Governor Hochul's Formal Apology to Seneca Nation

Originally established by Presbyterian missionaries on the Cattaraugus Territory in 1855, Thomas Indian School was owned and operated by the State of New York from 1875 until it closed in 1957. Thomas Indian School, and other residential boarding schools across the United States and Canada, operated under the government’s policy of forced assimilation of Native children.

At least 2,500 children from various Indigenous Nations were separated from their families and forced to attend the school. Children from the Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk, Poospatuck (Unkechaug), Shinnecock, and other Indigenous Nations passed through the doors of the school. Some of those children never returned home.They were stripped of the traditional language and culture, and suffered abuse, violence, hatred, and sometimes death, at the hands of school officials. Thousands of children are known to have died at the residential boarding schools. It is believed that the deaths of hundreds — if not thousands — more were never documented. The devastating impacts the boarding schools had on Native American families and communities, including the decimation of family structures and traditional language, are still keenly felt today.