News Release U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Yesterday, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs,
Churches are joining the U.S. federal government in facing the often-brutal history of Native boarding schools, which forced children from their families into schools where they were often abused, underfed and used as virtual slave labor. Some died there without ever going home. The Initiative, however, has no authority over Christian denominations, which operated about one-third of the approximately 400 Indian boarding schools in the U.S.