Growing up in Idaho, Melissa Abell wanted to be a veterinarian. Her mother, Treasa Keith, said the teenager once found a bird struggling to breathe. She pulled pebbles from its throat and watched until it flew away.
Keith, who didn’t learn her Indigenous culture, wanted her daughter to connect with her Alaska Native, Athabascan, Haida and Aleut heritage. There were few options for Native American education nearby, but Keith’s parents had attended a school in Oregon: the Chemawa Indian School. It is one of four remaining boarding schools for Indigenous children run by the US government, and is the country’s oldest continuously operating Indigenous boarding school.
Although Abell’s stepfather and Keith had some reservations – the school application form asked if Abell was a ward of the court, had ever been arrested, was on probation or had been in treatment – they saw it as an opportunity for Abell to meet other Indigenous kids and explore the world.
Abell was accepted and flew to Oregon in spring 2014. She passed a mandatory physical exam to return that fall. But on 14 December 2014, Abell’s roommate woke up to her hitting the wall and saying “I can’t breathe,” according to a Marion county sheriff’s office report. She ran down the hall to find dorm staff but couldn’t find anyone and returned to see students trying to help Abell. Another student ran to find someone and this time found a staff member, who called 911. The staff member called for help on a radio but a responding staffer didn’t understand – she told police she thought students were fighting. Staff thought Abell was seizing, so they rolled her on her side. The police report doesn’t say if they performed CPR.
Emergency personnel attempted to revive Abell, but were unsuccessful. Abell’s cause of death was heart failure, according to an autopsy report. She had a family history of heart murmurs, had oral surgery a month before and was on birth control, but the exact cause of heart failure is unknown.
She was 18.
Keith believes if the school had more staff and better emergency training, they could have saved her daughter’s life.
“It wasn’t urgent, is the way I felt,” she said of the response. “The kids shouldn’t have to be running around like that – watching their roommate die while they can’t find somebody.”
The US government once ran more than 400 Native American boarding schools across the country, including Chemawa. When it was built in 1880, the federal policy was to sever Indigenous children from their language and culture as part of an effort to take land and expand the United States.
The US government ended the assimilation policy in the 1970s and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) says it has reformed the remaining schools. But the US Department of the Interior’s inspector general, responsible for independent oversight of the department, has initiated an audit of Chemawa to get to the bottom of allegations of misspending and determine whether the bureau has increased academic achievement.
‘An unstable and unsafe environment’
Abell is the second student to die in the Chemawa dorms in two decades. In 2003, Cindy SoHappy, 16, died of alcohol poisoning in a holding cell. Staff were supposed to check on her every 15 minutes, but failed to do so. A 2005 investigation by the interior department inspector found a “historical pattern of inaction and disregard for human health and safety” contributed to her death, and that senior officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) “failed to take action” that could have prevented her death.
In 2011 – years before Abell’s roommates searched for staff – Chemawa teachers warned senior BIE officials that Chemawa was a dangerous place for children.
The Guardian reviewed reports related to Abell’s death, spoke to two former teachers who emailed Bureau of Indian Affairs officials in 2011 about conditions at Chemawa and reviewed their emails. The interviews and records show that many students who attended Chemawa experienced intergenerational trauma from boarding schools, but the school lacked the supervision and support they needed.
The school was “an unstable and unsafe environment” for students, who were “unsupervised to a dangerous degree”, wrote Chemawa teacher Joy O’Renick in a 2011 email to interior department assistant secretary for Indian affairs Larry Echo Hawk.
Another teacher, Celeste Karzon from Bay Mills Indian Community, an Indigenous community in Michigan, echoed her in a 2011 email to Keith Moore, the BIE director, warning of a lack of supervision of students and staff.
Hawk and Moore both left the agency in 2012.
O’Renick wrote that students were being “sent home in droves” without transparency about the reasons why. She said there was a practice of expelling students for minor infractions after “count day” in the spring, when federal funding for students on a per capita basis was locked in.
On arrival, students encountered inconsistent discipline and a culture of low expectations, the teachers told the BIE. Instead of investing in counselling, the school sent students home, the teachers told the Guardian. “This was a pattern,” Karzon said.
In recent years, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported and public hearings confirmed that students died shortly after graduating or being sent home from Chemawa. In 2011, Flint Tall, 15, died in a drunk driving accident after Chemawa sent him home. O’Renick testified that he was sent home for arguing with the school counsellor. In 2017, Marshall Friday, 18, died from inhaling air duster shortly after graduating. Friday’s mother testified that she didn’t think the school was totally at fault, but she believed Friday, who struggled with depression and anxiety, was self-medicating with inhalants because he couldn’t access his psychiatric medication from the school’s Indian Health Service clinic the week before his death.
The teachers also warned of financial red flags. Karzon told the BIE she was promised a certain salary but given substantially lower pay. O’Renick told the BIE she saw “unethical hiring and payroll practices” and her pay was cut after she raised concerns.
‘Opaque financial practices’
The teachers told the Guardian that after they reported to the BIE, they were reprimanded. O’Renick said the BIA launched an investigation, but she believed it did not yield results, so teachers contacted lawmakers and the media.
In 2017, Oregon Public Broadcasting published an investigative series into student deaths, including Abell’s, that questioned whether Chemawa was a safe place for children. They obtained data showing that, from 2010 to 2017, police responded to more than 1,300 incidents at Chemawa, including fights and sexual assaults. They reported allegations of misspending. They revealed that Chemawa leadership retaliated against teachers and the school’s culture of secrecy formed a roadblock to accountability.
The series led a group of Oregon lawmakers to send a letter to the interior department and BIE demanding answers. In 2019, the US House of natural resources and Indigenous affairs subcommittee held public hearings. Keith, Karzon and O’Renick testified.
In 2020, principal and superintendent Amanda Ward spoke to the Statesman Journal and blamed allegations on “disgruntled employees”. Ward said the school follows up with every student that it sends home. “It hurts to see and have that perception that the staff just send them home and don’t care anymore,” she said.
Ward acknowledged dorm understaffing: “It’s not easy when it’s 300 kids to however many dorm staff there are in the evenings.” She said the school had done “cross training” to create understanding between dorm staff and academic staff.
In 2021, two US senators wrote a letter to the interior department inspector general saying they received complaints about alleged financial mismanagement at the school. “These allegations have been difficult to evaluate due to the school’s opaque financial practices,” they wrote. They said they had repeatedly asked school officials for financial data but were ignored. The inspector general confirmed to the Guardian that it launched an audit into Chemawa financial management that is ongoing.
Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, one of the lawmakers pushing for change at Chemawa, said she was happy the audit is happening, but continued to encounter transparency issues at the BIE.
“It just seems to take longer [to get information] and it’s been frustrating at times,” she said.
She hopes the audit will get to the bottom of transparency and spending allegations, and result in Chemawa students receiving “trauma-informed and culturally-relevant education”.
Bonamici said the BIE had left behind the “ugly original purpose” of boarding schools and is trying to reshape Chemawa, but must do more to retain Indigenous teachers, teach Indigenous languages and encourage students to practice their own culture.
Chemawa “offers culturally relevant, high-quality education that prepares students with the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to flourish in the opportunities of tomorrow”, the BIE told the Guardian.
From 2015 to 2020, students maintained steady academic achievement until the pandemic hit, the bureau said. It added that it had hired more staff to tutor students. Under federal law, Indigenous applicants receive preference in hiring at BIE schools, and more than 60% of Chemawa staff are Indigenous so students “may thrive in a safe and affirmative learning environment”, the BIE said.
“Chemawa is dedicated to supporting the overall wellbeing of students,” the BIE said. Staff complete mental health first aid and trauma-informed care training, and Chemawa partners with the Office of Justice Services and Indian Health Services to provide students with behavioral health screening, mental health group classes, and treatment and prevention.
‘Hope for the best’
Abell’s friends searching for staff as crucial minutes ticked by points to a “laissez-faire attitude” that extends to the top of the BIE, said Chemawa historian SuAnn Reddick, who co-authored a spreadsheet of student deaths in Chemawa’s early years. Most died of diseases exacerbated by crowded conditions and malnourishment.
This year’s interior department report on boarding schools found 53 separate burial sites across the country. Investigators expect the number of graves to climb into the thousands. The report concluded the assimilation policy caused the deaths of Indigenous children, deteriorated the physical and mental health of students, eroded Indigenous languages and cultures and led to loss of territories and wealth.
For decades, the government has investigated school conditions and made improvements, and in the 1970s, the assimilation policy ended, Reddick said. Indigenous school boards were added so tribes could have an advisory role, but Reddick said Chemawa’s board has diminished in power.
Old structures endure today: children travel far from home to attend Chemawa and the hierarchy is similar to when it opened, Reddick said. While the assimilation policy is gone, its impacts linger. The policy brought many different nations together at schools, forcing children to only speak English, severely endangering fluency of Indigenous languages.
Today, students are allowed to speak their languages but few are fluent. The BIE said about 200 students from 57 Tribal Nations currently attend Chemawa. Ward told the Statesman Journal that there were so many different languages that it was complicated to teach them.
Reddick said Chemawa will not be fully reformed until the Tribes become deeply involved in a way that connects students with their history, culture and language.
Keith was pleased to hear about the audit, and said it should happen regularly at Indigenous boarding schools.
Asked if the school has reformed, she paused. “They’re giving it a good try, but I lost my daughter so they need to try harder.”
“I hope the best for the school, I hope they do turn around.”
• This article was amended on 18 December 2022 to correctly attribute a highlighted quote to Treasa Keith rather than to Melissa Abell.
