Tribes press federal government for accounting of Native funds used to run boarding schools
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Two tribal nations are pushing the federal government to account for how much Native American money paid for the boarding schools that took Indigenous children from their families for 150 years, telling a federal judge that the government’s own $23.3 billion estimate barely scratches the surface of what was lost.
The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California filed an amended class action complaint June 1 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They want the Department of the Interior to disclose how much was taken from Native nations, where the money came from, how it was spent and whether any of it remains.
The dispute reaches into Navajo history. The 1868 Treaty with the Navajo obligated the United States to build schoolhouses, one of at least 171 treaties the government now says implicate the boarding school system or Native education. The complaint also points to language loss as evidence of the program’s lasting damage, noting that Diné is the most widely spoken Native language and that without it the share of Native Americans who speak a Native language would drop from about 6% to 3%.
The government opened its first boarding schools in 1819 and modeled hundreds of later schools on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened in Pennsylvania in 1879 and operated until the program ended in 1969.
To read the full article, please see the June 25, 2026, edition of the Navajo Times.
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