Facing Uncomfortable History: Native American Boarding Schools
- Oakbrook Chumash Indian Museum
- Jul 1
- 3 min read
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains discussions of childhood trauma, abuse, and racism against Indigenous people.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government used assimilation as another tactic to address what was commonly known as the “Indian problem.” Throughout the next several decades, over 100,000 Native American children attended government or church-operated boarding schools that separated them from their families and forced them to abandon their cultures and assimilate into white American society.
The government forced many Indigenous families to send their children to boarding schools by threatening imprisonment or the withholding of food rations if they did not comply. Government officials and police also kidnapped Native children.
While some families chose to send their children to boarding school, they did so due to immense material and political pressures. These families hoped that through boarding schools, their children would learn to navigate a drastically changed world ransacked by settler-colonialism.
Many students indeed cultivated knowledge and useful skills that helped them later in adulthood. Practical vocational skills formed a core part of the boarding school curriculum: Native boys were prepared for farming or manual labor, while Native girls were prepared for domestic work.
However, few boarding school administrators and teachers bothered to learn about their students’ traditions, languages, and religions because they were thought to be inferior to mainstream American beliefs and values.
As part of the assimilationist agenda, students had their hair forcibly cut and were severely punished for speaking their native languages. Discipline was cruel and militaristic, and generations of Native children were humiliated and taught to be ashamed of their cultures.
Many students tried to run away from school and faced harsh discipline as a result. For example, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks recalled that the punishment for running away and getting caught was the “belt line”: “That was when the older boys would form two lines facing each other—ten boys on either side—and they would hit you with belts, sticks, and straps as you ran through the ‘line’” (Reyhner 2018, 59).
Boarding schools were also overcrowded, and children were given insufficient food and medical care. Administrators of these schools managed them as inexpensively as possible because cultural assimilation was viewed as a less costly alternative to ongoing military conflicts and physical genocide.
Due to disease and starvation, children regularly died in mass numbers. Navajo author Laura Tohe writes that “while some of us survived these schools, others ran away or died trying. . . . A cemetery adjoined almost every Indian school” (qtd. in Robbins 2017, 167-168).
Native American boarding schools have left a crippling legacy of cultural genocide. The pain and trauma that this system has inflicted upon generations of Indigenous peoples is incredibly difficult to reckon with.
Indigenous Americans, however, have displayed extraordinary resilience and are continually working to reclaim control of their children’s education and revitalize their traditions, languages, and religions.
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References and Further Reading
National Museum of the American Indian. “Struggling with Cultural Repression.” Native Words, Native Warriors. Smithsonian. 2020. https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/code-talkers/boarding-schools/.
Robbins, Sarah Ruffing. “Reclaiming Voices from Indian Boarding School Narratives.” In Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching. University of Michigan Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv65sxf3.7.
Reyhner, Jon. “American Indian Boarding Schools: What Went Wrong? What Is Going Right?” Journal of American Indian Education 57, no. 1 (2018): 58–78. https://doi.org/10.5749/jamerindieduc.57.1.0058.
Smith, Andrea. “Boarding School Abuses, Human Rights, and Reparations.” Social Justice 31, no. 4 (98) (2004): 89–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768278.
