Native American Boarding Schools - Non-reservation Boarding Schools

Non-reservation Boarding Schools

Harvard College had an Indian College on its campus in the mid-1600s, supported by the English Society for Propagation of the Gospel. Its few Indian students came from New England, at a time when higher education was very limited for all classes and colleges were more similar to today's high schools. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, "from the Wampanoag...did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period". In early years, other Indian schools were created by local communities, as with the Indian school in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1769, which gradually developed into Dartmouth College. Other schools were created in the East, where Indian reservations were less common than they became in the late nineteenth century in western states.

West of the Mississippi, schools near Indian settlements and on reservations were first founded by religious missionaries, who believed they could extend education and Christianity to Native Americans. Some of their efforts were part of the progressive movement after the Civil War. As Native Americans were forced onto reservations following the Indian Wars, missionaries founded additional schools with boarding facilities, to accommodate students who lived too far to attend on a daily basis.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded by the US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 at a former military installation, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man." Pratt professed "assimilation through total immersion." He had arranged for education of some young Indian men at the Hampton Institute, a historically black college, after he had supervised them as prisoners at a fort in Florida.

At the prison, he made efforts to have the Indians taught English and United States culture, while giving them leeway to govern themselves. From seeing the progress of both his younger prisoners and the ones who attended Hampton, he came to believe that removing Indians from their native culture could result in their successful assimilation into the majority culture of the United States. As at the Hampton Institute, he included in the Carlisle curriculum vocational training for boys and domestic science for girls, including chores around the school and producing goods for market. They also produced a newspaper, had a well-regarded chorus and orchestra, and developed sports programs. The vocational training reflected the administration's understanding of skills needed at most reservations, which were located in rural areas, and reflected a society still based on agriculture. In the summer, students often lived with local farm families and townspeople to continue their immersion in European-American culture, and provide labor at low cost to the families. Carlisle and its curriculum became the model for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; by 1902 there were 25 federally funded non-reservation schools in 15 states and territories, with a total enrollment of over 6,000 students. Federal legislation required Native American children to be educated. Parents had to authorize their children's attendance at boarding schools, but sometimes officials used coercion to gain a quota of students from any given reservation.

As the model of boarding schools was adopted more widely by the US government, many Native American children were separated from their families and tribes when they were sent or sometimes taken to boarding schools far from their home reservations. These schools ranged from those similar to the federal Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which became a model for BIA-run schools; to the many schools sponsored by religious denominations.

In that period, when students arrived at the boarding schools, their lives usually altered dramatically. They were given short haircuts (a source of shame for boys of many tribes), uniforms, and English names; sometimes these were based on their own, other times they were assigned at random, and sometimes children chose new names. They were not allowed to speak their own languages, even between each other, and they were expected to attend church services and encouraged to convert to Christianity. Discipline was stiff in many schools (as it was in families and other areas of society), and it often included chores and punishments.

The following is a quote from Anna Moore regarding the Phoenix Indian School:

"If we were not finished when the 8 a.m. whistle sounded, the dining room matron would go around strapping us while we were still on our hands and knees."

The 1928 Meriam Report noted that infectious disease was often widespread at the schools due to insufficient funding for meals providing good nutrition, overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions (an element shared by many towns in the early 20th century) and students weakened by overwork. The report said that death rates for Native American students were six and a half times higher than for other ethnic groups.