May 29, 2024
For decades, Catholic priests, brothers and sisters raped or molested Native American children who were taken from their homes by the U.S. government and forced to live at remote boarding schools, a Post investigation found.
May 29, 2024 at 6:35 a.m.
Clarita Vargas was 8 when she was forced to live at St. Mary’s Mission, a Catholic-run Indian boarding school in Omak, Wash., that was created under a U.S. government policy to strip Native American children of their identities. A priest took her and other girls to his office to watch a TV movie, then groped and fondled her as she sat on his lap — the beginning of three years of sexual abuse, she said.
“It haunted me my entire life,” said Vargas, now 64.
Jay, a 70-year-old member of the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes whose surname is not being used to protect his privacy, was sent to St. Paul Mission and Boarding School in Hays, Mont. When he was 11, Jay said, a Jesuit brother raped him in a shack next to the pine grove where the priests cut down Christmas trees.
“He said if I ever told anybody that I would go to hell,” Jay recalled.
Geraldine Charbonneau Dubourt was one of nine sisters who said they were sexually or physically abused by priests at an Indian boarding school in Marty, S.D. She said that she was 16 when a Catholic priest repeatedly raped her in a church basement and that a doctor and several Catholic sisters later forced her to undergo an abortion.
“If somebody says you get over the abuse, trust me, you don’t get over it,” said Dubourt, 75.
A photo taken in about 1905 of female students and several sisters at St. Paul in Hays, Mont. (Montana Historical Society Library and Archives)
These firsthand accounts and other evidence documented by The Washington Post reveal the brutality and sexual abuse inflicted upon children who were taken from their families under a systematic effort by the federal government to destroy Native American culture, assimilate children into White society and seize tribal lands.
From 1819 to 1969, tens of thousands of children were sent to more than 500 boarding schools across the country, the majority run or funded by the U.S. government. Children were stripped of their names, their long hair was cut, and they were beaten for speaking their languages, leaving deep emotional scars on Native American families and communities. By 1900, 1 out of 5 Native American school-age children attended a boarding school. At least 80 of the schools were operated by the Catholic Church or its religious affiliates.
The Post investigation reveals a portrait of pervasive sexual abuse endured by Native American children at Catholic-run schools in remote regions of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, including Alaska.
At least 122 priests, sisters and brothers assigned to 22 boarding schools since the 1890s were later accused of sexually abusing Native American children under their care, The Post found. Most of the documented abuse occurred in the 1950s and 1960s and involved more than 1,000 children.
“A national crime scene” is how Deborah Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and the chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, described the network of church-run Indian boarding schools.
“They committed crimes under the cloak,” said Parker, whose grandmother and other family members were sent to boarding schools. “They did it in the name of God.”
To investigate, The Post examined the work histories of priests named on lists, disclosed by Catholic entities, as having faced a “credible claim of sexual abuse.” Using those lists from dioceses and religious orders, The Post then identifiedwhich abusers worked at Indian boarding schools. Reporters also reviewed lawsuits, sworn affidavits, oral histories and thousands of boarding school records, and conducted interviews with former students.
The Post’s findings come at a time when the country’s first Native American cabinet secretary, Deb Haaland — whose own relatives were sent to boarding schools — is scrutinizing the history of the schools that were operated or supported by the U.S. Interior Department, the agency she now leads.
As with past government inquiries into the boarding schools, Haaland’s investigation has not delved into the sexual abuse of Native American children at church-run schools. A 2022 report by her department blamed the U.S. government for the boarding school system and cited the “rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse” of the children. But the report did not detail the schools where sexual abuse happened, the number of children raped or molested, or the names of priests and other religious members who abused them.
“We care deeply about this issue, but it’s outside the scope of what we sought to do with the investigative reports,” said an Interior Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said the department did not seek records from the Catholic Church because its investigation was focused solely on the U.S. government’s role and reviewed only federal government documents.
Experts say The Post’s findings are a window into the widespread sexual abuse at Indian boarding schools. But the extent of the abuse was probably far worse, because the lists of accused priests are inconsistent and incomplete, and many survivors have not come forward. Others are aging and in poor health, or, like their abusers, have died.
The chances to document their testimonies are disappearing.
“I’ve been waiting 67 years to tell this story,” said Jim LaBelle, 77, an Iñupiaq from Fairbanks, Alaska, who spent six years at the Wrangell Institute, a government-run school in the state, 700 miles from his home. He was forbidden to use his Alaska Native name. From the time he was 8, he was instead identified by number, a new one assigned each year.
The abuse of Native American children predated by decades the revelations that priests at Catholic churches had sexually abused thousands of minors in the United States and other countries. Those scandals of the early 2000s gave Native Americans the courage to come forward with their own stories of abuse and seek accountability through lawsuits.
“It showed that people could stand up against a powerful entity like the church and that people could be held accountable,” said Vito de la Cruz, a Native American and Chicano lawyer who has represented boarding school survivors.
An attempt to sue the federal government failed, but some survivors of sexual abuse have successfully sued Catholic dioceses and religious orders and received settlements.
Unlike children abused by priests at churches in Boston and other big cities while they were living at home, Native American children were put into the care of alleged abusers at remote boarding schools, sometimes hundreds of miles from home.
At some boarding schools, generations of Native American children were continuously under the care of Catholic priests, brothers or sisters who were later accused of sexual abuse.
The Post analysis of records disclosed by Catholic dioceses and religious orders revealed 122 individuals who were accused of sexual abuse and had worked at Indian boarding schools. Each rectangle represents one assignment.
NUMBER OF CONCURRENT ASSIGNMENTS
One or more individuals accused of abuse were consistently assigned to St. Ignatius over 66 years.
St. Ignatius Mission and School (Mont.)*
St. Paul Mission and Boarding School (Mont.) **
St. Francis Indian Mission School (S.D.)
St. Mary Mission School – Andreafsky (Alaska)
St. Mary’s Mission School (Wash.)
Holy Cross Boarding School (Alaska)
St. Labre Indian Mission Boarding School (Mont.) **
St. Xavier Mission School (Mont.) **
St. Andrew’s Industrial Boarding (Ore.)
St. Mary Mission and School (Kan.)
St. Regis Seminary (Mo.)
Red Cloud Indian School (S.D.)
Copper Valley Boarding School (Alaska)
St. Catherine Indian School (N.M.)
St. Charles Mission School (Mont.)
St. Stephen’s Mission Industrial School (Wyo.)
St. Joseph’s Mission School (Idaho)
Holy Family Mission and School (Mont.)
*20 sisters accused of abusing children worked at St. Ignatius between 1940 and 1975, records show. They are not included because records do not show exact dates of assignments or abuse.
**Includes two brothers and two sisters at St. Paul, one brother at St. Labre and one brother at St. Xavier. All were accused of abuse during specific years, but full assignment dates are unknown.
Note: Others accused of abuse worked at four additional schools. Those schools are not included because records do not list dates of their assignments or when the abuse occurred.
Sources: “Credibly accused” lists from dioceses and Jesuit provinces, ProPublica’s “credibly accused” dataset, and lawsuits.
Eighteen of the 22 schools examined by The Post employed at least one credibly accused priest, sister or brother for 91 consecutive years. At these schools, successive generations of students continuously lived among predators.
“They can scream for help, but no one’s going to hear them or believe them. It’s a perpetrator’s wonderland,” said Patrick J. Wall, a former Catholic priest who once worked for the church as a self-described “fixer” settling child sexual abuse cases. He has since worked with lawyers representing Native American boarding school survivors.
The U.S. government’s efforts to address its legacy of boarding schools lag far behind those of Canada, where survivors were paid billions in compensation and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 declared the schools a form of “cultural genocide.”
Pope Francis traveled to Canada in 2022 to apologize for the church’s role in the “cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time.” But the pope has remained silent about the abuse at Catholic-run Indian boarding schools in the United States, which had received little scrutiny until the Interior Department’s report.
Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, known as the apostolic nuncio, did not respond to an email or call for comment.
The church has addressed abuse by priests in U.S. parishes, but has said little about the molestation of children in Indian boarding schools. And although the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has grappled in recent years with the legacy of the church-run schools, it has not issued a formal apology.
“The church wounded my spirit, took away my soul and robbed me of my childhood.”
Clarita Vargas
Boarding school survivor
Asked by The Post if the group was considering one, spokesperson Chieko Noguchi said it is “committed to fostering dialogue and engaging in other efforts to reconcile involvement in the boarding school period in the United States.”
“The Catholic Church recognizes and acknowledges that the history that is brought to light regarding the boarding school period of American history may cause deep sorrow in the Native and Indigenous communities, but we also prayerfully hope it may bring real and honest dialogue and lead towards a path of healing and reconciliation with the impacted communities,” Noguchi said.
The Rev. Mike Carson, assistant director for the subcommittee on Native American affairs with the bishops conference, addressed the church’s role in boarding schools last year in a webinar.
“Once abuse surfaced, the schools need[ed] to be closed and investigated. That did not happen for the most part,” Carson said. “Once the federal government required only English to be taught in the Catholic boarding schools, the answer should be no, because it violates our faith and should be a line that should not be crossed.”
Carson acknowledged the sexual and physical abuse of children in the Catholic-run schools and called for more scrutiny of what occurred, but also noted a likely dearth of records.
The Post reached out to Carson, who referred inquiries to the bishops conference.
The Interior Department’s report did not explore the role of the Catholic Church in the schools, except to say the U.S. government paid the church and other religious institutions to run many of the schools.
“I don’t look at it as we’re out to criticize the Catholic Church as much as bring this period of history into the consciousness of the American people,” Haaland told The Post in an interview. “It happened to Native Americans, but the history belongs to everyone who’s an American.”
Boarding school survivors have praised Haaland’s efforts, but say they still want apologies from the president and the pope.
How we reported this series
Reporters Sari Horwitz, Dana Hedgpeth and Scott Higham and photojournalist Salwan Georges spent a year traveling to eight states. They spent time on reservations and interviewed more than two dozen Indian boarding school survivors who were sexually and physically abused as children.
Reporters attended one of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s “The Road to Healing” events on the Tulalip Tribes’ reservation in Washington state, where they met with and listened to survivors. Reporters also visited the American Indian Records Repository, located about 100 feet underground in limestone caves in Lenexa, Kan.
They also reviewed thousands of pages of court documents, sworn depositions, lawsuits, diaries of priests and sisters, correspondence between priests, and sexual abuse claim forms.
Investigative data reporter Emmanuel Martinez collected lists of Catholic priests who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse and conducted analysis to determine who had worked at Indian boarding schools.
Our investigation into the sexual abuse of children in America’s network of Indian boarding schools found that:
Two years ago, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the oldest and largest organization of Native Americans and Alaska Natives, asked for an apology from the pope — and for the church to disclose internal records on abusers.
“The Catholic Church holds important records about Federal Indian boarding schools that can help bring the truth to light. We cannot hold abusers accountable, seek redress for harm, or reconcile with the Church, government institutions, and, in some cases, our own communities and families, until we know the full, unadulterated truth — truth the Catholic Church is actively withholding,” wrote Fawn Sharp, a citizen of the Quinault Nation and the NCAI’s president at the time.
In March, Parker, of the boarding school healing coalition, met at the White House with Tom Perez, a senior adviser and assistant to President Biden, and asked for a presidential apology for the widespread mistreatment and abuse that Native American children suffered at boarding schools.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates have not pushed for reparations from the U.S. government. Parker said doing so now is a “non-starter” because they first want Congress to create a truth and healing commission to uncover the horrors of the schools and the country’s assimilation policy.
“Unfortunately, many, many leaders in this country don’t even know what a U.S. Indian boarding school was,” Parker said. “And that’s the first step.”
St. Mary’s Mission
Colville Reservation, Wash.
‘Movie nights’
Near the cliffs overlooking the Okanogan River, not far from a sprawling apple orchard in north-central Washington, the Catholic Church established St. Mary’s Mission School in 1886.
St. Mary’s, on the Colville Reservation, was created by federal policy that tasked people of “good moral character” with introducing Native American children to the “habits and arts of civilization” under the Civilization Fund Act of 1819. For Catholic missionaries and other religious groups, the schools were an opportunity to profit from contracts with the federal government and transform children the church saw as heathens into God-fearing disciples of Christianity.
Generations of children attended St. Mary’s before it was turned over to local tribes in 1973. Decades later, one former student’s stories of predatory behavior by a priest set off an avalanche of similar claims about priests at St. Mary’s — and at many other schools.
The account of Katherine Mendez, who was sent to the school in 1966, didn’t become public until 2007, when her nephew, Ken Bear Chief, a paralegal, told his boss that his Aunt Kathy had been molested as a child at St. Mary’s.
Blaine Tamaki, a trial lawyer in Washington state who knew little about Indian boarding schools, interviewed Mendez, then in her early 50s. Mendez, who was from the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, told him that shortly after she arrived at the school at age 11, one of the senior Jesuit priests — John J. Morse — began to prey upon her.
Mendez said Morse often ordered her to his office, sometimes to be disciplined. She said he insisted she sit on his lap, spanked her bare bottom and penetrated her with his fingers. He told her not to say a word about it if she ever wanted to go home again and see her mother, she said.
Mendez thought she was the only one. She wasn’t.
The abuse of children at St. Mary’s spanned more than two decades: Starting in 1948 and for 26 consecutive years, priests or brothers molested children at the school, according to The Post’s analysis. This was the longest uninterrupted stretch of abuse documented at any of the 22 schools. It is unclear whether church officials were aware of the abuse at St. Mary’s at the time.
Other survivors began to share their stories with Bear Chief — who was from the Nez Perce, Nooksack and Gros Ventre tribes — and the lawyers. One of those survivors was Clarita Vargas. She, too, had kept her secret about Morse for decades.
“The church wounded my spirit, took away my soul and robbed me of my childhood,” said Vargas, of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington. “It was the federal government that promoted the boarding school policy and the church was its arm. I blame them both.”
Vargas said Morse began to abuse her at St. Mary’s Mission in 1968. He told her that if she refused, she would not go to heaven. Sometimes, she said, Morse locked her in a rat-infested cellar.
Morse invited her and several girls to his office most Sunday nights, she said. He gave them hot cocoa, chocolate chip cookies or chocolate bars, and let them watch television. He would lean back in his recliner and place the girls one at a time on his lap, rubbing their backs until he ejaculated, Vargas said.
Tamaki and his lawyers heard repeatedly from other survivors about the “movie nights” that Morse hosted in his office. At Christmas, he gave the children candy canes. “They related the same exact story,” he said.
Some of the survivors said that as children they had tried to tell adults but were rebuffed or not believed. “It was almost like you were accusing God of abusing you if you reported it, because these priests were held up in such high esteem by everyone, second only to God,” said Bryan Smith, Tamaki’s law partner.
Tamaki’s investigation gathered evidence that Morse had molested 60 boys and girls, ages 5 to 15. The lawyers also identified about a dozen more priests at St. Mary’s who abused children from the 1940s into the 1970s.
The case grew to include about 500 former students at a dozen schools in remote Alaskan villages and on Northwest tribal lands in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. The 500 survivors sued the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province, formerly known as the Northwest Jesuits.
“There was a pattern and practice at these schools that were basically unsupervised, isolated outposts,” Tamaki said.
(Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Northwest Jesuits initially denied the allegations. In a 2007 deposition, Morse denied sexually abusing children.
“You’re aware that women now say they feel they were sexually molested by you by sitting on your lap?” a lawyer asked Morse.
“Yeah, and that did not happen,” Morse replied. “There was no molesting while they were sitting there.” Morse died in Spokane in 2015 at age 85.
In February 2009, the Northwest Jesuits filed for bankruptcy. The legal move stopped depositions and some disclosure of church records about individual priests, and prevented a trial, a tactic experts said the church has used many times.
The Jesuits agreed to pay $166 million in 2011 to about 500 survivors as part of a bankruptcy settlement. It is the fourth-largest sexual abuse settlement by Catholic entities to date, according to Terence McKiernan, founder of BishopAccountability.org, a watchdog group that tracks sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church. Survivors received on average $332,000 each, depending on the severity of abuse, said their lawyers.
As part of the settlement, the Jesuits agreed to make public a list of priests who had been accused of sexually assaulting children.
Two researchers, Jack Downey of the University of Rochester and Kathleen Holscher of the University of New Mexico, later used that list and other Jesuit lists to map the priests’ assignments. They found 47 priests accused of abuse who had been assigned to Catholic missions in Native American communities. The Post’s investigation, which reviewed their data and other records, identified the boarding schools where those priests worked and found 75 additional abusers.
“If something like that happened to them, they’d take it to the grave.”
Warren Morin
Holding a photo of his grandfather and other relatives attending St. Paul Mission and Boarding School in Montana
The settlement also required the Jesuits to issue written apologies to the survivors.
“On behalf of the Oregon Province, I want to express our most sincere sorrow for the pain and hurt caused by the actions of a few men who did not live up to their vows,” the Very Rev. Patrick Lee, the senior official of the Oregon Province, wrote of the 64 credibly accused men on the list. “We will continue to pray for all those who are hurting and hope that today’s announcement brings all involved one-step closer to the lasting healing they so richly deserve.”
For many of the survivors, it wasn’t about the money. “It was the acknowledgment they were wronged,” said de la Cruz, the lawyer who represented many of the survivors and is Yaqui. “Finally somebody said, ‘Yes, you’re right. The things that you buried deep inside your psyche and your soul were more our fault.’”
After the settlement, Mendez spoke to reporters.
“When I came forward and saw that others did too, it was as if the blanket that had hidden our secret was pulled off and we could move into the light again,” she said. Mendez died last year.
Vargas now lives about 40 minutes from her old boarding school. For a long time, she blocked out the abuse. But she had difficulty trusting anyone and found it hard to build relationships. As an adult, she never wanted to eat chocolate because that is what the abusive priest used to give the children.
When Vargas eventually told her story to one of the lawyers, she said she felt embarrassed and guilty.
“I shouldn’t have felt ashamed by it, but I was,” Vargas told The Post.
St. Paul Mission and Boarding School
Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Mont.
‘We were little kids’
The allegations of sexual abuse that started with Mendez in Omak led lawyers to discover long-hidden abuse at another school, St. Paul Mission and Boarding School, on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, 40 miles from the Canadian border in Hays, Mont.
“It was a dumping ground for predatory priests,” said de la Cruz.
St. Paul, surrounded by grassy plains at the foot of the Little Rocky Mountains, was established in 1889 and was among the first schools funded by the federal government. Both the Jesuits and the Ursuline Sisters, a Catholic order of women, worked there. St. Paul was troubled from the early days, according to descendants of survivors and a collection of about 10,000 pages of letters, diaries, memos, government reports and oral histories reviewed by The Post. Conditions at the overcrowded school were deplorable: poor plumbing, little heat, and horsemeat for food. Abuse was rampant.
The stories of the abuse that children endured at St. Paul and other schools were often passed down orally in Native American families.
George Chandler, a Gros Ventre man born in 1922, said in an oral history about his time as a student at St. Paul that “they would stuff flashlight batteries” in the children’s mouths to punish them. “They would jam it there and hit them like that and make their mouth bleed,” Chandler recounted. “If you cried, they would hit you all the harder. If one didn’t hurt you enough, they would stuff two in there.”
Warren Morin, 60, a member of the Gros Ventre tribe, told The Post that his grandfather told him harrowing stories about St. Paul and said he and the other boys and girls there “lived in hell.” But Morin said his grandfather never said anything to him about sexual abuse.
“If something like that happened to them, they’d take it to the grave,” Morin said.
(Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Survivors of sexual abuse at St. Paul began to share their painful stories as lawyers came to their reservation to investigate.
One of the survivors, the 70-year-old man named Jay, recounted in an interview with The Post how two priests, a brother and a sister sexually abused him at St. Paul. He was 6 when the abuse began in 1959, and it continued until he was 12.
Jay said Sister Sigfrieda Hettinger would tell him to stand before a statue of the Virgin Mary. She would order him to take down his pants and then would perform oral sex. He said she repeated the act with other children.
“We were little kids,” said Jay, a tall, slender man with closely cropped dark hair who still finds it hard to talk about what happened to him so many years ago.
“We didn’t know what to think,” he said. “She would touch us all over and put our face to her breasts. Before she would do these things, she’d make a sign of the cross.”
Hettinger, who worked at St. Paul from 1958 to 1966, denied in a 2015 deposition that she or anyone else at the school sexually abused children.
“I loved them all,” Hettinger said. “I never hurt them at all. I never touched them at all.”
“During the entire period of time, did you ever observe any child being sexually abused by anyone?” a lawyer asked her.
“No, no,” she said.
She died the next year at age 87 in Milwaukee.
At least 19 priests, brothers and sisters were accused of sexually abusing 21 Native American children at St. Paul, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, according to The Post’s analysis and court records.
One of the Jesuit priests who were accused of preying on children at St. Paul was the Rev. Edmund J. Robinson. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, church officials had moved him from boarding school to boarding school, according to church and court records, lawsuits and an article in the Great Falls Tribune.
The work history of Edmund J. Robinson
From 1956 to 1993, Catholic officials relocated Robinson a dozen times, including repeated assignments at two Indian boarding schools.
Indian boarding school
Other school or church
St. Thomas’ Church
St. Mary’s Mission
St. Ignatius Mission
St. Stanislaus’ Church
Robinson was first appointed to St. Paul Mission after ordination. He was accused of sexually abusing multiple children at St. Paul in a 2011 lawsuit.
Sacred Heart Mission
Note: According to church records, Robinson stayed at Servants of the Paraclete, a treatment center in Jemez Springs, N.M., in 1984 and 1985. The exact timing of his stay is unknown. In 1993, Robinson retired in Spokane, Wash. He died in 2014.
Source: Jesuits West list of “Credible Claims of Sexual Abuse of a Minor or Vulnerable Adult.”
That was the church’s pattern for many predatory priests, according to former church insiders and attorneys for the survivors. “It was remove, hide, shuffle,” said one of those lawyers, Dan Fasy.
Robinson, known as “Father Eddy,” started his career in the mid-1950s at St. Paul. Shortly after he arrived, he allegedly sexually abused a child. He then went to a Jesuit priests’ training college but returned to St. Paul, where he was later accused of sexually assaulting two more children. He was then moved to another boarding school, St. Ignatius Mission — 400 miles away in Montana — where he allegedly sexually abused a 5-year-old.
Robinson had been replaced at St. Paul by the Rev. Arnold Custer — who was also later accused of sexually abusing a child, according to court documents, local media reports, and watchdog groups that monitor predatory priests. Custer has since died.
In 1984, letters between church authorities showed that Robinson was being treated at the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez Springs, N.M., a facility for troubled priests, according to church and court records.
In New Mexico, Robinson said that he realized “something was wrong within him and that he must do something about it,” according to a November 1984 mental health evaluation obtained by The Post. One of the men involved in Robinson’s “spiritual direction” at Servants of the Paraclete was later accused of sexually abusing multiple children, records show. The center discharged Robinson the next year and he served at several other Catholic parishes until the early 1990s.
During his time as a priest, Robinson was accused of sexually abusing nine boys and girls at several boarding schools, records show. Robinson spent more than two decades working at Indian boarding schools, and served at St. Paul Mission on three separate occasions.
In 2018, the Jesuits West Province included Robinson’s name on a publicly released list of credibly accused priests.
Robinson had died in 2014 after spending the last years of his life at the Regis Community in Spokane, Wash. — like other Jesuits accused of sexually assaulting minors, according to the Jesuits West list of credibly accused priests, court documents, interviews with lawyers and local media reports.
In 2021, the Jesuit Conference released a statement about Indian boarding schools, saying, “We regret our participation in the separation of families and the suppression of Native languages, cultures and sacred ways of life.” Two years later, Jesuits West launched a website to address the role of the Jesuits in operating Indian boarding schools.
St. Paul’s and St. Francis Indian mission schools
Yankton Sioux Reservation and Rosebud Reservation in S.D.
‘We are not going away’
One by one, starting in the 1950s, Geraldine Charbonneau Dubourt and her eight sisters from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa were sent more than 400 miles away from their North Dakota home to St. Paul’s Indian Mission School in Marty, S.D., on the Yankton Sioux Reservation.
Dubourt, who attended St. Paul’s from 1955 to 1967, said that starting when she was 6, a priest fondled her on the playground, according to an affidavit. When she was a teenager, a different priest repeatedly raped her, she said. One of Dubourt’s sisters said that when she was 9, she was raped by a priest on a kitchen table. A third sister said that a priest “would take me down to the basement and have me perform oral sex on him.” He also showed her an area where coffins were stored. “One time he put me inside a coffin and I thought I would die,” she said in an affidavit.
In 2008, the nine siblings sued 12 priests, sisters and school workers over alleged abuse, in a case that became known as “The Nine Little Girls” and was covered by the Indian Country press, including by Native News Online. They also sued the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls and three religious groups.
The Sioux Falls Diocese and the religious organizations denied wrongdoing and said they had no responsibility for the priests, sisters and school employees, who have all since died. The diocese did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2010, shortly before the case was set to go to trial, the South Dakota legislature passed a law that prohibits victims of alleged sexual abuse who are 40 or older from suing institutions.
While many states have extended deadlines for filing sexual abuse lawsuits, South Dakota — which had 35 Indian boarding schools — is one state that took action to make it nearly impossible for aging survivors to seek justice, according to Marci A. Hamilton, an expert on child sex abuse statutes of limitation and the founder and CEO of Child USA, a nonprofit group working to end child abuse.
“What’s unbelievable is that since 2002, we’ve had 293 laws passed in the United States that extend the statute of limitations” for sexual abuse victims, Hamilton said. But “this law rolls it back rather than making it more generous.”
Steve Smith, a South Dakota lawyer who represented a Catholic congregation that ran an Indian boarding school in the state, wrote the legislation that changed the statute of limitations. The boarding school that his client ran had faced numerous lawsuits filed by former students who said they were sexually abused there. Protecting the congregation from further litigation was a motivating factor, Smith told The Post.
A series of court rulings eventually led to the dismissal of the suit brought by the Charbonneau sisters, along with lawsuits by more than 100 other survivors.
“If somebody says you get over the abuse, trust me, you don’t get over it.”
Geraldine Charbonneau Dubourt
Boarding school survivor
“The passage of the legislation was the catalyst for the sisters’ case and numerous other cases being shut down statewide,” said Gregory A. Yates, the lawyer who represented the South Dakota survivors. “The effect was to revictimize these survivors of childhood sexual abuse.”
Smith said in an interview that he “absolutely” believes that the nine sisters were molested at St. Paul’s.
“There is no doubt in my mind in just listening to them that they are sincere in their story,” Smith said. But he said that individual abusers should be held responsible — not churches or religious institutions.
Dubourt, with long gray hair, is now in poor health. She is still passionate about wanting accountability from the church and the state for what happened to her as a child. For nearly a decade, she and her sisters dressed in long Native American ribbon skirts and protested at the South Dakota Capitol, in Pierre, to try to get the law changed.
“If we die, we’ll go away,” Dubourt told The Post. “Other than that, we are not going away.” Three of her sisters have died.
Dubourt said she and her sisters still carry the abuse they suffered as children at St. Paul’s Indian Mission School.
“You just set it on the back burner for a minute so you can survive,” she said.
South Dakota’s law would have prevented the aging survivors of sexual abuse at another school, St. Francis Indian Mission School, from suing the church. But lawyers found “smoking gun” letters in church files that showed that church officials had “covered up” evidence of abuse, Yates said. The letters allowed the lawyers to successfully argue under a different statute that a Catholic order had fraudulently concealed evidence of sexual abuse, he said.
The lawyers discovered the letters in 2011 after two women who had attended St. Francis, on the Rosebud Reservation, said they were abused, Yates said. The letters revealed that priests knew that a colleague, Brother Francis Chapman, known as “Chappy,” was molesting children.
“Chappy had his problems — drinking to excess, fooling around with little girls — he had them down the basement of our building in the dark, where we found a pair of panties torn,” a priest named Richard T. Jones wrote to a fellow cleric in 1968.
Jones, who has since died, wrote that a person working at the mission didn’t want Chapman around children, but made no mention of action being taken.
Three years later, the Rev. Bernard D. Fagan, a superior at the St. Francis school, wrote to a church official that Chapman was involved in another incident “similar to those of the past.” Fagan said they decided to “counsel with him rather strongly in the hope that future incidents would be avoided.”
Fagan himself later admitted in a 1994 letter to a Diocese of Rapid City official that he sexually abused 12 Native American girls.
In 2015, the two former St. Francis students who sued received confidential settlements for abuse they suffered from Chapman, Yates said.
Both Chapman and Fagan have since died. In 2019, both were identified by the Rapid City Diocese as priests credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor.
“Let us all pray for reparation for the sins and failings of those who abused their power and authority which led to the injury of others, especially our children,” the Most Rev. Robert D. Gruss, then the bishop of Rapid City, wrote in disclosing their names.
Chapman was one of 10 alleged abusers at the school, The Post’s analysis shows. Starting in 1942 with his employment and for the next 61 years, the school continuously employed at least one priest or brother accused of sexually assaulting or raping children.
The Road to Healing
‘They were stolen’
On a recent afternoon at the Interior Department’s headquarters, Secretary Haaland pointed to framed photos of her parents and grandparents in her office, which is decorated with Native American paintings, pottery and blankets.
Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe of New Mexico and a Catholic, said that when her grandmother was little, she and other children were rounded up by a priest in their village and put on a train to a boarding school in Santa Fe, about 100 miles from her home. Her great-grandfather was sent more than 1,000 miles to one of the nation’s first federal boarding schools, in Carlisle, Pa., where the founder’s philosophy was: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
“They were stolen,” she said.
When Haaland was still a member of Congress in 2020, she introduced legislation to create the first commission in U.S. history to investigate and document America’s Indian boarding schools.
The legislation was reintroduced last year in the Senate and this year in the House — but has not reached the floor for a vote in either chamber. The commission would have subpoena power, which could be used to compel the Catholic Church and other religious institutions that ran the schools to disclose their internal documents about boarding schools, experts said.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has not taken a position on the legislation, said Noguchi, the group’s spokesperson.
After the 2021 discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, Haaland, by this time Biden’s interior secretary, launched her investigation into U.S. Indian boarding schools.
Canada was a role model for such an effort, advocates said.
The Canadian government had created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the prime minister issued a formal apology in 2008 after settling a massive class-action suit brought by school survivors. Seven years later, the commission reported that about half of the 78,748 survivors who filed claims said they were sexually or seriously physically abused. Nearly half of the 146 schools were run by Catholic organizations, according to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada.
But the U.S. government inquiry isn’t as far-reaching as that of Canada, which spent about $6 billion Canadian on its boarding school investigation, including compensation to survivors. The U.S. Congress has appropriated $21 million over the last three years for the Interior Department’s ongoing inquiry.
During that time, Haaland’s team has been sifting through tens of millions of pages of U.S. government records to piece together the history of boarding schools for a series of reports. The records, many on fragile onion skin paper, include attendance reports, contracts and correspondence. Documents are scattered across the country at the National Archives, universities, tribal offices and local historical societies. Nearly 100 feet underground in limestone caves in Lenexa, Kan., thousands of boxes of additional records on Native Americans and their education are stored in a temperature-controlled federal repository.
A 1928 investigation commissioned by the federal government called the Meriam Report chastised the schools for the mistreatment and malnourishment of students. A 1969 congressional inquiry condemned the schools for trying to destroy Native American culture, laying the groundwork for ending the government’s assimilation policy in the boarding school system. But neither investigation mentioned sexual abuse, and archived documents from the 1969 report contain no evidence that the matter was ever examined.
The Interior Department’s 2022 report, written by Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), said Native American boys experienced more physical and sexual abuse in the schools than girls. But it does not go further, and Interior officials said the abuse was rarely — if ever — recorded in government files.
“I doubt that you could find a lot of Catholic records or federal government records about abuse and neglect toward the students,” Haaland said.
Interior’s report, instead, focused on the history of the boarding school era and how it targeted Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children. It was the first government effort to count the schools and list their locations. The report also revealed that at least 500 boys and girls died at the schools — and that the number could “be in the thousands or tens of thousands.” Many were buried in unmarked graves at schools, the report said.
“This has never been about religion. It’s been about people abusing children.”
Matthew War Bonnet
Boarding school survivor, holding replicas of a rope and a strap used to lash children
As part of her effort, Haaland traveled to 12 places across the country, from Oklahoma to Alaska, on what she called “The Road to Healing” tour. For up to eight hours a day, she listened to stories of physical and sexual abuse told by survivors and their descendants. Survivor stories are being compiled by the healing coalition and the Interior Department into an oral history project that may be displayed by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
For many, Haaland’s listening sessions were the first chance to confront the government and say out loud what happened to them.
One afternoon in April 2023, hundreds of survivors packed into a cavernous hall supported by giant cedar columns on the Tulalip Tribes’ reservation in Washington state. After an opening ceremony of Native American drumming and singing, Haaland and Newland took their seats at the front. One by one, elderly boarding school survivors stood to tell their stories.
Nancy Shippentower of the Puyallup Tribe said her husband had been sexually abused at a boarding school in Oregon when he was little. “He said that he was an altar boy and he was raped by the priests,” she said. “He was sexually abused by the nuns. And his hands were beat black and blue.”
When Matthew War Bonnet, 78, of the Sicangu Lakota tribe, stood up and began to speak, a hush fell over the room.
At age 6, War Bonnet had been sent to the St. Francis Mission Indian School in Rosebud, S.D. War Bonnet said he and other children were beaten so badly that they were often sent to the infirmary for treatment.
War Bonnet held up replicas of a rope and a strap used to lash children as punishment. The rope was four strands tied together. They called it the “Jesus rope,” War Bonnet said.
The strap carried strands of razor-sharp metal strips.
“This strap taught me not to feel,” said War Bonnet, his voice cracking.
A year later, in her Washington office, Haaland singled out his testimony among the hundreds of accounts she had heard. Tears filled her eyes.
“It’s a terrible, horrific, devastating history,” Haaland said. “You name the worst thing that you could imagine happening to people and it happened to Indigenous people right here in this country.”
About this story
The Post is examining the legacy of America’s network of Indian boarding schools. Do you have a tip or story idea for our investigation? Email our team at boardingschools@washpost.com.
Reporting by Sari Horwitz, Dana Hedgpeth, Emmanuel Martinez and Scott Higham. Photography by Salwan Georges.
Additional reporting by Alice Crites, Riley Ceder and Ben Baker.
Graphics by Janice Kai Chen. Design and development by Natalie Vineberg. Additional development by Jake Crump.
Editing by David S. Fallis, Sarah Childress and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jenna Pirog, Martha Murdock, Jay Wang and Courtney Kan.
Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Photo research by Troy Witcher. Graphic editing by Emily M. Eng. Data editing by Meghan Hoyer.
Additional support from Cameron Barr, Kathy Baird, Matthew Callahan, Brandon Carter, Matt Clough, Maddie Driggers, Stephanie Hays, Jeff Leen, Jenna Lief, Jordan Melendrez, Sarah Murray, Amy Nakamura, Kyley Schultz, Erica Snow and Peter Wallsten.
Methodology
The Post identified Catholic priests, sisters and brothers who were accused of sexual abuse and worked at Indian boarding schools by reviewing their employment histories.
To establish school locations, The Post relied on data provided by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, or NABS, and the U.S. Interior Department, identifying 523 schools.
The Catholic Church ran or was affiliated with 82 boarding schools, according to NABS and other boarding school documents. Reporters identified the diocesesand religious orders for 72 schools based on information from Catholic Truth & Healing, a group of archivists and historians who conduct boarding school research.
While the Catholic Church operated the most schools of any religious group, some schools were run by Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists and other groups. By the 1980s, most of the boarding schools had closed or been turned over to the tribes or successor organizations to run.
Reporters focused on schools operated by the Catholic Church because of the availability of records and lawsuits by former students alleging sexual abuse. These records include lists of priests and members of religious orders who have been publicly identified by their dioceses or orders as being accused of “credible” or “established” claims of sexual abuse.
There is no standard for inclusion on these lists. In some cases, the allegations have been investigated by dioceses or provinces and determined to have merit; in others, the claims could not be investigated because too much time had passed or the alleged abuser had died.
The Jesuits West Province, for example, say its list includes members “against whom a credible claim of sexual abuse of a minor (under the age of 18) or a vulnerable adult has been made.” It notes that inclusion “does not imply that the claims are true and correct or that the accused individual has been found guilty of a crime or liable for civil claims.” It says anyone named on a list has been removed from the ministry.
Experts caution that the lists are incomplete: Most disclose only clergy members and those who served after the 1950s. Some of the lists fail to include any information about where people worked, the dates of employment or the years of abuse.
The Post compiled more than a dozen lists of priests, brothers and sisters accused of sexual abuse and built a data set of the names of more than 5,000 churches, missions and schools to which they had been assigned. Reporters then searched the data set and identified Indian boarding schools based on their name and location.
From the diocesan lists, reporters identified 64 priests, 20 sisters and 11 brothers who worked at 17 schools, most of them in Montana, South Dakota and Alaska. Some had been assigned to a school as early as the 1890s, and one had worked as recently as 2003 at an institution that assumed control of a boarding school.
The Post also identified two priests, one brother and an additional school by reviewing ProPublica’s data set of members of the Catholic Church accused of sexual misconduct. Through lawsuits, reporters found 24 additional priests, brothers and sisters who worked at four other boarding schools.
To calculate consecutive years of employment and abuse reported at individual schools, The Post included only individuals for whom specific years of work and abuse were known.
The Post used data from BishopAccountability.org to fill in missing assignment histories. For 20 people, there were no assignment dates. The Post was unable to identify when 13 individuals worked at four schools because of missing employment dates.
The reporting for the investigation also drew on information collected by journalist Mary Annette Pember and her work at Indian Country Today, as well as stories by Native News Online, Global Sisters Report, Reuters, Desolate Country, Huffington Post, South Dakota Public Radio and the Great Falls Tribune in Montana. Also reviewed was the U.S. Interior Department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report. Other resources included “Education for Extinction,” by David Wallace Adams; “American Indian Education: A History,” by Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder; and “Battlefield & Classroom,” by Richard Henry Pratt.
