The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California file an amended proposed class action.
Law360 (June 3, 2026, 5:58 PM EDT) -- A group of Indigenous nations has amended allegations against the federal government that seek an accounting of how much of Native American tribes' money was used in connection with federal Indian boarding school programs, telling the court that $23.3 billion barely scratches the surface of their losses.
Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, in an amended Wednesday proposed class action, say the United States has admitted that it made appropriations of more than $23.3 billion available in fiscal year 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars between 1871 and 1969 for the federal Indian boarding school system and associated policies.
That estimate, included in the second-volume U.S. Interior Department report on federal Indian boarding school initiatives published in July 2024, also does not include any wealth generated by Indian or Native Hawaiian children while they were in the boarding school system, including for agriculture and railroad industries and domestic labor, the amended suit says.
Without those industries, the boarding schools could not have been maintained, the tribes argue, citing the DOI's July 2024 report.
"This amended complaint explains why an accounting is not optional," Adam Levitt, founding partner of DiCello Levitt, told Law360 in a Wednesday statement. "It connects the federal government's own admissions with archival and accounting records showing how Native Nations' funds were pooled, spent, and never fully accounted for. Justice begins with the truth, and the truth requires a full accounting."
The tribal nations first sued the United States last May, alleging that the federal government used Indigenous nations' own funds to finance the program that they say was designed to separate Native American children from their families and destroy their language, customs and cultural identities.
The lawsuit was first filed in Pennsylvania's Middle District, home to the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the country's first Indian boarding school that opened in 1879 and served as a model for hundreds of others before the program shuttered in 1969.
By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous children were enrolled in a boarding school, the suit says.
According to court records, the lawsuit was transferred to a D.C. federal district court in September.
The U.S. admitted for the first time in reports published by the DOI in 2022 and 2024 that it used tribes' funds to implement the boarding school program and all the documents to prove it have been, and are still, solely under the federal government's exclusive control, according to the complaint.
Within those reports, the U.S. admits that it identified at least 171 treaties made with Indigenous nations that implicate the federal Indian boarding school system or education in general, the tribes allege.
In addition, the federal government provided excerpts of 127 treaties for those reports that explicitly include boarding schools or general Indian education provisions, they say.
According to the amended complaint, archival records reviewed this year showed that children from various tribal nations were placed in boarding schools, with payments made to each school for each child.
The lawsuit says that until May 2022, the United States had not revealed which records from the American Indian Records Repository existed regarding the Boarding School Program.
In addition, the amended suit says, the U.S. did not attempt to describe the comprehensive, national reach of the boarding school program, the harm it caused, or the manner in which it was funded.
That changed with the DOI's 2024 publication of the Boarding Schools Investigative Report that identified the schools by name and revealed, for the first time, much, but by no means all, that occurred within, the tribes argue.
"The amended complaint makes even clearer what Native Nations have long understood: the United States has not fully answered for how our own resources were used to support the boarding school system," Serrell Smokey, chairman of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, told Law360 in a Wednesday statement. "The government has acknowledged the harm, but acknowledgment is not the same as accountability. Our people are entitled to know what was taken, how it was used, and what remains."
In February, the DOI asked the D.C. federal district court to dismiss the tribes' proposed class action lawsuit, arguing that no law requires the U.S. to undertake such an accounting effort.
According to the DOI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Education, the tribes' lawsuit wrongly relies on the federal government's trust relationships with tribal nations that are not related to the U.S.'s role in Indigenous children's education.
"The general trust relationship between the United States and tribes does not create enforceable duties, including any duty to provide an accounting. And where plaintiffs fail to identify the specific duty they seek to enforce in a statute, treaty, or regulation — here, the duty to account for the boarding school system — equitable principles cannot fill the gaps to create duties that do not otherwise exist," they argued. Read More.