Several Native American tribes have filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to order the United States to release documentation of the brutal boarding school system that included one such institution in Carlisle.

The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California sued the Department of the Interior, its Bureau of Indian Affairs, its Bureau of Indian Education and its current leader, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for breaching its legal obligations to the tribes in stealing money from their trusts to fund torture and genocide at its federal Indian Boarding Schools.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania and encompasses its allegations under two counts while seeking certification as a class action lawsuit.

It relies on two volumes of the boarding schools investigative report released in 2022 and 2024, where the United States Government admits it used money taken from Native Nations to fund the Indian Charter School Program.

Despite knowing that the amount soared into the billions, “the fact is plain: No true accounting has ever taken place,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit seeks to compel the United States to release all records to provide accounting for a program that brutalized generations of Native American children and killed more than 5% of them, according to the reports.

In exchange for making permanent peace with the United States and ceding land, the Native Nations asked the United States to educate their children. Instead, the federal government used the Federal Indian Boarding School Program to dispossess Native Americans of territory while destroying their culture, the report said.

The purpose of these military-styled schools was to weed out Native American culture by requiring children to adopt new names and punishing those who spoke their native language, the report said.

“The assimilation of Indian children through the Federal Indian boarding school system was intentional and part of that broader goal of Indian territorial dispossession for the expansion of the United States,” the report said.

Instead of providing a real education, the United States separated Native children from their parents and “systematically sought to erase their cultural identity, killing, torturing, starving and sexually assaulting many in the process and doing untold damage to generations.”

It began at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first off-reservation school of its kind in America, and dragged Native American children to Cumberland County for a military-style education, the National Park Service said.

Its job was to “kill the Indian” to “save the Man,” according to the National Park Service.

At those 417 boarding schools across 37 states, children were tortured and sexually abused, according to the reports. Countless children died at the schools, many of whom were buried in unmarked graves at the institutions.

Meanwhile, in at least 171 treaties, in exchange for the Native Nations’ homelands and “everlasting peace,” the federal government promised to provide for Native American education.

The lawsuit does not focus on accounting for the atrocities inflicted upon generations of Native Americans, however. It focuses solely on the United States’ federal trust responsibility and its obligations to properly account for the Native Nations’ funds it used to fund the boarding school program.

The lawsuit is asking a federal court to order the United States to release a full accounting of Native Nations’ funds used to pay for the Federal Indian Boarding School Program.

That accounting would include:

• The $23.3 billion that’s estimated to have been appropriated for the boarding school program
• Monies removed from Native Nations’ Trust accounts for the boarding school program
• How those monies were pooled
• The performance of invested funds held in trust by the federal government
• The value of land ceded in exchange for promises related to education
• The “treaty-stipulated support” spent to support the program
• The value generated by child labor both for institution operations and through the Outing System to non-Indian families
• The economic harm caused by the Boarding School Programs
• The remainder of Native Nations’ funds and assets taken by the United States and used for the education of Native Nations’ children

The Native Nations also want the United States to preserve and publish all documents related to the boarding school program on an electronic database and preserve all documents it used to prepare the aforementioned investigative report until a full accounting is provided and authenticated.

In October 2024, former President Joe Biden apologized for the boarding school program and called it a “significant mark of shame” and a “blot on American history.”

Biden previously designated a national monument at the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which served as a flagship boarding school for more than 400 other federally supported, off-reservation schools across the United States.

In April, the administration of President Donald Trump cut $1.6 million from projects meant to capture and digitize stories of boarding school survivors.

The United States Army disinterred several corpses from the Carlisle Barracks last fall and returned them to their native tribes.

The Native Nations are represented by Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky PC, Dicello Levitt LLP, Fields Han Cunniff PLLC, Selendy Gay PLLC, and All Rise! PLLC.