President Biden issued a historic apology for Native American boarding schools. Here’s what policymakers can do next to support tribal education

In late October, President Joe Biden issued an apology for the U.S. Indian Boarding Schools program, a century-long concerted effort by the federal government to destroy Native American culture and assimilate Native children through a network of residential schools. This apology—the first of its kind by a sitting U.S. president—comes in the wake of the Department of the Interior publishing the second and final volume of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report, which quantified the scope of the economic, social, and human impacts of one of the most destructive assimilation policies in American history.  

Beyond laying bare the devasting impact of the boarding school program on Native communities and children, the Interior Department report also issued an explicit call for the federal government to pursue policies that help Indigenous communities heal, while raising awareness about the lasting impacts of the boarding schools on Native welfare. However, the report made it clear that well-intentioned policymaking and awareness initiatives will be insufficient in addressing the harms done to Native people. The federal government must also commit itself to investment in Indian Country commensurate with the scale of the trauma, economic harms, and social harms the boarding schools levied onto Native people and communities.  

With President-elect Donald Trump set to retake office in January, it is imperative that the steps President Biden and the Interior Department have taken do not wither on the vine. Given the destructive legacy of Trump’s last term for Indian Country—as well as the anti-diversity, assimilation-centric rhetoric he and his proxies expressed on the 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaign trails—it will be essential for congressional, state, philanthropic, and private sector actors to take steps to secure future investment and policy change to promote Native American welfare, prosperity, and self-actualization. 

This analysis provides a brief overview of the federal Indian boarding school system as well as current federal investments targeting Native American education, and proposes several complementary policy actions for holistically supporting Native individuals and communities. It also outlines some of the ongoing barriers to public awareness about the long-term impacts of federal abuse toward Indian Country, and how the historic and modern lack of public awareness creates barriers to new investment in tribal education and cultural revitalization. 

What were the federal Indian boarding schools? 

The boarding schools have their roots in the trust and treaty obligations the U.S. government has to Native American tribes. In exchange for the land cessations that Native nations made to the U.S., the federal government obligated itself to meet certain needs for tribes and Native American people for as long as the United States continued to exist on the land. Among these obligations is meeting the educational needs of Native American children.  

However, while the deceptively benign name of “boarding school” may conjure images of bucolic campuses and ivy-covered buildings for most Americans, these institutions were instead designed as tools of assimilation and cultural genocide toward Native nations. This mission was codified in 1819 with the passage of the assimilation-focused Civilization Fund Act, which empowered the executive branch to “in every case where he shall judge improvement in the habits and condition of such Indians practicable…employ capable persons of good moral character” and introduce to any tribe adjoining a frontier settlement the “arts of civilization.” The boarding schools were a key tool for advancing the assimilation mission. In many cases, Native American children were kidnapped from their homes and held as hostages in federal “schools,” where they were forced to take new “white” names, forbidden from speaking Native languages, and prohibited from taking part in any Native cultural practices. 

The findings of the Interior report are sobering. The report identifies 417 boarding schools across 37 states, as well as an additional 1,025 institutions such as day schools, orphanages, and boarding schools that did not receive government funding, but advanced similarly destructive assimilation efforts. Most disturbingly, the report confirms that at least 973 Native children died while in the custody of these schools, which separated children as young as three years old from their parents and communities and subjected them to rampant physical abuse, sexual abuse, and forced manual labor. None of this should be surprising from a set of institutions whose architect, Richard Henry Pratt, stated his goal was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man.” 

Nor was the U.S. government unaware of the abuses happening at these schools. As early as 1928, the Meriam Report, published by a team led by Brookings researcher Lewis Meriam, documented the substandard education and living conditions at the boarding schools. However, crucially, the Meriam Report did not call for the closure of the boarding schools, but rather recommended additional funding for them, with the aim of helping them function more effectively. In 1969, the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare published a new analysis, known as the Kennedy Report, condemning the boarding schools and labeling them a “national tragedy.”  

Yet despite decades of efforts by both Native and non-Native people to call out the abuses at these schools, they nonetheless continued to operate as tools of assimilation until well into the second half of the 20th century. All told, the U.S. government spent more than $23.3 billion on the boarding school system between 1871 and 1969, according to the Interior Department report. Other sources note the last assimilationist boarding school didn’t close until 1978—the year the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed. Today, there are boarding schools that continue to operate on some tribal reservations; however, they are frequently run by or in partnership with tribes, and don’t share the same explicitly assimilationist mission of those operating in earlier decades. 

At their peak in 1926, an estimated 83% of all Native American children were enrolled in boarding schools. Today, most Native American people are descendants of boarding school survivors, and many of those survivors are still alive. Indeed, many Native American people who are today in their 60s or older, particularly those who grew up in reservation communities, attended boarding schools. 

What is the state of Native American education today? 

While the boarding school era ended in the late 20th century, Native American students continue to face inequalities in educational access and outcomes. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ 2003 report, A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country, found that federal spending throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s had been wholly insufficient in meeting the basic needs of tribal communities. Moreover, the report found that because increases in funding for Native-serving programs failed to keep up with inflation, the constant-dollar value for federal investment in Indian Country had actually fallen over time. 

Despite the report’s findings—and its explicit call for strengthened investments—the Commission’s follow-up report in 2018, Broken Promises, found that “efforts undertaken by the federal government in the past fifteen years [had] resulted in only minor improvements, at best, for the Native population as a whole, and, in some respects, the U.S. Government [had] backslid in its treatment of Native Americans”.  

While the federal government cannot simply spend its way out of liability for the boarding schools, sustained and scaled investment in tribal communities is necessary for reducing the level of social, physical, and economic harms that the legacy of the schools and other past assimilationist policies such as the allotment of tribal reservations continue to inflict. As of 2024, the federal government’s own accounting of its investment in Native people and tribal communities was approximately $35 billion, including $25 billion in discretionary appropriations (approximately 2% to 3% of the federal government’s total nondefense discretionary budget for FY 2024). While this topline spending number may seem significant, only $2.5 billion of these appropriations is directly funding Native early childhood, K-12, and postsecondary education programs—a level of investment that is clearly insufficient given the ongoing challenges that Native students and communities face, and the scale of the federal government’s total investment in Native boarding schools throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.¹

While insufficient, the federal government’s current investments into Native American education—as well as tribal community and economic development more broadly—nonetheless provide potential channels for addressing the legacy of the boarding schools. Investing in tribally centered, tribally led systems of education for Native children and college students is one clear example. Indeed, the current landscape of tribally run K-12 schools and institutions of higher education was partially motivated by the Kennedy Report, which—in addition to calling for the end of the boarding schools—called for the federal government to establish an “exemplary school system” with funding for education, language and cultural revitalization, and trauma counseling.  

In the wake of the Kennedy Report, Congress enacted the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 (ISDEAA), which repudiated the boarding schools by allowing tribes to contract with the federal government to run their own schools and determine their own curricula.  

Today, the vast majority of Native American students attend state or locally run public schools. However, approximately 7% of American Indian and Alaska Native youth—primarily in rural reservation communities that aren’t served by public schools—are now enrolled across 185 schools funded by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). The BIE’s portfolio includes 129 tribally controlled K-12 schools and 56 BIE-operated K-12 schools, plus two BIE-operated higher education institutions (Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute). In addition, some tribes run their own schools that are independent of the BIE portfolio, but still receive federal funding through agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Native Americans. In addition to the two BIE-operated higher education institutions, there are an additional 33 tribally chartered or majority-Native tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) that are members of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. These institutions administer 90 campuses across 15 states.  

These schools not only serve to educate Native children and young adults—they also play an important role in revitalizing tribal language and cultural identity, and are critical in helping Native students break out of generational poverty and improving lifelong physical and mental health outcomes for Native individuals and communities. They often partner directly with Head Start providers in Indian Country to improve the quality and availability of early childhood education for Native children. Likewise, tribal higher education institutions contribute to tribal community and economic development. Like other higher education institutions, faculty at TCUs and other Native-serving organizations conduct research—often leveraging Indigenous methodologies—that contributes to community well-being. In addition, 74% of TCU alumni report working in areas related to Native American communities or tribal lands, making TCUs an important source of workforce development for tribal communities. 

However, these institutions and the students they serve still face acute challenges. Despite spending more per student than other public schools nationwide, schools in the BIE’s K-12 system have persistently languished due to poor management, insufficient funding, and eroding physical infrastructure. Additional disinvestment by the federal government in domains outside of education—such as health care and housing—has created severe obstacles for Native students that BIE schools are ill-equipped to address. As a result, students at BIE schools perform more than two grade levels behind the national average, and about one-third of a grade level behind nearby non-BIE public schools. Only half of students in the BIE’s K-12 system ultimately graduate from high school.  

In higher education, while TCUs have generated profound results for the well-being of individual alumni and communities, they have also been plagued by chronic underfunding. For example, of the nearly $345 million in research funding into land grant institutions, less than $5 million was appropriated specifically for research at TCUs (which Congress designated as land grant institutions in 1994). Despite the fact that the land grant system was originally created in 1862 through the expropriation of Indigenous land, in 2022, TCUs received just 1% of the level of land grant capacity funding on a per-institution basis as land grant institutions that were designated under Congress’ original 1862 law. While TCUs receive an average of $137,000 per institution in land grant capacity funding, non-tribal 1862 land grant institutions received an average of $11.6 million per institution. Additionally, many funding streams that specifically target Native American students are ultimately awarded to non-tribal institutions. For example, in FY 2021, the Congressional Research Service found that 85% of all funding appropriated through the Department of Agriculture’s $5 million New Beginning for Tribal Students program was ultimately awarded to 1862 and 1890 land grant institutions instead of TCUs.  

Beyond the federal government’s dedicated annual funding to Native American education, tribal educational entities are also engaging in creative ways to access the historic levels of place-based investment Congress passed since 2021. For example, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Regional Innovation Engines program awarded Navajo Technical University a $1 million development grant for its Advancing Distributed Manufacturing Innovations program, which seeks to “involve tribal communities in technology transfer and advanced manufacturing.” This grant comes during a period of unprecedented investment in semiconductor fabrication labs in and around the Phoenix region by manufacturers such as TSMC and Intel. Tribal communities and Native-led organizations have also seen an influx in investment through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and American Rescue Plan Act, which have provided multiple channels of funding for Native-led workforce training, cluster development, entrepreneurial ecosystem-building, broadband infrastructure, and planning and technical assistance. Investments like these demonstrate the value of asset-based approaches to investment in Indian Country by recognizing the value of Native identity, culture, and community in the development and implementation of tribal-serving programs. 

The Biden administration enabled these investments by prioritizing tribes and Native-led entities in its program guidance and notices of funding opportunities across major federal place-based programs such as the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) Build Back Better Regional Challenge, Recompete Pilot Program, and Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs), as well as the aforementioned NSF Regional Innovation Engines program. The EDA’s programs explicitly name Indian tribes or consortia of Indian tribes as eligible applicants, and the NSF similarly notes that tribal nations are eligible to submit proposals as the lead organization. The EDA also notes that it may establish a maximum investment rate of up to 100% for Indian tribe projects across its programs, and specifically namechecks TCUs as an eligible higher education institution within the Tech Hubs program. Meanwhile, the NSF notes that proposals that may impact the resources or interests of a federally recognized tribal nation will not be awarded funding without prior written approval from the relevant tribal nation. Each of these provisions has helped create pathways for Native communities and Native educational institutions to access these important sources of place-based funding, and should be maintained and enhanced. 

Increasing public awareness of Native American history faces growing headwinds 

Unfortunately, many Americans remain unaware of these recent successes and ongoing challenges. This is in part because most schools in the United States don’t teach any Native American history from after 1900, limiting Native American students’ ability to learn about their own history in school and giving students of all backgrounds the false impression that major events involving Native American people happened centuries ago.  

Moreover, the current wave of anti-DEI policies and other efforts to suppress aspects of U.S. history in schools and public discourse threaten recent gains such as the boarding schools report. Examples of these policies include the first Trump administration’s “patriotic education” commission, state efforts to ban so-called “divisive concepts” in educational settings, and proposals such as Project 2025’s plan to cut funding for “woke” schools. Each of these ideas puts emerging efforts to teach Native American history at risk.  

Finally, efforts to raise awareness of the boarding schools and their history can provoke backlash. This has been the case in Canada, where a more robust national dialogue around its similar system of “residential schools” sparked a growing residential school denial movement. These trends could emerge in the U.S. For example, as awareness of the federal Indian boarding schools has grown, some commentators have already begun to downplay their seriousness, or even insist they were good for Native American children. As such, it’s essential that policymakers allow our full history to be taught to counter these false and problematic ideas. 

What additional policy actions are needed? 

Ensuring that modern education and economic development policies translate into actual benefits for tribes will not only require an increase in the level of investment reaching these communities, but also structural change that centers tribes in curriculum design and operational structure; investments in wraparound services that address the unique crises students in Indian Country face; and efforts to educate the public about historic and present harms in Native American communities.   

To that end, beyond documenting the scope and scale of the boarding school system, the Interior Department’s report also outlines a series of policy steps the federal government should take to continue the process of reconciliation and healing from the boarding school era. The report recommends eight actions:  

1. “Acknowledge, apologize, repudiate, and affirm” the federal government’s role in the boarding school system. 
2. “Invest in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system,” including funding for individual and community healing; family preservation and reunification; violence prevention; high-quality elementary, secondary, and higher education for Native American students; and the revitalization of Indigenous languages. 
3. “Build a national memorial” to acknowledge and commemorate the experiences of tribes and Native American people within the boarding schools. 
4. “Identify and repatriate children who never returned from federal Indian boarding schools” to their tribes and families. 
5. “Return former federal Indian boarding school sites” to U.S. government or tribal ownership. 
6. “Tell the story of federal Indian boarding schools” through academic, government, and tribal channels, with an emphasis on sharing firsthand accounts. 
7. “Invest in further research” into the present-day health and economic impacts of the boarding school system, as well as related policies such as child removal, confinement, and forced assimilation. 
8. “Advance international relationships” with other nations that have their own histories of Indigenous boarding schools, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

The federal government has already taken an important first step by explicitly apologizing for its central role in the boarding school system. It is now essential to act on the other recommendations outlined in the report, which would make significant early progress in remedying the ongoing legacy of harm that the boarding schools have left in many Native communities. Beyond the federal government, other organizations such as the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Native American Rights Fund have put forward policy agendas to help Native communities and the nation as a whole heal from the impacts of the boarding schools. 

This piece does not aim to replicate the work of those organizations. Rather, what follows is a set of actions that federal, state, and local policymakers can take to complement those efforts by bolstering investment in Native American communities, protecting programs that support Native American students, and increasing our understanding of Native American student well-being. 

First, policymakers should take steps to ensure that progress made to date isn’t undermined. Given the central role that federal agencies play in educating Native students and supporting tribal economies, it’s critical that Congress prevent the incoming Trump administration from taking some of the destructive steps proposed on the campaign trail, such as abolishing the Department of Education. 

Likewise, while some states have enacted reparative policies for Native American students (such as tuition waivers, scholarships, and on-campus supports), those policies may now be at risk from recent judicial rulings that have sharply limited race-conscious policy in education, as well as potential Trump administration executive actions. In response, Congress should clarify that tribal citizenship is a political designation, not a racial one, and that actions to support tribal self-governance and economic well-being, inclusive of education policy, are not affected by recent federal court rulings. Such a policy could draw on the 1974 Supreme Court case Morton v. Mancari, which ruled that federal hiring preferences for tribal citizens was based on the federal government’s political relationship with tribes and did not constitute racial discrimination because it was “not even a ‘racial’ preference.” This approach would empower policymakers and educational institutions to safeguard Native American student policies that are based on tribal citizenship. 

Next, policymakers at all levels must do more to increase awareness of Native American history and remove barriers to teaching it. To do so, Congress should pass an “Indigenous Education for All” law that ensures Native American history, including 20th and 21st century history, is taught at all schools that receive federal funding. Such laws have a strong bipartisan history. In 1999, Montana took the groundbreaking step of passing the first Indian Education for All act, which has been followed by more recent state efforts such as Minnesota’s 2023 Indigenous Education for All act. From there, Congress should provide funding to public elementary and secondary schools—which educate the vast majority of Native American students today—to develop culturally relevant pedagogies for Native American students, deepen relationships with local and regional tribes, and provide opportunities such as Indigenous language learning in school. 

On the higher education side, Congress should bring TCUs into funding parity with other land grant institutions. Raising TCU land grant capacity funding to $11.6 million per year—to match the funding that 1862 land grant institutions receive—would provide an additional $400 million per year to those institutions. These resources can be complemented by providing greater funding for institutions through the Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act. Congress should also develop more robust funding streams for other institutions that serve Native American students, such as Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions. Doing so would help improve institutional capacity, individual economic well-being, and tribal community prosperity. 

Policymakers should also prioritize improving data about Native American students and giving tribes better access to data on their own citizens. Data on Native American students and individuals currently suffers from a variety of shortcomings. In some cases, unreliable sample sizes in government surveys make drawing statistically significant conclusions about Native populations impossible. In other cases, the data is incomplete. For example, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the federal government’s higher education database, does not disaggregate any information on Native American students who are either Latino or Hispanic or multiracial, who combined account for over 75% of all Native Americans. Nor does it collect any data on student tribal affiliation. These decisions make it impossible for researchers and tribes themselves to get a fuller picture of the successes and challenges for Native American students in higher education. Policymakers should increase funding to improve the presence of Native American people in government surveys, and leverage new guidance from the Office of Management and Budget to improve data collection practices about Native American students in education data. Policymakers can complement these efforts with steps such as funding investments into developing greater in-house data capacity for tribes; working with tribes to develop appropriate systems to make gathering, analyzing, and reporting data more efficient; developing a federal framework to protect tribal data sovereignty; and providing greater funding for digital literacy in tribal communities. 

To support these efforts, Congress should develop a set of robust, place-based investments into tribes and Native American communities, leveraging educational institutions and tribal educational offices as key economic and community development anchors. As discussed above, existing place-based federal programs—such as the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, Recompete Pilot Program, Tech Hubs, and NSF Regional Innovation Engines—can provide templates for the types of investments that leverage educational institutions’ ability to promote community and economic development in places, as well as the provisions that federal agencies should implement to ensure Native American communities can access those funding streams. In addition to developing a new set of place-based programs for Native American communities, policymakers can take steps to make all place-based programs even more accessible to Indian Country. For example, in future programs, Congress could provide additional funding for agencies to conduct proactive outreach to tribes to inform them about these programs and funding opportunities, as well as provide financial and technical assistance to tribes to defray the costs of applying for and implementing federal programs of this size. Given that tribes and TCUs frequently have fewer available resources than other governmental and higher education institutions, this type of additional proactive investment is needed to ensure Native communities truly have an equal shot at receiving federal funding. Policymakers should also attempt to adhere to principles for investing in Native American communities laid out by organizations such as United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. in their Marshall Plan for Tribal Nations, including favoring formula grants over competitive grants and eliminating statutory restrictions on spending to best enable tribal self-determination. 

Unfortunately, given the stated priorities of the incoming Trump administration and 119th Congress, extensive federal action in support of Native American students and tribal economies is unlikely. Thus, states, municipalities, and philanthropic organizations should in the coming years explore opportunities to execute some of these recommendations on their own. For example, states could expand the funding they provide to TCUs. While historically states have not funded TCUs, these institutions play an important role in supporting rural higher education as well as economic and workforce development in communities that state public colleges and universities do not serve—giving states a compelling economic reason to provide funding. States could also explore developing state-level funding streams to invest in tribal communities, and partner with tribes to share data these institutions collect on tribal citizenship and Native student education (from early childhood through postsecondary). Philanthropic organizations must also step up their investment in Native communities and Native education. Currently, less than 0.5% of all philanthropic funding goes to Native communities, meaning there is significant opportunity for philanthropy to do more to support Indian Country. Philanthropic funding is particularly critical in a moment such as the current one, when opportunities for federal action may be scarce. 

This list of policy items should not be taken as exhaustive. Additional investments are necessary, ranging from developing and recruiting top talent to work in Native-serving educational institutions to expanding child care and pre-K in tribal communities, among many others. An array of Native-led and Native-serving organizations have identified additional policy actions to support Native American students and educational institutions. Organizations such as the National Indian Education Association and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium have identified specific policy needs for students in elementary through higher education. The American Indian College Fund has developed research and policy agendas for TCUs in areas such as long-term sustainability, pathways for student success, and academic quality. Finally, a recently published landscape analysis on Native American higher education from the Aspen Institute recommends a variety of policies and best practices for the federal government, educational institutions, and philanthropy, ranging from improving data quality and supporting data sovereignty to developing more robust education-to-employment pathways and incorporating traditional knowledge into skills training. While the list of policy needs is long, it will take significant and sustained investment to overcome the destructive legacy of a century of government-sponsored boarding schools. 

Conclusion 

While it’s important that the U.S. government has made historic levels of investment into Indian Country since 2020, it’s clear that additional efforts are needed to invest in Native communities and raise awareness of some of the most critical historical issues that continue to affect Native American people today. 

So, while the Interior Department’s boarding school report and President Biden’s apology for the federal government’s involvement in the boarding schools have likely stirred up significant trauma and complicated feelings for both Native and non-Native people alike, they come at an important time. By gaining a deeper knowledge of the boarding schools and other policies levied against Native Americans, individuals can more easily understand the lingering health, economic, and other impacts that U.S. government actions have on the survivors of those policies and their descendants. 

Moving forward, what is needed is not a retreat from our history, but rather new resources to learn from it and respond to its modern effects, with the goal of creating a nation where all students, communities, and cultures can thrive. 

Robert Maxim is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and a descendant of Lizetta (Lizette) “Tink” Pocknett, a survivor of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.