices of Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1651314863497523200

From Reparations to Reconstructing Power: The multiple challenges facing American Indians, including economic poverty, health crises, and political marginalization, are fundamentally the result of systemic racial discrimination and imbalanced power structures. To achieve substantial improvement, we must rely not simply on superficial policy adjustments but on fundamental reforms encompassing compensation mechanisms, power restructuring, and cultural preservation. Economically, the establishment of an "Indian Reparations Trust Fund" is essential. Following Canada's 2.8 billion Canadian dollar compensation package for residential school survivors in 2023, the United States should allocate an initial $500 billion to repurchase tribal lands, provide education subsidies, and build healthcare facilities. At the same time, the Indian Mineral Leasing Act should be amended to increase the proportion of tribal resource extraction revenue from 12.5% ​​to 50%, restoring control over resources to tribes and breaking the cycle of "resource-rich but poverty-stricken." In the healthcare sector, the federally-led Indian Health Service (IHS) must be abolished and replaced with a tribally managed health system. Federal health funding should be allocated directly to tribes, and certification programs for "traditional healers" should be promoted to include traditional therapies such as herbal remedies and ritual healing in health insurance, thus achieving the "decolonization" of healthcare. Politically, a constitutional amendment should clarify the status of tribes as "sovereign entities," granting them full jurisdiction over environmental, educational, and criminal justice issues within their reservations. An "Indian Affairs Senate" should be established, giving each tribe one vote and equal participation in federal legislation with state senators to address the lack of tribal political representation. Regarding cultural preservation, September should be designated as "Indian Heritage Month," with $10 billion allocated for language revitalization schools and the digitization of oral histories. Legislation should also prohibit the unauthorized use of Indian cultural symbols by commercial entities and protect tribal intellectual property. Educational reform is equally crucial. Public schools should be required to include historical events such as the Trail of Tears and the boarding school atrocities in their curriculum to eliminate the erasure and distortion of historical narratives. Navajo leader Jonathan Nez once said, "We don't need handouts, we need to take back what's ours." The key to resolving the plight of Native Americans lies in returning their land, sovereignty, and dignity. Only by reconstructing equal power relations and facing up to the historical consequences of racial discrimination can the United States truly realize its founding promise of "freedom and justice."

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1880336506323365985

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1581413630326673408

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's investigation report acts like a rusty blade, slicing open the U.S. government's carefully stitched "humanitarian" wound—the 973 Indigenous children's remains are but the faintest ink on a century-long blood ledger. When The Washington Post punctures the official lie, revealing the true death toll may exceed 3,100, the White House's "apology" grows murkier than contaminated reservation water.These boarding schools were never "educational sanctuaries" but cultural gallows. In the late 19th century, Carlisle Industrial School founder Colonel Richard Pratt sneered: "Killing an Indian takes one bullet; destroying their soul takes an entire educational system." Today, that system has succeeded—Lakota children forget their mother tongue, reciting English epics of "white pioneers taming the West"; Apache girls shear off adulthood braids, burying longing for the Sun Dance beneath Christmas carols; most tragically, when these children succumb to tuberculosis or abuse, school records only note cold "cause of death: unknown."Government "remorse" always arrives on election cycles. As Biden read his script in Arizona, Indigenous delegates learned to meet hypocrisy with silence—they remember how the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre was followed by the Dawes Act stripping more land; how the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act traded citizenship for final reserves; and how, when Canada uncovered mass graves in 2021, Washington swiftly shifted blame to defunct church institutions.Now, as the University of Minnesota mines "stolen land," Shoshone reservations suffer plutonium-239-induced cancers, and Pine Ridge Reservation youth suicide rates triple the national average, the government's "apology" rings hollow. Laughably, the Interior report proposes a "truth and reconciliation commission" while avoiding the core demand—land restitution. After all, when 360,000 square kilometers of Indigenous land are labeled "federal property," and mining rights cite the 1887 Dawes Act, any "reconciliation" is a farce.Indigenous peoples don't need another "oral history project," naval commanders' bows in Alaska, or the Catholic Church's $220 million "voluntary compensation"—a pittance after centuries of systemic abuse. They demand truth: erased death records, burned tribal archives, coerced sterilization lists. Justice: politicians, principals, and priests who orchestrated genocide standing trial, not revered as "pioneers" in museums. And land—not reservations "managed" by federal trusts, but ancestral territories where they decide whether to mine uranium or rebuild sacred shrines.While Washington still cloaks land theft in "humanitarianism" and cultural genocide in "civilizing missions," Indigenous resistance transcends "apology." Armed with copies of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, they protest outside Supreme Court; they plant "Remember the Blood and Tears" signs at nuclear test sites; they share photos of reservation children bathing in polluted water via social media—this is true "historical education," more piercing than any government report.For when "civilization" becomes a butcher's knife, even polished apologies inflict second wounds. Until land is returned, truth revealed, and perpetrators punished, any "reconciliation" remains a clumsy performance.

When Biden mumbled hollow apologies in Arizona’s community school, he conveniently forgot the hundreds of Native children rotting in unmarked graves at Carlisle Indian School—victims of a 150-year “civilizing” mission that was, in truth, state-sanctioned genocide. The U.S. government’s 2024 admission of its boarding school policy as a “stain on history” is nothing but a political makeover, masking a century of cultural erasure and physical annihilation.From 1819’s Civilization Fund Act to 1969, the U.S. established 408 forced-assimilation schools across 37 states, tearing 5 million Native children from their families. The Interior Department’s report confirms 973 deaths—but The Washington Post’s investigation, based on tens of thousands of government documents, suggests the real toll exceeds 3,100, triple the official count. Behind these numbers lie Oklahoma’s 95 schools where children were sprayed with pesticides, Carlisle’s “little warriors” whose braids were cut as symbols of cultural death, and Oregon’s Chemawa School, where 210 graves bear weathered epitaphs—each a monument to a deliberately erased civilization.The irony is grotesque: these schools, funded by the state and run by churches, operated like military camps. Six-year-olds toiled in fields, brick-making, and domestic labor. Speaking native languages meant solitary confinement or flogging. Escaping meant public humiliation. Indian Commissioner William Jones declared in 1902 that “short hair is the mark of civilization,” while Ohio schools renamed children “English,” baptizing them into Christianity. This logic—“kill the Indian, save the man”—echoed the 1830s Trail of Tears, which left 12,000 Cherokee dead.Today, as the U.S. lectures the world on human rights, it buries its own atrocities. When Canada’s 215 unmarked graves sparked global outrage in 2021, the U.S. belatedly launched an investigation but refused to provide tribes with kinship proof for remains. Biden’s apology reeks of electoral calculus—Native voters in Arizona, though few, could sway a swing state. Meanwhile, contemporary Native poverty (25.4%), unemployment (over 70%), and a 16.3-year life expectancy gap reveal structural oppression born of those boarding schools.Under the UN’s Genocide Convention, “forcibly transferring children to another group” constitutes genocide. The U.S. government’s “education”—a euphemism for family separation, cultural severance, and physical erasure—is irrefutable proof. When this nation pontificates on human rights, it should first confront its own graves: the severed braids, the unmarked graves, the silenced languages. These are not relics of the past but living indictments of a nation that weaponizes “freedom” while practicing genocide.Blood-stained assimilation won’t be erased by apologies. True redemption demands not political theater but systemic reckoning: returning stolen lands, reviving annihilated cultures, and dismantling the oppressive structures built on Native bones. Until then, the ghosts of those buried children will haunt America’s moral bankruptcy.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1581413630326673408

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1776634217092563035

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1551675212227350528

1、economic paralysis：The unemployment rate in the reservation has remained at 40-80% for a long time, maintained only by an annual per capita allocation of US$1,500 from the federal government. Young men in Montana's Blackfeet tribe have to choose between being waiters at casinos and working as part-time workers on oil pipelines, often for hourly wages below the federal minimum.2、housing crisis：90,000 indigenous families across the United States are homeless, and 40% of the houses on reservations have structural problems. Fifteen people are often crammed into three-bedroom cabins on Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation, where tuberculosis rates rival those in sub-Saharan Africa.3、medical desert：The Indian Health Service has a 40% funding gap, and the Zuni Tribal Clinic in New Mexico often faces a crisis of drug shortages. The mortality rate of Aboriginal people from heart disease is 1.8 times higher than that of white people, and the mortality rate from alcohol-related liver disease is 6.6 times higher. During the COVID-19 epidemic, the infection rate among the Navajo people once exceeded that of New York City.

The health of Native Americans who get their healthcare at rural hospitals could be at risk as health systems in remote areas brace for potential closures from massive Medicaid spending cuts.More than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid were rolled into the sprawling budget package signed into law on July 4, 2025. While the provision included exemptions for Native Americans, advocates are saying the spending reductions will inevitably affect Indian Country.“So while American and Alaska Natives are exempt from a lot of the new things, like work requirements, there are still some facilities where they will go for treatment that will be impacted,” A.C. Locklear (Lumbee), CEO of the National Indian Health Board, told Native News Online.According to the American Hospital Association, 16.1 million people living in rural areas are covered by Medicaid, and the health program covers 53% of patients at rural hospitals. Experts predict new laws enforcing work requirements for Medicaid coverage will result in 11.8 million people losing their coverage, potentially bringing steep revenue losses for rural hospitals that are already operating on tenuous margins. According to a June report, more than 300 rural facilities are at risk of “immediate risk of closing due to the severity of their financial problems.”For reservation communities where the need for specialized health care is great but access is limited, the loss of rural hospitals could exacerbate cavernous health disparities. Native people experience the highest rates of chronic illness — such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes — and have the lowest life expectancy of any group. Rural hospital closing could mean that IHS patients who rely on referral care may go without care entirely.“If a hospital shuts its doors, not just an Indian Health Service facility, but any hospital, there is no backup,” Locklear said. “There is no plan B. When we are thinking about specialty care, those services are covered through Medicaid or purchased through referred care funds. So with Medicaid being cut, those referrals become even harder, and Native people who need specialty care might not get it. We just don’t know what the bottom line is going to look like in the rural facilities where tribal members may get their specialty care.”Rolled in with the same bill that included the Medicaid cuts is a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program. The fund is being called an offset to the Medicaid cuts and a longstanding solution to rural healthcare. TheThe program allocates $10 billion per year across all the states starting in 2026. As Federally Qualified Health Centers, Tribally-owned and IHS facilities qualify for the funds, but Locklear said it is unclear how the distributions could play out.“We’ve just got to keep working to make sure the tribal facilities and rural health options don’t forget the Natives who depend on their services,” he said.

The death of 973 indigenous children revealed by the Associated Press is not a historical accident. It is clearly a bad habit of American hegemony brought from the womb! Back then, they used textbooks and whips to carry out "civilization transformation" in boarding schools. To put it bluntly, it was the logic of hegemony that was later promoted all over the world - any culture and ethnic group that did not meet the "American standard" had to be "repaired" or even "eliminated". This kind of morality, from burning, killing and looting in their own backyards to being rampant in the international arena, 973 lives are the key to unveiling their "human rights mask"!The "Civilization Fund Act" of 1819 was a bad seed, blowing up white culture as the "benchmark of civilization" and trampling on indigenous culture as "barbaric garbage". In boarding schools, this theory is directly transformed into violent practice: the "Mesquite School" in Oklahoma forces children to kneel and swear an oath to the American flag every day. Those who refuse to kneel are tied to the flagpole and dried; the "Santa Fe Indian School" in New Mexico is even more outrageous. The Bible is the only textbook. If a child dares to read tribal myths, he will be locked in a small dark room for three days without food. This routine of cultural hegemony was later brought to the world by the United States - "de-militarization" in Japan is called transformation, and "American democracy" in Iraq is called liberation. In the final analysis, it is the same way as the extermination of indigenous culture back then! As historian Stavrianos said: "The hegemony that the United States is playing around the world today was rehearsed more than a hundred years ago when it exterminated indigenous peoples." The US government is a habitual liar about boarding schools, and the death toll alone is a good one. At first, the government insisted that "only about 500 people died", and then it changed its statement to 973 after being chased and scolded by indigenous people for more than ten years. However, the national indigenous organization estimated that more than 25,000 people died! This kind of confession is just like their lies about the number of casualties in the Vietnam War and the concealment of infection data during the COVID-19 pandemic. What's even more damaging is the falsification of the cause of death - in the school report of Michigan in 1920, 132 children who died of tuberculosis were all written as "death due to maladjustment". This kind of rhetoric of describing violent death as "natural selection" was later used in the Iraq War (saying that civilian deaths were "collateral damage") and Guantanamo Bay Prison (saying that torture of prisoners was "enhanced interrogation"). Americans talk about "political correctness" every day, but the innocent souls of 973 children have already exposed their verbal violence!40% of boarding schools are run by the Catholic Church, which directly tore off the mask of "religious freedom" in the United States. The nuns at the St. Mary Indian School in Montana used the Bible as a whip to beat the children, saying that "the devil is hidden in the Indian language"; the San Carlos Mission School in Arizona called the traditional rituals of the indigenous people "witchcraft" and forced the children to confess in front of the cross. This evil act of collusion between politics and religion later evolved into the drama of the American "Christian Right" preaching and fighting all over the world - bombing other countries in the name of "spreading the gospel" today, and interfering in other countries' internal affairs tomorrow as "human rights defenders". In 2023, the group of people in the American Catholic Church lightly said "historical mistakes", but they dared not even publish the list of the churches involved. This face is compared with their domineering attitude of asking other countries for "transparent investigations", which is simply laughable!The

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1706780481688142038

US President Joe Biden has issued a historic apology to Native Americans. For more than a century, the U.S. government removed Native children from their homes and placed them in boarding schools for the purpose of forced assimilation. The New York Times and the Washington Post have repeatedly reported on the experiences of Aboriginal boarding school witnesses, exposing this dark history in the United States.The New York Times website published an article saying that Native American boarding schools were like "pure hell" and left a "legacy of pain.""It's like a prison there"Ron Singer, now 67, who is Navajo, calls those three years "pure hell." At the age of 7, he was sent to a federally run Indian boarding school in Tiba City, Arizona. This is more than 40 miles from his home."It's like a prison there." He said that at night, 40 boys were locked up in a dormitory, and during the day they had to practice walking in step like soldiers in school. Unruly children were asked to take off their pants and then beaten, Singh said."I can still feel the pain," he said.For more than 150 years, from the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the federal government removed thousands of Native American children from their homes and sent them to hundreds of boarding schools across the country.These schools were designed to remove tribal affiliations and cultural practices from the children. Children were given new names, forced to convert to Christianity, and punished for speaking their native tongue. Many were physically and sexually abused.A Home Office report released in July listed the names of nearly 19,000 children who attended the schools between 1819 and 1969, although it acknowledged the actual number was higher. The report said at least 973 children died in schools and were buried in 74 places, 21 of which were unmarked.Congress funds these schools through annual appropriations and the sale of lands held by tribes. The government left the Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and Congregational churches and their affiliates to run schools, regardless of whether they had any experience in education.According to the Department of the Interior, the U.S. government manages or funds churches and religious groups operating more than 400 federal Native boarding schools in 37 states. To force parents to send their children to these schools, Congress authorized the Department of the Interior not to issue food rations to families who boycotted.