‘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
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 schools for Native American children. At least 408 received federal funding, including the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, present-day Hampton University.
Renewed attention to the system The first school opened in by the U.S. government, researchers 1801, and hundreds were eventually and Indigenous communities is established or supported by revealing a deeper understanding federal agencies such as the Interior of the difficult, sometimes deadly, Department and the Defense experiences of children in the Department. Congress enacted schools. Many children faced beatings, laws to coerce Native American malnutrition, hard labor, and parents to send their children, other forms of neglect and abuse. including authorizing Interior Some never returned to their families. Department officials to withhold Hundreds are known to have treaty-guaranteed food rations to died, a toll expected to grow as families who resisted. research continues. Congress also funded schools
The Native American boarding through annual appropriations and school system was vast and with money from the sale of lands entrenched, ranging from small held by tribes. In addition, the shacks in remote Alaskan outposts government hired Roman Catholic, to refurbished military barracks in Presbyterian, Episcopalian and the Deep South to large institutions Congregationalist associations to on both coasts. run schools, regardless of whether
Until recently, incomplete they had experience in education, records and scant federal attention paying them an amount for each kept even the number of schools student.
— let alone more details about Beyond the vast federal system, how they functioned — unknown. this new list also sheds light on
The 523 schools represented here boarding schools that operated constitute the most comprehensive without federal support. Religious register to date of institutions organizations ran at least 105 involved in the system. This data schools. was compiled over the course of Wherever they were located several years by the National Native or whoever ran them, the schools American Boarding School Healing largely shared the mission of Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy and assimilating Indigenous students research organization. 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.
Although 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.
Ben Sherman, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who spent four years living at the Oglala Community School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 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
U.S. 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 Sherman, 83, a former aerospace engineer.
“Don’t try to tell me this wasn’t genocide,” added Sherman, who said in an interview that he had once run away from the school and walked nearly 50 miles trying to 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, 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, Pennsylvania.
One of Glode’s sons, Mark, attended the Rapid City Indian Boarding School. The environment there was so harsh, 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, Sherman said, Mark and another boy slept on the railroad track. A train rolled through, striking and killing the two boys.
Although 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 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.”
A name off a blackboard
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, Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in what had been army barracks 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.” He helped establish the Hampton school.
Pratt dreamed of abolishing the reservations and scattering the entire population of Native children across the country, with about 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.
Upon arriving at 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 such as 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 historian David Wallace Adams wrote in his 1995 book “Education for Extinction.”
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 such as Smith, Brown or Clark, or given the names of presidents, vice presidents or other prominent figures.
News of 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 Morgan, commissioner of Indian affairs, said in a speech at the establishment of the Phoenix Indian School in 1891.
At Carlisle, authorities introduced an “outing” program: an arrangement by which children worked as manual laborers or maids in surrounding farms; businesses such as 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 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.
‘Military organization’
Among the most far-reaching effects of the boarding school era was the way it molded Native children to feed into the U.S. 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 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.
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 an 18-month period beginning in March 1899, school records show more than 1,280 outings by about 900 students, spanning five states and Washington, D.C.
Public health researchers have begun to attempt to account for the lasting toll of boarding school attendance.
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.
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 reestablish 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.
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.”