Financial Audit of Oregon's federally run Indian Boarding school results
Chemawa Indian school failed to properly spend millions in taxpayer dollars, and hundreds of thousands for student accounts.
Before we begin, here is some context: there are a handful of Indian boarding schools that are still open and accepting Indigenous students today. Many are now tribal-run, and others are not. There are multiple run privately by religious organizations in a few states. For all of my resources on this complicated history, please see my link page: https://showme-yourmask.info/residentialschools; it covers the history that has been documented thanks to the work of many. Included in the list is this graphic that contains all of the known Indian boarding schools, past and present:
Chemawa’s awful spending habits:
A federal audit of an open, federally-run Indian boarding school concluded and released its findings this month. Confirming what many indigenous families long suspected: The Chemawa Indian School Did Not Account for Its Financial Resources, and the Bureau of Indian Education Did Not Provide Financial Oversight.
As part of its audit, the inspector general took a close look at a $2.2 million sample of Chemawa’s spending of government funding over a two-year period. Auditors labeled more than a quarter of that spending — $593,000 as “inappropriate and potentially wasteful.”
The school spending as a whole was filled with problems. Donations were not reported or documented to BIE. Chemawa also violated federal guidelines “by accepting gifts from non-federal entities.”
Chemawa earned roughly $172,000 per year from six businesses that signed leases for billboards, cell towers and a Christmas tree farm.
Auditors said they couldn’t even find the actual lease agreements for most of those sales. The one they could locate was for a billboard, and the payments Chemawa staff reported for that billboard were well below what the school should have been receiving according to its contract.
According to the audit, that contract was signed in 2008 by the school’s then-principal, who didn’t have the federal authority to sign it.
A history of failing Indigenous Children
The audit took place after OPB did investigative reporting, an excerpt from OPB in 2017:
Three students came from three different tribes to attend Chemawa Indian School. Now, their mothers are still struggling to understand how their children’s futures fell apart — and what role the federally run boarding school played.
Chemawa occupies a unique place within the Bureau of Indian Education, a federal agency that has long struggled to properly supervise schools for Native youth.
Chemawa is the oldest of four off-reservation boarding schools still operating. The schools share a complicated history, dating back to the late 19th century, when their goal was to assimilate Native children into American society, sometimes by force. Through the last century, federal and tribal leaders refocused schools like Chemawa to support teenagers’ Native culture and prepare them for college and careers.
“Not only are we able to offer education, but we’re also able to offer a safe environment,” Braucher said. “One that is structured and well balanced between educational opportunities, cultural and traditional opportunities, and recreational opportunities.”
But based on dozens of interviews with former staff, students, tribal advisors and parents, Chemawa is breaking its promise to support and educate Native students.
For years, teachers complained about students being expelled for questionable causes, jeopardizing their education or sending them to unstable situations when they were safer on campus. Meanwhile, others who remained at the school fell into cracks in the system as their physical and mental health deteriorated.
Wyden, who requested the audit a year and a half ago with Merkley, responded to the audit Tuesday, saying “This new report confirms the worst fears of anybody advocating for Tribal students at the Chemawa School to be well educated and well cared for by the adults entrusted with these young lives.”
Chemawa Indian School is a school I have talked about before, and the school needs to be investigated more thoroughly. The lack of financial transparency is also a common complaint at many privately run schools.
Digging into the dark
This news is coming out as many other schools are investigating possible gravesites, with some archeologist teams beginning to find remains. There is also a massive movement among museums and colleges to respectfully identify and return indigenous remains that have been long withheld from their people under the guise of academia. While this news is a relief, more work still needs to be done as some institutions remain resistant to giving back what was stolen.
Continued colonizing at St. Labre
Today as I was reading my updates, I came across a story about an indigenous two-spirit student who attended St. Labre, a catholic run private school in Montana. Montoya enrolled in the school because they were led to believe he would be safer there and less prone to be targeted for bullying. While his peers celebrated him, the school staff, on the other hand, were less supportive.
Founded in 1884 by a group of Catholic Ursuline Sisters from Ohio, St. Labre Indian School is a private, faith-based school that now serves around 270 students from day care through 12th grade, and older students have the option to board.
“We just didn’t think they’d be so strict,” Magpie explained. “It kind of just seemed like they were pulling rules out of a hat.” She added that had her family known the struggles Montoya would face at Labre, they would never have chosen to enroll him there.
Montoya said when he’d ask administrators at St. Labre why they “were calling him out,” they’d tell him, “’It’s because we care about you, and we want you to have a future.’”
“They’d say things like, ‘You won’t get anywhere looking like that,’” Montoya recalled. Montoya said comments like these made him feel bad about himself. And sometimes, he’d wonder whether they were right.
“Is the real world going to be like that?” Montoya would wonder. “Or am I going to be accepted in the workplace and not have to deal with bad things?”
Students and teachers throughout the school year supported Montoya and advocated to the administration that he should be allowed to express himself how he wishes.
A teacher who wished to remain anonymous said Montoya was “a good student.”
“He comes from cultural people,” the teacher said. “He was expressing culture through the way he dressed and the jewelry he wore. (The school) makes decisions I don’t really understand.”
In January, Montoya wore his yellow cheerleading sweater, knee-high boots and a bow in his hair to school.
Again, he was called into the office before first period, where he said he was told to change. His boots were too high, earrings too long, makeup too bold.
When his mother came to pick him up from school that day, she unenrolled him.
Magpie said in unenrolling at Labre, her brother would miss out on educational opportunities, too.
“If he would’ve graduated from Labre, he would’ve gotten a scholarship,” she said. “Not that he can’t still get that, but it would’ve been more of a sure thing at Labre.”
“My brother’s presence at Labre was so big,” she said. “Enormous. Everyone loved him. He didn’t have problems with teachers or students. So I feel like he’s missing out on being with all the people he had to leave behind. The people he was close with.”
Montoya said he felt “pushed out.”
"It makes the school a less diverse place," he said of Labre. "It shows that the school ... only supports (a certain) type of student, and only this type of student will achieve, while they push all the others out."
But when he unenrolled, Montoya also felt relief.
“I felt free,” he said.
St. Labre may have pledged to right the wrongs of their past. But their actions have yet to reflect that. It begs the question: why are we still allowing the church to determine what is best for indigenous children?