Illness and Epidemics at the Stewart Indian School

Is it possible to think about anything other than illnesses and epidemics right now? When I was trying to decide what to write about this week, it seemed logical to explore these issues at the Stewart Indian School, especially because disease outbreaks were so common there (and at other off-reservation boarding schools) until the 1920s and 1930s.

Despite the frequency of epidemics at off-reservation boarding schools during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were not centrally documented by the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). In discussing this issue with other historians, there are only two items we have found (thus far) in National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) collections that record boarding school epidemics. Pictured below, they consist of two bright red books, one of which chronicles cases between 1901 and 1907, and the other in 1908. I found one page about outbreaks at Stewart. That is it.

You can piece together some information about epidemics from the annual reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, which often included reports from boarding school administrators, in separate reports written by boarding school superintendents, and in newspaper articles. Official reports on illnesses and deaths at schools like Stewart are almost assuredly incomplete, however, and it is likely that federal officials and local administrators purposefully kept poor records about student illnesses and deaths to make the boarding school system look more successful and safer than it actually was. The presence of cemeteries at most boarding schools, including the one at Stewart, pictured below, illustrates the reality of illness and death at these institutions.

So, why were there so many epidemics at boarding schools? Most of the circumstances that fostered epidemics stemmed from the chronic underfunding of the Indian Service, combined with the desire to enroll increasing numbers of students at these schools. Facilities did not expand as quickly as student populations, and neither did schools’ capacity to feed students or provide them with adequate medical care. At Stewart, as the student population increased in the early 1900s and into the 1920s, federal officials repeatedly denied funding requests to enlarge and improve housing, classrooms, or dining facilities. Boarding schools also often lacked access to fresh fruits and vegetables or quality proteins, so students’ diets consisted primarily of carbohydrates. This led to widespread malnutrition and hunger. Students also had limited access to healthcare. At the Stewart School, an infirmary was constructed on the campus in 1905 (pictured below), fifteen years after the school opened, and a sanitorium, where students with contagious diseases were isolated, added in 1916. However, there was rarely a full-time physician at the school, leaving students to be cared for by dorm matrons or, if they were lucky, a nurse employed by the school. 

The combination of these circumstances was, at times, devastating. Though details about disease outbreaks at the school were not always reported by school officials, those that were demonstrate the severity of the problem. In January 1891, an outbreak of mumps occurred at the school, infecting an estimated ninety percent of the student body. So many students ran away or were taken home by their parents that officials recorded a twenty percent decrease in the daily attendance average. During the summer of 1892, when all but 27 students were home for the summer, smallpox, scarlet fever, and diphtheria outbreaks occurred at Stewart and in surrounding communities. Of the 173 pupils enrolled in the 1892-1893 school year, only 79 arrived at the beginning of school, likely because of parents’ fears of disease at the school.  Overall, between 1890 and 1921, five smallpox outbreaks were recorded at the school.

Between 1926 and 1932, there were various epidemics of influenza, measles, scabies, tuberculosis and mumps, along with multiple cases of chicken pox, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and spinal meningitis at Stewart. And in 1934, after an outbreak of polio in which one student died from the disease, school officials found it difficult to persuade parents to enroll their children at the school.

By the end of the 1920s, the conditions Native children endured at boarding schools were resoundingly criticized, both by alumni and federal officials. In 1928, a Brookings Institution Report entitled The Problem of Indian Administration, more commonly known as the Meriam Report, highlighted problems at the schools and recommended that, over time, each of the poorly maintained boarding schools be closed. The report described the Indian school system as overcrowded and dirty, largely due to inadequate government funding, and confirmed that many students suffered from malnutrition and preventable illnesses.

Though federal officials rejected the wholesale elimination of off-reservation boarding schools, many were closed, and those that remained instituted recommended changes. At Stewart, this meant improving the diets of the study body and the construction of new buildings. During the 1930-1931 school year, Superintendent Frederick Snyder wrote that an increase in funding allowed the school to purchase fresh fruits for students, which they now enjoyed daily. School officials also received cows from the shuttered boarding school at Fort Bidwell in northern California, which provided students with a pint and a half of milk every day. A previously planted vegetable garden was also cited as a source of fresh vegetables in Stewart students’ diets. Renovations at the school in the 1930s reduced the crowding issues at the school, thereby alleviating some of the conditions that led to epidemics in previous decades. Though students continued to experience varied types of illness at the school, the epidemics that occurred during the first several decades after the school opened had ended by the 1930s.

Sources:

Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1891, 1892.

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?type=browse&scope=HISTORY.COMMREP

General Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75; National Archives and Records Building, Washington, D.C.

Records of the Stewart Indian School. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives - Pacific Region (San Francisco).

The Problem of Indian Administration (Meriam Report).” National Indian Law Library. https://www.narf.org/nill/documents/merriam/o_meriam_chapter9_part2_education.pdf

 Bonnie Thompson. The Student Body: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-1940. (Dissertation, Arizona State University, December 2013)

https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/125895/content/Thompson_asu_0010E_13545.pdf