native american boarding school essay

The History of Native American Boarding Schools Is Even More Complicated than a New Report Reveals

L ast week, the U.S. Department of the Interior released a more than 100-page report on the federal Indigenous boarding schools designed to assimilate Native Americans in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. Between 1819 and 1969, the U.S. ran or supported 408 boarding schools, the department found. Students endured “rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse,” and the report recorded more than 500 deaths of Native children—a number set to increase as the department’s investigation of this issue continues.

“This report, as I see it, is only a first step to acknowledge the experiences of Federal Indian boarding school children,” Bryan Newland, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, the study’s author, wrote in a memo.

The effort to catalog these institutions came nearly a year after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at the site of similar boarding schools in Canada raised awareness of this dark chapter in North American history.

“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” Deb Haaland , Interior Secretary and first Native American cabinet secretary, said in a statement . “It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal.”

To get an American Indian historian’s reaction to the significance of the Interior Department’s research and to better understand the history of these boarding schools, TIME called Brenda Child, historian and author of Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940.

Why were these boarding schools started?

We always have to remember that the goal of the schools was assimilation, but it was also about Native people . To me, the great genocide of the boarding school era is the land loss and dispossession that accompanies the boarding school policy. People at the time thought Native people could just abandon their homes and reservations and tribal ways and wouldn’t need a homeland anymore.

Why was Carlisle Indian Industrial School significant?

Carlisle was significant because it was the model for other government boarding schools. It came early in the history, and a lot of the ideas for Indian education were tested out at Carlisle. For example, at the time, people thought Indians had to go into manual trades because they were good with their hands. They weren’t educated to be doctors or teachers or lawyers. And so Carlisle had this program where students would spend half the day in the classroom, and then students would be trained in vocational work during half the day. And so other schools copied that.

It also sounds like the schools were training people for certain kinds of low-paying jobs that serve white Americans.

Yeah, it was a system that emphasized social class . Indian people were Native, but lower-class [who white people thought] should learn some good manual trades that benefited the white majority. The boarding schools were not really about benefiting Indians. They were a form of segregated education in the history of the United States. And we know who benefits from segregation.

How did the U.S. government get away with these boarding schools?

I think that the citizens of this country, and politicians in this country and reformers were deeply invested in dispossessing Indians, and that’s why the boarding schools persisted and why they were talked about by people at the time as being great—”This was going to be the best thing! Indians are going to become citizens! They’re going to get jobs!” And the price they’re paying is being dispossessed of their land. But that’s what it was all about. So I always say you have to look beyond the rhetoric of the assimilation era. And if we look at the land policies and see what happened, we see this era was an utter disaster for Native people that made them poorer than they ever were before.

Read more: The Historical Significance of Deb Haaland Becoming the First Native American Cabinet Secretary

What is your general reaction to the report?

The report doesn’t really periodize American Indian history very well. We generally date the boarding school era from 1879 when Carlisle, the first of the off-reservation federal schools, was established. That was the dominant form of Indian education in the United States for 50 years, up until [ Franklin D. Roosevelt’ s presidency], when the Indian office and the policymakers at that time turned away from assimilation as the policy. They had also turned away from the boarding school concept.

The federal government shut many of them down in the 1930s, and the big story of Indian education became public school education. But some of [the boarding schools] continued, actually, at the demand of the Indian families, who used them as a poverty relief program for their families to survive the Great Depression. So I think you have to look at this era as not just one policy that lasted for 150 years, that is still with us today, but that there are different eras in the history of American Indian education. And so what Native people who attended a government school might have experienced in 1879, when there were still Indian wars being fought in the United States, was quite different than what [an American Indian] student in the 1930s experienced when people in government were saying, “Well, Native people shouldn’t have to give up their languages or their cultures.” That’s a very different period. I don’t think that students who attended boarding schools experienced the same thing decade after decade.

Where does this report fit in the history of research on Indigenous boarding schools?

I think that what people in the United States government or perhaps in the Department of Interior, certainly in the Bureau of Indian Affairs , wanted to know is, are there things that we need to be concerned about in the United States? Is there a hidden history that we’re not aware of in regard to the government? What they’ve done is to try to take a very comprehensive look at any institution that could be called a boarding school, whether it was run by the federal government or whether it was run by church organizations.

Do you think that the report adds anything to the scholarship on this topic that’s important to note?

I did find it interesting that the report includes Native Hawaiians. Many of us who have written about the history of Indian education haven’t really included them in this history. There are a lot of similarities and parallels because maybe some of the same missionaries or officials started out in Indian schools and then went to Hawaii. These ideas about assimilating, changing Indigenous people were global. So I like that [the report] included Hawaii.

One of the problems that I see with the report is that it takes this sweeping view of schools. And most of us historians are specific about the kinds of institutions we study. So what the report does is sweep together all kinds of institutions—Catholic schools, Episcopal schools, Presbyterian schools—and I don’t know if that sheds light on the overall history. Maybe it provides a certain overview that there were many, many institutions, but I think it’s better to separate the church schools and the federal schools, the schools that the United States government funded, because they were different kinds of institutions with different purposes.

Read more: What Thanksgiving Means Today to the Native American Tribe That Fed the Pilgrims

What was the impact of the boarding schools on your family?

My great-grandfather went to Carlisle and my grandmother, his daughter, went to the Flandreau school in South Dakota in the 1920s. They were Ojibwe-speaking people who left our reservation at Red Lake in northern Minnesota, and [these boarding schools were] their first real experience with the English language. The schools wanted kids to speak English, have a basic grammar school education, but then to be trained in some domestic or manual trades. My grandmother went out to work as a domestic servant in the local white households in South Dakota. My great-grandfather was one of those people who played football with [Olympian] Jim Thorpe and so we celebrate this athletic history.

My grandmother was bilingual, unlike her husband that she married when she came back home to the reservation. She became the family advocate because she could write letters. She could speak out on many issues when they were trying to get a home loan, all the ways that you had to manage the bureaucracy of reservations. When she came back to Red Lake, my grandmother raised her children to speak the Ojibwe language. My grandparents insisted on speaking their language and didn’t give up their culture in any way. But I think it’s a mixed bag. [The boarding schools were] an institution that was designed to eliminate Native culture, Native languages , and we’ve paid a price for that.

What should the U.S. government do now, to make up for federal Indian boarding schools?

We can’t change the past. We can’t change the experience of assimilation. But what we can do is restore land to Native people who were dispossessed. And if you would ask Indians, they would tell you exactly what land they want restored.

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• Introduction

Origins of American Indian boarding schools

The boarding-school system, daily life and discipline at american indian boarding schools, resistance to and decline of american indian boarding schools, legacy of american indian boarding schools.

American Indian boarding school

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American Indian boarding school , system of boarding schools created for Native —that is, American Indian , Alaska Native , and Native Hawaiian —children by the United States government and Christian churches during the 1800s and 1900s. Hundreds of thousands of children attended the schools, which were sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their homes. The schools were intended to wipe out traditional Native cultures and assimilate Native children into the dominant white culture . Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the well-known Carlisle Indian Industrial School, described his philosophy of assimilation as “Kill the Indian…and save the man.”

The boarding-school system was part of the U.S. government’s broader policy toward Native peoples. As the United States expanded westward during the 1800s, tribal nations occupied land that American settlers wanted. Conflicts over land often led to violence between the U.S. military and Native peoples. As evidenced by the Plains Wars , this was a costly way for the United States to acquire land, in terms of both lives and financial expense. Government officials came to believe that assimilation was the safest and most economically efficient way to deal with “hostile” Native peoples. They made the education of children an essential part of their assimilation strategy. They thought that isolating Native children and educating them in the white tradition would break the ties between the children and their families, communities , and lands. This in turn would make it easier to acquire Native territory.

The foundation for a Native school system was laid when the U.S. Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act in 1819. The law provided funding for the education of Native children, with the goal of “introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization.” The funds were often given to church organizations that had already been active in trying to convert American Indians to Christianity .

The churches used the government funds to establish day schools for Native children that were run by missionaries. These schools were located mostly on reservations and did not have housing for students. Children attended school during the day and returned to their communities at night. Mission day schools were the main educational institutions for Native children in the mid-1800s.

Eventually, however, government officials decided that day schools were not well suited to the goal of assimilation because children were allowed to return to their homes at night. These officials determined that complete isolation would be a more effective way to break the children’s bonds with their communities, families, and cultures. They saw boarding schools as the answer.

The first government-supported boarding school for Native children was established in 1819, the year the Civilization Fund Act was passed. The number of boarding schools remained small, however, until the 1870s. It was then that the government stopped funding mission schools and took a more direct role in Native education. It began establishing boarding schools, first on reservations and then off them. The schools were often in abandoned military forts or other old government buildings.

Over the course of 150 years, from 1819 to 1969, the government funded or operated more than 400 Native boarding schools. The schools were spread across 37 states or territories. Oklahoma , once Indian Territory , had the greatest number, 76. The next-highest totals were in Arizona (47) and New Mexico (43). Most of the boarding schools were located on reservations; fewer than 30 were not. Reservation schools were less expensive to establish and run. However, off-reservation schools were favoured by some officials for the same reason that boarding schools were preferred over day schools—more complete isolation of children from their families and cultures. Off-reservation schools were set up in white communities, and many students were not allowed to return home even during school breaks.

Hundreds of thousands of Native children attended boarding schools, sometimes for four years or more. Some Native parents chose to send their children to the schools, largely because there were no other educational options. Most boarding-school students, however, were taken from their families and forced to attend. Government agents on reservations were responsible for gathering children for transport to the schools. In 1891 the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring Native children to attend school. After that, the agents pressured parents who were reluctant to cooperate by withholding food or other supplies. If necessary, they sent police to seize children.

The first and best-known off-reservation boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was opened in Pennsylvania in 1879. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder, recruited students from throughout the country. About 10,000 children from more than 70 Native communities attended Carlisle between its founding in 1879 and its closing in 1918. The typical student was between 14 and 18 years old, though some were much younger. The school’s most famous student was the athlete Jim Thorpe . Carlisle served as a model for the boarding schools that followed.

Boarding-school administrators used a variety of methods to pursue the goal of assimilation. Students were taught that their traditional cultures were primitive and inferior to white culture. Upon arrival, students were forced to trade their clothes for uniforms and to have their hair cut in European American styles. Each child was given an English name. Students were forbidden to use their native languages and had to speak English instead. They were also prohibited from practicing their traditional religions and forced to become Christians.

Boarding schools taught children some academic subjects, including math, science, and history. Students also took art classes and participated in sports. Half of the school day, however, was spent learning practical skills or doing manual labour. Girls were taught to cook, clean, make clothes, and do laundry. Boys learned trades such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and brickmaking. The many types of manual labour performed by students included digging wells, raising livestock and poultry, fertilizing crops, and cutting down trees for lumber. The schools relied on student labour in order to operate. In addition, some of the products made by students were sold outside the school system.

The schools were run like military camps. Students had to march in formation and perform military drills. Rules were strictly enforced, and discipline was harsh. If students spoke their native languages, they were cruelly punished. Other displays of Native cultures—song, dance, stories, religion, sports, or food—were punished as well. The many forms of punishment included beatings, electrical shocks, solitary confinement , the withholding of food or water, and long periods of forced labour or kneeling. Sometimes elder children were forced to punish younger ones. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were common.

Boarding schools were typically overcrowded, and physical conditions were often very poor. Many children suffered from malnutrition and disease, such as tuberculosis and measles . A U.S. government investigation carried out in 2021–22 found that boarding schools were responsible for the deaths of more than 500 children. Marked and unmarked burial sites were found at or near more than 50 schools.

Knowing that many children who were sent to boarding schools never returned, Native families responded in a number of ways. Many taught their children to hide from the government agents who collected children to send to the schools. Many children ran away, either during the trip to a school or from the school itself. Those who escaped often had to walk hundreds of miles to return home. Some communities made group decisions to keep their children hidden. A well-known example occurred in 1894–95, when 19 Hopi men from Oraibi pueblo were imprisoned for refusing to turn over their children to the authorities.

The government began to move away from the use of off-reservation boarding schools in the early 1900s. The schools were expensive to build and operate, and officials saw little evidence of assimilation. After leaving school, most students did not assimilate into white society. Instead, they returned to their reservations, where they found that the skills they had learned did not get them jobs. On-reservation boarding schools fell out of favour when the government began to question the effectiveness of assimilation as a policy. A government report released in 1928 found that the boarding schools were overcrowded and the students malnourished, poorly educated, overworked, and harshly disciplined . In the 1930s the government shut down many boarding schools. Those that continued to operate began to include Native history and culture in the curriculum.

Over the next few decades Native communities worked to gain control over the education of their children. Their efforts helped bring about the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which the U.S. Congress passed in 1975. The law gave tribes control over their own affairs, including the operation of their schools.

Today about 9 out of 10 Native children attend schools in the U.S. public school system. Most of the rest attend reservation schools operated by either the U.S. government or a tribe. Several government or Native off-reservation boarding schools remain open, but they now emphasize Native sovereignty and the preservation of traditional languages and cultures.

The boarding schools caused serious and enduring problems for Native individuals, families, and communities. The schools stripped away children’s sense of identity and destroyed extended family systems. They led to the loss of Native languages and other aspects of traditional cultures by disrupting the passing down of knowledge from one generation to the next. Many Native languages have very few speakers left, and some have gone extinct. Many researchers and activists have traced the most difficult issues faced by contemporary Native communities to the abuses that occurred at the boarding schools. They note that the problems common to many reservations—including high rates of suicide , substance abuse, and domestic violence —are clear aftereffects of child abuse .

The U.S. boarding schools inspired a similar system in Canada. In 1879 the Canadian government sent a representative to the United States to visit and study several schools, including Carlisle. The resulting report led to the creation of Canada’s Indian Residential School (IRS) system. The abuse and trauma suffered by Indigenous children in the IRS system were very similar to the experiences of students in the U.S. schools. In the 2000s the Canadian government officially apologized for the schools and provided reparations (payments) to former students.

The discovery of more than 1,000 unmarked graves at residential-school sites in Canada in 2021 drew new attention to the history of Native boarding schools in the United States. Soon after the discovery, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland called for a comprehensive investigation of the U.S. boarding-school system. The first report of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative profiled 408 schools and was released in 2022. It discussed the abuses that took place in the schools and identified burial sites at more than 50 schools. The report recommended further research to identify additional burial sites and to examine the full impact that boarding schools had on Native peoples and cultures.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

A century of trauma at U.S. boarding schools for Native American children

Federally funded schools used abusive tactics to strip children of their culture and inspired a similar program in Canada. A new initiative aims to reckon with that past.

Zitkála-Šá was eight years old when the missionaries came. Lured from the South Dakota Yankton Indian Reservation with promises of adventure, comfort, and an education, in 1884 the girl went willingly to Wabash, Indiana, to attend a Quaker-run boarding school dedicated to training Native American children.

Then she realized the teachers who had taken her traditional clothing upon her arrival wanted to cut her hair, too. Proud of her long black hair and raised to associate short cuts with the shame of captured warriors, Zitkála-Šá snuck away from the other children. But the adults found her hiding place. They dragged the kicking child into another room and tied her to a chair.  

“I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids,” she wrote in her 1921 memoir American Indian Stories . “Then I lost my spirit.” Renamed Gertrude by the missionaries, Zitkála-Šá would go on to live most of the rest of her childhood at boarding schools for Native students. ( Zitkála-Šá went on to fight for suffrage for women and Native Americans. )

She was one of hundreds of thousands of students who attended such schools in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. The U.S. boarding schools inspired a similar program in Canada, which is now reeling from the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at the residential schools its First Nations children were forced to attend.

( Canada’s residential school survivors reflect on a brutal legacy: “That could’ve been me.” )

The grisly discovery has also forced a reckoning in the U.S. about its residential boarding schools which punished Native students for speaking their languages, forced them to take new names, and coerced them to convert to Christianity. And many were federally funded in an ambitious attempt to force Native Americans to assimilate into white American society.

The first Native American boarding school

Native Americans had inhabited and tended their traditional lands for thousands of years before the arrival of white settlers in the 1600s. Rather than learn from the land’s indigenous people, however, the settlers began to pressure Native Americans to abandon their traditional societies and adopt the ways of the new republic.

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act , a law that allowed the federal government to exchange land in the western U.S. for some tribes’ ancestral homelands in the east. But despite brokering more than 350 treaties with Native tribes, the U.S. did not fulfill its promises. Instead of allowing Native people to establish permanent homes in the west, it pushed them onto government-assigned reservations.

At first, education was in the hands of missionaries, some of whom set up schools on and near the new reservations. But as white settlers flooded into the western U.S. in the mid 19th century, forced assimilation became a federal priority. The government started to invest in mission schools and day schools. But over time, writes historian Ronald C. Naugle, “The reservation environment, to which the child returned daily, undermined the process of assimilation.”

Instead, the U.S. turned to the idea of off-reservation boarding schools. It found a blueprint in the work of Army General Richard Henry Pratt, who oversaw the education of a group of Native American prisoners of war in Fort Marion, Florida. Pratt’s philosophy was what he called “kill the Indian, and save the man.” He was convinced that if Native children were removed from their Native context and placed in an Anglo one, they would assimilate within a generation.

Pratt convinced the federal government to invest in a pricey experiment: a boarding school in Pennsylvania that educated Native children far from home. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which Pratt opened in 1879, would become the most prominent of the 25 federally funded off-reservation boarding schools that would open over the next few decades. (More than 300 other day and on-reservation boarding schools received federal funding as well.)

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was upheld as a model throughout the nation. Its influence didn’t end there: In 1879, the Canadian government sent lawyer Nicholas Flood Davin to the U.S. on a fact-finding mission. Davin visited the Carlisle school and other institutions and returned to Canada with a glowing review of the new educational system. Davin recommended the government create its own residential school system as soon as possible.

Abuse in the name of assimilation

At the federal boarding schools, which were located in white communities, children were given Anglo names. Their native languages and cultural practices were forbidden. Their strict educations included language lessons and studies in subjects like manual labor, housekeeping, and farming, and students were usually required to help keep the school self-sufficient by laboring there when they were not in the classroom.

For many, the schools were hotbeds of humiliation, abuse, and victimization. They were also dangerous. Unsanitary conditions and overcrowding fueled communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, and smallpox, especially among students weakened by trauma and meager rations. Schools had their own cemeteries —and students often built their classmates’ coffins.

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Other children died by suicide or ran away. The practice was so common that some schools offered bounties for runaways. “The temptation to return to their wild life, with the savage influences surrounding them, is no doubt very strong,” wrote one newspaper reporter in a lengthy article about life at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, the school Zitkála-Šá attended.

Yet the U.S. government considered the schools a success—so much so that in 1891, it passed a federal law that made attendance compulsory for Native children. The Bureau of Indian Affairs—the federal agency tasked with distributing food, land, and other provisions included in treaties with Native tribes—withheld food and other goods from those who refused to send their children to the schools, and even sent officers to forcibly take children from the reservation. It was “civilization by kidnapping,” said one Native American advocate at a 1927 Congressional hearing.

Earlier generations of Native Americans had suffered the loss of nearly all of their lands. Now, the boarding schools broke up their family units and endangered their languages and cultural practices.

But many Native parents did not part from their children without a fight. One memorable act of protest occurred in 1894, when a group of Hopi men in Arizona refused to send their children to residential schools. Nineteen of them were taken to Alcatraz Island in California, about a thousand miles away from their families, and imprisoned for a year.

The fight to close the boarding schools

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, enthusiasm for the system dwindled and the schools floundered. In 1928, the U.S. government commissioned what is now known as the Meriam Report, a comprehensive update on the state of Native American affairs. Its authors criticized everything from the schools’ deteriorating conditions to the often heavy manual labor the children were forced to perform, and pointed out that the schools relied on long outdated teaching techniques like rote learning and recitation. Students were stiff, hungry, sick, and demoralized, they wrote , and were subjected to harsh physical punishments.

The report resulted in some immediate changes—among them, the emergency allocation of funds for better food and clothing in the schools. But even though the report recommended dismantling the boarding school system in favor of day schools, the schools persisted.

Meanwhile, the fractures they had introduced into Native culture widened. Native languages began to die out , fueled by children’s absence from the reservation and their forced use of English. Traditional parenting skills were not passed on to younger generations. And over the years, children at the schools reported widespread neglect and physical and sexual abuse.

“The most debilitating message was one of self-hatred,” write s Mending the Sacred Hoop, a Native-owned nonprofit that works to end violence against Native women. In a 2003 report on the boarding school experience, the nonprofit traced violence in Native American communities—which experience an order of magnitude more violence than their majority white counterparts—to the abuse and trauma many children suffered during their educations.

Native Americans continued to fight to close down the schools. Self-determined education was a priority for the burgeoning pan-Indian movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act , which granted tribes the ability to assume responsibility for programs that had been administered by the federal government. ( The radical history of the Red Power movement’s fight for Native American sovereignty. )

It was the death knell for most residential schools, but a few remain. Today, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education still directly operates four off-reservation boarding schools in Oklahoma, California, Oregon, and South Dakota. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), a Native-run nonprofit, 15 boarding schools and 73 total schools with federal funding remain open as of 2021.

Reckoning with the past

In the late 20th century, the federal government began to acknowledge the schools’ grisly legacy. In 2009, Congress passed a joint resolution of apology to Native Americans that included a reference to “the forcible removal of Native children from their families to faraway boarding schools where their Native practices and languages were degraded and forbidden.” In 2016, the U.S. Army began repatriating the remains of some of the bodies buried at the Carlisle Indian School to their tribes and bands. It is the only known effor t to do so in the United States; repatriation is ongoing.

The number of children who were sent to off-reservation residential boarding schools over their century-long history is unclear. But the scars remain—and intergenerational wounds were reopened with recent reports of the unmarked graves in Canada. In response, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative , a program designed to review the schools’ histories and legacy. The program will investigate known and suspected burial sites.

The Native American boarding school coalition applauded the initiative. “We have a right to know what happened to the children who never returned home from Indian boarding schools,” the NABS said in a release . “The time is now for truth and healing.”

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Primary Source Set Native American Boarding Schools

The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher’s Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

Beginning in the late 19th century, many Native American children were sent to boarding schools run by the U.S. government. These schools were usually located away from Native American reservations, and were intended to remove children from the influence of tribal traditions and to assimilate them into what the schools’ proponents saw as American culture.

Native American boarding schools of the period transported children far from their families, forced them to cut their hair, and punished them for using non-English names and languages. Most were run with military-like schedules and discipline, and emphasized farming and other manual skills. Although many Native American children attended day schools and parochial schools, between the 1880s and the 1920s, the term “Indian school” was widely used to refer to government-run off-reservation boarding schools.

Many Native American parents refused to send their children to boarding schools and fought for their rights in court. Students fled schools in the night or set school buildings on fire. Some graduates, like the Santee Dakota physician and lecturer Charles Eastman and the Yankton Dakota musician Zitkála-Šá, went on to become public figures, but questioned the methods and ideology of the schools.

A few boarding schools became well known nationally. Some, like Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, fielded sports teams and bands that kept them in the public eye. Before-and-after photographs of students were published in newspaper and magazines to demonstrate and publicize the schools’ “civilizing” process. Unmediated accounts by Native American students or their families were rarely published.

By the 1920s, off-reservation government boarding schools faced increasing criticism for questionable teaching practices, substandard living conditions, and poor medical care, and Native American education soon entered a new era. Today, former boarding school students and their descendants are working to research and honor those who endured the boarding school experience.

Suggestions for Teachers

This is a challenging subject to teach. It can be difficult to find accounts in which students and parents describe their experiences of the boarding schools without interference by non-Native writers or editors. Descriptions and depictions of the schools and their students from the late 19th and early 20th century are rife with patronizing language and racist caricatures. Photographs of the boarding schools and their students can be found easily today, but most were taken by non-Native photographers, and many were published either by organizations sympathetic to the boarding schools or by the schools themselves.

• Support students as they select and analyze an image of students at government-run Native American boarding schools. Ask students: What’s happening in this image? Who do you think was the audience for this image? Why do you think this image was created? Finally, ask them to speculate about how the individuals in the image might have depicted themselves differently if they had created the image.
• Direct students to select a newspaper article about Native American boarding schools and to identify one or more perspectives on Native American education expressed in the article. What evidence is provided to support those perspectives? What surprises you about those perspectives? What perspectives are missing?
• Ask students to identify a former student who attended a Native American boarding school and research that student in historical newspapers, photographs, or other historical primary sources. What affect did the boarding school experience have on that person’s life? What evidence can students find of his or her opinion of the boarding school system?

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Buffalo and Eagle Wing & The American Indian Boarding School

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Buffalo and Eagle Wing is a legend of the Plains Indians culture of North America, which is part origin myth and part cautionary tale on the importance of keeping one's promises. Although scholars agree on the general provenance of the tale, its attribution to a given nation is unclear.

Although the story is often attributed to the Blackfoot Confederacy, it has also been referenced as a Cherokee legend. The first English translation of the tale is attributed to the writer and teacher Ella E. Clark (l. 1896-1984), who wrote extensively on the oral tradition of the Native Peoples of North America , specifically those of the Pacific Northwest and modern-day Canada, but it is unclear which nation it came from as she first read it in a schoolboy's essay, which omitted that information.

The difficulty in assigning a point of origin to the story is due to the institutionalized assimilation of Native Americans into Euro-American culture as mandated by the curriculum and policies of the American Indian boarding schools (also known as American Indian residential schools), spearheaded by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918). These institutions stripped their Native American students of their culture including, of course, the tradition of storytelling. Regarding Buffalo and Eagle Wing, scholars Margot Edmonds and Ella Clark, write:

This story was written years ago by a pupil at the Haskell Institute, a school for Indian boys and girls. He had heard his grandfather tell it. The boy's exact tribe is unknown, although it was one from the Great Plains. (192)

The Haskell Institute opened as the United States Indian Industrial Training School in 1884, and, although today it enjoys an excellent reputation as the Haskell Indian Nations University, preserving Native culture, it was originally patterned on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Buffalo and Eagle Wing , therefore, is of interest to scholars not only for its content but because its missing provenance exemplifies the cultural losses caused by boarding schools across North America.

Boarding Schools & Assimilation

Although Missionary Schools directed toward the conversion and ' civilization ' of Native Americans had existed in North America since the Colonial Period, the boarding schools sought to 'kill the Indian to save the man' by removing Native American children from their homes, prohibiting the use of their native languages and traditional observances, including hairstyle and dress, and forced assimilation into Euro-American culture and religion . Students were not allowed to identify, in any way, with their nations, and this extended to mentioning one's people in classwork – such as the essay of the student at Haskell mentioned above.

Civil War veteran and officer Richard Henry Pratt (l. 1840-1924) had fought in the so-called “Indian Wars” between 1868 and 1875, and he was then placed in charge of the Native American prisoners sent to Fort Marion, St. Augustine , Florida. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on the educational model he had implemented at Fort Marion with these prisoners of war, which included mandatory haircuts, Euro-American dress, and an end goal of complete assimilation. Pratt's now infamous saying, "kill the Indian to save the man", expressed his policies completely in that he believed one only had to encourage assimilation, through military discipline, for Native Americans to reject what he saw as their 'backward culture' and embrace 'civilization' epitomized by Euro-American culture and religion.

Pratt opposed the reservation system and segregation and believed Native Americans could become 'productive members of society' if they converted to Christianity , abandoned their culture, and learned a trade . Boys were instructed in agricultural and industrial work and girls in domestic chores. Students who failed to observe school policy or made mistakes in adhering to various protocols were beaten. Scholar Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz comments:

The stated goal of the project [of the boarding schools] was assimilation. Indigenous children were prohibited from speaking their mother tongues or practicing their religions, while being indoctrinated in Christianity. As in the Spanish missions in California, in the US boarding schools the children were beaten for speaking their own languages, among other infractions that expressed their humanity. Although stripped of the languages and skills of their communities, what they learned in boarding school was useless for the purposes of effective assimilation, creating multiple lost generations of traumatized individuals. (151)

Among the many losses was the tradition of storytelling, which was an integral part of the culture of every Native American nation, and, as noted, Buffalo and Eagle Wing is a prime example of this.

Blackfoot, Cherokee, or Unknown

The story is referenced by many reputable online sites and organizations as a Blackfoot tale. Still, the story is not included in Blackfeet Indian Stories edited by the historian and anthropologist George Bird Grinnell (l. 1849-1938) or Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park by James Willard Schultz (l. 1859-1947), both of whom had extensive knowledge of the oral tradition of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

In the work Rise of Environmental Consciousness: Voices in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet , scholars Beth S. Caniglia, Thomas Jerome Burns, Rachel M. Gurney, and Erik L. Bond attribute Buffalo and Eagle Wing to the Cherokee; but the story does not appear in the comprehensive Myths of the Cherokee by the famous ethnographer James Mooney (l. 1861-1921) who spent years with the Cherokee nation and so would be expected to include a didactic origin myth such as this one among the many others.

The stories of the diverse Native American nations share certain similarities and themes and yet reflect the specific values of that nation. Certain schools of literary criticism – such as deconstructionism – maintain that establishing a point of origin for a tale, and even the author, is irrelevant to an understanding of the text as one should simply engage with the piece itself. Historians and anthropologists, however, place a high value on the point of origin of a given tale for what it says about the culture that produced it.

Because many different nations produced works with similar themes, unless the people of a nation are specifically mentioned in the text, it is often difficult to identify the nation of origin unless it is cited by a work's translator or editor. In the case of Buffalo and Eagle Wing , the scholar who first brought the tale to English readers' attention, Ella Clark, gave the provenance as 'unknown' and so how it has come to be attributed, with apparent certainty, to either the Blackfeet or Cherokee is unclear. Both of these nations hunted buffalo and so why they – or any Plains Indian nation – would have produced a story condemning buffalo hunting is something of a mystery.

This very lack of clarity, however, is what makes the story important to modern scholarship outside of its content. It is probable, if not certain, that the student at Haskell Institute who wrote the story down would have included his nation in the text had he not been prohibited from doing so. The story, then, serves as both a fine example of Native American oral tradition and as a testimony to the cultural losses suffered by Native Americans through the policies of the boarding schools beginning in 1879 and continuing until the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which gave the nations the right to determine their own children's course of education.

It should also be noted that boarding schools are not a relic of the past and continued after 1975 and into the 21st century, although now, like the Haskell Institute, they support Native American sovereignty and not only preserve but also champion the cultures of North American indigenous peoples. Schools like Haskell are transparent in dealing with their pasts, recognizing the damage done by the earlier educational model.

No Native American nation ever asked Pratt, or anyone else, to take charge of their children's education or their own. The values of the European colonists and later Euro-Americans were at odds with those of the indigenous peoples of North America. The nations did ask, however – repeatedly – that the many treaties they signed with the United States government promising them their lands would be honored; but none of them were.

Read in this context, Buffalo and Eagle Wing resonates with the theme of broken promises and betrayal (although there is no way of knowing whether the author was referencing US government-Native American relations). The story revolves around a magical buffalo who befriends a young man and his grandmother and, in return for superhuman speed, extracts from the youth the promise that he will not kill buffalo.

The moral of the tale is the importance of keeping one's promises, but at the same time, the story is an origin myth relating how the world came to function as it does, tied directly to the theme of the broken promise. When the story opens, there are no impediments to travel, and the people and buffalo live freely in their own lands; but all of that changes by the time the tale is done.

The following passage is taken from Voices of the Winds: Native American Legends , edited by Margot Edmonds and Ella Clark.

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A long time ago there were no stones on the earth. The mountains, hills, and valleys were not rough, and it was easy to walk on the ground swiftly. There were no small trees at that time either. All the bushes and trees were tall and straight and were at equal distances. So, a man could travel through a forest without having to make a path. At that time, a large buffalo roamed over the land. From the water, he had obtained his spirit power – the power to change anything into some other form. He would have that power as long as he only drank from a certain pool. In his wanderings, Buffalo often travelled across a high mountain. He liked this mountain so much that one day he asked it, "Would you like to be changed into something else?" "Yes," replied the mountain. "I would like to be changed into something nobody would want to climb over." "All right," said Buffalo. "I will change you into something hard that I will call 'stone.' You will be so hard that no one will want to break you and so smooth that no one will want to climb you." So Buffalo changed the mountain into a large stone. "And I give you the power to change yourself into anything else as long as you do not break yourself." Only buffaloes lived in this part of the land. No people lived here. On the other side of the mountain lived men who were cruel and killed animals. The buffaloes knew about them and stayed as far away from them as possible. But one day Buffalo thought he would like to see these men. He hoped to make friends with them and persuade them not to kill buffaloes. So he went over the mountain and travelled along a stream until he came to a lodge. There lived an old woman and her grandson. The little boy liked Buffalo, and Buffalo liked the little boy and his grandmother. He said to them, "I have the power to change you into any form you wish. What would you like most to be?" "I want always to be with my grandson. I want to be changed into anything that will make it possible for me to be with him, wherever he goes." "I will take you to the home of the buffaloes," said their guest. "I will ask them to teach the boy to become a swift runner. I will ask the water to change the grandmother into something, so that you two can always be together." So Buffalo, the grandmother, and the little boy went over the mountain to the land of the buffaloes. "We will teach you to run swiftly," they told the boy, "if you will promise to keep your people from hunting and killing buffaloes." "I promise," said the boy. The buffaloes taught him to run so fast that not one of them could keep up with him. The old grandmother could follow him wherever he went, for she had been changed into Wind. The boy stayed with the buffaloes until he became a man. Then they let him go back to his people, reminding him of his promise. Because he was such a swift runner, he became a leader of the hunters. They called him Eagle Wing. One day the chief called Eagle Wing to him and said to him, "My son, I want you to take the hunters to the buffalo country. We have never been able to kill buffaloes because they run so very fast. But you too can run fast. If you will kill some buffaloes and bring home the meat and the skins, I will adopt you as my son. And when I die, you will become chief of the tribe." Eagle Wing wanted so much to become chief that he pushed from his mind his promise to the buffaloes. He started out with the hunters, but he climbed the mountain so fast that they were soon left far behind. On the other side of the mountain, he saw a herd of buffaloes. They started to run in fright, but Eagle Wing followed them and killed most of them. Buffalo, the great one who got his power from the water, was away from home at the time of the hunt. On his way back he grew so thirsty that he drank from some water on the other side of the mountain, not from his special pool. When he reached home and saw what the hunter had done, he became very angry. He tried to turn the men into grass, but he could not. Because he had drunk from another pool, he had lost his power to transform. Buffalo went to the big stone that had once been a mountain. "What can you do to punish the hunter for what he has done?" he asked Stone. "I will ask the trees to tangle themselves so that it will be difficult for men to travel through them," answered Stone. "I will break myself into many pieces and scatter myself all over the land. Then the swift runner and his followers cannot run over me without hurting their feet." "That will punish them," agreed Buffalo. So Stone broke itself into many pieces and scattered itself all over the land. Whenever the swift runner, Eagle Wing, and his followers tried to run over the mountain, stones cut their feet. Bushes scratched and bruised their bodies. That is how Eagle Wing was punished for not keeping his promise to Buffalo.

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Bibliography

• A Few Indian Boarding Schools Remain Open by Sequoia Carrillo and Allison Herrera : NPR , accessed 13 Mar 2024.
• Blackhawk, N. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmasking of U.S. History. Yale University Press, 2023.
• Caniglia, B., et. al. . Rise of Environmental Consciousness: Voices in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. Cognella Academic Publishing, 2016.
• Dunbar-Ortiz, R. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States . Beacon Press, 2015.
• Edmonds, M. & Clark, E. Voices of the Winds: Native American Legends. Castle Books, 2021.
• Grinnell, G. B. Blackfeet Indian Stories. Riverbend Publishing, 2005.
• Jackson, J.K. & Gill, S. Native American Myths & Legends. Flame Tree 451, 2013.
• Johnson, M. G. Encyclopedia of Native Tribes of North America. Firefly Books, 2022.
• Mooney, J. Myths Of The Cherokee. Dover Publications, 2017.
• School History | Haskell Indian Nations University , accessed 13 Mar 2024.
• Schultz, J. W. Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park. Loki's Publishing, 2019.
• Teuton, S. Native American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018.

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For more than 150 years, spurred by federal assimilation policies beginning in the early 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were sent to boarding schools across the country. In many cases, they were forcibly removed from their homes.

A new accounting shows that at least 523 institutions were part of the sprawling network of boarding schools for Native American children. At least 408 received federal funding. Renewed attention to the system by the U.S. government, researchers and Indigenous communities is revealing a deeper understanding of the difficult, sometimes deadly, experiences of children in the schools.

Many children faced beatings, malnutrition, hard labor and other forms of neglect and abuse. Some never returned to their families. Hundreds are known to have died, a toll expected to grow as research continues. Archival materials from the schools tell countless painful stories.

Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections

Almost 7,800 children attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School , where assimilation was a founding principle: Upon entry, children were renamed and stripped of their tribal clothing and hairstyles. In promotional materials, the school disseminated before-and-after portraits of students.

New York State Archives

In some cases, Native families willingly sent their children, hoping schools might offer future opportunities or better conditions than reservations. Often, though, the process was coercive. As part of an application process for Thomas Indian School , parents were required to give up custody of their children.

Alaska State Archives, AS 32254

Parents who resisted the boarding school system could be severely punished. The mother of 3-year-old Nu-Shukk, of the Tlingit tribe, was incarcerated in 1895 after refusing to return her daughter to Douglas Island Friends Mission School .

iStock Photo

Haskell Indian Industrial Training School , like many others, relied on student labor to grow and cook food, sew clothes, handle building maintenance and construction, and produce revenue from items sold in the school’s shops.

• 1 – Jose M. Apacheos, Pima, died Oct. 25, 1900
• 1 – Emily Jones, Pima, age 17 years, Feb. 21, 1897
• 1 – Katalina, age 6, Jicarilla Apache, died June, 1892
• 2 – Frank Charles, W.Shoshone, died May 6, 1901
• 2 – Emily Rosenow, Navajo, age 16 years, died April 10, 1897
• 2 – Walker Castorr, Apache, age 12 years, died April 3, 1892
• 3 – Chico Juan, Papago, age 15 years, died Sept. 7, 1902
• 3 – Sava Cook, Pima, age 13 years, died May 26, 1898
• 3 — Julia Fox, Mohave, age 10 yrs., died Feb. 12, 1892
• 4 — Taylor Dave, Shoshone, age 19 yrs., died June 21, 1903
• 4 — Bertha Snooks, Pima, age 15 years, died July 1, 1898
• 4 — Pablo Trujillo, Pueblo, age 14 years, died Dec. 11, 1892.

National Archives , Denver, Colorado

A record book from the early 1900s from Santa Fe Indian School includes a diagram of a cemetery that shows the locations of 25 graves, all but two of which belonged to students. An initial report on the federal boarding school system released by the Interior Department last year cited more than 50 school sites known to contain burial grounds.

‘War Against the Children’

The Native American boarding school system — a decades-long effort to assimilate Indigenous people before they ever reached adulthood — robbed children of their culture, family bonds and sometimes their lives.

By Zach Levitt ,  Yuliya Parshina-Kottas ,  Simon Romero and Tim Wallace Aug. 30, 2023

The Native American boarding school system was vast and entrenched, ranging from small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to refurbished military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down both the West and East coasts.

Until recently, incomplete records and scant federal attention kept even the number of schools — let alone more details about how they functioned — unknown. The 523 schools represented here constitute the most comprehensive accounting to date of institutions involved in the system. This data was compiled over the course of several years by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition , a nonprofit advocacy and research organization. It reflects the efforts of historians, researchers, activists and survivors who have filled in many of the blanks in this dark chapter of American history.

The first school opened in 1801, and hundreds were eventually established or supported by federal agencies such as the Interior Department and the Defense Department. Congress enacted laws to coerce Native American parents to send their children to the schools, including authorizing Interior Department officials to withhold treaty-guaranteed food rations to families who resisted.

Congress also funded schools through annual appropriations and with money from the sale of lands held by tribes. In addition, the government hired Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Congregationalist associations to run schools, regardless of whether they had experience in education, paying them an amount for each student.

Beyond the vast federal system, this new list also sheds light on boarding schools that operated without federal support. Religious organizations ran at least 105 schools; many were Catholic, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, but smaller congregations such as the Quakers ran schools of their own.

Wherever they were located or whoever ran them, the schools largely shared the mission of assimilating Indigenous students by erasing their culture. Children’s hair was cut off; their clothes were burned; they were given new, English names and were required to attend Christian religious services; and they were forced to perform manual labor, both on school premises and on surrounding farms. Those who dared to keep speaking their ancestral languages or observing their religious practices were often beaten.

While the boarding school era might seem like distant history, aging survivors, many in their 70s and 80s, are striving to ensure the harm that was done is remembered.

‘Our language, our culture, our family ties, our land’

Ben Sherman, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who spent four years living at the Oglala Community School in Pine Ridge, S.D., said he placed the emergence of some of the worst abuses at Native American boarding schools with the sunset of the “shooting wars” waged by the United States government against Indigenous peoples in the last decades of the 19th century.

“The government was not done with war, so the next phase involved war against the children,” said Mr. Sherman, 83, a former aerospace engineer.

“Don’t try to tell me this wasn’t genocide,” added Mr. Sherman, who said in an interview that he had once run away from the school and walked nearly 50 miles trying get home. “They went after our language, our culture, our family ties, our land. They succeeded on almost every level.”

Some of the most enduring impacts of the schools involved trauma passed on from one generation to the next, Mr. Sherman said, explaining how his immediate family attended boarding schools for four generations. His great-grandmother, Lizzie Glode, was among the first group sent to a boarding school in Carlisle, Pa.

Lizzie Glode’s portrait and student card from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

One of Ms. Glode’s sons, Mark, attended the Rapid City Indian Boarding School. The environment there was so harsh, Mr. Sherman said, that in 1910, when Mark was 17, he and three other boys ran away. They followed the railroad tracks south toward the Pine Ridge reservation.

At one point, Mr. Sherman said, Mark and another boy slept on the railroad track. A train rolled through, striking and killing the two boys.

While researchers say the known toll is still far from complete, there are at least hundreds of Native children who died while attending boarding schools. In site after site, children’s bodies were stuffed into graves without regard for the burial traditions of their families or their cultures.

In recent years, tribal nations around the United States have begun to use technologies like remote sensing surveys and ground-penetrating radar to scour locations for evidence of burial sites. In July, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah confirmed that 12 children were buried in unmarked graves at the site of the Panguitch Indian Boarding School in southern Utah.

Archival records, including an 1899 map, make reference to a cemetery on the premises of Genoa Indian Industrial School in Nebraska, about 90 miles west of Omaha — but the location of the cemetery has been lost. At least 86 students are thought to have died at Genoa from causes including typhoid, tuberculosis and an accidental shooting.

According to this 1899 page from the Plat Book of Nance County, Neb., a cemetery was located on the premises of Genoa Indian Industrial School. Its exact position on the former school grounds is presently unknown.

Historic Map Works

Present-day investigation efforts to find students’ remains at Genoa are being led by the Nebraska state archaeologist, in consultation with 40 Native nations whose children attended the school.

In its preliminary report released last year, the Interior Department indicated it expected the number of children known to have died in Native American boarding schools to grow into “the thousands or tens of thousands.”

‘The names of white men sewed on our backs’

A driving force behind the frenetic expansion of the boarding school system was Richard Henry Pratt, a military officer who fought in the Red River War, a campaign in the 1870s to forcibly remove the Comanche, Kiowa and other tribes from the Southern Plains of the United States.

In 1879, Mr. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in what had been army barracks in Carlisle, Pa., and set about transforming it into a flagship institution spawning dozens of similar schools around the United States. He was blunt about his mission, as in an infamous proclamation : “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Mr. Pratt dreamed of abolishing the reservations and scattering the entire population of Native children across the country, with some 70,000 white families each taking in one Native American child. He came up short in this effort, but he did succeed in creating a model that placed schools in white communities, often far from the reservations where Native children were born.

Where Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s students came from

For dozens of children from Alaska, and elsewhere, only the state they came from is known.

Aleutian Islands

Philippines

Carlisle Indian

Industrial School

Upon arriving at Mr. Pratt’s school, the children were often photographed in their Native clothing. Then the boys quickly had their long hair cut short, a particularly cruel and traumatic step for those coming from cultures like the Lakota, where the severing of long hair could be associated with mourning the dead.

Boarding schools made the assault on tribal identity a central feature of their assimilating mission, often starting with renaming children, as the historian David Wallace Adams explained in his 1995 book “Education for Extinction.”

The original gym built for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School sits on what is now the U.S. Army War College campus in Carlisle, Pa.

Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

One former Carlisle student, Luther Standing Bear, of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and Oglala Lakota Nation, recalled being asked to point to one of the names written on a blackboard, then having the name written on a piece of tape and placed on the back of his shirt.

“When my turn came, I took a pointer and acted as if I were about to touch an enemy,” he wrote in “My People the Sioux,” a 1928 book. “Soon we all had the names of white men sewed on our backs.”

Just as Carlisle had a renaming policy, other schools took note, often assigning names that could be humiliating, such as Mary Swollen Face or Roy Bad Teeth. In other cases, children were randomly bestowed common American surnames like Smith, Brown or Clark, or given the names of presidents, vice presidents or other prominent figures.

Mr. Pratt’s photographers would take pictures of the children again — boys in their uniforms, girls in Victorian-style dresses — as evidence of the school’s mission.

Mr. Pratt imbued Carlisle with a militaristic culture, dressing and drilling the children as if they were soldiers and even using a court-martial format, in which older children would sit as judges over younger children, to enforce rules. (Mr. Pratt reserved the power to overrule the court.)

Cadet officers at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

News of Mr. Pratt’s experiment spread, and a vast array of similar schools were established all over the country. Some of the clearest descriptions of what such schools sought to accomplish are relayed in the words of the white officials in charge of these institutions.

“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them,” Thomas J. Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs, said in a speech at the establishment of the Phoenix Indian School in 1891.

The same year, a newspaper report published an exchange between the superintendent of Grand Junction Indian School and the secretary of the Interior that indicated that a student’s toe was cut off because his foot could not fit into a government-issued shoe.

An excerpt from an article that appeared in Grand Junction News on May 30, 1891.

Newspapers.com

At Carlisle, authorities introduced an “outing” program: an arrangement by which children worked as manual laborers or maids in surrounding farms; businesses like wagon-makers; and households. The objective appeared to be to provide the students with a modest income while promoting practices of thrift and savings.

Other institutions made the access to a reservoir of cheap child laborers a selling point when persuading community leaders to establish a Native boarding school.

Such “outing” systems eventually became widespread around the United States. Practices differed considerably from school to school, and abuses emerged — such as paying the children unfair wages, making them cover their own room and board, removing them from their studies for months at a time, and placing them in lodgings that were substandard or segregated from white laborers.

‘90 million acres of land’

In November 1894, U.S. soldiers arrived in the remote northern Arizona mesas where the Hopi people had lived since time immemorial. Their orders: Take the children.

But some Hopi parents had already made it clear they would not send their children to the Keams Canyon Boarding School. Facing resistance, authorities had tried bribing Hopi parents with yards of cloth, or tools like axes. They used their bare fists, striking Hopi who didn’t want to send their children away. They withheld food supplies guaranteed by treaties in a bid to starve the Hopi into submission.

When even those tactics failed, and resistance to having their children hauled away was compounded by tensions over farmland, two cavalry companies arrived to arrest 19 Hopi men. The captives were imprisoned on California’s Alcatraz Island for nearly a year, and the removal of Hopi children proceeded as planned.

Men from the Hopi Tribe being transported to Alcatraz.

Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas; Voth photo #57; used by permission of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office

The treatment of the Hopi, which briefly captured public attention in the 1890s when the writer Charles Lummis made it the focus of a crusade against federal Native American education policies, soon faded from view.

Brenda Child, a historian whose Ojibwe grandparents were sent to Native boarding schools, emphasized in an interview that the period of the greatest expansion of the boarding school system — from the last decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th — coincided with colossal theft of Indigenous land.

When Native American boarding schools were opening at a steady clip around the country, the General Allotment Act of 1887 allowed federal authorities to divide up and distribute Native lands. The law effectively turbocharged land dispossession, allowing white people to take control of “surplus” land belonging to Indigenous peoples.

“Indian people lost 90 million acres of land during the half century that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United States,” said Dr. Child, a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

Some of the earliest schools, like the Asbury Manual Labor School, near Fort Mitchell, Ala., took root in the 1820s, when the U.S. government was on the cusp of forcibly relocating peoples, including the Cherokee and Creek, from their homelands in the Southeast United States to lands west of the Mississippi River.

The Interior Department report released last year by Bryan Newland, the department’s assistant secretary for Indian affairs, showed that land dispossession and funding for Native American boarding schools went hand in hand. To help pay for the federal boarding school system, the inquiry noted, the federal government had used money from trust accounts set aside for the benefit of tribal nations as part of treaties in which they ceded lands to the United States. In other words, the United States government effectively made Indigenous peoples use their own funds to pay for boarding schools that severed their children’s ties to their families and cultures.

By the 1920s, so many Native American boarding schools had been created that nearly 83 percent of school-age Indigenous children were enrolled in such institutions.

Memorial Hall at the Phoenix Indian School in Arizona, which operated for 99 years after its establishment in 1891.

Questions about the costs and effectiveness of assimilation policies, along with revelations of some of the horrors in the system, slowly led to changes. An inquiry in 1928, commonly known as the Meriam Report, detailed how children were malnourished, overworked and harshly disciplined.

In the 1930s, when the process of dispossessing Native lands had largely been completed, the federal government began shutting down many of the schools. That took decades, as Native peoples sought to gain control of the education of their own children, against a backdrop of activism aiming to bolster Native sovereignty.

From the 1960s to 1980s, federal authorities began handing over administration of some remaining schools to the Bureau of Indian Education or the tribes. Institutions such as the Santa Fe Indian School and the Sherman Indian High School, in Riverside, Calif., still operate under this model, emphasizing Native sovereignty and preserving traditional languages and cultures. At least nine boarding schools in the accounting of 523 schools opened after 1969.

A U.S. Senate report in 1969 noted the tragedy and failure of the system, helping to spur approval of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975, giving tribal nations greater control over the schools.

Railroad tracks line the former campus of the Carlisle Indian School.

A Supreme Court case this year reflected how the abuses of the boarding school era are still echoing across institutions. The case involved a challenge to a 1978 law, known as the Indian Child Welfare Act, aimed at keeping Native American adoptees within tribes. The court upheld the law, bolstering the notion that tribal nations are distinct sovereign communities in the United States and alleviating fears of resurrecting policies giving authorities greater power to separate Native children from their families and cultures.

Last year’s Interior Department investigation came at the direction of Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo whose own grandparents were boarding school survivors. In an effort to lift the veil on abuses within the system, Secretary Haaland has been traveling around the country for more than a year, conducting listening sessions with Indigenous communities still dealing with the fallout from the boarding school system. In the Senate, a bill has been introduced to establish a truth and healing commission to address the legacy of Native boarding schools, similar to one undertaken by the Canadian government in 2007.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Ms. Haaland said in a statement. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”

‘Military organization, drill and routine’

Among the most far-reaching effects of the boarding school era was the way it molded Native children to feed into the American military and economy. Schools around the country trained Indigenous students to become manual laborers or prepared them to go to war — not against the United States, as some of their parents had done, but for it.

At the Phoenix Indian School, administrators developed an exceptionally militaristic atmosphere. In addition to requiring students to wear uniforms and conduct regular drills, all pupils had to stand for inspection at 7:30 a.m. on Sundays.

“Too much praise cannot be given to the merits of military organization, drill and routine in connection with the discipline of the school,” the school’s superintendent, Harwood Hall, wrote in an 1897 report.

A very early class of young boys with flags at the Albuquerque Indian School.

National Archives , Denver, Colorado, Identifier 292873

A company of boys, trained by the Arizona National Guard, formed an elite campus group that was eventually attached to the 158th Infantry. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the federal government had yet to recognize Native Americans as citizens, much less allow them to vote. But the Phoenix Indian School sent dozens of students to enlist during World War I. Two were killed.

In addition to training soldiers, the boarding schools sought to supply laborers. The Albuquerque Indian School, for instance, was known for sending boys out to work for local farmers, in addition to teaching “harness making, shoe making, cooking and baking, sewing, and laundry work,” according to a superintendent’s report in the 1890s.

Young school girls attending a sewing class at the Albuquerque Indian School around 1910.

National Archives , Denver, Colorado, Identifier 292877

But sometimes administrators looked much farther afield to place the children in their care into jobs. In 1905 and 1906, the Albuquerque Indian School sent 100 boys and 14 girls to work in Colorado, on the railroad and in the beet fields.

At Carlisle, which had pioneered the “outing” system, it soon became a brisk business. In one 18-month period beginning in March 1899, school records show more than 1,280 outings by about 900 students. Many students were sent out more than once, and at least 23 did not return to the school because they ran away from their outings. The map below shows more than 200 of their destinations, spanning five states and Washington, D.C.

Where Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s students were sent to work

Some students were sent to places as far as Western New York.

Most students were sent to towns outside of Philadelphia and Trenton.

Westchester

County, N.Y.

Indiana, Pa.

Philadelphia

PENNSYLVANIA

Anita Yellowhair, 84, a Navajo survivor who was taken from her family in Steamboat, Ariz., to live at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah, said children were simply not allowed to question being made to work as part of their school experience.

“It was just what you did, no questions asked,” said Ms. Yellowhair, a former dental assistant who now lives in the Phoenix area. “They hired me out on weekends to clean the homes of white families.”

Anita Yellowhair, 84, sitting outside her home in Arizona.

The Sherman Institute in Southern California made use of child labor from its very beginning in 1902 — starting with the construction of the school itself. Male students at the school built much of the institution intended to assimilate them into white culture: its dormitories, hospital, vocational workshops, farm buildings and auditorium.

The outing system at Sherman, which Kevin Whalen, a historian, called “a means to prepare students for second-class existence,” became known for sending so many girls to work as servants in white households that the school employed an “outing matron” to supervise them.

A Sherman Institute student working as a housekeeper.

Sherman Institute

Sherman Institute students picking tomatoes.

Sherman also sent boys to labor in fields around Southern California, picking citrus fruit, digging ditches, managing livestock and cutting and baling hay. One company, Fontana Farms, employed hundreds of male students, mostly Navajo and Hopi, from 1908 to 1929, making them work six days a week for 10 hours a day and live in racially segregated shacks apart from white workers.

‘I was just a child’

James LaBelle was 8 years old in 1955, when he was taken with his 6-year-old brother to the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. He said his mother, who struggled with alcoholism, had been given a choice: send her sons to boarding school or put them up for adoption.

When his mother chose boarding school, Mr. LaBelle said, he found himself literally tied to other Native Alaskan children by a rope inserted in the belt loops of their pants. He said his destination, where he spent the next several years, was the Wrangell Institute, a boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in southeast Alaska.

James LaBelle, 76, in his yard in Anchorage.

Ash Adams for The New York Times

Mr. LaBelle, who is Inupiaq and an enrolled member of the Native Village of Port Graham, still finds it hard to describe the treatment he endured at Wrangell. Now 76, his voice grows shaky when he recounts the punishments children received — and how children were turned into punishers.

During weekdays, it was common for supervisors to tell children to undress so they could be paddled or whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails, Mr. LaBelle said. And when weekends came, he said, it was time for the “gauntlet,” when some children were ordered to get completely naked and others were ordered to hit them with belts for perceived violations of school rules.

“It could have been a prison or a mental hospital,” said Mr. LaBelle, who is now a lecturer on historical trauma and a board member of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. “They made the children the enforcers.”

An undated photograph of the Wrangell Institute, which operated in southeast Alaska from 1932 to 1975.

P44-01-053, Alaska State Library, Skinner Foundation Photo Collection

When he was 10, Mr. LaBelle said, he and another boy were punished for wrestling by being doused with nearly freezing water from a fire hose. Sexual violence was also rampant, he said, citing the example of a girl who was repeatedly abused by an administrator for the entire eight years she was at Wrangell.

And in addition to witnessing other male students being raped by a supervisor, Mr. LaBelle said, he was sodomized by another boy. When the lights went out at night, Mr. LaBelle said, he could hear other children, especially some of the youngest, sobbing and calling for their mothers.

“It was the only time we could show emotion,” Mr. LaBelle said. “It didn’t take very long until it grew and grew and grew. The entire section of the dorm for the youngest kids were all wailing in the dark.”

A photograph of Mr. LaBelle from his time as a student at Mt. Edgecumbe, one of two Native American boarding schools he attended.

The range of experiences at these schools was immensely varied. Despite the overwhelming emphasis on assimilating children into the dominant white culture of the United States, some former students were exposed to Indigenous cultures different from their own, met their future spouses or learned a trade that enabled them to put food on their family’s table. But many survivors say the horrors of the system saturated their own experiences to the point where they linger with them to this day.

“I was just a child, so I couldn’t stand up for myself,” said Ms. Yellowhair, who described the punishment meted out at Utah’s Intermountain school to students caught speaking languages other than English. “For doing that, they made us get on our knees to clean the toilets,” Ms. Yellowhair added. “It was very embarrassing and humiliating. That’s why some of us never talk about our time at school.”

Ms. Yellowhair and Mr. LaBelle are among the survivors attempting to grapple with the trauma of the boarding school experience as it endures in their own bones and is passed on, metamorphosing and evolving into different forms of grief, from one generation to the next. They have chosen to make their own painful experiences public; others do not.

Public health researchers have begun to attempt to account for the lasting toll of boarding school attendance, as well. A study by Ursula Running Bear of the University of North Dakota found that Native Americans who had attended boarding school were more likely to have a host of serious chronic health conditions than Native people who did not attend boarding school, even after controlling for demographic factors. Her work builds on similar findings concerning the Indigenous residential school system in Canada.

While it may be impossible to fully recount the horrors of the time, some of the most devastating and harrowing episodes were laid out in routine bureaucratic reports, which listed the toll of dead children as if they were discussing livestock losses.

For instance, several paragraphs into a subsection of the “Report Concerning Indians in Utah” submitted in July 1901 to the Interior Department, E.O. Hughes, the superintendent of the Uintah Boarding School in Whiterocks, Utah, noted that something unusual had happened.

“In December came the catastrophe,” Mr. Hughes said in his report. A measles outbreak that started at the boarding school, he explained, quickly spread to more than half the school because of substandard care in the infirmary. Learning of the crisis, many parents from surrounding reservations quickly went to the Uintah school and took their children home.

“It was found necessary to call for a troop of cavalry to protect the buildings from being burned,” Mr. Hughes wrote, noting that “four of our pupils died in camp,” while another 17 children in the vicinity died as a result of the measles outbreak.

An excerpt from an article in The San Francisco Call on December 13, 1900.

Library of Congress, Chronicling America

A precise accounting of how many children died at Native American boarding schools remains elusive. At some schools, dozens of children died; 189 students are known to be buried at Carlisle alone. Clues continue to emerge.

For instance, in a city park just north of downtown Albuquerque, workers digging irrigation trenches in the 1970s found the bones of children. The site, it turned out, was the cemetery of the Albuquerque Indian School.

A decades-old plaque describing the location as “used primarily for burial of Albuquerque Indian School students from the Zuñi, Navajo and Apache tribes” itself went largely unnoticed until the discoveries of student graves at Canadian boarding schools recently focused greater attention on such sites in the United States.

A memorial at the site of what was the cemetery of the Albuquerque Indian School, just north of downtown Albuquerque.

Now the plaque is gone, replaced by a memorial under the shade of a tree with stuffed animals, toys and an old basketball. A sticker on a weathered sign at the memorial proclaims “Land Back” — a slogan of a movement seeking to re-establish Indigenous sovereignty over purloined lands.

Plastic mesh fencing around the site seeks to place it off limits to any further despoiling. And another sign, this one put up by the City of Albuquerque, warns passersby that disturbing marked burial grounds can result in a felony charge. On a recent day in late July, the entire park, including the area where Native children were once laid to rest, was empty.

Reflecting how the reckoning of the boarding school era is still in an incipient phase, in Albuquerque and around the United States, the sign explains that the city is “listening to Pueblo & Tribal Leaders, as well as the broader community, to plan the future of this site.”

METHODOLOGY

Data for the map of boarding school locations is from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition . This data includes 408 schools in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report , which classified schools based on four criteria: provided on-site housing; provided formal academic or vocational training; received federal funds or other federal support; and operated before 1969. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition data includes an additional 115 schools outside of the scope of that report; 105 of these additional schools were church-run institutions. Nine of the remaining 10 schools opened after 1969; one requires further research into its dates of operation as a boarding school.

Many Indian boarding school institutions changed names, locations, or operators over time. Institutions are designated as distinct institutions from previous iterations if they observed a change in two or more of these criteria.

The map includes 519 schools with known locations; four schools without a known location were excluded from the map. The map includes modern state and federal reservation boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau for reference.

Data for the map showing where Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s students were from , and the map showing where students were sent to work , are from the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center .

The student origins map was created using archival information spanning the duration of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918. The locations shown on the map were derived from available information on student locations prior to their arrival at the school. Locations are approximate and mapped to one of four types of geography: city, county, reservation or state.

The student outings map shows destinations from March 1899 through September 1900. Locations are approximate and mapped to one of four types of geography: addresses, towns, cities or county centroids. County centroids are generated based on 1900 county boundaries from the IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System at the University of Minnesota.

An earlier version of text in a photo slide with this article misstated the number of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Just under 7,800 students attended the school, not more than 10,000.

An earlier version of this article misstated the source of a quotation by Luther Standing Bear. It came from his 1928 book “My People the Sioux,” not his 1931 memoir “My Indian Boyhood.”

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Native American Children Endured Brutal Treatment in U.S. Boarding Schools, Federal Report Shows

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Tens of thousands of Native American children were removed from their communities and forced to attend boarding schools where they were compelled to change their names, they were starved and whipped , and made to do manual labor between 1819 and 1969, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Interior found.

At the 408 federal Indian boarding schools across 37 states or territories that Native American children were mandated to attend, children and teenagers were forced to assimilate into Western culture. These boarding schools were supported for more than a century by the United States government as well as religious institutions, according to the report.

The Department also identified marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 schools across the Federal Indian boarding school system, and expects to find more. Based on initial analysis, approximately 19 Federal Indian boarding schools accounted for more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian child deaths, and the count is expected to increase to thousands or tens of thousands, according to the report.

“This is not new to us. It’s not new to many of us as indigenous people. We have lived with the intergenerational trauma of federal Indian boarding school policies for many years,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a cabinet position, said. What is new is the current administration’s willingness to address the long-running demands of Native Americans to acknowledge and document what went on in the government-run schools, she added.

“My maternal grandparents were only 8 years old, they were stolen from their parents’ culture and communities, and forced to live in boarding schools until the age of 13,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, at a press conference on Wednesday.

“Many children like them never made it back to their homes. Each of those children is a missing family member, a person who was not able to live out their purpose on this earth, because they’ve lost their bodies as part of this terrible system.”

The deaths of Native American children at these boarding schools led to the erosion of American Indian tribes, Alaska native villages, and the Native Hawaiian community, the report found.

‘Lasting scars for all indigenous people’

The report is the first finding made public after Haaland commissioned an investigation into federal Indian boarding schools last June following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

“Federal Indian boarding schools have lasting impact on Native people and communities across America. That impact continues to influence the lives of countless families, from the breakup of families and tribal nations to the loss of languages and cultural practices,” said Bryan Newland, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs. “This has left lasting scars for all indigenous people,” he said.

The department looked into its own records for the initial investigation and found approximately 50 percent of federal Indian boarding schools may have received support or involvement from a religious institution or organization, including funding for infrastructure and personnel.

Funding for some of these boarding schools also might have come from tribal trust accounts, some of which were based on revenue from surrendering Indian territories to the United States, the report found.

Grim look at life inside the schools

Poor living conditions, brutal punishment, child labor, vocational education, and forced assimilation were common threads the investigation revealed across the boarding schools.

The schools would make Native American children use English names instead of their given ones, cut their hair, and ban or discourage the use of their native languages.

“Our children had names, our children had families, our children had their own languages,” said Deb Parker, chief executive officer of the National Native American Boarding School Association.

“Our children had their own regalia, prayers, and religion before boarding schools violently took them away,” she said.

The punishment used at the boarding schools was often brutal, the report found. The system used solitary confinement, flogging, withholding food, whipping, and slapping as forms of discipline. Schools would also sometimes make older children punish younger children, according to the report.

Boarding schools would also rely on students to perform manual labor during school hours, such as raising livestock and poultry, chopping wood, making bricks, and working on the railroad system for boys and cooking and sewing garments for girls. Once students got out of the boarding school system, they were ill-prepared to join the mainstream economy and job market by pursuing college or a career, which led to adverse economic impact on Native American communities, the report found.

The impact of the boarding school system is still present, according to the report. In addition to the trauma and poverty the boarding school system caused for Native American communities, survivors of the system are more prone to serious health conditions, according to studies by the National Institutes of Health. The studies found that adults who attended boarding schools were three times more likely to have cancer, twice as likely to have tuberculosis, and more than 80 percent more likely to have diabetes compared to people who didn’t attend these schools.

The department will continue investigating the impact of the boarding school system, but meanwhile, Haaland and her team encouraged protecting Native American children and families, investing in cultural revitalization so children could learn their native languages and cultures, and defending the Indian Child Welfare Act passed in 1978 to safeguard the rights and well-being of Native American children.

“This is the time right now where we can speak the truth and we can honor our loved ones,” Haaland said.

“This is a time to honor our boarding school survivors, our relatives , and the children who are still asking these questions and wondering, ‘Where is my grandfather? Where’s my auntie?’ What happened to our family? We deserve that answer.”

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Chapter 3: Boarding Schools

Struggling with cultural repression.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, many American Indian children attended government- or church-operated boarding schools. Families were often forced to send their children to these schools, where they were forbidden to speak their Native languages. Many Code Talkers attended boarding schools. As adults, they found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service.

Explore This Chapter

Chapter 3 Resources

• Teacher Materials: Boarding Schools
• Student Worksheet: Argumentative Writing
• Student Worksheet: Constructing Questions
• Student Worksheet: Text–Dependent Test Prep 1
• Student Worksheet: Text–Dependent Test Prep 2

The Boarding School Tragedy

Indian boarding schools were founded to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with mainstream American culture. The first boarding schools were set up starting in the mid-nineteenth century either by the government or Christian missionaries. Initially, the government forced many Indian families to send their children to boarding schools. Later, Indian families chose to send their children to boarding schools because there were no other schools available.

At boarding schools, Indian children were separated from their families and cultural ways for long periods, sometimes four or more years. The children were forced to cut their hair and give up their traditional clothing. They had to give up their meaningful Native names and take English ones. They were not only taught to speak English but were punished for speaking their own languages. Their own traditional religious practices were forcibly replaced with Christianity. They were taught that their cultures were inferior. Some teachers ridiculed and made fun of the students’ traditions. These lessons humiliated the students and taught them to be ashamed of being American Indian. The boarding schools had a bad effect on the self-esteem of Indian students and on the wellbeing of Native languages and cultures.

However, not all boarding school experiences were negative. Many of the Indian students had some good memories of their school days and made friends for life. They also acquired knowledge and learned useful skills that helped them later in life.

In Indian civilization I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indian in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian , 1867—1904, 1964

The Boarding School Environment

Indian boarding schools usually imitated military life. Children were forced to cut their hair, wear uniforms, and march in formations. Rules were very strict and discipline was often harsh when rules were broken. The students learned math, science, and other academic subjects. They also learned trades and practical skills, such as agriculture, carpentry, printing, and cooking. Athletics were encouraged and children also took arts classes, such as music and drawing.

Code Talkers and Boarding Schools

Many of the American Indian Code Talkers attended boarding schools—and many have memories of being punished for speaking their languages. They also remember how the schools were run like military organizations and how this later made it easier for them to adapt to life in the American military.

They tell us not to speak in the Navajo language because you’re going to school. You’re supposed to only speak English. And that was true. They did practice that and we got punished if you was caught speaking Navajo. John Brown Jr., Navajo Code Talker

We even had to march to school, march to chow, march everywhere, to church. It was still kind of military bases. So when we went in the service everything just came natural, physically and morally and everything. Merrill Sandoval, Navajo Code Talker

3.4 Carl Gorman – Boarding Schools

As a child, Carl Gorman attended the Rehoboth Mission School in New Mexico. Carl did not like the harsh rules or the way he and other children were treated, so he ran away. His father understood how he felt and did not make him return to Rehoboth. Later, Carl’s family sent him to the Albuquerque Indian School, where he thrived.

3.5 Charles Chibitty – Boarding Schools

Charles Chibitty began his schooling at the Ft. Sill Indian School in Oklahoma. There he and the other Indian children were punished if they spoke their tribal languages. For high school he attended the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Tribal languages were allowed there, but the education was still very strict and militaristic.

Listen to the quote Your browser does not support the audio element. When we got talking, ’cause we’re not allowed to talk our tribal language, and then me and my cousin, we get together and we talk in Indian, we always hush up when we see a teacher or faculty coming. And then we always laughed and said, ‘I think they’re trying to make little white boys out of us.’ Charles Chibitty, Comanche Code Talker

Reflection and Discussion Questions

What do the sources (images, narrations, and quotations) tell you about what life was like for American Indian children who attended boarding schools?

Why do you think the U.S. government and the churches that ran boarding schools wanted to separate Native children from their family for long periods of time?

How are forced assimilation programs, like American Indian boarding schools, harmful to children, families, and communities?

Lesson Plan

Aug. 29, 2021, 2:43 p.m.

Lesson plan: Native American boarding schools and human rights

Students will examine primary source photos before and after learning about Native American boarding schools in the U.S. and the long-term effects of such policies. Students will then examine the United Nations'

Convention on the Rights of the Child

and the “Definition of Genocide” and “Elements of the Crime” from

The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

Students will use these resources to determine if the ways in which the United States government treated Indigenous peoples in the creation and implementation of Native American boarding schools upheld or violated children’s rights and if this treatment fits the definition of genocide.

Note for instructors: This is a difficult and painful topic. Please carefully review all the material ahead of time to assess whether or not it is appropriate for your classroom.

• Use historical context to help make sense of primary source photos
• Understand the rights of children
• Understand what constitutes genocide
• Use evidence to support their conclusions about Native American boarding schools
• Understand the effects that Native American boarding schools had on Indigenous peoples
• Learn about the Carlisle School and the impact it had on Indigenous peoples of the past and today (extension)

Grade Levels

Supplemental links.

• GOOGLE DOC VERSION

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.1: Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, connecting insights gained from specific details to an understanding of the text as a whole. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.2: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.7: Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.9: Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.

Note for students, before starting this lesson: This is a difficult and painful topic. We will be examining materials that may be triggering or upsetting. If you would like to opt-out of this lesson, at any time, please feel free to.

For a Google doc version of this lesson, click here (you will be prompted to make a copy).

Main activities

Introduce students to the topic: Native American boarding schools .

• Examine (10 min) primary source photos:

Source: Library of Congress

Ask students:

• What do you see in these photos?
• What do you think is happening?
• What questions do you have?

All students should record their responses to each of the questions. Students who wish to can share their responses aloud to the class.

• Provide (5 min) brief historical context. Let students know that this is a difficult and upsetting subject to examine.

For more than 150 years, Indigenous children in the United States were taken from their families and forced into far away boarding schools. From the 1870s to as late as the 1960s, nearly 300 boarding schools, many government-run, operated around the country. Native languages, religion and customs were forbidden. The goal, to separate Indian children from their homes and strip away their indigenous cultures (PBS NewsHour).

• Watch this PBS NewsHour segment (10 mins) :

• Reexamine (10 min) primary photos, and ask the same three questions:
• Distribute United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child and the United Nations definition of genocide . (15 min)

Students read the “Preamble” + “Article 29” of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the “Definition of Genocide” and “Elements of the Crime” from The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect . Have students highlight and annotate segments that relate to the Native American boarding schools.

• Ask students to respond in writing to the questions (20 min):
• How were Indigenous people affected by how the United States government treated them in Native American boarding schools?
• How do the ways in which the United States government treated Indigenous peoples in the creation and implementation of Native American boarding schools uphold or violate children’s rights? Which rights were upheld? Which rights were violated?
• Do the ways in which these boarding schools functioned fit any of the components in the definition of genocide? Which one(s)?

Students who wish to can share their responses aloud to the class.

Extension activities

• Research & writing activity : Take a deeper dive into The Carlisle Indian School and its founder Captain Richard Henry Pratt's speech in which he used the now well-known phrase to describe his philosophy of assimilation: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." The following links may be helpful:

The Carlisle Indian School Project

Dickinson College biography of Henry Pratt

Full text of Pratt's speech from Dickinson College

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

United Nations definition of genocide

Write an essay that addresses:

• What the Carlisle Indian School was, its purpose, and how it operated
• The philosophy behind its creation
• The impact on Indigenous peoples then and now
• The rights of children
• Dive into the Library of Congress with this primary source research challenge.
• Find 2 primary sources from the time period during which Native American boarding schools existed (1870–1960) that justifies or condemns behaviors that would be considered genocide according to the U.N.’s definition.
• Write an essay that first identifies and describes your 2 primary sources. Then expand your thinking by writing about how these sources directly relate to the U.S. government’s behaviors towards indigenous people.
• 3. PBS NewsHour Weekend aired a series of short stories from the Indigenous community in Yellowknife, Canada exploring alcohol use, addiction, resilience and healing. Many of these issues stem in part from the trauma caused by the residential schools that Canada also had in place for decades.

The “Turning Points” project, from the Global Reporting Center, is a series produced, directed and written by Indigenous people who wanted to share their stories. Be sure to check out EXTRA's lesson plans on the series: One elder’s survival story at Indigenous residential boarding school and One Indigenous man’s journey in fatherhood, addiction and healing .

About the lesson author

Dina Weinberg has worked with children and teens in public and private schools for the past 25 years. She taught middle school English, worked as a teaching artist on large scale collaborative mural projects, created and led a Seed to Table Garden program and taught fine art to children for the last 20 years. Her approach to teaching and learning stems from her belief that every person has the right to grow in a fulfilling, enjoyable, and safe way. Dina currently works one-on-one with students on expository, personal, and historical writing skills; math and science, and building organizational skills.  She is the mother of two grown daughters and lives in Bronx, New York, with her husband.

Fill out  this form  to share your thoughts on Classroom’s resources. Sign up for NewsHour Classroom’s ready-to-go  Daily News Lessons  delivered to your inbox each morning.

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Indian Boarding Schools Evaluation Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Establishment of indian boarding schools, the boarding school experience.

In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries the U. S. government opened many schools for Indians or Native American children in order to introduce Euro-American standards (Harley, 1994).

This paper seeks to reflect on the events that led to the establishment of the schools, what life was at these schools and their effects on Indian populations, this is in regard to the larger context of the Native American Experience and propose mechanisms of dealing with the effects.

Indian boarding schools were primarily established in order to kill the Indian culture and ensure that they adopt a Euro-American culture that was completely alien to them. There are several other reasons why the Indian boarding school was established, such as weakening families by taking their children away (Smith, 2010).

Indian boarding schools were first established by Christian missionaries, who had the sole intention to provide education for the native people, “The Carlisle Indian Industrial School established by a US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt” was the first school to adopt total assimilation of the Indian culture (Smith, 2010, p. 34).

The school was built in 1879 at a military facility and its curriculum was based on what was taught in prison. The school was established following Pratt’s successful teaching “experiments” on young Indian prisoners (Smith, 2010, p. 35).

Schools were widely used as a way of “civilizing” Indians mainly by the church (Monaghan, 2005, p. 56). The rationalizations of the “manifest destiny” and the doctrine of “discovery” were widely used as an excuse by the European settlers to commit atrocities on the Native Americans (Pease, 1986). The Christian belief of manifest destiny was used as a prelude in the expansion and colonization of the Americas (Harley, 1994).

Basing on this belief, the missionaries felt obliged to spread the gospel to the natives, who, after being softened through Christian ideals, would be colonized by the European settlers. Seemingly, the initial boarding schools established by missionaries were not only meant to impart civilization but also serve as means of achieving the divine mission of spreading the gospel.

The doctrine of “discovery” was a major source of friction and some of its aspects are still present in the current United States property rights (Smith, 2010, p. 45). This doctrine was used to validate the claim that Europeans discovered empty land in the America’s.The Native Americans had a communal land ownership system.

The Europeans had embraced individual land ownership practices. Boarding schools were therefore used to change the Native American’s cultureand the communal land practices by extension.

Life in the Indian boarding schools was tough, several victims told about the horrifying experience they went through at the boarding schools. Bill, who belongs to the Pattwin Indian group, remembers that he was sent to the boarding school while aged only six years (Harley, 1994).

He remembers a sad experience which filled an everyday life of the boarding school. He remembers being bathed in Kerosene by matrons and having his head shaved against the Indian culture.

In what can be regarded as transforming Indians inside and out, it’s seen that all aspects of the Indian culture were forbidden. Different accounts provided by individuals who went through the schools show that the Native Americans denied everything that pertained to their culture, from wearing long hair to speaking their language.

The Indian children’s names were changed and they were not allowed to go home to their parents to ensure a cultural disconnection.

The aim of the government was to replace the Indian culture, indeed as stated by Pratt “the only good Indian is a dead one” (Monaghan, 2005, p. 23). This implied that the Indian culture had to be killed. The methods advanced by Pratt and fellow minded Americans were geared towards ensuring that assimilation was gained through total immersion (Pease, 1986).

The aim was to “kill the Indian culture in the Indians and save them” (Smith, 2010, p. 67). History says that Pratt organized the education of some young Native Americans after he had encountered them at a prison in Florida (Smith, 2010).

It’s said that Pratt saw positive changes in the Indians after teaching them English, some basic economic skills and ways to govern themselves. It was the main reason to establish several boarding schools and kill the Indian culture, as well as ensure that Indians are assimilated into the popular American culture.

Therefore students were to be transformed in regard to “language, religion, family structure, economics, and emotional expression among others” (Smith, 2010, p. 13).

However, things did not always go according to the plan as the children were later subjected to untold abuses. This can be compared to genocide in the sense that it purported to kill the Indian culture and ensure their forceful adoption of an alien culture.

Several historical accounts indicate that students were abused in the boarding schools. The US government ran as many as 100 schools both on and of reservations (Harley, 1994). Young children were sometimes forcibly snatched from their parents. Many of them did not understand what was going on. The late Indian Activist Floyd Red Crow shared on how it felt to be taken away from his mother (Harley, 1994).

He was taken as a young child from a reservation in South Dakota for the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School in North Dakota (Monaghan, 2005). He remembers seeing his mother cry as the bus took him away.

It’s hard to imagine how hurting that was for him and his mother. Annual reports on Indian affairs seemed to suggest that Indians were savages who needed to be compelled by whatever means possible, to send their children to school (Smith, 2010).

Some parents just took their children to these boarding schools simply because there were no other schools for them. It’s important to note that most other public schools were closed for the Indian child. The federal schools were the only ones available to them and curriculum at these boarding schools was different.

The curriculum in the public schools was focused on trades, for example boys studied carpentry, while girl’s curriculum included house keeping (Smith, 2010). There were no concepts in math or other science subjects. Thus, it can be said that, as much as the boarding schools were used to assimilate the Indians, the curriculum was not complete and was not meant to achieve total good for the Indian children.

Punishment in the boarding schools was severe. There were accounts of abuses taking place in the boarding schools in form of beatings, food rationing and heavy labor. The federal government commissioned an investigation on the progress and policies towards the Indian boarding schools (Pease, 1986). The report provided in 1928 revealed the “problem of the Indian Administration” (Smith, 2010, p. 70).

It showed that many of the children in the boarding schools were “overworked, harshly punished and poorly educated” (Smith, 2010, p. 71).This finding makes it hard to believe that the government was indeed committed to ensuring the assimilation of Indians.

The care provided to the Indian children was inadequate in all aspects. In spite of the fact that the food provided was insufficient in both quantity and quality, young children aged between 10 and 12 were being subjected to heavy industrial work for up to four hours a day.

A survey conducted in the 1960s shows that many teacher’s felt that their primary role was to civilize the Native Americans rather than to teach them. This indicates how the schools were institutionalized. The Kennedy administration declared the Indian education to be a national tragedy (Monaghan, 2005).

The emotional impact caused on the Indian children who attended the boarding schools can be seen in some written accounts. For instance, one former student says that he can never forget when he saw his mother cry when he was taken away forcibly.

To this date, there are still several factors that have not been properly addressed regarding the plight of Indians. These problems are often summed up as the “Indian Problem” and most of them pertain to their cultural practices and the land factor. As stated earlier, the doctrine of discovery is still very much in the US constitution (Pease, 1986).

This paper sought to reflect on the events that led to the establishment of the schools, how life was at the schools and their effects on Indian populations, this is in regard to the larger context of the Native American Experience and propose mechanisms on how to deal with the effects.

It’s imperative that the government identifies new workable ways of dealing with the issues affecting the Indians.The government should ensure that measures are undertaken to preserve the Indian culture. By extension, the Dakota and Ojibwe languages should be preserved through measures such as provision of support, promotion and encouragement by the federal government.

Harley, B. (1994). Readings in Diocesan Heritage Volume VIII St. Boniface Indian School. San Bernardino: Diocese of San Bernardino.

Monaghan, E. (2005). Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Boston: University of Massachusetts.

Pease, M. (1986). A Worthy Work in a Needy Time: The Montana Industrial School for Indians. Montana: M. Pease.

Smith, A. (2010). Soul Wound: The legacy of Native American Schools. New york: Amnesty International.

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IvyPanda. (2019, July 2). Indian Boarding Schools. https://ivypanda.com/essays/indian-boarding-schools/

"Indian Boarding Schools." IvyPanda , 2 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/indian-boarding-schools/.

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Native American Leader Dennis Banks on the Overlooked Tragedy of Nation’s Indian Boarding Schools

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On “Columbus Day” — known to many as Indigenous Peoples Day — we’re joined by Dennis Banks, a legendary Native American activist from the Ojibwe Tribe. In 1968, he co-founded the American Indian Movement. A year later, he took part in the occupation of Alcatraz Island in California. In 1972, he assisted in AIM’s “Trail of Broken Treaties,” a caravan of numerous activist groups across the United States to Washington, D.C., to call attention to the plight of Native Americans. That same year, AIM took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. In early 1973, AIM members took over and occupied Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for 71 days, which some have come to call Wounded Knee II. Earlier this year, he led a cross-country walk from Alcatraz to Washington calling for the release of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Banks shares his thoughts about Columbus Day, the U.S. treatment of American Indians, and his own story of growing up in the BIA boarding school system. [includes rush transcript]

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AMY GOODMAN : We’re on the road in Durango, Colorado, at Fort Lewis College, which graduates more Native Americans than any four-year college in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman. But we’re going now to New York, where Dennis Banks is, the legendary Native American activist from the Ojibwa Tribe. In 1968, he co-founded the American Indian Movement. A year later, he took part in the occupation of Alcatraz Island in California. In 1972, he assisted in AIM’s Trail of Broken Treaties, a caravan of numerous activist groups across the United States to Washington, D.C., to call attention to the plight of Native Americans. That same year, AIM took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. In early 1973, the American Indian Movement took over and occupied Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for 71 days. Earlier this year, he led a cross-country walk from Alcatraz to Washington calling for the release of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who’s been held for 35 years.

Dennis Banks joins us in New York. This weekend, he served as a jurist in the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. We’ll get to that in a moment, but as we broadcast today on the federal holiday known as Columbus Day, that others call Indigenous Peoples Day, Dennis Banks, can you share your experience as a Native American in this country?

DENNIS BANKS : Well, first of all, I’ve been watching your program this morning, and—with these young people from the college, and I want to say that I feel great that—you know, that the young people are really getting up there and speaking. And it feels like now I—you know, I’m almost 80 years old—I can sit back and retire, you know, and say, “Look, our young people are taking over.” And that’s great. That’s what I’d like to see. I’m very impressed with the students you had on there this morning.

But I was going to say, are we still talking about Columbus Day? You know, it’s been so—what, it’s been four years since I talked to you, Amy. This is, you know, when the Longest Walk 2 arrived in Washington, D.C. And now we’re talking about—we should be talking more—I don’t want to talk about Columbus, but I will talk about this day. In South Dakota, which I thought would be the last one to adopt a day like this as a Native American day, but they have moved forward, and they’ve proclaimed this day as Native American Day. And it is a day for observation, celebration and, you know, looking at the contributions that native people have made, not only in South Dakota, but in Minnesota and all around Indian country. And that’s what this day should be about.

And I don’t want to reflect about, you know, the lost explorer. You know, they’ve got towns named after him, like Custer, South Dakota, is named after Custer, a man who was, you know, bent on killing native people. But people honor those kind of renegades and those kind of rogues. So, I want to look at the more positive things, and that’s—and it’s good. I’m glad that you’re carrying this day, though—I really am—and being at Fort Lewis. I’ve spoke there previously two or three times.

AMY GOODMAN : Dennis Banks, for people who are not familiar with these boarding schools that Native Americans were put into over the years, can you describe what your experience was? Where did you live? Where were you sent? What happened to you in these schools growing up?

DENNIS BANKS : I was in the boarding schools when punishment was very severe if you ran away. This was during the early ’40s. I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old, and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home. And, you know, the beatings began immediately, the—almost the de-Indianizing program. It was a terrible experience that the American government was experimenting with. And that was trying to destroy the culture and the person, destroy the Indian-ness in him and save the human being, save the—kill an Indian, save the man. That was, you know, the description of what this policy is about, about trying to—

AMY GOODMAN : Now, the government ran the schools?

DENNIS BANKS : The U.S. government paid—of course, they ran a lot of the schools themselves, but they also delegated a lot of it to the Christians, Christian communities. The Catholics had some. The Episcopalians had some. The Lutherans had some. Methodists had some. And so, it was like a complicit—there was complicity between the churches and the state in taking care of Indian problem, solving the Indian problem, and trying to change who we were.

AMY GOODMAN : Dennis, where had—where had you lived? Where had you lived, and where were you brought to school?

DENNIS BANKS : I lived on the federal—or, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, where I was born, in northern Minnesota. And I was taken to a boarding school 300 miles away to the south, southernmost part of Minnesota, the southwestern part, called Pipestone Indian School. I stayed there three years—six years—

AMY GOODMAN : And how—

DENNIS BANKS : Go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN : How did you communicate with your family? And how often did you get to see them? Did you get to talk to them?

DENNIS BANKS : Never. Never. You know, they cut off all communication with your parents, and a lot of letters, which I found later in—I stayed there for six years without communicating to—with my parents at all. And finally, they let us go home for six years. Of course, we couldn’t speak the language. We could speak only English and—what these young people were talking about.

But there was severe punishment for running away from that kind of system. I ran away. I kept running away. Almost once a week, I’d run away from those schools. They’d catch me. They’d bring me back to the school, beat me. And it was—it was terrible. I mean, there was other kinds of punishment that we went through, as well. And it was—now that, it was a—that kind of experience, I still remember what it is like today. And I have a friend who has been—who had been my friend for over 70 years now, and we remember those days. There were—we stuck together. A lot of people stuck together. Just being together, that’s what saved a lot of us from terrible consequences of speaking. But eventually, they—you know, they kept beating me down, and I kept—so I started learning English, and I started learning who the presidents were. I started learning all that stuff.

And then they let me go home for 30 days. Six years. And I asked my mother, I said, “Why didn’t you write to me?” And she—you know, and she says, “I did.” But I never—I never questioned beyond that. And then there was—they sent me to another boarding school in North Dakota, another 200 miles away. I was there for three years. And then, after that, same thing: no—only English, you know, corporal punishment. And then I went home for another 30 days, asked my mother, “Why is it you didn’t write to me again?” She says, “I did, and I did.” Then they sent me to another boarding school in South Dakota further away, so another 400 miles. I kept running away from these schools. And I finally ran away from the last one, and I finally made it home.

And so, I wanted to say, Amy, that this not only happened to people in North Dakota and South Dakota and Minnesota, but all across the country, thousands upon thousands of young students, Native students, were taken from their homes, and some were forcibly taken, some because of economic times allowed that to happen, but it was always taking them away from the parent, separate them from the parents for long periods of time, and which they did with me. And all of a sudden, I lost my family relationship with my mother. I lost that feeling with my mother, because I thought she abandoned me.

And it wasn’t ’til almost just three years ago when my daughter was—they were doing a documentary on Dennis Banks, and they found—they went to—in the federal depository records in Kansas City. And she called me, and she says, “Dad, we found” — “Dad,” she said, “we found your—we found your school records.” And I said, “Bring them back.” So she brought them back, and I started looking at them. And she says, “Dad, we also found something else.” She handed me a shoebox. And I opened up the shoebox, and those were letters, letters from my mother. And I started opening them up, and I started reading them. And in the second one, there was a letter to the superintendent of the school that said, “Here is $5. Please send my children—my son back home to me.”

And I couldn’t finish reading these letters, because I was just tearing up and—so I went to the grave site. My mother had passed away. When she did pass away, I went to bury her, but there was no emotions with me. And then, going there this time with the letters—and I was reading the letters. I had a chair; I was sitting right by her grave, and I started reading these letters. And I knew that she loved me then. I mean, even now, even at this moment, I feel that, man, it’s a hard—it’s a hard experience to tell people. But I tell them anyway. I tell what happened, because it was a terrible, terrible experience. But it failed, failed miserably. I mean, but even today, I mean, I know some of the language. I don’t know—I don’t know all the language. I know a lot of songs, which came back to me. But the language, it seems like you start—you want to say something, and then you remember the beatings and stuff like that. And so—but it was terrible.

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Unpacking the Past: Nez Perce woman shares her family’s Native American boarding school experience

By Jennifer K. Bauer

As a child, Roberta Paul discovered remnants of the last war against Native Americans in an old trunk passed down in her family.

Inside, handwoven baskets and Indian beadwork were nestled next to Victorian-era autograph books and calling cards. There were black-and-white photographs of people she knew were her Nez Perce relatives, but she didn’t know who they were. 

“We were told to assimilate, that you don’t need to know your culture,” said Roberta, who grew up in Craigmont and Lewiston and goes by the name Robbie. 

She didn’t realize it then, but this fog of not-knowing was a desired outcome of what has been called the last war against Native Americans, fought against their children in the classroom. 

From the late 1800s to the 1970s, the U.S. government pursued a federal policy that forced or coerced tens of thousands of Indian families to send their children away for years to distant boarding schools. The goal was to “civilize” and “Americanize” native children by stripping them of their culture. Upon arrival at the government and church-run schools , children were given new names, haircuts and uniforms. They were forbidden to speak their language or practice their religion, which were considered inferior to white beliefs and values. Contact with family back home was discouraged and limited. By 1926, nearly 83 percent of school-age Indian children were attending boarding school. Robbie’s ancestors were among them. 

The trunk held their story, which she was led to tell in the Washington State University exhibit “Grandfather’s Trunk: Spirit of Survival.”

“We’re not meant to forget our history,” said Robbie, who believes few people outside Indian Country know the full story or impact of the boarding schools. 

“Would you say forget the Holocaust? This was a holocaust. Manifest Destiny was to wipe us out. The hurt is very deep.” 

It wasn’t until she was ready to commit suicide at age 39 that she came to understand how deep.

Growing Up Native

When Robbie was a child, she took her doll to school in Craigmont. She still has it. It has long black yarn hair and a soft, white deerskin dress with a fringe worn away by love and time. It was handmade by family friend Ida Blackeagle. She remembers how other children ridiculed the doll because it was an Indian. It is one of her first memories of shame for being native. 

Over the years, she heard Indians called heathens, drunks and lazy. There were teachers who told her she would never amount to anything because of her race. When Robbie went to prep school in 1967 at what is now Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., the brochure emphasized that the school’s goal was to help native students assimilate. She wanted to fit in. 

She married and had children. In 1989, her husband walked out on her. Devastated, she tried to kill herself six months later.

“I didn’t want to be that stereotype single mom with kids,” she remembers.

Her pastor intervened at the last minute. He told her it was OK to be afraid. But there was another voice. That voice said, “It’s time to go home.” 

She’s since come to realize the voice belonged to her grandfather, Jesse Paul, the owner of the trunk, who died in 1936.

Home was the family ranch at Craigmont. Robbie visited on a quiet, muddy day in late February. The screech of a red-tailed hawk scared her. 

“I’d lived so long without being in touch with my heritage,” she said. 

The hawk circled in the sky as she walked the property. She encountered other animals and many memories and emotions. The unusual sight of hundreds of chipmunks enjoying the sun reminded her she needed to have fun. A woodpecker’s cry told her she needed to be able to laugh at herself. She heard her grandfather's voice again. He said, “This is where you were created.”

“That began my journey of healing of trauma and unresolved family grief,” said Robbie, who decided to return to school to study psychology and follow the teachings of her ancestors to discover her story. 

She has returned to the ranch many times since to lie on the ground and listen for answers. Ninety percent of healing is listening, she tells people. 

“My dad could predict the weather because of how the birds sing. He would say, you have to listen so carefully that you can hear a bird take a drink of water on the other side of the mountain.”

Wounds of the Past

Before the U.S. government named Robbie’s grandfather Jesse Paul, he was Ka-Khun-Nee, or Black Raven. At age 7 he experienced the Nez Perce War, in which he witnessed the death of his father and two siblings. Three more siblings died when the Nez Perce were forced into exile in Oklahoma. He and his mother were the family’s only survivors, and he was 10 in 1880 when the government took him from her and sent him to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa.

Carlisle was viewed as a model for the federal Indian school system. Jesse was part of the second largest group of Indian students to arrive. It was founded and run by Richard Pratt, whose motto was “Kill the Indian, and save the man.” Pratt had convinced the federal government that training native children to accept “white man ways” and values was more efficient than fighting them. More than 10,500 children from nearly every American Indian nation in the U.S. were sent to Carlisle; this included more than 100 Nez Perce, Robbie said.

Robbie knew her grandfather had attended Carlisle but came to a full realization of what happened to him there while at a conference on suicide prevention in Spokane. The group watched a PBS documentary called “In the White Man’s Image,” which detailed how children sent to Carlisle had their identities instantly wiped away. 

“It overwhelmed me. I ran out of the room and threw up in the Spokane River,” she said. 

The children lived in military-style barracks where outbreaks of deadly diseases like tuberculosis were common. Three Nez Perce youth are buried on the grounds of Carlisle, which is now Army War College. Many tribes have worked to repatriate remains of youth buried at the 350 U.S. Indian boarding schools, but no one has come forward to claim these three children, Robbie said. She reads their names every time she speaks about the schools, in hopes someone will recognize them: Luke Phillip, Samuel Johns and Rebecca Little Wolf.

Jesse graduated in 1888 and was reunited with his mother on the Nez Perce Reservation. He went on to help form the first Nez Perce tribal government. In 1894, he married Lydia Conditt, a graduate of Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Ore. In the trunk he was issued at Carlisle, Jesse stored Lydia’s mementos from boarding school, including the autograph books and calling cards exchanged by students. They are valuable historical artifacts today because Chemawa records from that era were destroyed in a fire, Robbie said. Chemawa was one of the largest boarding schools on the West Coast, and she is working to share information about the students who attended.

Another artifact in the WSU exhibit is a large wooden crate once used to deliver an upright piano to the Paul ranch. The family used it as a woodbox, but it became a hiding place the day the Indian agent came to take Jesse and Lydia’s young children to boarding school. The couple didn’t want them to go away at such a young age, Robbie said. Jesse and Lydia had 11 children; the seven who survived all attended boarding schools, including Paul’s father, Titus, also called Koo-Ya-Mah, or Mountain Lion.

Moving Forward

Robbie retired as the director of Native American Health Sciences at Washington State University’s Spokane campus in 2016. She lives in Deer Park, Wash. Outside a few greetings and names, she doesn’t know her native Nez Perce language. She plans to eventually move to Lapwai to learn more. 

In her family, the language disappeared at the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, where Titus went in 1922 at age 14. He spoke fluent Nez Perce before going to school. He lost it there, she said. 

The rules were the same as they were when Jesse attended boarding school. Youth were forbidden to speak their native language or perform Indian ceremonies or dances. He was taught to farm and work on machines. Titus later told stories about sneaking out to join other youth for “stomp dances” down by the creek at the school. Sometimes they got caught and had to march for four hours or longer on the parade grounds at school. While he was away, three of his siblings died at White Hospital in Lewiston. He was unable to return home for their funerals, or the funeral of his mother five months later. 

Robbie is a member of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition . At its conferences, the group listens to the stories of survivors to help acknowledge the intergenerational trauma the schools caused.

“A lot of Indians don’t want to remember it because it was so painful,” Robbie said. 

Outsiders who argue it’s all in the past continue to perpetuate the thinking they’re superior to a native people, she said.

“Not acknowledging it happened, that’s erasing who we are as a people.”

The healing coalition’s work includes considering reparations, which could include a formal apology from the government. Canada operated Indian schools with similar agendas and implemented the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007, offering a formal apology and monetary reparations to survivors. 

On an individual level, people could help by supporting tribal programs to help reestablish native languages, she said.

The coalition is working to encourage Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist churches that ran boarding schools to make their records public to survivors and their descendants, she said. It also wants churches to repudiate the doctrine of discovery , a centuries-old principle of international law asserting that Christian nations have a divine right to claim dominion over land inhabited by non-Christians. The doctrine has played a role in shaping U.S. laws and policies regarding property rights and other issues.

Until the past is fully witnessed and acknowledged, the pain will continue to be internalized and passed down to future generations, Robbie said.

“When the head and the heart come together, that’s when you have your power.”

WHAT: “Grandfather’s Trunk: Spirit of Survival.”

WHEN: 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays through June 12.

WHERE: Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections Room, Holland-Terrell Library, Washington State University, Pullman.

COST: Free.

Editor's Note: This article was edited March 4 with new information that the exhibit was extended until June 12. 

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Sample Essay On Native American Boarding Schools

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: United States , Government , Education , America , American Government , Students , India , Politics

Words: 1700

Published: 02/27/2020

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Indian/Native American Boarding Schools

Native Americans were marginalized and suppressed by the US government in the 19th century. Given that the Native Americans were the minority in the country and acted as a threat to the state, they were forced into reservations where they could be easily monitored by the US government (Adams 67). Though the Native Americans were oppressed in their livelihood, some chose to continue embracing their culture and not that of the foreigner. In the late 19th century, the Native American youth were forced into boarding schools where they had to adapt to the European way of life (Hirschfelder 28). This form of Eurocentric behavior exhibited by the running government indicate that they wanted the American Indians to assimilate to the euro-American standards. In addition, the American Indians were looked down upon by the Europeans who regarded the indigenous as uncivilized. Thus, the aim of the government was to eradicate the American Indian way of life by replacing their cultural beliefs with those of the Europeans. This paper will discuss how and why the US government advocated for Native American boarding schools. Americans Indian boarding schools were established by the US government with the aim of civilizing the indigenous people (Tout 39). As a result, the US congress passed a bill known as the Federal Indian policy that enforced all American Indian youth to be forcibly removed from their families and put in a boarding school that was run by the government (Adams 73). Through this Act, the greater community believed that the American Indian youth would integrate in the American way of life and alienate their cultural beliefs. In addition, the Euro-Americans believed that boarding schools would enable American Indians to be brainwashed and that they would not have an influence from the older generation who treasured their traditional beliefs. It is crucial to note that these boarding schools had been established away from the reservations to cut any form of communication between the American Indian youth and their families (Adams 78). The boarding schools also ensured that the American Indians did not speak their native language as part of seasoning them to become part of the greater American society. This shows that the boarding schools were enacted to forcefully put American Indians through school so that they can be part of the greater and dominant society. It is a paradox that the US government paid the church organizations to run boarding schools where American Indian had been enrolled out of their own consent (Tout 92). Given that a church organization should reflect moral ethics, the church organizations at that time supported the suppression of the American Indians which is in contrast with their religious faith. It is significant to note that the federal government encouraged church organizations to run the boarding schools because any form of religious or traditional practices was not condoned. Thus, the American Indians who had been enrolled in these schools had to adapt and integrate to their new surrounding in order to escape any harsh punishments (Kidwell 759). Missionary schools were strict in terms of its student practicing Christianity. This means that the American Indians had to assimilate and practice Christianity despite knowing little about the religion. For example, the Native Americans were forced to memorize the Lord’s Prayer and read the Bible as part of their daily routine The US government believed that education would wash away the culture and traditions of Native Americans and make them civilized in the long run. During this era, there was an industrial boom in the Western nations that required people to work (Stout 34). Thus, education ensured that the Native Americans would join the working class to build the county’s economy. This is relevant because the Native Indians had to feel as part of the greater community in order to assimilate to the Euro-American standards. In addition, the Native Americans were forced to wear military uniform, march, and honor the American flag (Hirschfelder 87). Through this, they would become patriotic towards the country. The American Indians had to go through this horrific procedure because they did not have a choice in that there was an institutional violence that was against their culture. Being a minority meant that they could not retaliate. This is because of hundreds of thousands Native Americans were massacred by the US government (Hirschfelder 82). Thus, American Indians lived in fear and had to assimilate with the Americans because laws and policies were used to suppress them. Sitting Bull was an Indian American leader who motivated his people to fight the US government. The Sitting Bull is legendary to the Native American history because many people were massacred by the US government because of practicing the Ghost Dance Movement (Adams 113). The Ghost Dance Movement was a dance of resistance in that the US government wanted to take over their sacred lands because they were rich in minerals. Thus, the American Indian people were seen as a threat to the country’s stability and given the rich minerals in the lands, the US government to use the minerals to grow the country’s economy. The US government had motives and had to force the American Indians to migrate from their holy lands. The sitting bull believed that the American Indians should resist because the deity will protect them from the US soldiers who had bullets (Hirschfelder 98). This was not the case. Like many Native Americans, Sitting Bull wanted the American Indians to enjoy their freedom and live in peace. However, the US government overpowered them. It is clear that the US government used forceful measures to abate the American Indians. Sitting Bull writes, “If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.” This quote was written to show a sense of sorrow and oppression that the American Indians had gone through in that the Euro-Americans referred them as savages. This dehumanizes the American Indians and show a form of superior complex among the Europeans who had settled in America. The white Americans had built prejudice against the Native Americans to illustrate their primitive ways (Trafzer 124). Thus, the white Americans used dynamic measures to ensure that the American Indian assimilate to the white Americans ways. For example, the American Indians were forced to convert into Christianity and be patriotic to the country that had massacred the indigenous people. According to a white man named Pratt, he adopted a maxim goal to “kill the Indian, and not the man (Trafzer 134).” This premise shows that the white Americans wanted to change the Indian Americans by annihilating their culture and beliefs. Thus, the Sitting Bull makes a compelling statement that rebukes the white Americans for trying to change his people to alienate their culture and embrace that of the Euro-Americans. Henry Ward Beecher was an American abolitionist who believed in not only the emancipation of all slaves but also was against the mistreatment of the Indian Americans (Kidwell 757). Beecher believed that people should enjoy their freedom and that no one deserved to be subjugated. Thus he believed that “The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion.” Beecher believed that the Euro-Americans had come to a foreign land, where they used violent measures against the Americans Indians with the aim of taking authority and land. In addition, the white Americans wanted to power and due to their ethnocentric ways, they built prejudice against the Native Americans by calling their savages and primitive. In addition, the Euro-Americans imposed their culture on American Indians so as to assimilate and be like them (Kidwell 758). However, Beecher claims that Native Americans cannot mirror white American ways because the American Indians are the lions and the Ox is the imposed American ways such as education and Christianity. In conclusion, Native Americans have been suppressed by the Europeans through the mass killings of the Americans Indians, put them in reserves, and forced them to be educated in order to assimilate the Euro-American ways. It is clear that the US government established boarding schools for the Native Americans so that they can alienate their traditions and beliefs. According to most Europeans, the Native Americans were savages and primitive. These Eurocentric notions exemplified the mistreatment of the Indian Americans. The Indian Americans youth were forcibly taken from their families and forced to stay in school. This was crucial for white Americans because they wanted to replace the Native American culture with that of the Euro-American culture. The US government also used church organizations to run boarding schools that taught the Native Americans Christian doctrines. This meant that the Native Indians could not practice their culture nor speak their language. This was part of the seasoning process that would ensure Native Americans would assimilate to the American way of life. The Sitting Bull is also a significant figure in the American history because he encouraged the Native Americans to fight against the US government because of their oppressive rule. He did not want to change his livelihood and culture because that was his identity. Beecher on other hand was a Christian figure and abolitionist who disliked how the US government treated Native Americans. Like Sitting Bull, he believed that one’s identity could not be changed or erased.

Works Cited

Adams, David Wallace. Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Print. Hirschfelder, Arlene B.. Native Americans. New York: Dorling Kindersley Pub., 2000. Print. Kidwell, C. S.. "To Remain An Indian: Lessons In Democracy From A Century Of Native American Education; Learning To Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience And American Indian Literature; Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences." Ethnohistory 54.4 (2007): 757-759. Print. Stout, Mary. Native American boarding schools. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2012. Print. Trafzer, Clifford E., Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc. Boarding school blues: revisiting American Indian educational experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Print.

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Native American Boarding Schools

• A Brief History

Healing from the Brokenness

Students were forced to go to boarding schools because of the lack of any other schools in their neighborhood. As teachers were there to merely educate, their health and wellness were not taken into consideration. According to Collins in another one of her essays titled, “The Broken Crucible of Assimilation”, Melville Wilkinson was an army veteran and one of the founders of the Forest Grove Indian school in the 1840s before it moved to Salem. Under his supervision, forty-three Native American children died while on campus (Collins 2000: 469-474). While there were not a lot of details about their deaths in the essay, one can assume that one of the reasons for the high number was the lack of medical care and other necessities at school. Chalcraft, the superintendent at the Chemawa Indian School after its move to Salem, “was aware of the problems common to nonreservation Indian schools: culture shock, family separation, overcrowding, antiquated facilities, unappetizing and inadequate food, poor sanitation, deficient health supervision, among others” (Collins 1998: 391).   Collins pointed out that Chalcraft knew about the poor living conditions and continued with his education plan anyway. Lack of medical care led to numerous problems and was one of the many abuses the young students went through.

Indian schools were also heavily influenced by military-style discipline. The boys wore military-like uniforms and went about their days by a strict bell schedule. Wilkinson took his military experiences and created the same disciplines in the Indian school. If they disobeyed, they were subject to harsh punishments, as the teachers sought obedience and conformity (Collins 2000: 475). This created a high intensity environment with few freedoms or room for mistakes. Harsh punishments for disobedience and strict rules for discipline were two of the most scarring experiences for Native American students. One student named Richard Monette who attended boarding school in North Dakota and is now the Native American Bar Association President wrote,

“Native America knows all too well the reality of the boarding schools…where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solutions for uttering Native words” (Soul Wound, Smith).

Students were subject to all kinds of abuses in an effort to assimilate them into white society. Their heads were shaved, their native clothes stripped from them, forced to study Christianity, given American names, and only allowed to speak English. Teachers had many different strategies for punishment in the event that they broke any of these rules (Soul Wound, Smith). Not only were they vulnerable to these kinds of physicals abuses, but sexual abuse ran rampant up into the 1980s. Joseph Gone is one historian that conducts research for the Boarding School Healing Project, which is just one example of a population’s attempts at healing from the decades of abuse and loss of cultures. Gone stated, “We know that experiences of such violence are clearly correlated with post-traumatic reactions including social and psychological disruptions and breakdowns,” (Soul Wound, Smith). The abuses that so many boys and girls experienced were carried into new generations and clearly affected Native American populations. From these abuses, there are cases of Natives themselves becoming molesters, along with alcoholics and acquiring high rates of suicide. The sexual and physical harm became a threat in their own families as they repeated what was done to them.

While some Native Americans have good memories of meeting their spouses and best friends, many continue to have nightmares and scars to remember their devastating school experiences. The Boarding School Healing Project was created in pursuit of recovering from the decades of injustice. The project set up hotlines and healing services for survivors and is bringing about responsibility from the state of Washington and local churches to aid in the healing process (Soul Wound, Smith). The Chemawa Indian School is still running today and is the oldest school that is still in operation. From their website’s homepage, they have a section on the history of the school. Interestingly, the brief history has no mention of the abuses and pain Natives went through during the early years. They are focused on a new mission,

“to help students reach the highest goals and achieve the most that they can in their life after high school. This is complemented by the help of the IHS clinic located right on campus, the AVID program, which seeks to help under served students with access to higher level classes and college entrance requirements…”

The school is not letting their past hurts and abuses get in the way of success for the new generation of students. For this particular school, they have fought through the challenges and are bringing new opportunities for the Native American students that their parents never had.

Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation faced daily physical and sexual abuses that many have not recovered from. Their culture, language, idea of home, was stripped from them, often times never to return. From this came brokenness and the continuation of a destructive cycle passed on to the next generation. For some, the hotlines and services have become an aid in the healing journey. The Chemawa Indian School has come out of the hardships to provide opportunities for success for its students. In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, allowing parents to keep their children out of boarding schools. Although there were varying outcomes for Native Americans, invaluable culture was lost, families torn apart and children stripped of their childhood through the process of assimilation, scars of which remain today.

June 23, 2021 at 7:50 pm

In 1945 my father took me to the Indian School in Salem where i was born. Same time went to the blind school. The conditions the kids at Chemawa school, like the dark ages.

June 28, 2021 at 4:20 pm

How were you born at an Indian School?

February 22, 2022 at 8:03 pm

I’m pretty sure they meant that they were born in Salem.

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Teacher’s day 2024: this article discusses short and long essay ideas in english on dr. sarvepalli radhakrishnan for teacher’s day. find some of the best ideas to write on dr. sarvepalli radhakrishnan in 10 lines, 100 words, 150 words, 250 words, and long format..

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Good Morning! Today, I am going to speak some lines about Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the special occasion of Teacher’s Day. Dr.Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan is a renowned Indian philosopher, scholar and statesman. Born on 5th September 1888, he made a significant impact in the society. Not only this, he also served as the first vice president and second president of India. 

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's Essay In 150 Words

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, born on September 5, 1888, in Tamil Nadu, India, was a distinguished philosopher and educator. He played an important role in shaping the education system of the country. He also earned international recognition for many of his international works and projects. Radhakrishnan also served as India’s first vice president from the year 1952 to 1962. It was his deep commitment to education that made this day an important day to celebrate Teacher’s Day in India. 

Teachers are the pillars of society and they impart their knowledge to shape the future generations of the society. A gifted teacher himself, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan emphasised the importance of ethical and moral education. 

Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's Essay In 200 Words

Good Morning! Today, I am going to speak some lines about Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the special occasion of Teacher’s Day. Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born in 1888 on the 5th of September in Tamil Nadu at Tirutlani, India. He had a great personality and was a famous teacher as well. 

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Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's Essay In 500 Words

Students can take the ideas from the above lines and then add on the below lines to complete the essay in 500 words. 

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, one of India’s most prominent philosophers and statesmen is best for knowing his important contributions to education, philosophy and the understanding of Indian culture. He was born in 1888 in a small village in Tamil Nadu and yet created a significant impact on society with his intellectual brilliance and unwavering dedication or commitment to the betterment of society. 

Top 10 Additional Lines On Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

• Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born on September 5, 1888, in a small village in Tamil Nadu and he is widely recognised as one of the greatest philosophers and teachers of his time. 
• Ramakrishnan also served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He also served as the second president from the year 1962 to 1967. 
• His birthday is celebrated as Teacher’s Day on September 5 to honour him and the work he did for the betterment of society. 
• Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan has also served as a professor of philosophy at prestigious institutions. 
• He was also awarded the Bharat Ratna,  India's highest civilian honour, in the year 1954.
• The projects and impeccable work of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan have helped to bridge the gap between  Eastern and Western thought, making Indian philosophy more accessible to the world.
• The interpretations of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on Hinduism have helped change Western perceptions of Indian spirituality. 
• Radhakrishnan is best known for his interpretation of Indian philosophy, particularly Advaita Vedanta.
• He believed that education should not only impart knowledge but also instil moral and ethical values. 
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