What was vocational training like at Native American boarding schools? What types of training did students receive and why? And how was vocational training connected with the assimilationist mission of boarding schools?

At off-reservation boarding schools across the U.S., it was common for students to spend half of their day engaged in basic academic instruction, and the other half in vocational training courses. In practice, this meant that after completing English, math, and social studies courses, boarding school students spent their afternoons in on-the-job training programs. In some ways, this training mirrored programs available to non-Native public school students in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. My great aunt and uncle, for example, participated in this kind of program in New York in the 1930s, and built careers out of their training.

However, the vocational training programs at Native American boarding schools were developed for different reasons and with different motivations. For one, vocational training programs at these boarding schools were based on white supremacist assumptions: federal officials argued that Native children had no aptitude for advanced academic instruction, and should therefore develop practical skills to ensure their economic self-sufficiency. This was not the case in public schools in the U.S., where students’ tests scores and interests factored into their vocational training opportunities. The types of training offered to Native children were also impacted by such assumptions. Many vocational programs focused on training students in menial tasks, based on the assumption they would not establish or manage their own businesses, but work for someone else. Young men were thus taught house painting and how to pump gas, and young women domestic skills so they could find jobs cleaning in other women’s homes.

It is also important to point out that the chronically underfunded boarding school system relied on students’ labor to keep the schools running. Teaching girls to do laundry, for example, meant a school did not have to hire workers for those positions. Similarly, having male students work on a school farm meant hiring fewer farmhands. Students were not paid for any of work they did at boarding schools; in fact, federal officials considered their labor as a sort of quid pro quo for the educations they received at these schools. That school budgets actually benefited from students’ free labor was rarely mentioned.

Additionally, and unlike vocational training programs at public schools, boarding school vocational programs were considered critical to the assimilation of Native students into mainstream American society. The training programs offered at boarding schools also encouraged students to gain experience in career fields that were often not available to them on their reservations or in their communities. This meant graduates had to search for jobs in cities or regions far from their homes, further reducing their connections with their land and family. Schools also maintained “outing programs,” whereby students were sent to work for local white families, where they earned a small wage and learned “proper” behavior from their employers, all as a means of hastening students’ assimilation. Boarding school officials also hoped vocational training would make Native communities financially self-sufficient, which they thought would lessen the financial burden Native people supposedly imposed on the U.S. government. Of course, this idea completely ignores the reality that federal financial obligations were mandated by hundreds of treaties signed between U.S. officials and sovereign Native nations over hundreds of years.

So, what did these programs look like in practice? For starters, vocational training was gendered within boarding schools, meaning that completely separate programs were available to male and female students. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this meant boys received instruction in house painting, carpentry, farming, or blacksmithing, while girls’ training focused almost exclusively on domestic skills: cooking, housekeeping, childcare, and sewing. School officials also viewed female students’ domestic skills as especially important to their assimilationist goals. Upon graduation, Native women were expected to manage their homes in accordance with the values taught in boarding schools, and to share them with family members and within their communities to spread the U.S. government’s assimilationist message. Young women were later permitted train as nursing aides as well, but even this opportunity continued to place women primarily in caregiver roles.

At the Stewart Indian School, more training opportunities became available to students in the late 1960s, though school officials continued to denigrate students’ intelligence by asserting that these programs were basic in nature. Male and female students enrolled in business administration courses at that time, though school officials emphasized the accompanying classes did not prepare students for advanced degrees or professional employment in that area. Being in Nevada, Stewart also offered male students employment in local casinos, and later developed a police cadet program in which male and female students could enroll.

Unfortunately, it is hard to quantify the extent to which vocational training programs helped or hindered boarding school students. School officials rarely contacted alumni to check on their status, and I have not found any statistics indicating how many students obtained jobs in the fields for which they trained. With regard to the Stewart Indian School, I found only one instance, in the 1920s, in which school officials reached out to former students to see whether they were using their training. And the responses they received were decidedly mixed. However, Stewart students and alumni did exert pressure on school officials to improve their vocational opportunities by making the programs more modern and relevant to student interests, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also important to emphasize that despite the deficiencies in boarding school vocational training programs, many Stewart Indian School students went on to earn advanced degrees in a variety of subjects and attain leadership positions within their tribal nations, which many used to advocate for increased educational opportunities for Native youth.

Sources:

National Archives and Records Administration. Records of the Educational Division. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives - Pacific Region (San Francisco).

National Archives and Records Administration. Records of the Educational Division. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives – Washington D.C.

Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum Collection (all photographs).