Pursuing Restorative Justice for the Legacy of Federal Indian Boarding Schools

Authors

Jilly Horowitz, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Abstract

This Note examines the United States’ federal boarding school policy, designed to eliminate Native populations, and the federal government’s efforts from June 2021 to December 2024 to acknowledge and address its harms. For 150 years, Native children were subjected to this brutal policy and were removed from their communities and placed in boarding schools. These schools were focused less on providing education and opportunity for Native students, and instead were tools to carry out a concentrated federal policy of cultural assimilation and forcible removal from Native lands. The federal government implemented this policy throughout the country, operating or funding 451 schools across thirty-seven states. Although the policy was never a secret, the federal government did not acknowledge or confirm the extent of its involvement until a 2022 report from the Department of the Interior (“Department”). Notwithstanding the relative quiet of the boarding school policy, its goals have been expressed in the open for centuries. As Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the most notorious boarding schools, clearly and hauntingly articulated the genocidal mission of this effort: “[T]he only good Indian is a dead one . . . . In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | Dispute Resolution and Arbitration | Education Law | Human Rights Law | Law | Legal History

Recommended Citation

Jilly Horowitz, Pursuing Restorative Justice for the Legacy of Federal Indian Boarding Schools, 27 Cardozo J. Conflict Resol. 119 (2025).
Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/cjcr/vol27/iss1/7