In the late nineteenth century, the United States government funded and created boarding schools to purge Native American children of their tribal identities and cultures.[1] Such children, through enticement or force, were transported hundreds or even thousands of miles from their reservations and deposited at institutions like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first of its kind (opened 1879). With the United States now spanning the continent, officials and advocates saw federal boarding schools as a method by which a rogue element within American borders – indigenous nations – could be eradicated, removed from their land, absorbed into mainstream society through re-education. The mission, write historian Jacqueline Fear-Segal and sociologist Susan Rose, was “to impose ‘civilization’ through total immersion” and “prepare Native youth for assimilation and American citizenship.”[2] While this was the intention, it can be argued that students generally did not learn to be “Americans” as defined by white visionaries, but did see value in the skills and knowledge attained at these institutions, highlighting a tension between utility or intellectual, technological growth and cultural preservation.

With Native American youth cleaved from their homes, families, and traditions, white educators implemented their curricula to “kill the Indian” and “save the man,” to quote Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle school, in 1892.[3] We know from Pratt’s writings that teaching English, industriousness, and self-sufficiency was highly important. This would cure Native Americans’ “chronic condition of helplessness” and enable them to live and work alongside whites.[4] His school sent youth “out into our communities,” Pratt explained, “to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored.”[5] This is a reference to the “outing” program, which entailed sending students to work as farmhands, maids, and so on during the summers (children often did not go home for many years).[6] Students, Pratt declared, in “joining us and becoming part of the United States,” should also be made “loyal to the government… Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large.”[7] “Teaching American citizenship” was crucial.[8] White customs, habits, and life purposes beyond nationalism and the world of work should likewise be inculcated. Pratt uses the terms “civilize” and “assimilate,” so necessary to end indigenous people’s (albeit environment-based, not innate) “savagery.”[9]

In 1890, the U.S. secretary of the interior handed down guidelines for indigenous boarding schools, stating Americanization required “training of the hand in useful industries; the development of the mind in independent and self-directing power of thought; the impartation of useful practical knowledge; the culture of the moral nature, and the formation of character.”[10] Students experienced a highly regimented environment — “military-style,” to quote Fear-Segal and Rose.[11] The secretary wrote that pupils should be forced to attend religious services and punished for using any language but English. “Grave violations of rules” resulted in “corporal punishment or imprisonment in the guardhouse.”[12] Donald Warren of Indiana University writes that the curriculum featured reading, writing, and speaking English, arithmetic, and U.S. history and government.[13] Schoolwork also included industrial training, farming, mechanics, housekeeping, singing, and mastery of instruments.[14] Proper personal care, hygiene, and dress (they wore uniforms) were important, as were manners and etiquette. “They should be taught the sports and games enjoyed by white youth,” the secretary continued, from baseball to marbles.[15] “The girls should be instructed in simple fancy work, knitting, netting, crocheting…”[16] Each boarding school was to display the American flag daily.

Primary sources left by Native Americans illuminate reactions, including what students rejected or took to heart. Zitkála-Šá of the Yankton Dakota, a student at Carlisle, wrote of “unjustifiable frights and punishments” and “extreme indignities” like having her hair shorn, being tied down, teachers striking students, and incomprehensible rules.[17] Originally excited to journey east to attend school, once there her “spirit tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom,” and she “rebelled.”[18] She broke rules, ran and hid from teachers, did chores improperly, and tore frightening pictures of the devil in a Christian story book. When tuberculosis swept through Carlisle, Zitkála-Šá grew suspicious of both the quality of care sick youths received and the religious rites (“superstitious ideas”) pressed upon the dying.[19] To Zitkála-Šá, the strict routine of this “civilizing machine” was a “harness” causing “pain.”[20] She was “actively testing the chains which tightly bound my individuality.”[21] After three years, she returned home to South Dakota and felt lost, in “chaos,” being “neither a wild Indian nor a tame one” after her experience.[22] She wept seeing young people on the reservation wearing white America’s clothing and speaking English, and wanted to burn her mother’s bible.

Resistance to assimilation, despair over cultural erosion, and crises of identity were common among Native American youth who attended federal boarding schools. Fear-Segal and Rose write that “some found [Carlisle] traumatic and begged to go home or ran away; others completed their Carlisle schooling but lived with stress and disturbance upon their return.”[23] Only seven percent of students graduated from this school; most were discharged. “The vast majority did not assimilate into mainstream society,” the scholars write, but returned to their nations, often feeling as Zitkála-Šá did.[24] The researchers cite the example of Plenty Horses of the Sicangu Lakota — “When I returned to my people, I was an outcast among them. I was no longer an Indian. I was not a white man…” — but also note that indoctrination could work, at least for a time, as with Sun Elk from the Taos Pueblo: “After a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances.”[25] Native American children could be made ashamed of who they were. Nevertheless, with most returning to reservations, and with accounts of resistance and “feeling caught between two cultures,” one can posit that students largely did not learn to be so-called true Americans, who would leave their reservations and integrate with white society.[26]

Yet students recognized the advantages of skills and experience they gained at boarding schools. There was much use value in certain knowledge and practices – which may have made some lifestyle changes feel less threatening to the larger culture. Despite her painful experiences, Zitkála-Šá wrote that after graduating, “I was the proud owner of my first diploma.”[27] She then went to college, against her mother’s wishes. Zitkála-Šá, then, both lamented cultural erosion or transformation and continued participating in its mechanisms. Perhaps there was a distinction between entering the white world to be educated in new ways (more acceptable) and bringing white ways of living, speaking, and thinking back to the reservation (less acceptable). But Zitkála-Šá’s mother may reveal a different tension. She is deeply suspicious of whites, with their “lies” and violent conquests, but is “influenced…to take a farther step from her native way of living” by replacing her wigwam with a log home.[28] Perhaps the difference was in fact that certain things added to indigenous life were generally more palatable (knowledge, diplomas, forms of shelter) than others. Individuals would of course have different views on what was agreeable, with a mother pushing a bible and a daughter wanting to burn it. There was, Donald Warren writes, little “agreement on the need to choose between tribal and white cultures” – some were more open to mixing than others – but there was “growing acknowledgement that learning English and preparing for employment in the U.S. economy banked useful assets…”[29] Some pursuits and practices from white society were judged to be sensible, or even matters of survival — Zitkála-Šá “will need an education when she is grown,” her mother mused when deciding about Carlisle, “for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces.”[30] The gun may be the best example of a novelty too practical to ignore. Ohíye S’a of the Santee Dakota wrote of hating the idea of wearing white America’s clothing, but this was long after he started using a gun![31] Usefulness may have impacted the degree to which practices and technology were seen as threats to tradition.

Letters, alumni surveys, and other primary documents suggest other students saw utility in education at white institutions. Vincent Natalish became a civil engineer in New York, took courses at Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later sought to enroll his son at Carlisle.[32] Elizabeth Wind became a nurse in Wichita, Kansas, and also tried to send her boy to Carlisle.[33] Mary North, writing to the alumni association in 1912, praised “dear old Carlisle” which “taught us so many useful things [and] helped us so much in our living and working on our farm, which we love better than living any other place.”[34] Her family tried “to live like the good white people live.”[35] Martha Napawat reported to the school later in life that she wanted “to be a good example of Carlisle. You tell the white people that it does pay to educate the Indian… I am trying to keep a house like a white woman.”[36] “Great improvement in Indians” could be seen, for example the transition from teepees to houses.[37] Writings to school officials and former figures of power are open to questions of sincerity (did former students simply tell boarding schools what they wanted to hear?), but voluntarily sending one’s child to Carlisle is indicative of the perceived value of such an education, at minimum for survival in an increasingly white world, an idea scholars have touched upon.[38]

In sum, the experience of indigenous children in federal boarding schools was complex. Cultural erasure, oppression, trauma, resistance, interest in learning, and cultural adaptation all occurred together. Pratt’s mission to “release these people from their tribal relations,” “citizenizing and absorbing them” into the larger American society through education did not succeed. The most important thing students were to learn – that Native American societies had little value and should be abandoned – went largely unlearned. Still, white schools offered training and knowledge that students found useful and engaging; such learning was brought back to reservations, and to a lesser extent turned into careers beyond the reservations. Boarding schools, among much else, did change students and indigenous nations. The field should continue to refine its understanding of the degree of this change, and explore whether new ways of living were viewed with hostility in inverse correlation to utility, which could reveal a new layer of Native American agency.[39]

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[1] Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan Rose, eds., Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). See the introduction.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Richard Henry Pratt, Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271. Online at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle.

[7] Pratt, Official Report.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “Rules for Indian Schools,” U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1890 (Washington, D.C., 1890), cxlvi, cl-clii. In Sol Cohen, ed., Education in the United States: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1977), 3:1756.

[11] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle.

[12] “Rules for Indian Schools,” 1759.

[13] Donald Warren, “American Indian Histories as Education History,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2014): 263. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24482179.

[14] “Rules for Indian Schools,” 1757-1760.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Zitkála-Šá, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” American Indian Stories (Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921), 47-80. Online at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/school.html.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle; Pratt, Official Report.

[27] Zitkála-Šá, “School Days.”

[28] Zitkála-Šá, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” American Indian Stories (Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921), 7-45. Online at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/impressions.html.  

[29] Warren, 269.

[30] Zitkála-Šá, “Impressions.”

[31] Ohíye S’a (Charles Eastman), Indian Boyhood (New York: McClure, Philips, and Co., 1902). Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/337/337-h/337-h.htm#link2H_4_0031. See chapter 12.

[32] Superintendent to Vincent Natalish, December 17, 1915, and Vincent Natalish to Oscar Tipps, December 14, 1915, in “Vincent Natalish (Nah-tail-eh) Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/vincent-natalish-nah-tail-eh-student-file. See pages 21-25 of the PDF.

[33] Superintendent to Mrs. Paul B. Diven, January 3, 1911, and Betty W. Diven to Moses Friedman, January 26, 1914, in “Elizabeth Wind (Ro-nea-we-ia) Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/elizabeth-wind-ro-nea-we-ia-student-file. See pages 10 and 17 of the PDF.

[34] Mary L. N. Tasso to Officers of the Alumni Association, February 1, 1912, in “Mary North Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/mary-north-student-file. See pages 10-11 of the PDF.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Mary Napawat Thomas Returned Student Survey, in “Mary Napawat Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/martha-napawat-student-file. See pages 6-7 of the PDF.

[37] Ibid.

[38] For more on survival and education, see Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “Culture, Place, and Power: Engaging the Histories and Possibilities of American Indian Education,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2014): 395–402. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24482187.

[39] Warren’s “confining binary” of “victims or agents” may be further eroded if perceived usefulness impacted decisions about encroaching white cultural elements. See Warren, 261.