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Michigan lawmakers are set to hold a Feb. 27 hearing about a taxpayer-funded report on tribal boarding schools that was completed in September but shelved without being released to the public or presented to the Legislature. The report, which Bridge Michigan first reported on and which the Associated Press distributed through a partnership, recommended an apology for Michigan’s role in the deaths and abuse of Native American children tied to federally funded boarding schools.
Rep. Tom Kuhn, R-Troy, who chairs the House general government subcommittee, said the subcommittee wants answers about how the state spent more than $1 million for a 300-page study and then discarded it. In remarks to Bridge Michigan, Kuhn said, “We’d like to get some understanding of why we spent over a million dollars on a 300-page report and then threw the report in the garbage can.” He said the Department of Civil Rights declined an invitation to testify at the hearing.
Kuhn said the Department of Civil Rights told Bridge it chose not to appear because of “potential litigation with Kauffman.” The Kauffman and Associates firm—the Oregon company that conducted the study—received an invitation to testify as well, Kuhn said, adding that he had not yet received a reply.
The AP story described the report as having been overseen by the Department of Civil Rights and as never having been released. According to the reporting, a summary presented to the Legislature omitted recommendations that the consulting firm included in the final 300-page document. Bridge Michigan obtained the full report, including accounts from survivors of abuse in the homes and material describing the state and local communities’ roles related to the federally funded boarding schools that later closed more than 40 years ago.
The reporting also said Kauffman and Associates told the state it believed its findings were being handled inappropriately. Michigan officials criticized the report as too “shoddy” to show to the public, while Kauffman accused the state of “whitewashing” findings, according to the account distributed by AP. The Department of Civil Rights did not return a request for comment Monday, which the report noted was a federal holiday.
The story places the Michigan investigation in a broader historical context involving the U.S. Indian boarding school system. It said there were at least 417 federal-operated Indian boarding schools across 37 states in the 19th and 20th centuries, citing the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report released in 2024. It also said that five federal boarding schools were located in Michigan—in Baraga, Mackinac Island, Schoolcraft County, Mt. Pleasant and Harbor Springs—and that the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition lists three additional schools in Marquette, Omena and Assinins. It said the last listed school in the state closed in 1983: the Holy Childhood of Jesus Catholic Church and Indian School in Harbor Springs.
According to the Michigan report described in the AP story, children in the schools were not allowed to speak native language or wear Native American clothing, and some were given non-native names. The report said physical and sexual abuse were common. The story also noted that there is no known documentation of how many children were taken from families and shipped to boarding schools in Michigan or how many died at those schools, but it cited documentation by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan that 229 students died at the Indian Industrial Boarding School in Mt. Pleasant from 1893 and 1934; it said only five of the deaths were officially documented by the school.
The report’s recommendations, as described by the AP story, focused on accountability and responses that would affect future investigations and state policy. They included: an executive order apology by the governor recognizing Michigan’s “deliberate participation” in the national policy of Native American boarding schools; using subpoena power in a subsequent investigation to “ensure full archival research is completed, including denominational archives”; eliminating the statute of limitations for physical and sexual assault on minors to allow charges in older cases; and funding Native American language revitalization programs in schools and communities.
The reporting said the recommendations were comparable to steps taken elsewhere: in 2024, President Joe Biden issued an apology for the federal government’s role in the boarding schools, and some states have issued reports, acknowledgments or apologies, including Colorado in 2023, as well as Wisconsin and New York. The AP story also described an ongoing Attorney General’s investigation modeled on a clergy abuse investigation in Michigan that reviewed millions of pages from Catholic dioceses. It said Danielle Hagaman-Clark, criminal bureau chief in the AG’s office, told Bridge in January that criminal charges may be slim because the last boarding school closed 42 years ago and some perpetrators may be dead or statutes of limitation may have run out, but she said there still is value in accountability.
The report described why Michigan involvement remained a central question for survivors and tribal advocates. One document discussed in the AP story—reported as included in the full report but not in the 16-page summary released by the Department of Civil Rights—was a 1923 letter from a superintendent of a boarding school in Mr. Pleasant to a child’s step-father after the child ran away. In that letter, the superintendent wrote that if the child did not return to school, “I will be compelled to place the matter in the hands of the sheriff,” a county official, the AP account said.
The AP story also included survivor accounts captured during the study. It said one survivor told Kauffman and Associates, “I can’t imagine a scenario where thousands of people from one race are forced to schools around the state and the state itself had no involvement; their knowledge of ongoing (events) where kids were killed had to have been reported to some extent or another.” Another survivor said, “How do you have these mass graves and children never coming home, other kids saw. So, how would it be possible that the state didn’t know?”