By Heather Cabot
It was an apology long overdue.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently acknowledged the nightmarish physical, sexual, and emotional abuse inflicted on children at Thomas Indian School spanning 102 years. The existence of what she called a “prison-camp,” where more than 2,500 youngsters were ripped from their families and terrorized in a bid to extinguish their Native identity, was little known outside of the Cattaraugus Territory near Buffalo, a six-hour drive from Rye. Although the state-run institution closed in 1957, the decimation of the Seneca community, language, and traditions along with multigenerational trauma have never been repaired.
Hochul, who had been invited by tribal leadership to issue the apology despite a fraught relationship over casino revenue, shocked many non-Natives unfamiliar with the school and its state-sanctioned forced assimilation. But I wondered why it had taken so long for any New York governor to atone for this shameful chapter in state and federal history and what real impact Hochul’s words will have.
My interest stems from the work I’ve done on a book with Hopi journalist Patty Talahongva, a third-generation survivor of Phoenix Indian Industrial School, once the second largest Indian boarding school in America. We have spent the last three years tirelessly trying to uncover her Hopi family’s experiences in hopes of shedding light on this largely untold story of American history.
In May of 2023, I found myself far from Rye in a secure, windowless room outside Riverside, Calif., combing through thousands of yellowed, crumbling Bureau of Indian Affairs files unearthed from the depths of the National Archives. To my left, Patty held her breath as we scanned ragged pages for clues about her ancestors. It was the first time she and her relatives sought access to these government records in hopes they might reveal a new crumb of truth about the family’s traumatic entanglements with the 99-year-old institution.
Her paternal great grandfather, maternal grandmother, grandfather, and numerous great uncles and aunts were among the thousands of Native students in the early 20th century torn from their parents and transported by wagon and cattle car far away from their remote desert home to Arizona’s capital city. Dozens of relatives on her mother’s and father’s side of the family attended Phoenix Indian throughout the facility’s lifetime, as well as other boarding schools across the West. And in 1978, tragic circumstances sent Patty and her younger sister Rosalie to Phoenix, too.
On Oct. 12, 1890, Indian Affairs Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan justified the founding of the Phoenix Indian in a speech to Anglo settlers, claiming it “cheaper to educate the Indians than to kill them.” It would open its doors less than a year later and grow into one of the longest running of more than 400 federally operated institutions established to carry out the U.S. campaign of land dispossession and cultural genocide under the guise of “education.”
The mandate of forced assimilation eventually fell away at Phoenix Indian but the school was still open in the late 1980s while I lived just 10 minutes north and a world away. Like many of my non-Native peers, I grew up ignorant of the history hiding in plain sight in the heart of Central Phoenix along busy Indian School Road, where I learned to drive my parents’ station wagon. I had always been curious about the reddish-brown adobe buildings you could glimpse through the high fence along the boulevard next to the Veterans Administration Hospital and in the shadow of the city’s newly erected skyscrapers. But I never thought to ask meaningful questions until several years ago when I began to read about Canada’s reckoning with its own “residential schools” and the 2021 horrific discovery of mass graves of 215 children buried beneath Kamloops Indian Industrial School in British Columbia.
As it turns out, I would learn that Canada’s system was modeled on America’s and its notorious motto of “Kill the Indian in him and save the man,” coined by boarding school mastermind Capt. Richard Henry Pratt. Like New York’s Thomas Indian School, its Phoenix counterpart was founded to systematically stamp out Indigenous culture through brute force.
Children taken from their families were renamed, their flowing hair cut. They suffered whippings or had their mouths washed out with lye or worse for speaking tribal languages. The Native American National Boarding School Healing Coalition estimates that by 1926, more than 80 percent of Native children in the U.S. were enrolled in these identity-altering and militarized institutions. Young people were also forced to perform manual labor to maintain the schools and many were hired out to Anglo families as cheap domestic and farm workers, including Patty’s maternal Grandma Rosalie Lalo during the 1920s. She was lucky to make it home to the Hopi Reservation after seven harsh years. The Washington Post reported in 2024 that across the boarding school system, more than 3,000 students died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse.
The U.S. government has only begun to admit the abuse and destruction. On the heels of Hochul’s visit to Seneca, two tribes filed the first class-action lawsuit against the Department of Interior alleging misappropriation of $23 billion used to carry out boarding school policy instead of efforts promised to support the collective benefit of Native people. Two landmark reports by the Department of Interior in 2022 and 2024 under former Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet official and whose grandmother survived boarding school, contained the first attempt at tallying the damage of this inhumane era. The findings spurred another first: an official apology from a sitting U.S. president, delivered last fall by former President Joe Biden at the Gila River Community in Arizona. As she listened intently in the audience, Patty wondered what her grandmother would have thought of his words of contrition.
Gov. Hochul went even further than Biden, calling out Thomas Indian School as “a site of sanctioned ethnic cleansing.” But beyond the mea culpas, what more can be done to help heal these deep wounds?
One step forward is ensuring the next generation learns of this history. Hochul advocates the development of new K-12 curriculum for New York. Congress must also uphold its treaty obligations which include maintaining promised healthcare and education funding along with continued efforts to help families like Patty’s track down their boarding school pasts. We hope Patty’s story will light a fire under those in power to move beyond words and take concrete action to right past wrongs.
Heather Cabot is a Rye resident. Her book with Patty Talahongva, “Indian School Road,” is due to be published by Hachette in September 2026.
