PHOENIX – When the Phoenix Indian School was established in 1891, the top federal administrator considered it a budgetary win to send Native American children to boarding schools to enforce assimilation into white society.
“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them,” Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan said at the opening of the school.
The true cost of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada, and the abuses Native Americans endured in them, continues to be revealed. With nearly 1,000 bodies in mass graves discovered this month on the grounds of Canadian boarding schools amid their ongoing investigation, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Halaand’s recent pledge to investigate past abuses in the U.S., Arizona’s Indigenous boarding schools will face fresh scrutiny.
Rosalie Talahongva, who curates the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center, said she and many of her Hopi relatives went to school there.
“If you ask, was that voluntary, I would ask you, is it voluntary when there isn’t any other option?” Talahongva said.
The Phoenix Indian School closed in 1990 by order of the federal government. But a handful of Indian boarding schools remain in operation.
“Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt had a lot to do with the structure of these boarding schools,” Talahongva said, referring to the founder of the influential Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. “His idea was ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ So the whole destruction, annihilation of Indian identity – Indian culture was to be destroyed at these federal boarding schools.
“There were many children that were just forcibly taken away from their families and made to come to boarding school.”
By 1900, 20,000 children were in Indian boarding schools. By 1925, that number had more than tripled, according to Boarding School Healing.
Students were stripped of everything related to Native life. Their hair was cut short, they had to wear uniforms, and students were punished physically for speaking anything but English. Contact with family was discouraged or prohibited. Survivors have described a culture of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the schools. Food and medical attention often were scarce and led to many deaths, according to The Atlantic.
Some of the schools were operated by the Catholic Church. The Atlantic reports “about one-third of the 357 known Indian boarding schools were managed by various Christian denominations” under the 1819 Civilization Fund Act.
The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix did not respond to requests for comment.
The operation of the long-shuttered schools will face new inquiry under the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative announced Tuesday by Haaland. The department intends to identify boarding school facilities and burial sites across the country and review enrollment lists.
The announcement came after the discovery of the remains of 215 children on the grounds of Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. More graves have already been found in Canada. The Cowessess First Nation found 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The Sioux Valley Dakota Nation is working to identify a series of unmarked graves at the former Brandon Residential School in Manitoba, according to Chief Jennifer Bone. So far, 104 possible bodies of Indigenous children have been discovered on or around the school’s property.
“It will be hard to look back on that past, but it’s time that it was acknowledged,” Talahongva said. “The atrocities that happened here need to be acknowledged.”
According to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, four off-reservation Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools are still in use: Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, Sherman Indian School in Riverside, California, Flandreau Indian School in Flandreau, South Dakota, and Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma. However, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition told Reuters more than 70 schools still operate in the U.S.
Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, calls herself a product of “horrific assimilationist policies” in the U.S.
“I come from ancestors who endured the horrors of Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead; the same agency that tried to eradicate our culture, our language, our spiritual practices, and our people,” she said Tuesday in remarks to the National Congress of American Indians.
Marsha Small, a Montana State University doctoral student, has been using ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves at the Chemawa Indian School cemetery in Salem, Oregon. So far, she has found 222 sets of remains at the school, which remains in operation.
“Until we can find those kids and let their elders come get them or know where they can pay respects, I don’t think the Native is going to heal, and as such I don’t think America is going to heal,” Small told Reuters.
One researcher told Reuters they believe that as many as 40,000 children may have died in Indian boarding schools in the U.S.
“We must uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of the schools,” Haaland said in remarks about the new Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. “This investigation will identify school facilities and sites, the location of known and possible burial sites located at or near school facilities, and the identities and tribal affiliations of children who were taken.”
The initiative will proceed in several phases and include the identification and collection of records and information related to the Department of Interior’s own oversight and implementation of the Indian boarding school program, as well as conducting consultations with Tribal Nations, Alaska Native corporations and Native Hawaiian organizations, according to a press release from the Department of the Interior.
“I know that this process will be long and difficult,” Haaland said. “I know that this process will be painful and won’t undo the heartbreak and loss that so many of us feel, but only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”
Cronkite News reporter Julia Sandor contributed to this report.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2021.
Hey America, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, Americah! Now lets just sweep this under the rug and pretend that it never happened, and if it did happen, lets justify if by saying how the “Indian Savages” didn’t know how to properly care for their children or their land, unlike the white man. Let’s also be outraged at the librul journalists who have the audacity to dig up anything that stains the good name of Lady Liberty!
A nut posts, “librul journalists” and calls others white trash.
First of all, “Indigenous boarding schools” should neither be capitalized nor written. It’s nonsense.
Secondly, extracting the intent from the tortured grammar, there are no indigenous people in the western hemisphere. There is no evidence whatsoever of human evolution here. Everyone came from somewhere else.
Just a little history for you newcomers who haven’t been here for 75 years, Tucson had an Indian School, located on Indian School Road (now known as Ajo Road) just east of the present I-19. The land is now occupied by a tacky shopping center.
I grew up just south of there in a suburban neighborhood of one-acre lots that was ruined when Interstate 19 divided it exactly in half. I guess Sonora counts as one of the “states” joined by the highway and justified the mayhem.
I don’t know a lot about the operation of the school, but I know it had a swimming pool that was open to us in the summer and some of the older Indian kids attended classes at the nearby Pueblo High School where I went. I don’t recall seeing any signs of abuse, although as best as I remember they weren’t particularly good students.
I really fail to understand the hand wringing over the boarding schools. When you have a far-flung, sparse population how else can these folks be educated? Do you build dozens and dozens of schools over hundreds of square miles to educate a few dozens of kids, or do you bring them to the school? Seems obvious to me.
But then I’m an engineer, not a liberal.
Spoken like a true white supremacist there, Wesley.
Ya see, kids, white people like Wesley subscribe to their own narrow world view that the fascist white-judeo-christian values justify murdering people who are neither white nor christian, and then kidnapping their children and beating them until they forget their own language and their culture. As recently as a few years ago, we saw this policy in action, when the Trump administration separated children from their parents who were fleeing violence and persecution. Its bizaare how people like you, Wesley, are allowed to have political power.
I have to hand it to you whitetrash, you have the amazing ability to cram 10 pounds of BS into a five pound bag. None of which is worthy of rebuttal.
Hey Wes,
Is it really necessary for you to continue proving that you’re a racist f*ckwit on these threads? Haven’t you thoroughly proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt already??
Indigenous should ALWAYS be capitalized when referring to groups of people. And the whole point of Indian boarding schools was cultural genocide, a term that describes the purposeful destruction of people’s culture and identity, which was a fundamental facet of the larger genocidal strategy that White people used to conquer this continent and eliminate its original inhabitants.
Anyone can interview many Native people in Arizona today and can be told stories of various tribal families shuffling and hiding children to keep them out of forced boarding schools. And not so long ago.
Well skinny not only do you have a problem expressing yourself, you need a little lesson:
The word indigenous, as originally defined meant evolving in a particular place. As such, there are no indigenous people in the western hemisphere as I stated before. Now the word has been politically bastardized to mean, more or less, the first people on the block. So if we want to use that meaning, then compared to you, I’m indigenous, since I know I was here before you. So continuing along in that vein, you are inferior to me. How does that feel?
Another example of screwing with the language is the word “discriminating.” The original, pre-PC meaning described someone who possessed good taste or refinement. Fuzzy-headed liberal-speak has turned the word into a pejorative.