How to Make a Bed (While Ignoring Disease and Overcrowding)
How to Make a Bed (While Ignoring Disease and Overcrowding)
Circular Number 63: Bed Making (February 15, 1904)
Life at Native American boarding schools in the early twentieth century was highly regimented; bureaucrats from the Department of the Interior sought to manage every last aspect of student life. A few years ago I found a huge book of “circulars,” similar to memos, in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., that captures how strictly the daily lives of students and employees were managed. Some of the contents of these documents made it into my book on the Stewart Indian School. Many that did not are still worth writing about, though, if only because they represent the intense control and negligence of federal officials overseeing the Native American boarding school system.
Bedmaking circular, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., RG 75.Estelle Reel photo courtesy of Wikimedia commons. One such document from February 1904 concerns bed making. Over the course of two and a half pages (!), Superintendent of Indian Schools Estelle Reel provides detailed instructions to school superintendents and dorm matrons on the proper way to make a bed. Reel recommends the bed making methods used by the U.S. Army, and even provides an illustration that shows how to create “a military roll from the head to the foot.” She further instructs that children should only sleep one to a bed, and that no child should be permitted “to sleep with their heads under the bedclothes or their arms over their heads.” The dorm rooms in which children slept should remain “clean and cheerful,” but with “no useless hangings and few pictures or ornaments,” to “collect dust.” Windows in the dorm rooms could only be opened after children went to sleep, and even then only with a board installed at the bottom of a window with “a slope inward of about fifteen degrees” that would prevent wind from blowing directly on the sleeping children. Overall, Reel connected good bedmaking with “the preservation of good sanitary conditions,” and believed it to be “conducive to health of mind and body” for Native students.
So…bedmaking. Why does this stand out? And why does it, quite honestly, irritate the heck out of me? Clearly, this memo is about more than bedmaking and maintaining clean living spaces. On a broader level, it reflects a Progressive Era focus on the proper and precise administration of government bureaucracies and an effort to standardize federal practices. In terms of boarding schools, Reel’s memo highlights the militaristic and regimented nature of student life at boarding schools: not only were students forced to perform military drills and march to and from class during this period, they were even required to make their beds like little soldiers. Personalizing their living spaces was basically forbidden, according to this document, which reflects not just the effort to assimilate Native children, but the desire to fully separate these kids from anything that might remind them of home. Thinking about these young children, sleeping in their precisely made beds, not allowed to snuggle under their blankets or place their arms wherever they want, with no pictures of their families or homes, is pretty bleak.
But even more than any of this, when I think of Native American boarding schools in the early 1900s, I think of sickness and disease. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boarding schools were underfunded, overcrowded, and lacked proper sanitation facilities for the number of children living at these schools. Students frequently did not have enough to eat, and the food they had was of poor quality. This led to malnourishment and, as a result, made children more susceptible to disease. Tuberculosis was rampant at boarding schools during this period, along with outbreaks of influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhoid, measles, mumps, and the eye infection trachoma. Though many boarding schools had hospitals on campus, medical personnel did not fully understand how contagious these diseases were, so even if there was enough space to separate the sick children from the healthy children, this probably would not have occurred. As a result, The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, notes that by 1915, “the Indian tuberculosis incidence rate at Indian boarding schools (and on reservations) was four or more times the non-Indian rate,” while “Three out of ten students had trachoma.” (Note: The Heard Museum collection actually contains a photo of the Carlisle Indian School Hospital using the bedmaking technique Reel advised in 1907.) The prevalence of disease and death at boarding schools in the late 1800s and early 1900s in part accounts for the construction of cemeteries at most schools after they opened.
Examining data on illnesses at specific boarding schools further emphasizes the extent of disease as a problem in the early twentieth century. Though this data is not available for all boarding schools in the U.S. over time, my colleague Preston McBride wrote a detailed dissertation about this topic at four boarding schools: Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon; the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, and the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. The bottom line of McBride’s research: between 1879 and 1934, thousands of Native children died of disease at just four off-reservation boarding schools, while thousands more died at home as a result of infections they acquired while attending school. He specifically argues, using documentation from federal archival sources, that a combination of federal policies, underfunding, and “gross negligence” on the part of school officials was the cause of these deaths.
McBride also names each of the children who died as a result of this negligence in an appendix that runs hundreds of pages. His documentation is precise and conclusive. And again, this data focuses on four schools. The total number of off-reservation boarding schools during the time span covered in McBride’s research changed as some closed and others opened, but at one time there were as many as 27 off-reservation schools open. If a similar review was conducted of all of these schools, how many more deaths would be uncovered? The potential numbers are devastating to consider.
All of this is why Estelle Reel’s directive on bedmaking bothers me. Making beds and keeping your blankets rolled up did nothing to address the actual health concerns facing Native children attending boarding school. Clean sheets are good. Tidy bedding is nice. But because federal officials focused on issues like this – again, spending two and a half pages on how to make a bed – rather than addressing actual issues of overcrowding and poor nourishment, thousands of Native children died. Gross negligence, indeed. But boy, those beds must have looked great.
Sources:
Georgia State University Library: Health is a Human Right, American Indian Boarding Schools
The Heard Museum: Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, Health
https://boardingschool.heard.org/health/
McBride, Preston. A Lethal Education: Institutionalized Negligence, Epidemiology, and Death in Native American Boarding Schools, 1879-1934
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1bw51497
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Record Group 75, Bureau of Indian Affairs.