HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) 鈥� President Joe Biden plans to designate a national monument at a former to honor the resilience of Native American tribes whose children were the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions.
The White House said Monday Biden would announce the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument on Monday during a tribal leaders summit.
More than 10,000 children passed through the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School by the time it closed in 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. They came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that were meant to erase Native American traditions and 鈥渃ivilize" the children so they would better fit into white society.
The children were often taken against the will of their parents, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases.
There are ongoing efforts to return the children's remains, which were buried on the school's grounds, to their homelands. In September, the remains of three children who died at Carlisle were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.
at government-funded Indian boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an Interior Department investigation.
During a series of public listening sessions on reservations over the past several years hosted by the Interior Department, recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for using their native languages.
The forced assimilation policy officially ended with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.
Biden in October for the schools and the policies that supported them.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families鈥� will, said no single action would adequately address the harms caused by the schools. But she said the administration's efforts have made a difference and the new monument would allow the American people to learn more about the government's harmful policies.
鈥淭his trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation," Haaland said in a statement.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the assimilation campaign.
Monday's announcement marks the seventh . The 25-acre site (10 hectares) will be managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Army. It鈥檚 now the site of the U.S. Army War College.
Native American tribes and conservation groups are pressing for more monument designations before Biden leaves office.
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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.
Matthew Brown And Marc Levy, The Associated Press
