Background: Boarding Schools and Assimilation

Boarding Schools and Assimilation

A picture of uniformed students at the Carlisle Indian School, circa 1900. Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carlisle_pupils.jpg

Before diving into my work on the Stewart Indian School, I thought it might be helpful to share some information about the creation of the off-reservation boarding school system and how assimilationist programs were initially implemented at these schools.

The architect of the boarding school system was a U.S. Army officer named Richard Henry Pratt. After serving in wars between the U.S. military and Native nations in the West, Pratt was assigned as a jailor to a group of Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida in 1875. During his three years in this assignment, he created an education program for these imprisoned men designed to educate and “civilize” Native peoples with the goal of integrating them into U.S. society. It is important to note that these men were not asked whether they wished to participate in Pratt’s program, nor were they consulted about its content or parameters.

Pratt’s efforts were praised by the U.S. government, and he developed support for expanding his educational program. Pratt and his supporters rationalized that a new type of education was the most humane option for resolving what was termed “the Indian problem” in the late nineteenth century, given the toll that decades of removal, massacre, broken treaties, and war had taken on Indigenous nations. Pratt is famous for coining the motto “kill the Indian, save the man,” meaning that Native peoples could only survive in the U.S. by abandoning their cultures, languages, and lands, and in their place adopting Christianity and mainstream white, middle-class American values.

Pratt began working with the Office of Indian Affairs to develop off-reservation boarding schools as a vehicle to rapidly “civilize” and educate Native children, and assimilate them into U.S. society from a very young age. Unlike day school and boarding schools that already existed on reservations, these schools would give U.S. officials complete access to Native children, without interference from parents or family members who might continue speaking their languages or engaging in cultural practices with their children.

The first off-reservation boarding school in the U.S. was opened in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with Pratt at the helm. Over the next three decades, 26 additional schools opened across the U.S., enrolling thousands of Native children, some as young as four years old. As with Pratt’s first “civilizing” project, Native peoples were not consulted about any aspect of these schools or their establishment.

From the beginning, assimilation was the primary objective of these schools, and this would be accomplished through the erasure of all aspects of students’ Indigenous identities, from their appearance and clothing, to their Indigenous names and languages. Children had their hair cut, were given school uniforms and, at some schools, ID numbers. They were punished for speaking their languages and forced to attend Christian church services.

Photographs of Carlisle student and Navajo citizen Tom Torlino, circa 1882. Such “before and after” photographs were used by school officials to show the dramatic impacts of assimilation and civilization programs. Photo Credit: http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/tom-torlino-student-file

Students spent half of their days in basic academic classes, learning English and math, and the other half engaged in gendered vocational instruction, in trades such as woodworking, farming, or painting for boys, and in domestic life for girls. Vocational training was meant to ensure that graduates could earn a living or keep a proper home as a wife and mother upon their graduation.

 Officially, students were forbidden from spending time with their families to prevent them from engaging with their cultures and languages. Many families found ways around these rules and plenty of students ran away from boarding schools, but some children went years without seeing their loved ones. Collectively, these policies fractured generations of Native families and nearly destroyed many Indigenous peoples’ links to their cultures and languages. Though touted as a humane way to protect Native peoples, the damage unleashed by decades of assimilationist programs in boarding schools continues to impact Indigenous families across the United States.

Until next time,

Samantha

For more information on this topic: 

David Wallace Adams. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Richard Henry Pratt. Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904. Edited by Robert M. Utley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964.

Carlisle Indian School Project: http://www.carlisleindianschoolproject.com/history/

Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center: http://www.carlisleindianschoolproject.com/history/