American Indian boarding schools, also known more recently as American Indian residential schools, were established in the United States from the mid-17th to the early 20th centuries with a main primary objective of "civilizing" or assimilating Native American children and youth into Anglo-American culture. In the process, these schools denigrated American Indian culture and made children give up their languages and religion.Mary Annette Pember, "Death by Civilization ", March 8, 2019, The Atlantic, Retrieved April 12, 2021 At the same time the schools provided a basic Western education. These boarding schools were first established by Christian missionaries of various denominations. The missionaries were often approved by the federal government of the United States to start both missions and schools on reservations, especially in the lightly populated areas of the West. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries especially, the government paid Church denominations to provide basic education to Native American children on reservations, and later established its own schools on reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) also founded additional off-reservation boarding schools. Similarly to schools that taught speakers of immigrant languages, the curriculum was rooted in linguistic imperialism, the English-only movement, and forced assimilation enforced by corporal punishment. These sometimes drew children from a variety of tribes. In addition, religious orders established off-reservation schools.
Children were typically immersed in the Anglo-American culture of the upper class. Schools forced removal of indigenous cultural signifiers: cutting the children's hair, having them wear American-style uniforms, forbidding them from speaking their mother tongues, and replacing their tribal names with English language names (saints' names under some religious orders) for use at the schools, as part of assimilation and to Christianize them. The schools were usually harsh, especially for younger children who had been forcibly separated from their families and forced to abandon their Native American identities and cultures. Children sometimes died in the school system due to infectious disease. Investigations of the later 20th century revealed cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Summarizing recent scholarship from Native perspectives, Dr. Julie Davis said:
Since those years, tribal nations have carried out political activism and gained legislation and federal policy that gives them the power to decide how to use federal education funds, how they educate their children, and the authority to establish their own community-based schools. Tribes have also founded numerous tribal colleges and universities on reservations. Tribal control over their schools has been supported by federal legislation and changing practices by the BIA. By 2007, most of the boarding schools had been closed down, and the number of Native American children in boarding schools had declined to 9,500.
Although there are hundreds of deceased Indigenous children yet to be found, investigations are increasing across the United States.
History of education of American Indians by European colonists
In the late eighteenth century, reformers starting with President George Washington and Henry Knox, in efforts to "civilize" or otherwise assimilate Native Americans, adopted the practice of assimilating Native American children in current American culture. At the time the society was dominated by agriculture, with many yeomen subsistence farmers, and rural society made up of some small towns and few large cities. The Civilization Fund Act of 1819 promoted this policy by providing funding to societies (mostly religious missionaries) who worked on Native American education, often at schools established in or near Native American communities. The reformers believed this policy would help the Indians survive increasing contact with European-American settlers who were moving west into their territories.
Moses Tom sent his children to an Indian boarding school.
Early mission schools In 1634, Fr. Andrew White of the English Province of the Society of Jesus established a mission in what is now Southern Maryland. He said the purpose of the mission, as an interpreter told the chief of a Native American tribe there, was "to extend civilization and instruction to his ignorant race, and show them the way to heaven".Foley, Henry. Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. 1875. London: Burns and Oates. p. 352. The mission's annual records report that by 1640, they had founded a community they named St. Mary's. Native Americans were sending their children there to be educated,Foley, p. 379 including the daughter of Tayac, the Pascatoe chief. She was likely an exception because of her father's status, as girls were generally not educated with boys in English Catholic schools of the period. Other students discussed in the records were male.
The same records report that in 1677,
In the mid-1600s, Harvard College established the Harvard Indian College on its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, supported by the Anglican Society for Propagation of the Gospel. Its few Native American students came from New England. In this period higher education was very limited for all classes, and most 'colleges' taught at a level more similar to today's high schools. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, "from the Wampanoag...did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period".Monaghan, E. J., Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, University of Massachusetts Press. Boston: MA, 2005, pp. 55, 59
In the early colonial years, other Indian schools were created by local New England communities, as with the Indian school in Lebanon, Connecticut in 1754. This would eventually become a parallel institution to Dartmouth College, which has retained some programs for Native Americans. Other schools were also created in the East, such as in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by Moravian missionaries. Religious missionaries from various denominations developed the first schools as part of their missions near indigenous settlements, believing they could extend education and Christianity to Native Americans. Moravian missionaries launched these schools with the intention of converting Native Americans and growing their church numbers. They were able to get government funding and launch this initiative on a large scale because their work also served the US government's purpose of shrinking Native American territory at the time. East of the Appalachian Mountains, most Indians had been forced off their traditional lands before the American Revolutionary War. They had few reservations.
In the early nineteenth century, the new republic continued to deal with questions about how Native American peoples would live. The Foreign Mission School, a Protestant-backed institution that opened in Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1816, was set up for male students from a variety of non-Christian peoples, mostly abroad. Native Hawaiians, Muslim and Hindu students from India and Southeast Asia were among the nearly 100 total who attended during its decade of operation. Also enrolled were Native American students from the Cherokee and Choctaw tribes (among the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Southeast), as well as Lenape (a mid-Atlantic tribe) and Osage students. It was intended to train young people as missionaries, interpreters, translators, etc. who could help guide their peoples. In some cases, students from this operation left their tribes entirely and assimilated into these religious communities. One instance of this would be when a Cherokee student by the name of John Ridge married the daughter of a trustee of the Foreign Mission School, Sara Northrup.
Nationhood, Indian Wars, and western settlement Through the 19th century, the encroachment of European Americans on Indian lands continued. From the 1830s, tribes from both the Southeast and the Great Lakes areas were pushed west of the Mississippi, forced off their lands to Indian Territory. As part of the treaties signed for land cessions, the United States was supposed to provide education to the tribes on their reservations. Some religious orders and organizations established missions in Kansas and what later became Oklahoma to work on these new reservations. Some of the Southeast tribes established their own schools, as the Choctaw did for both girls and boys.
After the Civil War and decades of Indian Wars in the West, more tribes were forced onto reservations after ceding vast amounts of land to the US. With the goal of assimilation, believed necessary so that tribal Indians could survive to become part of American society, the government increased its efforts to provide education opportunities. Some of this was related to the progressive movement, which believed the only way for the tribal peoples to make their way was to become assimilated, as American society was rapidly changing and urbanizing. It is important to make the distinction that the attacks on white supremacy and the promotion of equality (by the progressive movement) was not the driving force behind the creation of these schools. This is supported by Democratic representative Allen Thurman (who served from the 1860s to 1880s), who explains that the concept of US citizenship (as proposed by progressives) both championed equality for most people in the US while taking a hostile approach to Native Americans, as they believed that their sovereign identity had to be erased in order for the US to establish common citizenship rights.
Following the Indian Wars, missionaries founded additional schools in the West with boarding facilities. Given the vast areas and isolated populations, they could support only a limited number of schools. Some children necessarily had to attend schools that were distant from their communities. Initially under President Ulysses S. Grant, only one religious organization or order was permitted on any single reservation. The various denominations lobbied the government to be permitted to set up missions, even in competition with each other.
Assimilation-era day schools
Day schools were also created to implement federal mandates.https://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/fallon-indian-day-school Fallon Indian Day School retrieved 8/5/21 Compared to boarding schools, day schools were a less expensive option that usually received less parental pushback.
One example is the Fallon Indian Day School opened on the Stillwater Indian Reservation in 1908. Even after the process of closing boarding schools started, day schools remained open.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School
After the Indian Wars, Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt was assigned to supervise Native prisoners of war at Fort Marion which was located in St. Augustine, Florida. The United States Army sent seventy-two warriors from the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche and Caddo nations, to exile in St. Augustine, Florida. They were used as hostages to encourage their peoples in the West to remain peaceful.
Pratt began to work with them on education in European-American culture, essentially a kind of immersion. While he required changes: the men had to cut their hair and wear common uniforms rather than their traditional clothes, he also granted them increased autonomy and the ability to govern themselves within the prison. Pleased by his success, he was said to have supported the motto, "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." Pratt said in a speech in 1892:
Pratt provided for some of the younger men to pursue more education at the Hampton Institute, a historically black college founded in 1868 for the education of freedmen by biracial representatives of the American Missionary Association soon after the Civil War. Following Pratt's sponsored students, Hampton in 1875 developed a program for Native American students.