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This presentation documents the ways in which Native American peoples were impacted by government-sanctioned boarding schools in the late 19th century and early 20th century America. Federally imposed acts condoned the abduction of indigenous peoples’ youth to schools where they were taught American culture and civilization, while being brutally stripped of their own heritage. Through this presentation, you will see the cruelty of the American government, as well as the perseverance of the indigenous people in America.

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The Civilization Fund Act of 1819 legalized the removal of Native American children from their families to be taught in established United States boarding schools. Although technically the act demands that the “means of instruction” and enrollment can only be instituted by one’s parents’ “own consent”, this aspect of the Civilization Fund Act was most frequently neglected, resulting in the mass abduction of Native American youth. The Civilization Fund Act is responsible for the initiative to strip indigenous American people of their culture, alienating them from their heritage and history, as an expression of late 19th century white-savior complex. For example, the language of this Act denies indigenous American peoples of their agency and sovereignty, classifying them as a tragedy which the United States government is magnanimous enough to save. The American schools and tutors proposed in this act are intended to educate students in “the habits and arts of civilization”, directly implying that Native American people lack such sophistication, debilitating the reputation of Native American people, and spreading misinformation as a result of lawmakers’ own ineducation. The act also deflects accountability for the injuries Native American people have suffered throughout the history of European colonization and American westward expansion, and references indigenous peoples’ “final extinction” while lacking in clear American culpability.

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1887 Chiricahua Apache Children at Carlisle Indian Industrial School from Fort Marion

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1887 Chiricahua Apache Children at Carlisle Indian Industrial School from Fort Marion

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In an effort to prevent more wars with Native Americans, off reservation boarding schools were created, to educate the Indigenous children in the ways of the American. The programs were run by the Department of War, and the point was to completely erase the native culture. The first children to attend Boarding Schools were prisoners of war or hostages. The 17 children pictured above, were some of those children. In order to keep enrollment numbers up, children were forcibly taken from their homes, parents were coerced into giving children up, and some families were even mandated to give a child to the school like a sacrifice. Those who collected the children for schooling were considered ‘recruiting police’. The children were enrolled in schools far away from home, so they could not be influenced by their families, and punished for demonstrating any cultural behavior. Their hair was forcibly cut, and they were ordered to bathe. While bathing, their clothes and shoes were stolen and they were forced into wearing military uniforms and Victorian dresses. Students were given numbers and renamed, and speaking their first languages would result in corporal punishment. This entire process completely stripped the native children of their identity.

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Photograph of student body of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in March, 1892, by John Choate.  

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Photograph of student body of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in March, 1892, by John Choate.  

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Over the course of the thirty-nine years which the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated, more than 10,000 Native American children were in attendance. Only 158 of those children graduated, others having escaped, or died on campus from physical trauma or illness. Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879 with the goal to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”. Pratt envisioned Native Americans and white people as being “equal”, although evidently his practices and policies tell us otherwise, having said himself “that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead”, and one must “save the man” within them. The dehumanizing implications of this statement are apparent enough. Another way in which students were controlled in the school was by rooming together children of different nations, who often spoke different languages, forcing them to communicate through American culture, speeding the indoctrination and isolating students further from their familiar way of life. The school was the first federally-funded Native American boarding school that was located off the site of any reservation. Pratt himself would eventually admit that “The children would be hostages for the good behavior…” of the tribes and nations from which they were taken.

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Hopi prisoners at Alcatraz, January 3, 1895. 

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Hopi prisoners at Alcatraz, January 3, 1895. 

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Not many parents were on board with their children being taken. The leaders of these boarding schools had to use nefarious tactics to get the parents to comply. A compulsory attendance law legalized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs ability to withhold food, clothing and annuities from families who refused to send their children to the government-run schools. If parents refused after that, the children were simply rounded up and thrown into large wagons, taken without the consent of either parent or child. In 1894, however, it was taken to a new level. After parents continued resisting, U.S. cavalry troops arrived in the Hopi village of Oraibi, in Arizona, and arrested 19 leaders for refusing to send their children to school. They were shipped to Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay, and were incarcerated for nine months. They were shipped just under 1000 miles away from their families and homes, because they could not agree to their children being taken from them and assimilated into an invading culture.

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Laundry room at Riverside Indian School, Anadarko, Oklahoma, 1901

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Laundry room at Riverside Indian School, Anadarko, Oklahoma, 1901

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The Boarding schools developed this program called the ‘Outing Program’. Children received practical instruction as domestic helpers, laborers on farms, and other manual jobs. The students would sometimes be paid a small salary, which would be taken by the school to be placed in a quote unquote ‘savings account’. Occasionally the students would be given a pittance to use as spending money. Despite these cushy sounding conditions, the students were unable to say no, and this practical instruction took place instead of other educational instruction. The students, who were being used as an unwilling workforce, worked under less than perfect physical conditions as well. This servitude was an excellent way for the United States government to pigeonhole Indigenous people into low income jobs, as it was all that was available, not to mention offered, to Indigenous people in American society. No matter the age, a boarding school student had a job. The boarding schools depended on their student workforce to stay in power.

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Natalie Curtis' "The Indians’ Book", with illustrations and cover art by Angel De Cora.  

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Natalie Curtis' "The Indians’ Book", with illustrations and cover art by Angel De Cora.  

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Angel De Cora, née Hinook-Mahiwi-Kalinaka (Fleecy Cloud Floating in Place), was born in what is now Thurston, Nebraska, in the year 1871. She was of French and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) heritage, and was the granddaughter of Winnebago chief, Little Decorah. There exist conflicting accounts of the origins of her Anglicized name, Angel, one being that it naturally translates from Fleecy Cloud Floating in Place, another being that her mother was drawn to the name after spotting it in the Bible. Neither story is well corroborated by evidence, and sadly, it is another example of Native American erasure. De Cora was kidnapped from her family at a young age to the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, and did not return to her mother, by then widowed, for five whole years. De Cora, as an adult, studied art at Smith College and illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, and finished her education at the Cowles Art School in Boston, along the way meriting awards for her “sympathetic, humanizing depictions of native peoples”, and garnering acclaim from artists’ circles. De Cora wrote autobiographies in the form of short stories, published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, complete with her own illustrations. She partnered with author Natalie Curtis, a fellow advocate for the preservation of Native peoples’ arts and music, to create The Indians’ Book in 1907, a collection of the songs and stories of 18 Native American tribes from across the North American continent, written in their original scores with accompanying English transcripts. De Cora provided every illustration in the book, along with the book’s cover art, too. De Cora stylized the cover art and designs on the main title page to complement the “design conventions” of the Native peoples’ artworks included in the book. The book was met with national acclaim, and received commendation from Theodore Roosevelt himself. De Cora’s illustrations are one of the first instances of Native peoples’ art reaching a broader American audience. De Cora would continue as an advocate for the arts and a teacher at the Carlisle school, passing away from pneumonia in 1919. De Cora is an example of a Native individual having been successfully integrated into an American lifestyle, at the cost of her personal estrangement from her family and much emotional distress. However, her contributions to the art world and to the American public knowledge of Native peoples’ culture and history must not be understated. It is an example of representation of Native stories on an authenticity and artistic and academic quality that had yet to be seen. The tragedy is that such communication came at De Cora’s expense.

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Navajo Indian Code Talkers Henry Bake and George Kirk, 12/1943

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Navajo Indian Code Talkers Henry Bake and George Kirk, 12/1943

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Despite the best efforts of the boarding schools, they were not able to completely erase the indigenous culture from the students they taught. What had once been extremely frustrating for them, became an asset when World War 1 and 2 came around. Suddenly, the ability to speak two languages was incredibly useful when it came to coding messages. But not any language would do, it had to be something that other countries had no information on or ability to learn for themselves. So the indigenous native languages were called upon, and the ‘American Indian Code Talkers’ were born. They created two codes, one code where each letter of the english alphabet had a corresponding native word, like A being translated as the native word for ant. The second code was a more direct translation, with a dictionary of 411 words created for words that didn’t exist before in native languages. For example, the word submarine did not exist, so it was translated to the equivalent of iron fish. These code talkers, doing incredibly important work, were ordered to remain secret, and knowledge of them remained classified until 1968. It was only in 2001 when they were aptly rewarded with Congressional Gold medals.

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Children's Cemetery at Carlisle Indian School, 1991 (Stop 8)

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Children's Cemetery at Carlisle Indian School, 1991 (Stop 8)

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“Of all the changes we were forced to make, that of diet was doubtless the most injurious, for it was immediate and drastic. White bread we had for the first meal and thereafter, as well as coffee and sugar. Had we been allowed our own simple diet of meat, either boiled with soup or dried, and fruit, with perhaps a few vegetables, we should have thrived. But the change in clothing, housing, food and confinement combined with lonesomeness was too much, and in three years nearly one half of the children from the Plains were dead and through with earthly schools. In the graveyard at Carlisle most of the graves are those of little ones.”
-Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Lakota; attended Carlisle Indian School 1879 (age 11) to 1885.

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The emotional stress, unsanitary conditions, complete change in diet, and overcrowding resulted in a terrible health crisis in Native American boarding schools. Tuberculosis and Influenza wiped out so many students and even teachers.  In 1915 the Indigenous tuberculosis rate was 4x the non-Indigenous rate. 30% of students had trachoma, a contagious eye infection, and Indigenous rates of measles, chickenpox, mumps, smallpox and other contagious diseases were double or triple the national rates. Luther Standing Bear, a graduate of Carlisle Indian School, wrote, “Of all the changes we were forced to make, that of diet was doubtless the most injurious, for it was immediate and drastic. White bread we had for the first meal and thereafter, as well as coffee and sugar. Had we been allowed our own simple diet of meat, either boiled with soup or dried, and fruit, with perhaps a few vegetables, we should have thrived. But the change in clothing, housing, food and confinement combined with lonesomeness was too much, and in three years nearly one half of the children from the Plains were dead and through with earthly schools. In the graveyard at Carlisle most of the graves are those of little ones.”

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Locations of known Native American boarding schools in continental U.S. as of 1982, with data informed by study conducted by T.J. Morgan.

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Locations of known Native American boarding schools in continental U.S. as of 1982, with data informed by study conducted by T.J. Morgan.

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There lies a clear correlation between the location of Native American boarding schools and Native American government-sanctioned reservations. The blue indicates Native peoples’ territory, and the red dots, countering the blue, are the schools. The data presented in this map was informed by a survey conducted in 1892 by T.J. Morgan. This map acts as a visual representation of the physical imposition upon Native peoples’ spaces that the United States government placed during the late 19th century. One may also note how the divisions of American state borders cut across Native American territory, which may segregate Native peoples’ communities. In many ways has America compartmentalized and divided Native American peoples.