The Native American boarding school system – a decades-long effort to assimilate Native people before they were adults – robbed children of their culture, family ties and sometimes their lives.
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For more than 150 years, spurred by federal assimilation policies that began 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 record 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 US government, researchers and Indigenous communities reveals a deeper understanding of children's difficult, sometimes deadly, experiences in 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 number expected to rise as the investigation continues.
Archival material from the schools tells countless harrowing stories.
Almost 7,800 children attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School , where assimilation was a fundamental principle: Upon entry, children were renamed and stripped of their tribal clothing and hairstyles. In promotional materials, the school distributed before-and-after portraits of students.
In some cases, native families willingly sent their children, hoping that the schools might offer future opportunities or better conditions than reservations. Often, however, the process was coercive. As part of an application process for the Thomas Indian School , parents had to relinquish custody of their children.
Parents who resisted the boarding school system could be severely punished. The mother of 3-year-old Nu-Shukk, of the Tlingit tribe, was imprisoned in 1895 after refusing to return her daughter to Douglas Island Friends Mission School .
Haskell Industrial Training School of India , like many others, relied on student labor to grow and cook food, sew clothes, handle building maintenance and construction, and generate revenue from items sold in the school's stores.
A record book from the early 1900s by Santa Fe Indian School includes a diagram of a cemetery showing the locations of 25 graves, all but two belonging 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 sites.
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Native American boarding was vast and well-established, from small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to converted military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down both the West and East coasts.
Until recently, incomplete records and little federal attention kept even the number of schools — let alone more details about how they operated — unknown. The 523 schools represented here are the most comprehensive record to date of institutions involved in the scheme. This data was collected over several years by National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a non-profit 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 Home Office and the Ministry of Defence. Congress enacted laws to force Native American parents to send their children to schools, including authorizing Interior Department officials to withhold food rations from families who resisted.
Congress also funded the schools through annual appropriations and with money from the sale of tribally owned land. In addition, the government hired Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Church associations to run schools, regardless of whether they had experience in education, paying them a sum 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 churches, such as the Quakers, ran their own schools.
Wherever they were located or whoever ran them, schools largely shared the mission of assimilating indigenous students by erasing their culture. The children's hair was cut. Their clothes were burnt. They were given new, English names and had to attend Christian religious services. and were forced to do manual labor, both on the school grounds and in the surrounding farms. Those who dared to continue speaking their ancestral languages or observe their religious practices were often beaten.
While the boarding school era may seem like distant history, the elderly survivors, many in their 70s and 80s, are trying to make sure the harm done is not forgotten.
"Our language, our culture, our family ties, our land"
Ben Sherman, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who spent four years living at Oglala Community School in Pine Ridge, SD, said he placed the emergence of some of the worst abuses in 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 wasn't done with the war, so the next phase involved a war on 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 left school and walked nearly 50 miles trying to get home. “They took our language, our culture, our family ties, our land. They succeeded on almost every level."
Some of the most lasting effects of the schools involved trauma passed down from one generation to the next, Mr. Sherman said, explaining how his 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.
One of Mrs. 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 to the Pine Ridge Reservation.
At one point, Mr. Sherman said, Mark and another boy slept on the railroad tracks. A train rolled over, hitting and killing the two boys.
While researchers say the known toll is still far from complete, there are at least hundreds of indigenous children who died while attending boarding schools. From place to place, children's bodies were stuffed into graves without regard to their families' burial traditions or culture.
In recent years, tribal nations in the United States have begun using technologies such as remote sensing surveys and ground-penetrating radar to search sites for evidence of burial sites. In July, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah confirmed that 12 children were buried in unmarked graves on the grounds of the Panguitch Indian Lodge in southern Utah.
Archival records, including an 1899 map, refer to a cemetery on the site of the Indian Industrial School in Genoa, Nebraska, about 90 miles west of Omaha — but the location of the cemetery has been lost. At least 86 students are believed to have died in Genoa from causes including typhus, tuberculosis and an accidental shooting.
Current research efforts to find the remains of the Genoa students are being conducted by the Nebraska State Archaeologist in consultation with 40 Native nations whose children attended the school.
In preliminary report released last year, the Interior Department said it expected the number of children known to have died in Native American boarding schools to rise into the "thousands or tens of thousands."
"White men's names are sewn on our backs"
A driving force behind the rampant expansion of the boarding school system was Richard Henry Pratt, a military man 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 used to be barracks in Carlisle, Pa., and set about turning it into a landmark institution that spawned dozens of similar schools across the United States. His crude mission, as reported in a notorious declaration was: "Kill the Indian in him and save the man."
Mr. Pratt dreamed of abolishing reservations and dispersing the entire population of Native American children across the country, with about 70,000 white families each hosting a Native American child. He failed in this effort, but succeeded in creating a model that placed schools in white communities, often far from the reservations where Native children were born.
When they arrived at Mr. Pratt's school, the children were often photographed in their native clothing. The boys then quickly cut their long hair short, an especially harsh and traumatic step for those from cultures such as the Lakota, where cutting long hair could be associated with mourning the dead.
Boarding schools made the assault on racial identity a central feature of the assimilation mission, often beginning with renaming children, as historian David Wallace Adams explained in his 1995 book Education for Extinction.
A 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 and then write the name on a piece of tape and place his shirt on his back.
"When my turn came, I took a pointer and acted as if I was going to touch an enemy," he wrote in "My People the Sioux," a 1928 book. "Soon we all had white men's names sewn on our backs."
Just as Carlisle had a renaming policy, other schools took note, often giving names that could be derogatory, such as Mary Swollen Face or Roy Bad Teeth. In other cases, children were randomly assigned common American surnames such as Smith, Brown, or Clark, or the names of presidents, vice presidents, or other prominent figures.
Mr. Pratt's photographers would again take pictures of the children — 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 soldiers and even using a court-martial format, in which the older children would sit as judges over the younger children, to enforce the rules. (Mr. Pratt reserved the power to overrule the court.)
News of Mr. Pratt's experiment spread, and a vast array of similar schools were established throughout the country. Some of the clearest descriptions of what such schools sought to achieve are relayed in the words of the white officials in charge of these institutions.
Thomas J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, "It is cheaper to train Indians than to kill them," he said in a speech at the founding of the Phoenix Indian School in 1891.
That same year, a newspaper report published an exchange between the superintendent of the Grand Junction Indian School and the secretary of the interior that said a student's toe was cut off because his foot did not fit in a government-issued shoe.
In Carlisle, the authorities introduced an 'outing' scheme: an arrangement whereby children worked as manual laborers or maids on surrounding farms, in businesses such as wagon makers and households. The goal appeared to be to provide students with a modest income while promoting thrift and saving practices.
Other institutions made access to a pool of cheap child labor a selling point when persuading community leaders to establish a native boarding school.
Such "excursion" systems eventually became widespread in the United States. Practices varied widely from school to school, and abuses emerged – such as paying children unfair wages, paying for their own room and board, removing them from their studies for months at a time, and placing them in accommodation that was substandard or separated. by white workers.
"90 million acres of land"
In November 1894, American soldiers arrived in the remote areas of northern Arizona where the Hopi 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 Keams Canyon boarding school. Facing resistance, the authorities tried to bribe the Hopi parents with pieces of cloth or tools such as axes. They used their bare fists, beating the Hopi who did not want to chase their children away. They withheld food supplies in an attempt to starve the Hopi into submission.
When even these tactics failed and resistance to taking their children away was exacerbated by tensions over farmland, two companies of cavalry arrived to capture 19 Hopi men. The captives were imprisoned on Alcatraz Island, California for nearly a year, and the removal of the Hopi children proceeded as planned.
The treatment of the Hopi, which briefly gained public attention in the 1890s when author Charles Lummis made it the focus of a crusade against federal Native American education policies, quickly faded.
Brenda Child, a historian whose Ojibwe grandparents were sent to native boarding schools, pointed out in an interview that the period of greatest expansion of the boarding school system — from the last decades of the 19th century to the early decades of the 20th — coincided with colossal theft of indigenous land.
As Native American boarding schools steadily opened across the country, the General Allotment Act of 1887 allowed federal authorities to divide and distribute native lands. The law effectively superseded land confiscation, allowing whites to take control of "surplus" land that belonged to indigenous peoples.
"Indians lost 90 million acres of land during the half-century that assimilation politics dominated Indian education in the United States," said Dr. Child, professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Some of the earliest schools, such as the Asbury Manual Labor School near Fort Mitchell, Ala., took root in the 1820s, when the U.S. government was on the verge of forcibly relocating peoples, including the Cherokee and Creek, from their homelands in the Southeastern United States to settle west of the Mississippi River.
The exhibition of the Interior Department released last year by Bryan Newland, the department's assistant secretary for Indian affairs, showed that land divestment and funding for Native American boarding schools went hand in hand. To help pay for the federal boarding school system, the investigation noted, the federal government had used money from trust accounts set aside for the benefit of tribal nations as part of the treaties by which they granted lands to the United States. In other words, the United States government effectively made Natives use their own funds to pay for boarding schools that severed their children's ties to their families and culture.
By the 1920s, so many Native American boarding schools had been established that nearly 83 percent of Native school-age children were enrolled in such institutions.
Questions about the cost and effectiveness of assimilation policies, along with revelations of some of the atrocities in the system, slowly led to change. A study in 1928, commonly known as the Meriam report, described in detail how the children were malnourished, overworked and harshly disciplined.
In the 1930s, when the process of vacating Native lands was largely complete, the federal government began to close many of the schools. This took decades as indigenous peoples sought to gain control over their children's education in a context of activism aimed at strengthening national sovereignty.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, federal authorities began handing over management of some remaining schools to the Bureau of Indian Education or tribes. Institutions such as Santa Fe Indian School and Sherman Indian High School, in Riverside, California, still operate under this model, emphasizing Native sovereignty and preserving traditional languages and cultures. At least nine boarding schools among the 523 schools opened after 1969.
A exhibition of the US Senate in 1969 noted the tragedy and failure of the system, helping to pass the Education Self-Determination and Education Act of 1975, giving tribal nations greater control over schools.
A Supreme Court case this year reflects how the abuses of the boarding school era still reverberate across institutions. The case involved a challenge to a 1978 law known as the Indian Child Welfare Act aimed at keeping adopted Native Americans within tribes. The court upheld the law, reinforcing the notion that tribal nations are separate sovereign communities in the United States and allaying fears of reinvigorating policies that give authorities more power to separate Native children from their families and cultures.
Last year's Interior Department investigation came under the direction of Secretary Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member whose grandparents were boarding school survivors. In an effort to lift the veil on abuses within the system, Secretary Haaland has been traveling across the country for more than a year, holding listening sessions with Indigenous communities still dealing with the effects of the boarding school system. One was introduced in the Senate bill to create a truth and healing commission to address the legacy of domestic boarding schools, similar to one undertaken by the Canadian government in 2007.
"Federal Indian boarding school policies have affected every Native 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 these policies and these places have caused."
"Military Organization, Exercise and Routine"
Among the most far-reaching effects of the boarding school era was the way it shaped Native children to turn to the American military and economy. Schools across the country trained Native 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, the administrators developed a highly militaristic atmosphere. In addition to requiring students to wear uniforms and conduct regular drills, all students were required to stand for inspection at 7:30 am. on Sundays.
"Too much praise cannot be given to the merits of military organization, drill, and routine in relation to school discipline," wrote school superintendent Harwood Hall in an 1897 report.
A group of boys, trained by the Arizona National Guard, formed an elite campus team 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, let alone 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 workers. The Albuquerque Indian School, for example, was known for sending boys to work for local farmers, in addition to teaching "strap-making, shoe-making, cooking and baking, sewing and laundry," according to an inspector's report. in the 1890s. .
But administrators sometimes looked much further afield to place children in their care in 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 pioneered the "excursion" system, it soon became a brisk business. In an 18-month period beginning in March 1899, school records show more than 1,280 walkouts from about 900 students. Many students were sent more than once and at least 23 did not return to school because they ran away from their outings. The map below shows their more than 200 destinations, spanning five states and Washington, DC
Anita Yellowhair, 84, a Navajo survivor who was taken by her family to Steamboat, Ariz., to live at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah, said the children were simply not allowed to question that they were being forced to work as part of their school.
"It was exactly what you did, no questions asked," said Ms. Yellowhair, a former dental assistant who now lives in the Phoenix area. "I was hired on the weekends to clean the houses of white families."
The Sherman Institute in Southern California used child labor from its inception in 1902 — starting with the construction of the school itself. The school's male students built much of the institution to assimilate them into white culture: its dormitories, hospital, vocational labs, farm buildings, and auditoriums.
The field trip system at Sherman, which Kevin Whalen, a historian, called "a means of preparing students for a second-class existence," became famous for sending so many girls to work as servants in white households that the school employed a "exit matron" to oversee them.
Sherman also sent boys to work in fields around Southern California, picking citrus fruits, 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, working six days a week for 10 hours a day and living in racially segregated shacks, except for white workers.
"I was just a kid"
James LaBelle was 8 years old in 1955 when he and his 6-year-old brother were flown to the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. He said his mother, who struggled with alcoholism, had a choice: send her sons to boarding school or give them up for adoption.
When his mother chose the boarding school, Mr. LaBelle said, he found himself literally tied to other Alaska Native children with a rope that had gone through 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.
Mr. LaBelle, who is Inupiaq and a registered member of the Native Village of Port Graham, still struggles to describe the education he received in Wrangell. Now 76, his voice trembles as he recounts the punishments the children received – and how the children turned into punishers.
On weekdays, it was common for supervisors to tell children to strip so they could be paddled or whipped with a cat's tail, Mr. LaBelle said. And when the weekends came, he said, it was time for the "gauntlet," when some kids were ordered to strip completely and others were ordered to be spanked for perceived infractions of school rules.
"It could have been a prison or a mental institution," 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 punishers."
When he was 10, Mr. LaBelle said, he and another boy were punished for fighting 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 throughout her eight years 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 younger ones, crying and calling for their mothers.
"It was the only time we could show emotion," Mr. LaBelle said. “It didn't take long for it to grow and grow and grow. The whole section of the dormitory for the younger children was crying in the dark."
The range of experiences in these schools was extremely varied. Despite the overwhelming emphasis on the assimilation of 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 allowed them to put food on their family's table . But many survivors say the horrors of the system infused their own experiences to a point that remains with them to this day.
"I was just a kid, so I couldn't stand up for myself," said Ms. Yellowhair, who described the punishment meted out at Utah's Intermountain School to students who were caught speaking languages other than English. "To do that, they made us kneel down 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 trying to deal with the trauma of the boarding school experience as it endures in their very bones and is transmitted, morphed, and evolved into different forms of grief, from one generation to the next. They have chosen to make their own painful experiences public. Some others don't.
Public health researchers have also begun to try to account for the permanent costs of attending boarding school. 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 several serious chronic conditions than non-attending Native Americans, even after controlling for demographic factors. Her work is based on similar foundings on the residential school system in Canada.
While it may be impossible to fully chronicle the horrors of the time, some of the most devastating and harrowing episodes were reported in routine bureaucratic reports, which listed the number of dead children as if discussing animal casualties.
For example, several paragraphs into a subsection of the "Report on Indians in Utah" submitted in July 1901 to the Department of the Interior, EO Hughes, the superintendent of the Uintah Boarding School in Whiterocks, Utah, noted that something unusual had occurred.
"In December came the disaster," 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 at the dispensary. Upon learning of the crisis, many parents from surrounding reservations rushed to the Uintah school and took their children home.
"It was found necessary to call out a troop of cavalry to protect the buildings from burning," Mr. Hughes wrote, noting that "four of our pupils died in the camp," while 17 other children in the area died as a result of the measles outbreak. .
The exact record of how many children died in Native American boarding schools remains unknown. In some schools, dozens of children died. 189 students are known to be buried in Carlisle alone. The clues keep popping up.
For example, in a city park just north of downtown Albuquerque, workers digging irrigation ditches in the 1970s found children's bones. The site, it turned out, was the Albuquerque Indian School Cemetery.
A decades-old plaque describing the site as "used primarily for the burial of students of the Albuquerque Indian School from the Zuñi, Navajo and Apache tribes" went largely unnoticed until discoveries of student graves at Canadian boarding schools recently focused more attention on such sites in the United States.
Now the plaque is gone, replaced by a memorial under a tree with stuffed animals, toys and an old basketball. A sticker on an outdated sign at the memorial proclaims "Land Back" – a slogan of a movement that seeks to restore indigenous sovereignty to forgotten lands.
Plastic mesh fencing around the site seeks to put it off-limits to any further alteration. And another sign, this one put up by the city of Albuquerque, warns passers-by that trespassing on marked burial sites can lead to a felony charge. On a recent day in late July, the entire park, including the area where the native children once rested, was empty.
Reflecting how the reckoning of the boarding school era is still in its infancy in Albuquerque and around the United States, the sign explains that the city is "listening to Pueblo & Tribal Leaders, as well as the wider community, to plan the future of this website.”
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METHODOLOGY
The data for the map of boarding school locations comes from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. This data includes 408 schools in Federal Boarding School Research Initiative Report of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ranked schools based on four criteria: providing on-site housing, providing formal academic or vocational training, receiving federal funds or other federal support, and operating prior to 1969. The data from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition include an additional 115 schools outside the scope of this report. 105 of these additional schools were church institutions. Nine of the remaining 10 schools were opened after 1969. Further research is needed into the dates of its operation as a boarding school.
Many Indian boarding schools changed names, locations, or operators over time. Institutions are defined as different 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 with no known location were excluded from the map. The map includes modern state and federal reservation boundaries from the US Census Bureau for reference.
The data for the map it shows where the students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School came from and the map it shows where the students were sent to work , come from Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center .
The student provenance map was created using archival information covering the duration of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918. The locations shown on the map are derived from the information available on the locations of the students prior to their arrival at the school. Locations are approximate and map to one of four types of geography: city, county, reservation, or state.
The pupil expenditure map shows destinations from March 1899 to September 1900. Locations are approximate and are mapped to one of four types of geography: addresses, towns, cities, or concentric counties. Centroid counties are created based on 1900 county boundaries from IPUMS National Historic Geographic Information System at the University of Minnesota.
Sources: National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition ; Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project ; Sierra Alvarez, Cronkite News; Libby Bischof, University of Southern Maine; Rose Buchanan and Cody White, National Archives. Brenda Child, University of Minnesota; Jim Gerencser, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center ; Denise Lajimodiere; Elizabeth Rule and Derek Baron, Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies . Dave Williams, Nebraska State Archaeologist. Research Initiative Report on Federal Indian Boarding School , US Department of the Interior, 2022. Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs , US Department of the Interior, 1901. "Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875-1928," by David Wallace Adams. "The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona 1891-1935" by Robert Trennert. "Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute Field Trip Program, 1900-1945," by Kevin Whalen; " History of the Albuquerque Indian Boarding School ”, Antonia Gonzales and Theodore Jojola, New Mexico PBS; " Hopi Prisoners on the Rock ,” by Wendy Holliday, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office; " A Battle for the Children: American Indian Child Removal in Arizona in the Era of Assimilation ”, by Margaret B. Jacobs, University of Nebraska; " A History of the Cemetery at the Albuquerque Indian School ,” by Joe Sabatini, Indian Pueblo Cultural Center; " Kill the Indian, Save the Man ,” by Jane Yu, Pennsylvania Center for the Book
Taylor Johnston and Christine Zhang contributed reporting.
From the Zach Levitt , Yulia Parshina-Kottas , Simon Romero and Tim Wallace
Source: nytimes