We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We also looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders. Today, we’re going backward slightly to cover the first of two painful chapters in American education.
Chiricahua Apache children as they looked upon their arrival at one of the Carlisle Indian Schools, 1886. pictures like these were meant to show their ‘savage’ nature. Image in the public domain.
Between 1819 through the 1970s, the United States implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the nation. These schools were intended to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native and (eventually) Native Hawaiian children into mainstream European American culture. To that end, the children were removed — even abducted — from their families, their communities, their culture, their languages, and their religious beliefs.
In practical terms, this meant that their native dress was taken away. Boys had their long hair cut. Punishments were doled out for those who were caught speaking their native tongues. The impetus to do this wasn’t wholly malicious; many believed it was the only way for indigenous people to fully integrate into American society. Some indigenous people also believed this was a better way for their children, to learn to straddle both worlds and hopefully be successful in both.* But the practice certainly arose from White discomfort with indigenous ways and that, coupled with the belief that beatings and other harsh forms of punishment like withholding food were absolutely necessary to form the character of any child and perhaps especially of indigenous children, led to a system in which many, many children were physically, sexually, and emotionally abused.** Still others died of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and measles because of malnutrition and the crowded condition.*** Some children disappeared completely; they went to the Indian boarding school and were simply never heard from again. The U.S. government was — and still is — unable to account for their fates. The conservative estimate is that 973 children died in the boarding schools, but the real number is almost certainly higher.
Boys from the Omaha Nation at the Carlisle School, dressed in cadet uniforms, 1880; image in the public domain.
The residential schools really got going just after the Civil War, when the U.S. government turned its attention to the West and the “Indian problem.” Several Christian denominations urged the government toward the boarding school model, with the express intent of eradicating native culture. They argued that the “complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents” was necessary, and that they must destroy the connection to their families of origin because “the warm reciprocal affection existing between parents and children [was] among the strongest characteristics of the Indian nature.” In other words, their loving, supportive family life prevented them from rejecting their backgrounds. The vast majority of federal Indian boarding schools were run by Christian denominations, Catholic and Protestant, on behalf, and with the full support, of the federal government.
We don’t know how many children were ultimately taken. We do know that by 1900, 20,000 children were in residential schools; by 1925, that number had more than tripled. In fact, in 1925, more than 80% of indigenous children were attending federal Indian boarding schools. At their peak, there were 417 of these schools across 37 states and territories. And the children were seldom there by choice. Here’s an account from the Hopi Nation of how their children were taken from their homes and sent to a boarding school in Arizona:
On December 28, 1890, the U.S. military entered Third Mesa of Hopi and took 104 children from
their families so they could be sent to the Keams Canyon Boarding School.
And when they resisted the abduction of their children:
Four years later, on November 25, 1894, two U.S. cavalry companies with rapid-fire artillery guns arrived again at Third Mesa to arrest 19 Hopi leaders as prisoners of war after they refused to send additional Hopi children to the school….The U.S. Government sent [those] leaders to Alcatraz Island…where they were held captive until September 1895 — isolated next to the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay more than 1,000 miles from their families, their Tribe, and their Hopi homelands.
Debating class at the original Carlisle Indian School. Note the slogan on the wall: “Labor Conquers All Things.” Image in the public domain.
What did the students learn? Certainly they learned to read and write. They were also taught trades like furniture building, shoe repair, blacksmithing, carpentry, and bricklaying. At the original Carlisle School, students constructed a number of the buildings to expand the campus as part of their vocational training. Girls were given lessons in “useful skills” like ironing, clothes mending, and European-style cooking. There is photographic evidence of other educational opportunities: physics lessons, music classes, and debate, and for boys, sports like football and track. Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox Nation) played football and ran track at the Carlisle School prior to competing (and winning gold) in track at the 1912 Olympics. But there was also a clear military aspect to the school: boys wore military-style uniforms. Children marched across the grounds to and from various locations and sometimes just so that their marching might be inspected. Children who disobeyed went to the guardhouse for punishment or were forced to perform hard labor. Students often had to wait for a series of bells before meals to tell them when to sit, when to pray, and when to eat. Several of the Native American Code Talkers in WWII spoke of how familiar the U.S. military was because of their experience at the Carlisle School.
The Carlisle School in particular was careful to curate what we would now call its “brand:” a school that was successfully assimilating indigenous students and turning them into Americans. Administrators took before and after photos of children, showing them arriving at the school with long hair and traditional clothing and then in the style of European Americans with closely cropped hair and cadet uniforms. Photos like this were shared with the media and in school publications as propaganda to show politicians and the American public that cultural assimilation was working and Indians were becoming productive, English-speaking Christians.^
Thanksgiving play at an Indian boarding school, date unknown. Everything about this image is painful. Public Domain.
And yet…the carefully curated images belied a very dark side to this approach. In 2024, the U.S. Department of the Interior released a report on the extent and effects of the residential school system between 1819 and the 1960s. The report shares survivor accounts that illustrate how students’ traumatic experiences in Indian boarding schools—some of which operated into the 1960s—continue to harm them, their descendants, and their communities to this day. The report notes that intergenerational trauma — trauma that impacts the mental and physical health of multiple generations — and debilitated tribal economies are still affecting Native American populations today. In 1969, a report commissioned under JFK found that “Conditions within Indian schools, particularly boarding schools, have done a great deal to bring about the causes of problem drinking and very little to prevent them.” Further research has demonstrated that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can negatively affect mental and physical health and cognition over an individual’s lifetime and can impact the children and grandchildren of that individual. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can be quantified into a score as a measure of traumatic childhood events children have been exposed to. These include: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, intimate partner violence, household substance use, household mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and household member incarceration.^^ ACEs scores for modern American Indians and Alaska Natives are significantly higher than those for Whites and Hispanics — 2.32 for indigenous people versus 1.52 and 1.66 for Whites and Hispanics respectively. The 2024 report says these higher scores “may be associated with intergenerational experiences and trauma including genocide of [American Indian and Alaska Native] individuals, abuse from the boarding school system, interruption of traditional practices, and centuries of colonialism.”^^^
Not until 1975 were Native American tribes allowed to take over education in federal boarding schools or establish schools of their own on tribal lands. Until 2024, however, no one from the U.S. government acknowledged or apologized for the abusive system it established and allowed to flourish for so long. President Joe Biden issued such an apology in late October, after the Department of the Interior report was released. While that was historic — and necessary as a means of demonstrating that the indigenous people of the U.S. are not invisible and that this abuse actually happened and happened on a wide scale — the report issued an explicit call for the federal government to invest in its Native population to a degree that is commensurate with the scale of the trauma and economic and social harms the boarding schools perpetuated against Native communities.
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*BUT — and it’s a big but — the Cherokee Nation offers a glimpse into how effective assimilation ultimately was. The Cherokee were an Eastern tribe located in what is now Georgia and they adopted many European practices: Western dress, market-oriented agriculture, European-style education, and (in 1820) a formal government with a written constitution. They also developed an alphabet for their language and many became literate. What they did not do was cede their rich farmlands to European settlers. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land in 1829, the Georgia state government declared all Cherokee laws invalid, confiscated the land, and began distributing it to White colonists. The Cherokee took this to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1832 and won — the court held that Georgia was way out of bounds and had to give the land back. But by then it was too late. President Andrew Jackson, elected in 1830, refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling and instead, ordered the removal of the Cherokee, first to concentration camps in neighboring states and then to lands west of the Mississippi that had been “designated for Indians.” Between the disease-ridden camps and the 1,600 mile walk to what would become Oklahoma, more than 4,000 Cherokee died, out of a total population of about 16,000. For them, assimilation did not produce a better life at all.
**This was not unique to the United States. Canada and Australia instituted similar programs to assimilate First Nations and Aboriginal peoples with similar patterns of abuse and generational trauma. France also had an assimilation policy in its African colonies, specifically aimed at providing just enough education to make indigenous people useful to the colonial government, though their program did not rely on forced attendance.
***Evidence that withholding food as punishment was both widespread and frequent.
^That’s why almost every image in this post is from the Carlisle Schools; they were prolific spin doctors.
^^There’s quite a bit more here, including witnessing family or community violence or abuse, being placed in foster care or in care with other relatives, and family financial stressors.
^^^This might seem like a bold assertion if you don’t understand epigenetics. When a person experiences a stressor it can lead to epigenetic alterations in a person’s body — changes to their DNA — that are then inherited by their children. This has been demonstrated in multiple studies. The effects of the Irish potato famine resulted in epigenetic alteration in those who experienced it that has continued to be passed down through Irish families. These changes don’t affect the sequence of DNA, but they do change how genes are turned on and off and that results in differences in outcomes — people age more quickly or are more susceptible to age-related illnesses like cancer and heart disease, and have shorter lifespans. Rat studies have shown that fear can induce widespread epigenetic changes; it’s the same for humans. Traumas, like the ones used to calculate the ACEs score, are major drivers of epigenetic alterations that can reverberate down multiple generations. Here, virtually every Native American experienced deep trauma over a 170-year period, so the epigenetic effects are exponential and very much still affecting Native communities.