Abstract

Excerpted From: Holly K. Doyle, Unbound: Actualizing Social Healing Through Justice for Native Survivors of Federal Indian Boarding Schools, 48 New York University Review of Law and Social Change 451 (2026) (426 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Kanaka Maoli artist, activist and scholar Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio describes this time as one of hulihia. A time of overturning, of “chaos and creation and abundance and fear.” She thinks of the global pandemic (which leaves over seven million people dead at the time of this writing) and the attempted insurrectionist coup preceding President Biden’s 2021 inauguration. But, she notes, part of hulihia is also “all of the beautiful uprising” by Indigenous groups asserting their right to self-determination and by the Black Lives Matter movement to end white supremacist violence against Black people globally. She observes that times of transformation are difficult and painful. They always have been. But she finds resolve in knowing “[t]his is what it feels like to tear down violent systems” and “create the world we deserve.”

Former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland also knows that “work[ing] toward a future we are all proud to embrace” means braving the difficulty and pain of acknowledging historic injustice and its persisting wounds. A member of the Pueblo of Laguna and the first Native American cabinet secretary, Secretary Haaland lives with the intergenerational trauma caused by centuries of state-sanctioned physical and cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. She is the granddaughter of two generations of United States Federal Indian Boarding Schools survivors.

These schools--one component of the federal government’s machination to acquire Native territories for United States expansionism--separated Native children from their families, severed Native cultural, physical and economic connection to the land and destroyed Native identity. “From the earliest days of the Republic,” the United States conspired to take Native land for the benefit of the growing country’s white inhabitants by kettling Indigenous peoples into nonmigratory lifestyles, orchestrating their fall into debt and holding out an expectant hand. Boarding schools advanced this effort. Canada did something similar. So when Secretary Haaland heard the news that Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation discovered the remains of 215 children at Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, she felt “sick to [her] stomach.” A month later, she launched an investigation into the system that stole her grandparents “from their families when they were only 8 years old ....”

Canada’s federal government, like the United States, operated a boarding school system from 1883 to 1996 as part of its “policy of cultural genocide ... to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.” “Aboriginal children [were separated] from their families[] in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and ... indoctrinate[d] ... into a new culture--the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society.” For these harms Canada’s government and churches “embarked on a far more extensive program of reconciliation with Canada’s stolen generations.” Though not without significant shortfalls, the Canadian initiative-- thanks to years of Indigenous advocacy--extracted formal apologies from the country’s highest officials and, most recently, from Pope Francis. Billions of dollars in economic capacity-building were transferred to Indigenous communities as key components of reparative justice. “[S]ome progress has been made, [although] significant barriers to reconciliation remain.”

The United States, however, falls dispiritingly short of Canada’s imperfect standard. Promises of reconciliation made in the late 1980s through the new millennium remain largely unfulfilled. In 2000, for example, then-Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, apologized on behalf of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He expressed his “profound sorrow for what [the] agency ha[d] done in the past.” For the “ethnic cleansing that befell” Native peoples “[a]s the Nation looked to the West for more land.” For the “devastation of tribal economies and the deliberate creation of tribal dependence on the services provided by [the] agency.” For the “futile and destructive efforts to annihilate Indian cultures.” “Worst of all,” Gover lamented, “the Bureau of Indian Affairs committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools, brutalizing them emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually.”

Speaking for 10,000 Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, Gover accepted “the moral responsibility of putting things right.” But over twenty years passed before the Department of the Interior investigated the boarding schools with an eye toward social healing through reparative justice. And up until President Biden’s formal apology in October 2024, Gover--himself a Native person--was the only federal official to apologize to Native peoples. Despite being “longoverdue,” some Indigenous activists remarked that Biden’s “apology was monumental in the short history of the so-called United States, particularly for policy moving forward, and hopefully for the healing of the survivors and all of our descendants.”

In general, when Secretary Haaland was at the agency’s helm and President Biden was in office, the United States renewed its commitment to “put[ting] things right.” Secretary Haaland embarked on a nationwide “Road to Healing” listening tour designed to collect and preserve survivors’ oral histories. The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act passed through the Senate and, at the time of this writing, awaits action by the House. In Haaland v. Brackeen, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (“ICWA”), and Justice Neil Gorsuch contextualized the Court’s decision by chronicling the historic events begetting ICWA’s enactment--namely the federal government’s “darker designs” to isolate and assimilate Native children through the boarding school program. ICWA aimed to “promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families” given the ““alarmingly high percentage of Indian families ... broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children ... by nontribal public and private agencies.” Challenging ICWA meant challenging Native people’s ability to do what they could not during the boarding school era: decide for themselves what is best for Native children.

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s stunning majority decision upholding ICWA’s constitutionality, the case is part of “a terrifying pattern[] in which attacks on Native children are a prelude to broader attacks on tribal sovereignty.” Right-wing special interests will likely continue their crusade against ICWA, and “[t]he fear is that this case is like the first upright domino in a long row. If they can topple ICWA, they can topple everything else.” We need only flip the page to the Court’s refusal to enforce federal treaty obligations in Arizona v. Navajo Nation to understand the extent to which sovereign tribal nations are subject to the whims of the Court, Congress and federal agencies.

What happens next in the hotly divided present-day political milieu will determine if “our country is to heal from [the] tragic [boarding school] era.” Though the boarding school initiative is a necessary and historic first step toward reconciliation, the report’s current recommendations fail to address many of its critical key findings. Will the boarding school initiative advance enduring and comprehensive social healing by revising and expanding its recommendations to specifically redress the harms of land dispossession? Or will it remain a half-baked restorative justice attempt that fails to meaningfully repair the damage and ultimately disserves Native communities and American society? Or will we, the American polity, allow yet another reconciliation initiative to languish into oblivion? What guidance exists for practically tailoring and strategically charting next steps and overall aims?

This piece endeavors to shape, guide, and, where needed, recalibrate the boarding school initiative by assessing its concepts and particulars through Professor Emeritus Eric K. Yamamoto’s multidisciplinary social healing through justice analytical framework. Social healing through justice offers pragmatic, dynamic and strategic processes to foster comprehensive and enduring healing for individuals, communities and societies harmed by historic injustice. “The kind of 'justice’ that activates social healing ... cannot be merely an idea or words on paper. It must be experienced.” This Article seeks to actualize that experience.

Section II describes the working principles and four main inquiries forming the social healing through justice praxis framework. Section III recounts Canada’s reconciliation efforts with First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. Section IV discusses how unfolding events in Canada catalyzed the United States’ first-ever Federal Indian boarding school investigation. It details the report’s key findings, conclusions and recommendations, assessing the latter through the social healing through justice lens. It gives credit where due, explores gaps in the initiative’s recommendations and proposes next steps for the department as it pursues healing. Section V concludes by considering the current political climate and what might happen if the department’s initiative or the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act stagnate yet again.

Braided throughout the piece are linkages to ho’oponopono, an ancient familial restorative justice practice for Kānaka Maoli. The epigraph is one expression of kala, or release, that ho’oponopono participants invoke after the transgression is forgiven so that the wrongdoing no longer binds harmer and harmed together. Indigenous groups--American Indians, Alaska Natives and Kānaka Maoli--are not yet in a place to speak this prayer of release for the damage wrought by Federal Indian Boarding Schools. The United States does not yet deserve it. I hope this Article will help change that.

[ . . . ]

Where does all this leave the United States in its incipient reconciliation process with Native groups for the dispossession of land, culture and life wrought by the Federal Indian boarding school program? It is clear that the United States and Canada share troubled twin histories regarding each country’s treatment of its Indigenous populations. Each tore Native children from the unwilling arms of their parents. Each embraced futile, racist pedagogies that attempted to “kill the Indian in the child” and to “[k]ill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Each deliberately destroyed Indigenous economies, languages, cultures, families and communities and cheated Indigenous people out of their territories as an integral part of colonialist westward expansion. And each possess lackluster reconciliation track records.

Yet Canada appears committed to fulfilling the ninety-four calls to action made by its Truth and Reconciliation Commission nearly a decade ago. In some important respects, reconstructive and reparative acts followed Canada’s recognition of the harm and its assumption of responsibility. Time will tell if the United States shares Canada’s commitment.

As social healing through justice scholars caution, “reconciliation initiated does not signal social healing achieved. Reconciliation is a long-term multi-faceted political, social, and economic process. It bears potential not only for significant benefits but also for incompleteness and regression.”

As currently conceived and advanced, the United States Federal Indian boarding school initiative is incomplete. Missing are crucial reconstructive and reparative measures targeting the underlying historical antecedents of present-day disparities suffered by Native groups. What are we--our federal, state and local governments and our community organizations--going to do to repair the persisting damage of land dispossession? Of cultural and physical genocide?

An irrefutably political and sharply divided Supreme Court will probably entertain future challenges to ICWA and tribal sovereignty. An even more fractionalized Congress will decide the fate of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act, a bill with the potential to advance the “pure, unadulterated struggle” of social healing through justice.

How do we chart a path forward? This formidable question warrants nuanced, likely elastic, answers. I believe we must begin by shifting our collective mindset from “savior” or “ally” to “co-conspirator.” I believe we must realize our own self-interest in repairing this damage.

A well-known appeal to the conscience of the American polity argues the “wrongful systemic exclusion of others” and the attendant “benefits or privileges accrued over generations ... gives rise to an important degree of responsibility for participating in efforts to repair the damage through generations.” Social healing through justice scholars observe that democratic governments’ interest in “reclaiming legitimacy as a society actually committed to civil and human rights” converges with the justice and healing interests of harmed groups.

Black researcher and scholar Heather McGee offers another “interest” for us to consider: responsibility to redress harm exists not only because members of a privileged group receive manifold benefits from mass injustice, but because we too are harmed by policy-making rooted in white supremacy. Take for example the community pool that permanently closes rather than desegregate. Every child and every family loses out. The interests of harmer and harmed converge.

I believe the path forward demands endurance. I believe we should treat reconciliation as a discipline. Reconciliation takes time. It asks much of its participants. It is a daily, ongoing practice requiring adaptability and resiliency. And it is how many of the first peoples, first nations and first kingdoms of the so-called United States and Canada redressed harm. Little else can fundamentally heal individuals, communities and societies, both past and present.

The United States faces an opportunity to release itself and the first peoples of this land from the painful bonds ensnaring them. I hope it will rise to the challenge and actualize social healing through justice for untold generations of Native survivors of Federal Indian Boarding Schools and their families. As it unbinds Indigenous groups from the harm through land restoration and cultural and economic revitalization, may the United States also be unbound from its damning legacy. May it never perpetuate the same harm again. Ke kala aku nei au iā 'oe a pēlā nō ho’i 'au e kala ia mai ai.

J.D., William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, 2024.