Beginning in the nineteenth century, boarding schools played a fundamental cycle in the programs designed by the U.S. government to foster the assimilation of native peoples into the mainstream of American society. Reformers and politicians who favored the policy of reservation allotment also advanced the concept of placing Indian children in residential schools where they would speak English, learn a vocation, and practice farming. Advocates of boarding schools argued that industrial training, in combination with several years of isolation from family, would diminish the influence of tribalism on a new generation of American Indians. For fifty years after the first federally administered residential school was established in 1879 at Carilsle, Pennsylvania, thousands of Native American children and youth were sent to live, work, and be educated in the schools.
———Prior to Carlisle, most American Indians had little experience with the boarding-school concept. Some had attended mission schools, and three unique institutions had developed earlier in the century: the Choctaw Academy and the Cherokee Male and Females Seminaries. The Choctaw Academy in Kentucky, founded in 1825, was a male boarding school that Indian and white children attended. The academy was funded by proceeds from Choctaw land cessions in the Southeast during the 1820s. By 1851, the Cherokees in Oklahoma had opened male and female seminaries near Tahequah to educate members of their nation. Cherokee students studied a curriculum that was patterned after that of Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts.
———Boarding-school attendance increased dramatically when Congress increased funding for Indian education in the 1870s. The Indian Industrial School at Carlisle was the most well known of the Indian boarding schools, and developed a reputation for athleticism and winning football teams. Jim Thorpe, the most famous Native American athlete of the twentieth century, was a student at Carlisle when he won the decathlon and pentathlon during the Olympic Games in Sweden in 1912. Indian students like Thorpe were recruited to Pennsylvania from many tribes and regions in the West. Carlisle's founder, Richard Henry Pratt, a former officer in the U.S. military, designed the simple boarding-school program. Ideally, students were to spend half the day in the classroom and the remainder in manual labor. The vocationally oriented "outing program" was also a trademark of Pratt's that many other schools adopted. His goal was encapsulated in the phrase "Kill the Indian and save the man."
———By 1899, twenty-five residential schools had been established in fifteen states with a total enrollment of twenty thousand students. Tremendous tribal diversity was reflected in the boarding-school population. In 1917, the final year Carlisle was in operation, fifty-eight tribes were represented in the student body, with Ojibwa students in the majority. The Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas founded in 1884, was a very intertribal school, with students enrolled from the Midwest, the Southwest, and Oklahoma. Hundreds of Cherokee students attended the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, though the institution also recruited from a wide range of tribes Not all Indian boarding schools were as diverse as Carlisle, Haskell, and Chilocco. The Santa Fe Indian School, opened in New Mexico in 1890, primarily educated Pueblos and youths from other tribes in the Southwest. Reservation boarding schools, like Riverside in Oklahoma and Kansas Canyon in Arizona, served more local Indian populations.
———The transition to boarding-school life seldom came smoothly for Indian children. The experience was punctuated by the trauma of separation from family and community, sever bouts of homesickness, and a difficult period of adjustment to a new environment. The loneliness students experienced was compounded by harsh policies that strictly regulated visits home. Officials limited the frequency and duration of children's visits to their families, contending that relatives and other community members would hinder the work of assimilation, or that newly reformed and educated students would lapse into their former "degraded" lifestyles. For Indian children, this often meant an extended stay of four years or more at school. Inflexible boarding-school regulations developed into a source of conflict between parents and school officials. As one mother complained to a school superintendent at the Flandreau Boarding School in South Dakota, where her daughter resided, "It seems that it would be much easier to get her out of prison than out of your school."
———The boarding-school setting also proved to be conductive to the spread of disease. Many of the Indian deaths during the great influenza pandemic of 1918, which hit the Native American population hard, took place in boarding schools. At Haskell alone, over three hundred students grew critically ill, and many died. In the early twentieth century trachoma, the contagious and painful eye diseases, afflicted nearly half of the boarding-school population.
———Tuberculosis was also commonplace in government boarding schools, where disease and healthy students intermingled. Little effort was made to provide afflicted children with special care to enriched diets. In letters to their family members, students sometimes complained of poor health. In 1924 a young student from Ashland, Wisconsin, requested that she be sent to a tuberculosis sanatorium rather than attend school while suffering the effects of the disease. The girl, miserable because of painful lesions on her legs that refused to heal, complained about the constant drilling and marching that was so much a part of the boarding-school regimen. The student tried to reason with her superintendent when she said: "How do you expect me to learn and study when I suffer so [?] . . . Would you rather have me go away to a sanatorium and get well and there I can learn and be happy or, Have me going to school and suffer?" By 1924, when this letter was written, students with tuberculosis had long been "officially" excluded from attending government boarding schools.
———Native American parents often charged government boarding schools with ravaging the health of their children. In letters to school superintendents and sometimes to the Indian Office in Washington, parents complained about the outing programs, the long days, the work details, and the fact that boarding schools relied heavily on unpaid student labor for their operation. Some parents grew so concerned about the deteriorating health of their children that they refused to return them to boarding schools. The father of another student wrote to Flandreau in 1913 to explain his son's absence in September. The man, a cattle rancher, simply said he "preferred to have a live cowboy rather than a dead scholar." Unfortunately, hundreds of Native American children did not survive the boarding-school experience. Many Indian schools, including Haskell, Carlisle, Chemawa (in Oregon), and others, maintained cemeteries to bury the many Indian children who succumbed to sickness and disease.
———The Mariam Report, a major investigation into Indian affairs was published in 1928, confirmed the complaints Indian families and students had been making for years. It asserted that government boarding schools needlessly separated families and that children were often malnourished, sick, insufficiently clothed, overworked, harshly punished, and poorly trained. During John Collier's long tenure as Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945, many government boarding schools closed or changed to day schools. Ironically, attendance rose during the same period because of Indian poverty during the Great Depression. Despite Collier's wishes, government boarding-schools were never completely abandoned. A few schools remained operational at midcentury. Haskell Institute converted to the Haskell Indian Junior College in 1964, Chilocco closed in 1980, and the Phoenix Indian School ceased operating late in the Reagan era. Some institutions continued as boarding schools but hired new administrators and instituted more contemporary policies. The Santa Fe Indian School, founded in 1890 to educate Indian children in the Southwest, is operated today by the All Indian Pueblo Council in New Mexico.
———The boarding-school concept had many shortcomings, but the institutions are credited with cultivating "Pan-Indianism," an important part of native identity in the twentieth century. People formerly separated by language, culture, and geography lived and worked together in residential schools. Students formed close bonds and enjoyed a rich cross-cultured exchange. Graduates of government schools often married former classmates, found employment in the Indian Service, migrated to urban areas, or returned to their reservations and entered tribal politics. Countless new alliances, both personal and political, were forged in government boarding schools.

BRENDA J. CHILD (Red Lake Chippewa)
University of Washington at Milwaukee