Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. HICKENLOOPER. Madam President, standing here listening to my distinguished colleague from Alaska, it is hard not to be angry at what we as a country did, and we are here today to reckon with this disgraceful part of our past. The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act is the first attempt by the Federal Government to formally investigate and address this horrific period in U.S. history. This legislation and the truth that it will unearth is an essential step toward healing.

Now, from the early 19th to the mid-20th century, the U.S. Government established 408 Federal boarding schools across the United States. Now, these schools were created for the purpose of stripping Native American children of their language, their religion, and their cultural identity. In the over 100 years that these schools were in operation, our government took an estimated 100,000 Native American children from their homes and from their families. An estimated 40,000 of these children died alone, without their family, at government-sanctioned schools.

And this is the story of one of those schools.

Now, in 2022, I visited Colorado's Fort Lewis College. It is a wonderful, remarkable college. It has one of the highest, if not the highest, proportion of Native American students of any college in the country. But it traces its origin back to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, and I went there to discuss the boarding school's history with students at Fort Lewis and with the Tribal Council of the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribes.

It is because of the hard work of Fort Lewis College and the hard work of the Tribes that we can bring many of the details of this dark history to light.

Now, Fort Lewis was established in 1892 in Hesperus, CO. To call Fort Lewis a school really is--that is a bald-faced lie. Native American children were not given an education in reading or writing or math. The education model, instead, was based on assimilation into a White and Western way of life, and it came at a truly devastating cost.

From 1892 to 1909, an estimated 1,100 children attended this boarding school in southern Colorado. These children were forcibly taken from their families of the Southern Ute, Navajo, Apache, and other numerous Tribes.

Desperate to save their children, many Southern Ute families refused to turn their children over. As punishment, the school's superintendent Dr. Thomas Breen cut off the Tribe's food rations to try to force the children's attendance.

Breen's tactics failed. The Southern Ute Tribe was steadfast in their resistance and their refusal to give up their children.

Upon arrival at Fort Lewis, students were stripped of their clothing, their names, and, as Senator Murkowski said, their hair. Each day, the children were required to perform manual labor, like digging ditches and planting crops, oftentimes in the hot midafternoon sun. Combined with the poor sanitation and lack of food, many students quickly became ill. Disaster struck in the school's first year. A tuberculosis epidemic hit, followed by trachoma, known at that time as ``sore eyes.'' Two children died. Four others became blind. All were under the age of 12.

Now, punishment of children at Fort Lewis was often severe. One father reported that his sons were forced to sleep outside in a coal shed in the middle of winter without adequate blankets. Superintendent Breen himself was known for sexually abusing his young female students and teachers. When the girls became pregnant, school officials made sure that they ``disappeared,'' transporting them to other schools to avoid suspicion.

Our Federal Government never held Breen accountable. School reports show that 31 children died during the 16 years that the Fort Lewis school was in operation. I can guarantee you that the actual number is probably higher.

This is the story of just one of these schools. There were four others in Colorado. There were 403 more across the country. That is 407 other Superintendent Breens, tens of thousands of children who died in unmarked graves and who never saw their families again.

It is hard to imagine why our government was preying on our own children. Why would our government sanction such conduct? Our government understood that erasing Native people's identity was a necessary condition to erase their claim to their land, to assimilate them right out of existence, and to ignore the lands guaranteed by treaty to the Tribes.

Don't take my word for it. In less than 50 years, from 1887 to 1934, Native Americans lost two-thirds of their Tribal lands, of their treaty lands.

And the legacies of this deep trauma remain embedded in Tribal communities today. In Colorado, we see it in the high rates of poverty, the high rates of addiction, the high rates of suicide among our Native American communities. We see it in children who don't know their parents' indigenous names or who have lost their own language, families who don't know what happened to their relatives, to their ancestors, many of whom just never returned home.

The Truth and Healing Act is not going to erase this dark past, but it does acknowledge our responsibility to unearth the stories of suffering and injustice that we have buried for generations.

In 2022, I joined Secretary Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, at a dedication ceremony for the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. In front of Tribal leaders and elected officials, Secretary Haaland told the crowd:

Stories like the Sand Creek massacre are not easy to tell but it is . . . our duty to ensure that they are told. This story is part of America's story.

The Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, along with the 407 others, is a part of our story. When we pass the Truth and Healing Act, we make a choice to tell the whole story, and we make a choice never to repeat it.

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