RequireStudents write an essay which summarizes and analyzes an .docx

Require
Students write an essay which summarizes and analyzes an
article’s content and the author’s perspective. The essay
summarizes the main points (what the article says) and then
analyzes the author’s effectiveness (strengths and weaknesses)
in presenting the argument (how the author conveys the
message). Students are assessed on their ability write cohesive
paragraphs, a thesis statement that is fully supported throughout
the essay, an introduction, and a conclusion free of punctuation,
grammar, and spelling errors. Students write in their own
words, objectively without bias, and support their statements
with reliable evidence. The essay consists of four- to five-
pages, including a title page and a references page consisting of
at least three credible and/or relevant sources. At least three in-
text citations from different sources are required. The essay
must be formatted in APA, including a title page, a references
page, page headers, document headers, one-inch page margins,
and be double-spaced using Times New Roman 12-point font.
· Rubric Detail
Below Standard
Approaching Standard
At Standard
Exceeds Standard
DAS-U-Analysis and use of course concepts
Points Range:0 (0%) - 17.25 (17.25%)
• Does not attempt to explain how the evidence relates to topic •
Superficial and poorly developed analysis • Little or no
connections are made to course concepts • Uses few sources,
may misunderstand them, and lacks critical thinking • No or
minimal scholarly references
Points Range:17.25 (17.25%) - 22.87 (22.87%)
• Analysis of the evidence stretches its meaning to support topic

• Some new ideas and insight, but lacks depth and detail •
Incorporates some course concepts, but accuracy and
development are not consistent • Shows basic understanding of
sources but does not critically evaluate them • Incorporates few
or no scholarly references
Points Range:22.88 (22.88%) - 28.12 (28.12%)
• Analysis explains how the evidence supports the topic in most
cases • Analysis reflects insight but is not fully developed •
Incorporates many course concepts but sometimes does not
develop them • Shows careful reading of sources but little or no
critical evaluation • Incorporates adequate or minimum number
of scholarly references to support analysis
Points Range:28.12 (28.12%) - 30 (30%)
• Analysis shows a strong relationship between the evidence and
the topic • Analysis is insightful and original • Incorporates
course concepts accurately, consistently, and frequently •
Critically evaluates sources • Incorporates numerous or more
than the minimum number of scholarly references required to
support analysis
DAS-U-Organization and coherence
Points Range:0 (0%) - 17.25 (17.25%)
• Is unclear with no or minimal organization, so ideas appear to
be arranged in a random order • Few or inappropriate transitions
between paragraphs, and ideas are not developed clearly • Does
not appropriately respond to the assignment
Points Range:17.25 (17.25%) - 22.87 (22.87%)
• Minimal organization so ideas appear as a list • Transitions
between ideas are minimal, and development of ideas may lack
coherence • Not all aspects of the assignment are addressed
Points Range:22.88 (22.88%) - 28.12 (28.12%)
• Follows a logical organization • Ideas are developed but not
all pertain directly to the topic • Topic is communicated clearly
but not completely, and most or all aspects of the assignment
are addressed
Points Range:28.12 (28.12%) - 30 (30%)
• Uses logical structure with introduction, body, and conclusion

• Sophisticated development of one idea to another, and reader
is guided through the progression of ideas • Clearly
communicated topic, and all aspects of assignment are
addressed
DAS-U-Style and mechanics
Points Range:0 (0%) - 11.5 (11.5%)
• Contains spelling, punctuation, and/or grammatical errors, so
understanding is difficult • Contains numerous awkward or
ungrammatical sentences, and sentence structure is simple or
monotonous • Misuses words, or uses words that are too vague
and abstract or too personal and specific for the topic
Points Range:11.5 (11.5%) - 15.25 (15.25%)
• Contains spelling, punctuation, and/or grammatical errors
which may temporarily confuse the reader, but does not
generally impede the overall understanding • Sentence structure
generally correct but may be wordy, unfocused, repetitive, or
confusing • Uses relatively vague or general words and
sometimes inappropriate words
Points Range:15.25 (15.25%) - 18.75 (18.75%)
• Contains spelling, punctuation, and/or grammatical errors, but
does not impede understanding • Sentences generally clear, well
structured, and focused, but some may be awkward or
ineffective • Generally uses words accurately and effectively,
but sometimes may be too general
Points Range:18.75 (18.75%) - 20 (20%)
• Almost entirely free of spelling, punctuation, and/or
grammatical errors • Sentences are varied, clearly structured,
carefully focused, and fits assignment’s purpose and audience •
Words chosen for their precise meaning and an appropriate level
of specificity is used
APA Style (citations, references, formatting)
Points Range:0 (0%) - 11.5 (11.5%)
• Does not use in-text citations or reference credible sources to
support ideas • Does not apply APA document formatting
Points Range:11.5 (11.5%) - 15.25 (15.25%)
• Attempts to use in-text citations and reference credible

sources to support ideas • Does not apply APA document
formatting consistently but some attempt is made with some
errors
Points Range:15.25 (15.25%) - 18.75 (18.75%)
• Almost always uses in-text citations and references credible
sources to support ideas • Consistently applies APA document
formatting but may include a few errors • Consistently uses
APA document formatting
Points Range:18.75 (18.75%) - 20 (20%)
• Always uses in-text citations and references credible sources
to support ideas • Flawlessly uses APA document formatting
with minor errors
BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AT T H E ICIOWA-
COMANCHE AGENCT, 1893-1 920
CLYDE ELLIS
On a clear, windy afternoon in August 1990,92-year-old Parker
McKenzie pointed
to the ramshackle remains of the Rainy Mountain Boarding
School and said, “That
was where I got my start.”’ The ruins lay in the center of what
had once been the
campus of a reservation boarding school where young Kiowa
Indians like McKenzie
embarked o n what the government intended to be a
transforming experience. In
this remote corner of the sprawling Kiowa-Comanche-Apache
Reservation in
southwest Oklahoma, government teachers struggled for three
decades to make the
vision of a new Indian race a reality by encouraging young

Kiowas to become cul-
turally indistinguishable from the whites who surrounded them.
Rainy Mountain School was part of a system of government
boarding schools
established on reservations across the country in the late
nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. Convinced of the schools’ power to remold
Indian youngsters, gov-
ernment officials made them the dominant institution of post-
Civil War policy. In
a controlled environment, safely isolated from the so-called
barbarous life of the
camp, Indian children could be systematically assimilated into
the white culture.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan regarded the
reservation board-
ing school as nothing less than “the object lesson . . . [and]
gateway out from the
reservation.”2 No other institution promised the changes offered
by the boarding
schools, for none could so effectively teach Indian children how
to read and write,
and how to live.3
Despite the role of education in the campaign to end the so-
called “Indian
Problem,” little work has been done on the reservation schools
that lay at the heart
of the program. What we d o know about the schools tends to
be bound up in larger
Clyde Ellis is assistant professor of history a t Elori College,
North Caroliiia.
‘Parker McKenzie to the author, 1 August 1990.

2Annual Report of the Cornmissioner of Indian affairs
(hereafter ARCIA), 1881, 27.
3Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis:
Cliristian Reforniers and the Indian, 1865-1900
(Norman, 1976), 301; David Wallace Adams, “Pundaniental
Considerations: The Deep Meaning of
Native American Schooling, 1880-1900,” Harvard I & x f i o n a
l Review58 (1988): 1-28. AHCIA, 1881.27.
Annual Report oftlie Secretary of the interior, 1880,7-8.
778 THE HISTORIAN
discussions of agency life, and often these discussions are not
so much by Indians as
they are about Indians. The difference is crucial, for the student
perspective presents
a rich portrait of life in a reservation boarding school and offers
a revealing look at
how young Indians learned, what they learned, and how their
lives were affected. As
Michael Coleman points out in his recent work on Indian
schools, student accounts
have a potency and resonance missing from official reports:
The school obviously was such a radically new experience that
it imprinted itself
deeply upon the minds of the narrators-they recalled the arrival
with special vivid-
ness. Further, most of them began life in oral cultures, where
accurate recall and the
faultless performance of ritual and other duties were seen as
vital to survivaL4

In late 1892, Commissioner Morgan ordered Kiowa-Comanche
Agent George
Day to prepare for the opening of a new boarding school at
Rainy Mountain. “Make
a thorough canvass among the children of school age [six to
sixteen] and suitable
health who are tributary to the Rainy Mountain School,”
Morgan wrote.
“[Establish] a thorough understanding with the parents and
effect such arrange-
ments that you may get the children into the school without
delay as soon as you
are ready to receive them.”5 Kiowa parents generally were
willing to enroll their chil-
dren, for too few schools existed to accommodate the school-
age population. Except
for episodic illness, bad weather, or some unanticipated
development, the school
usually filled quickly to its official capacity of 150 students.
The reasons for putting children in school varied. Myrtle Ware
enrolled at Rainy
Mountain in 1898 because her family was poor. Ware recalled,
“I can’t be taken care
o f . . . [so, my aunt] took me up there to Rainy Mountain. She
asked my dad, ‘I
wanta put her up to school there, where I’ll go and see her,’ and
I went up that way?
Annie Bigman entered around 1904 for similar reasons. “Daddy
started me to
‘Michael Coleman, Americalr Indian Childreti a t School,
1850-1930 (Jackson, 1993), 197-98; Robert
Trennert, ThePhoenixIndian School: Forcedhssimilatiori in
Arizona, 1891-1935 (Norman, 1988). 112-49;

David Wallace Adams, Education For Extinction: Americon
Iridinns and the Boarding School Experience,
1895-1928 (Lawrence, 1995), 207-69; K . Tsianina
Lomawaima, They Called I t Prairie Light: The Story of
Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln, 1994); Clyde Ellis, To Change
Them Forever: Indinn Educntiori nt the
Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920 (Norman, 1996),
91-93.
Thomas Morgan to George Day, 14 November 1892, Rainy
Mountain School Records, Records of
the Kiowa Agency, Record Group 75, National Archives,
Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma (hereafter RMS, OHS).
6Myrtle Paudlety Ware interview, 1 1 November 1967, T-76,2,
Doris Duke Oral History Collection,
Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Library
Archives, Norman, Oklahoma (hereafter
DDOH).
BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AT THE KIOWA-COMANCHE
AGENCY, 1893-1920 7 7 9
school when I was about four years old,” she stated. “He was
sick then. He don’t
want to take care of a little one so he pushed me to school.”’
Guy Quoetone attended J. J. Methvin’s Methodist Institute near
Anadarko
because of his father’s membership in the Methodist Church.
Quoetone would have
gone to one of the agency schools in Anadarko “if my father
hadn’t already have

joined the Methodist church. . . . [Wlhen we started to school he
wanted me to go
to that school [Methvin] James Haumpy’s parents sent him to
Rainy Mountain in
1913 to be with “those other boys they was schooling out
there.” Haumpy found lit-
tle solace in the prospect; “I was a little boy. I don’t know how
to talk English. They
put me in school. Well, I ain’t used to it. And I cried and cried,
I wanna go home.”
But Haumpy also recalled that school was not entirely
unpleasant. “I’d take my
horses down there,” he said. “I seen pretty girls at that
scho01.”~
Parker McKenzie said that by the time he entered Rainy
Mountain in 1904, “most
of the Kiowas already were impressed of the benefits of
education and took advantage
of schooling.” As far as McKenzie was concerned, “the Indian
was already out of us by
the time we went to school . . . missionaries had already been
doing this.” McKenzie
also commented that Rainy Mountain was so well known to the
Kiowas by then that
“no one had to inform them about the schools. They were on
hand and saw them.”
His parents, convinced of the advantages that schooling gave
their children, enrolled
Parker and his brother Daniel “to get us used to boarding school
life.”’O
Important tribal leaders also supported the schools. When
schools began to open
on the reservation in the 1880s, headmen and chiefs often took
the lead in encour-

aging Kiowas to enroll their children. Some of them understood
the importance of
education: others used it to gain favor with agents. In August
1905, for example, Big
Tree, an influential Kiowa chief, responded to Agent James
Randlett’s solicitation of
the chief‘s help, “We are going to the Ghost Dance Friday and I
will let the people
know about the school and tell them to put these children in
school.””
’Annie Bigman interview, 14 June 1971, M-I, 3, IIDOH; Sally
McUeth, Ethnic ldcntity and the
Boarding School Experience of West-Centml Oklnhornn
Itrdinrrs (Washington, D. C., 1983), 108-1 I ;
Lomawaima, They Called I t Prairie Light, 35-40; Coleman,
Aniericnti Indian Children nt School, 60-79.
‘Guy Quoetone interview, 23 March 1971,T-37,16, IIDOH.
gJames Haumpy interview, I 1 July 1967, T-81,6, DIIOH;
Bruce David Forbes, “John Jasper Methvin:
Methodist ‘Missionary to the Western Tribes‘ (Oklahoma),’’ in
Chirrchrnen and The Westcrn brdinns,
1820-1920, ed. Clyde A. Milner and Floyd A. ONeil (Norman,
Okla., 1985). 64-65.
loParker McKenzie to the author, 1 August 1990.
“Big Tree to James Randlett, 30 August 1905, KMS, OHS; Jim
Whitewolf, Jim Whitewov The L i / . of
a Kiowa-Apache Indian (New York, 1969), 83.
780 THE HISTO~UAN

Although Kiowa parents and leadership generally supported the
schools, other
issues sometimes affected enrollment. In September 1900, for
example, Kiowa par-
ents responded to allotment negotiations by keeping their
children at home. Rainy
Mountain Superintendent Cora Dunn reported only two dozen
students at the end
of the opening week and noted that “the Kiowas are in an ugly
frame of mind over
the terms of the allotment treaty, and are determined to be as
annoying as possible.”
Surveying the situation, she concluded that “some coercive
measures will have to be
used.” A group of parents remedied the situation by collecting
and delivering a
number of children to the school.’2
Parents usually discovered that they could not challenge the
system very long,
especially when annuities hung in the balance. In 1898
Commissioner William A.
Jones announced that unless parents put their children into
school he would cut off
rations and annuities. “If that does not suffice I will send their
children anyway,” he
thundered. “Make it peremptory, and let them understand that I
do not care and
will not have any obstacles in the way of these children going.”
Jones also supported
“more vigorous measures,” including jailing children and
parents who resisted. l 3
Once enrolled, Kiowa youngsters entered a new world where no
lesson was too

small to be learned, no detail too small to reinforce. The
assimilation process began
immediately with deliberate measures to change the physical
appearance of the
children. Guy Quoetone was still in his Kiowa clothing when
his parents delivered
him to the Methvin School. Staff members ushered him into a
room where two men
and a woman waited for him.
They shut the door and about that time I get excited and they
got a chair. . . . They
commence to hold me.. . . [Tlhis barber.. . he come from behind
and cut one side of
my braid off.. . . About that time I turned tiger! I commenced to
fight and scratch and
bite and jump up in the air! They had a time, all of them,
holding me down. Cut the
other side. Two men had me down there and that white lady
tried to hold my head and
then that barber cutting all the time. It was almost an hour
before he finished cutting
my hair. And you ought to see how I looked. I sure hate a
haircut!I4
Along with haircuts and baths came uniforms. Annie Bigman
recalled that Rainy
Mountain girls wore grey uniforms that resembled sleeveless
jumpers. A white
I2Cora Dunn to James Randlett, 5 September a n d 14
September 1900, RMS, OHS.
”William A. Jones to William T. Walker, 1 October 1898, RMS,
OH% ARCIA, 1898,6-7.

I4Quoetone interview, T-637, 17, DDOH.
AGENCY, 1893-1920 781
blouse, black shoes, and stockings completed the e n ~ e m b l e
. ’ ~ Sarah Long Horn
remembered a military look to school clothing and that girls
wore ribbons in their
hair identifying them as members of company A, B, or C.I6
Lewis Toyebo’s clothes
also reminded him of army outfits. “Our school uniforms were
grey with red
stripes,” Toyebo said, “and our play clothing were plain jeans.
We were a sight on
earth.”” Others were less sanguine. Juanita Yeahquo, for
example, chafed at the
memory of uniforms which she described as “awful clothes. . . .
I guess we got prison
clothes and didn’t know it.” She especially resented the large,
heavy boots. l 7
Some students also received English names. Working from lists,
administrators
simply assigned names. There was little variety, and school
rolls show an inordinate
number of girls named Sarah, Mary, Elizabeth, and Bessie.
Popular boys’ names
included Robert, Henry, Albert, James, and Frank. Each student
also received a per-
manent number. Lewis Toyebo was number 41 from the day he
entered in 1898
until he left in 1909. Myrtle Ware was number 19, “which I kept
for so many years

until I was dismissed from the school,”lR Parker McKenzie said
that “like prison
convicts we were mostly identified by our assigned numbers
rather than by name,
except in classrooms where we were ‘respected’ by our given
English names.”I9
School life also meant an immediate end to childhood patterns
of association.
Strictly separated by sex and age, matrons hovered closely over
their wards. “Keeping
the sexes apart was routinely strict,” said Parker McKenzie.
“We were under strict dis-
cipline, we were never free.” Children had separate living
quarters, ate at separate
tables, occupied different portions of the same classrooms, and
were kept apart at
chapel services. School officials allowed them to mix only at
the school’s carefully
chaperoned social functions, and even then it was not quite an
open field. Students
marched to and from such events “in military order-and
separately, too,” recalled
McKenzie.*O Sarah Long Horn remembered that the boys
occasionally made daring
forays into the girls’ dorm, but the odds of success were long,
and punishment swift
I5Annie Bigman interview, T-57: 16, DDOH
I6Sarah Long Horn interview, 27 June 1967, T-62,9, DDOH.
”Juanita Yeahquo interview, 21 June 1968, M-2, DDOH.
IR‘‘Happy 90th Birthday Lewis Toyebo, February 28,1982:’
copy of commemorative birthday pmm-

phlet in the author’s possession (hereafter “Lewis Xoyeho
Birthday”).
I9Parker McKenzie to Randle Hurst, 23 October 1987 (in the
author’s possession); Ware interview,T-
76,4, DDOH; Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., and Lonnie I .
Underhill.“Kenaming the American Indian, 1890-
1913,”American Studies 12 (1971): 33-45.
”McKenzie to Hurst, 23 October 1987.
782 THE HISTORIAN
and sure. “They watch us real dose,” she said. “There’s got to
be one teacher u p in
front and there’s got to be somebody else in the back that will
watch the boys and the
girls.”2’ Fred Bigman grumpily recalled, “we never did get to
talk to any girls.”22
A high premium was placed on discipline, and the transformed,
uniform appear-
ance of the students contributed to an environment based o n
military models.
McKenzie wrote, “I distinctly remember . . . how odd it was to
line u p like I imag-
ined soldiers lined up.”23 Students queued u p for every
occasion and marched to
meals, classes, and chapel services. Boys drilled every day
before breakfast except
Sunday. “It was not unusual for the little ones’ skins to appear
blue from the cold. It
was very sad to see six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds being
compelled to learn the

rudiments of soldiery as early as 6:OO a.m.”24 A former
student at Riverside School
in Anadarko said that boarding school
. . . w a s really a military regime. . . . We marched
everywhere, to the dining hall, to
classes; everything we did was in military fashion. We were
taught to make our beds in
military fashion, you know, with square corners and sheets and
blankets tucked in a
special way. . . . O n Sundays we had an inspection . . .just like
the m i l i t a r ~ ? ~
Those who stepped out of bounds were quickly disciplined.
“Everything you do,
you get punished,” recalled one student. “You’d get tired and
get punished.”26
Correction ranged from stern lectures to draconian whippings.
By far the most
common sin was speaking Kiowa; getting caught meant extra
drill duty, carrying
stepladders on the shoulders for several hours, restriction from
the school’s social
events, or soapy teeth brushing. One Rainy Mountain student
remembered being
forced to hold quinine tablets in her mouth. Sometimes
punishment was intended
to humiliate. Rainy Mountain boys caught speaking Kiowa wore
sandwich boards
that read “I like girls.” At other schools boys wore dresses.
Rainy Mountain girls
sometimes stood face-first in corners until they spoke
English.27
*‘Long Horn interview, T-62, 10, DDOH.

’*Fred Bigman interview, T-50,24, DDOH.
*)McKenzie to the author, 1 August 1990.
24McKenzie to Hurst, 23 October 1987.
25McBeth, Ethnic Identity, 102-3.
27Long Horn interview, T-62, 10, DDOH; Mclleth, Etlinic
Identify, 105; Ellis, To Change Then2
Forever, 105-11.
AGENCY, 1893-1920 783
Efforts to suppress the Kiowa language rarely succeeded,
however. Most of the
children carried on conversations in Kiowa “when the matron
ain’t listening,” said
Myrtle Ware?g Despite punishment, McKenzie said, Kiowa
“remained the domi-
nant language away from the campus, particularly with the
younger boys.”29 Kiowa
was also used in the majority of Indian homes where children
went for holiday vis-
its and summer vacations.30
The most serious offense short of violence or sexual misconduct
was running
away. Runaways were often treated harshly and made examples
to the other stu-
dents. Captured and returned, runaways were usually whipped

by male employees.
These sessions were genuinely feared because they occasionally
ran out of control.
In 1891, for example, a teacher at the Kiowa School in
Anadarko whipped two boys
so savagely that they and a companion ran away and froze to
death in a winter
storm.3’ Annie Bigman recalled that “when they whip ‘em some
would half kill
them.”32 Commonly administered punishments also included
paddlings, standing
on tip-toe with arms outstretched, or walking with a ball and
chain. Some schools
locked children in darkened closets or forced boys to shave
their heads and wear
girl’s clothing.
In extreme cases Rainy Mountain students were arrested and
subjected to the vile
conditions of the Fort Sill stockade. In May 1895
Superintendent Cora Dunn wrote
to the agent about “a case of most willful disobedience from
this school.” The solu-
tion, she observed,“is about thirty days in the guard house at the
Agency.” Dunn left
the final decision to the agent, but noted that the young man in
question came from
a family “that needs a good lesson.”33 Cases like this were rare,
however, and most
disciplinary problems were handled at the school.
Still, boys and girls alike tried to leave. Some were lonely,
others were scared, and
a few simply did not wish to stay in school. A Wichita girl who
attended Riverside
School in the second decade of this century said:

I don’t exactly know why, but I was all the time running away.
There were two older
girls who at the end of the week would say, “let’s go home.”
And since I was the little
interview, T-76, 10, DDOH
MMcBeth, Ethnic Identity, 134-135.
’‘William T. Hagan, United States-Comanche Relations: The
Reservotion Years (Norman, Okla., 1990),
196.
’*A. Bigman interview, T-57,18-19, DDOH.
”Dunn to Hugh Baldwin, 27 May 1895, HMS, OHS.
784 THE HISTORIAN
kid, I’d always say,“Okay.” . . . [M]y folks would just bring us
back the next day. I don’t
ever remember getting punished for that.34
James Haumpy ran away, he said, because the older boys were
always trying to pick
a fight with him.“I don’t fight,” he said,“you know how it is.”
But when he discov-
ered that the girls did not particularly like him, that was too
much to take. “Young
and got to go to school,” he said, “and some girls they don’t
like you. That’s why I

wanna go home.”35
Discipline might bring order, but the classroom was the real
laboratory of
change. There, said policymakers, Kiowa children would be
molded into citizens
free from the temptations of a wild life on the plains. At least
that was the plan. The
standard sixth-grade boarding school education rested mainly on
the acquisition of
vocational skills-farming and industrial arts for the boys,
domestic training for the
girls. To these were added lessons in the rudiments of history,
grammar, arithmetic,
civics, the English language, and the Christian religion. A
boarding school educa-
tion was intended to be a stepping stone from the reservation to
an independent
and self-sufficient life. It promised nothing more than that.36
Most experts agreed on the need to recognize limits. “The
Indian needs a prac-
tical education,” opined the Most Reverend John Ireland in
1902. “It is well for him
to know that he must live as a white man, and consequently he
must learn to work.”
Teach the boys a trade of some kind, and teach them farming,
which is, of course,
the most important of all.. . . Teach the girls.. . . cooking, teach
them neatness, teach
them responsibility.. . . [Tleach them how to serve a nice
appetizing meal for the fam-
ily; do this and I tell you you have solved the whole question of
Indian civili~ation.~’

A 1914 report from Superintendent James McGregor described a
typical day at
Rainy Mountain. Drilling and cleaning began at 6:OO a.m., and
morning roll call
came at 6:45. Breakfast followed from 7:OO to 7:30, after
which students performed
routine chores. Morning classes met from 8:OO to 5:OO with a
one-hour lunch break
%McBeth, Ethnic Identity, 86-87,
35Haumpy interview, T-81,6, DDOH.
%K. Tsianina Lomawaima,“Domesticity in the Federal Indian
Schools: The Power of Authority Over
Mind and Body,” American Ethnologist 20 (May 1993), 236-37;
Frederick Hoxie, A Finn1 Promise: The
Campaign to AssimilatetbeIndians, 1880-1920 (NewYork,
1989), 189-21 1.
”ARCIA, 1902,420-2 1; Ellis, To Chnnge ’171ern I:orewr, I I I -
16.
AGENCY, 1893-1920 785
Rainy Mountain Indian School, ca. 1915. Dining hall, kitchen,
bakery, and girls’ dorm.
Parker McKenzie Coll.
“I was head teacher at the govt. Indian school almost a year.
(Kiowa girls)” December
1910. Photo by Mamye Blakely.

786 THE HISTONAN
Kiowa Indians playing marbles. Mrs. John R. Williams Coll.
Rainy Mountain Indian School’s bakers’class, ca. 1914-1915.
Sister Nellie on lower right;
she died August 1917. Parker McKenzie Coll.
AGENCY, 1893-1920 787
Rainy Mountain Indian School principal, Mr. McGregor (left),
and Mr. Wolf (right), with
track team. Post card printed between 1910 and 1918.
at noon. Supper was served at 6:IO. There were numerous
evening socials as well as
lectures o n topics ranging from the humane treatment of
animals to patriotism.
Evening roll call came at 2 1 5 for small pupils, 8:OO for the
older ones. At 9:OO it was
lights out. Weekends brought a respite of sorts. Saturday
mornings were devoted to
work from 8:OO to 11:00, but afternoons were free. On
alternate weekends chaper-
oned groups could go to nearby Gotebo or to Boake’s Trading
Post. The Sabbath
meant Sunday school from 1O:OO a.m. to noon, recreation and
free time for much
of the afternoon, and church service from 5:OO to 6:15. Church
attendance was
mandatory; one Kiowa girl recalled that “you went to church;

there was no not
going.”38
Between 1894 and 1910 there were two divisions of classes,
kindergarten through
third grade and fourth through sixth grade. After 1910 the
academic program was
divided into three parts: kindergarten through second grade,
third and fourth
grades, and fifth and sixth grades. And in 1916 a redesigned
curriculum designated
schools as either pre-vocational or vocational; reservation
boarding schools charac-
terized the former, off-reservation boarding schools the latter.
As a pre-vocational
school Rainy Mountain offered a wide variety of training
classes suitable for the age
%Rainy Mountain School Calendar, 1913-1914, KMS, OHS;
McBeth, Ethnic Identity, 100
788 THE HISTORIAN
and experience of its students. First, second, and third graders
concentrated on
lessons in music, manners, health, arithmetic, and some limited
vocational skills
described by the Indian Office as “industrial work.” Instruction
in reading, gram-
mar, and spelling rounded out the academic day. Beginning with
the fourth grade
academic skills were scaled back in favor of more intensive
vocational instruction.
Academic training in the fourth grade, for example, consisted of

145 minutes a day
of instruction in reading, history, geography, and other topics;
vocational work,
however, took u p 240 minutes.39
I t sounded fine in theory, but in reality, poor facilities and a
lack of teachers
meant that Rainy Mountain rarely offered a complete
curriculum. In September
1915 an inspector reported that due to “the lack of facilities and
of sufficient . . .
employees, little in the way of systematic instruction can be
given.”40 Moreover, the
chronic lack of teachers meant that classes were enormously
overcrowded. In
December 1912 attendance stood at 146, but the school
employed only two acade-
mic teachers plus an industrial teacher. Forty-seven percent of
the student body (67
pupils) were in the first grade, and 28 percent (41 pupils) were
second and third
graders. Thus, 110 of 146 students attended grades one through
three with one full-
time teacher. In September 1913 the situation was largely the
same. With 108 stu-
dents on campus (soon to top off at 166), 85 pupils were
assigned to the first grade
with one full-time teacher, a situation described by the agent as
“somewhat diffi-
cult.” Even when Rainy Mountain got teachers, it could not
retain them. Between
1895 and 1902 it had no fewer than fifteen different teachers,
and another dozen
came and went between 1915 and 1917.41
Academic progress in Rainy Mountain’s crowded conditions

was glacial. Parker
McKenzie remembered many boys well into their teens who had
advanced only to
the second or third grade despite five or six years of i n s t r ~ c
t i o n . ~ ~ A 1915 insyec-
tion report revealed that 10 percent of the school’s first and
second graders had
been at Rainy Mountain for as long as seven years. One of the
chief problems was
the language ba1-rier.4~ Teachers insisted that English be used
exclusively, which cre-
ated an especially grueling transition for very young pupils,
many of whom were so
39ARCIA, 1916,9-23.
40Quarterly Report for Indian Schools, December 1912, RMS,
OHS.
“Cat0 Sells to Ernest Stecker, 15 February 15,1913, RMS, OHS;
Dunn to Stecker, Septeniber 1,1901,
W S , OHS; C. V. Stinchecum to Sells, 5 January 1917, Kiowa
Agency Classified Files, 1907-1909, Record
Group 75, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
42McKenzie to the author, 1 August 1990.
43C. F. Hauke to Stecker, 10 March 1915, RMS, OHS;
McKenzie to Hurst, 23 October 1987.
BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AT THE K I O W A - C O M A N
C H E AGENCY, 1 8 9 3 - 1 9 2 0 789
frightened that according to McKenzie they “just clammed up.”

McKenzie remem-
bered his own introduction to the English language and
chuckled at his confusion.
To demonstrate the use of articles his teacher placed a boy’s hat
on a stool and said
that it could be “a” hat, or “the” hat. “Some of us were
puzzled,” said McKenzie,
“because she was seeing two hats where we only saw one. . . .
How she managed to
get it across to us still mystifies me.”44 Bigman said that
learning English was one of
the most difficult tasks he faced. “Boy, I had a hard time,” he
said. “When they start
talking English I don’t know what they are talking about.”
Once, when called to the
board for spelling and grammar exercises, he panicked.
[Tlhat teacher told me to come up to the blackboard, write
something on it. I didn’t
know what to write. I didn’t know what she said. So I ask a g u
y . . . what’d she say. . . .
‘She said for you to run out.’ Boy I jumped up and grabbed my
cap and away I went. I
went plumb back to our boy’s building.
Bigman eventually progressed “to where I got to learn to talk
English pretty good.
Wasn’t extra good.” Looking back on the experience, he said,
‘‘I had a hard time. . . .
Oh, it was painful.”45
Students occasionally received unexpected language lessons.
One young boy’s
first exposure to English came from the school’s farmer. As he
watched the man har-
nessing uncooperative animals, the youngster heard the farmer

scowl “stand still,” a
command emphasized with several obscenities. Asked to share
his beginning
knowledge of English in class later that day, the youngster
enthusiastically repeated
“Stand still, you-son-of-a-bitch!” The teacher, apparently, was
not amused.46
Because many students took several years to attain even
minimal English fluency,
academic training remained remedial at best. When asked if she
remembered any of
the classes she took in school, Sarah Long Horn said no. She
commented at length,
however, o n her vocational training. “That’s where I got all
my work, my neatness
and my sewing, most of my cooking, things like that, because
we stay there and do
all that work.”47 Myrtle Ware’s memory of the classroom was
that her teacher taught
them “how to write and sing and read and spell. . . . At a certain
time you go to
44 McKenzie to the author, 1 August 1990.
45F. Bigman interview, T-50,24, DDOH.
&Eric Lassiter interview, Greensboro, NC, 16 March 1993.
“Long Horn interview, T-62,8-9, DDOH.
790 THE HISTO~UAN
school, you know, so many hours, and then you’re out to work

so many hours,
She spent much of her time working in the laundry, where she
was eventu-
ally hired as an assistant matron. William Lone Wolf, said
“mostly they teach us how
to work. . . I learn to work there.”49 Students from the
reservation’s other schools
made similar comments. “We were taught practical things such
as sewing and cook-
ing, laundry and how to care for a family,” said one student.
“All the things we
learned were things we needed to know for our immediate
living.”50 Others regret-
ted not getting more academic training. “It didn’t take me long
to realize how far
behind I was,” noted a former Fort Sill student. “I had a little
math and science . . .
compared to those who attended public s ~ h o o l . ” ~ ’ One
Riverside student lamented
the lack of academic instruction; another Fort Sill student said,
“I don’t think it was
good because it was really academically inferior to the public
school.”52
Thankfully there was more to school life than the vocational
training that dom-
inated students’ lives. A wide variety of extra-curricular
activities, including reading
circles, cooking clubs, lectures, bible study, and sports, offered
welcome relief from
the school routine. Most holidays were celebrated to encourage
patriotism, and the
Indian Office regularly issued guidelines reminding the schools
to observe apyro-
priate holidays. Christmas was especially important, for it

included a week‘s vaca-
tion, during which children were allowed to go home. There was
also an annual
Christmas dinner, complete with turkey (or pork when the
budget was tight) and
small gifts. Halloween, New Year’s Day, and Easter (“which
was the only time 1 ever
saw eggs,” said Parker McKenzie) were also ~ e l e b r a t e d .
~ ~
The school band was an especially popular diversion. Cora
Dunn started the
band in the late 1890s because she believed music played an
integral role in the
introduction of Angloamerican culture at Indian schools. In her
opinion, no other
aspect of the curriculum was as effective in the intellectual and
moral elevation of
the pupils. “I attend personally to the instruction of the music
pupils,” she wrote,
“Ware interview, T - 7 6 , 3 , 5 , DDOH.
‘%Villiam Lone Wolf interview, T-42,8, DIIOH.
McBeth, Ethnic Identity, 92.
511bid, 93.
52McBeth, Ethnic Identity, 93; Clyde Ellis, “‘A Remedy For
Barbarism’: Indian Schools, the Civilizing
Program, and the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation, 187 I -
1915,” American fndian Culture and
Research Journal 18 (1994): 85-120.
53Parker McKenzie interview, Mountain View, Oklahoma, 1

August 1990; Morgan to Indian Agents
and Superintendents of Indian Schools, 22 October 1891, KMS,
OHS; Adams, Education For Ixfinction,
191 -206.
AGENCY, 1893-1920 791
“and find them more enthusiastic and responsive in this than in
any other branch
of study? The band proved a huge success. “The proficiency of
the Rainy
Mountain band is a matter of pride and no school influence has
contributed more
to the advancement of the pupils,” she wrote in 1907.55 Indeed,
students eagerly par-
ticipated and showed impressive talent. McKenzie said that
Dunn produced “won-
derful school bands from fourteen to twenty-year olds who
learned to play the
masterpieces even before some mastered the fourth grade.”56
Rainy Mountain also sponsored athletic teams for both sexes.
Like the band, they
were a source of school pride and offered a welcome occasion
to get away from cam-
pus. Cora Dunn supported sports and always included athletic
equipment in her
annual budget requests. Baseball games against neighboring
reservation schools
and local teams began as early as 1902. “The boys are taking
great interest in play-
ing ball this year,” she reported that year, “and have arranged
match games with the

ball clubs of the surrounding towns.”57 Girls also participated
and around 1910
began their own basketball team.58
The school’s failure to eradicate the Kiowa language
occasionally paid interest-
ing dividends at athletic events. One Kiowa who attended the
predominantly
Comanche Fort Sill School in the 1930s remembered lingering
around the line of
scrimmage when his team played the predominantly Kiowa
Riverside School team.
After eavesdropping o n the plays being called in Kiowa in the
Riverside huddle he
would translate them into English for his teammates. Sixty
years later he still
slapped his knee at the thought of fooling the Riverside team.
For once, he said, “it
was okay to talk Kiowa.”59
Finally, a rich and closely guarded unofficial life kept students
busy. Although
school administrators tried to regulate all student activity, the
children inevitably
found ways to get around the controls. On one level the
activities simply maintained
a level of autonomy. James Silverhorn said that in the evening
“the boys used to all
% u n n to D. W. Browning, 19 December 1895. RMS, OHS.
55Dunn to John Blackrnon, April 25, 1907, KMS, OHS.
%McKenzie t o Hurst, 23 October 1987; McKenzie interview, 1
August 1990.

57Dunn to Randlett, April 23, 1902, RMS, OHS.
58“Lewis Toyebo Birthday.”
59Harry Tofpi interview, Shawnee, Okla., 6 August 1990.
792 THE HISTOKIAN
go u p on the hill-up on Rainy Mountain and stay up there until
supper time. Just
to take a walk.”@ Likewise, clandestine conversations in Kiowa
preserved an impor-
tant measure of identity. Other activities combined
mischievousness with a deter-
mination to be independent. Parker McKenzie recalled late night
kitchen raids
when students would break into the dining hall after “gravy
day,” fill their hats with
gravy and biscuits and then sneak back to their rooms for a
feast. On mornings
when there was a heavy frost or rare snow fall, older boys
sometimes “borrowed” the
fire escape ladders and dashed to the top of Rainy Mountain for
a ride down that
was as exciting as it was dangerous?’
When Rainy Mountain closed in 1920, it left a contradictory
legacy of simulta-
neous success and failure. Cutting Kiowa students’ hair,
dressing them in uniforms,
and teaching them to farm or bake did not erase their cultural
identity.
Administrators underestimated the ability of Indian people to
adapt to changing

cultural patterns; instead of destroying Kiowa culture, schools
like Rainy Mountain
paved the way for a new sense of identity that fit as comfortably
as possible into the
social and economic realities of the twentieth century. Rainy
Mountain produced
students who learned English but retained Kiowa, combined
non-Indian values
with their own, and took jobs in the white community without
becoming wholly
part of it. There was a middle ground, and Kiowa students often
found it. As one
Fort Sill graduate put it,“I know who I am: I am a Kiowa. No
school could ever take
that away from me.”62
Yet despite its numerous limitations, Rainy Mountain’s
programs enabled most
students to make their way in the world outside the campus. It
was not a perfect
education, and it was not what the students had been promised,
but it helped ease
the transition from the life their parents had known to the one
they faced.“If it had-
n’t been for Rainy Mountain School, I probably would not be
typing this account,”
wrote Parker McKenzie. “Despite the hardships we encountered
there, they were
60James Silverhorn interview, 28 September 1967, T- 146,4,
DDOH.
“McKenzie to Hurst, 23 October 1987; Lomawainia, They
Called It Prairie Light, 95-96,98, 128-29.
62SiIverhorn interview, T-146,1, DDOH; E Bignian interview,

T-50,1, DDOH; Eric Lassiter, “ ‘They
Left US These S o n g s . . .That’s All We Got Left Now’: The
Significance of Music in the Kiowa Gourd
Dance and its Relation to Native American Continuity,” in
Native Americati Values: Survival arid
Renewal, ed. Thomas Shirer and Susan M. Branstner (Sault Ste.
Marie, 1993). 378-79; McBeth, “Indian
Schools and Ethnic Identity: An Example From the Southern
Plains Tribes of Oklahoma,” Plains
Anthropologist 28 (Spring 1983): 120; Michael Coleman, “The
Symbiotic Embrace: American Indians,
White Educators and the School, 1820s- 1920s.” Hislory
o/Educafiori 25 (1996): 1-18,
AGENCY, 1893-1920 793
well worth the time. . , . It provided us the opportunity for an
education, though
rudimentary for most of us.”63 And McKenzie, who spent
nearly 40 years as a
Bureau of Indian Affairs employee, never gave up his Kiowa
identity. He originated
and perfected a written system for the Kiowa language and
became a prominent
tribal historian.
Other students carried similar memories away from the school.
“But I really did,
I really did like that school,” said Sarah Long Horn. “I’m
always thankful that I went
to that school because that’s lots of things that I had . . . learned
from that place.”64
O n his 90th birthday Lewis Toyebo told his descendants that

he had “fond memo-
ries [ of Rainy Mountain]. . . . I now see the Kiowa people have
made rapid progress
from the tipi to the halls of higher education. . . . That was the
wish and prayer of
our ancestors who have gone on.” Most important of all, Toyebo
and others knew
that while Rainy Mountain Kiowa gave Kiowa children a
rudimentary academic
education, it was not at the cost of what made them Kiowa.”
Standing in the road that runs past Rainy Mountain, it is
impossible to recognize
the remains of the campus. Save for the tumbledown remains of
a few buildings, the
school that an inspector once called the pride of the Indian
Service is gone. But
there is more to this place than the windswept emptiness of the
Southern Plains; the
mountain is there, an enduring landmark for generations of
Kiowas. In the words
of N. Scott Momaday, Rainy Mountain represents a vital thread
in Kiowa culture-
“a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever,
and the human spirit,
which endures.”66 To this day it remains a powerful force in
the Kiowa community.
Most living Kiowas had relatives who went to the school,
roamed its campus, were
molded by its forces. People regularly visit the mountain to cut
sage and cedar, and
to take a curious peek at the school’s remains.
For many people the trip is akin to a pilgrimage. Visitors
invariably talk about
the school and what it must have been like for the

grandmothers, great-uncles,
cousins, or parents who went there. They speak with reverence
about those people
and what happened a century ago in a lonely corner of a vast
reservation. The
Kiowa people have never forgotten that place; they venerate its
memory, and they
celebrate the survival of their people in the midst of a troubling
time.
6’McKenzie to Hurst, 23 October 1987.
MLong Horn interview, T-62,14, DDOH.
65‘‘Lewis Toyebo Birthday.
&N. Scott Momaday, The Way To Rainy Mounmiri
(Albuquerque, 1993), 4.
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AMERICAN lVDIAN CUITURE AND RESFARCH,IOURNAL
29.4(2005) 75-94
"I knew how to be moderate. And I
knew how to obey": The Commonality
of American Indian Boarding School
Experiences, 1750s-1920s
MARGARET CONNELL SZASZ
In 1743 Samson Occom, a twenty-year-old Mohegan, made his
way north from his
Native community to the English settlement of Lebanon,
Connecticut. Occom
eagerly anticipated learning to read through tutoring from
Congregational
minister Eleazar Wheelock. As he wrote, "When I got up there,
he received me
With kindness and Compassion and instead of Staying a
Fortnight or 3 Weeks, I
Spent 4 years with him."' A little more than a century later, in
1854, a student at
the recently opened Cherokee Female Seminary wrote in the
student newspaper
this advice to her peers: "Let us begin now in new energy that
we may gain that
intellectual knowledge which will reward the hopes of our
Nation, fitting us for
doing much good among our people." 2 Some sixty years later,
in 1915, during
her first day at Santa Fe Indian School, a five-year-old girl from
SanJuan Pueblo
clung to her mother's shawl as she faced the challenges thrust
upon her. Taken

to the principal's office, she pulled the shawl about her,
recalling later, "The
principal pointed to a clock up there and he asked me if I could
tell the time. I
just looked at it and I didn't know what to say. I didn't know
how to tell time, so
Ijust covered my face [with my shawl] and the students
laughed."'
3
THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSALITY IN
THE BOARDING SCHOOL EXPERIENCE
These American Indian students lived in three different
centuries; they were
members of three different tribes; and they attended school in
three vastly
Margaret Connell Szasz is a professor of history at the
University of New Mexico, where
she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on American
history, American
Indian/Alaska Native history, and Native American and Celtic
higtory since 1700. She
has taught at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she is
currently a research
fellow in the School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy.
75
AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL
different regions of North America. Yet the commonality of

their experience
may transcend their temporal, tribal, and geographical
divisions. This essay
explores the common threads of the otherwise seemingly
disparate boarding
school experiences of Native American children. Each of these
boarding
schools and its students possessed unique qualities that were
shaped by a
multitude of conditions, including the cultures of the tribes
represented, the
location, the era, and the schools' directors-missionary, Indian
nation, or
United States government. Yet each of these institutions also
symbolized an
education that removed the students from their homes, their
families, and
their indigenous communities. This single common theme, and
several others
that will be introduced shortly, may serve to connect the
experiences of the
thousands of Indian boarding school youth who found
themselves thrust into
an institutional culture that contrasted sharply with their own
environment.
In the long run, whether those outsiders who directed the
schools proved
to be English colonials, missionaries, instructors from eastern
colleges, or
employees of the United States Indian Service, Indian youth
viewed them as
doctrinaire purveyors of foreign customs and beliefs.
During the decades that followed the Red Power movement of
the 1960s
and 19 7 0s a number of scholars found themselves drawn into

the compelling
theme of American Indian boarding schools. 4 With the
exception of David
Wallace Adams's impressive overview, Education for
Extinction: American Indians
and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, and Michael
C. Coleman's valu-
able study, Indian Children at School, 1850-1930, most books
that have entered
this burgeoning field focus on the individual schools that the
Indian Office
opened during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.
The histories
of these schools range from Donal F. Lindsey's Indians at
Hampton Institute to
Dorothy R. Parker's Phoenix Indian School: The Second Half
Century.
Scholars writing in this field have relied heavily on Native
accounts of the
schools. The twentieth century saw the publication of numerous
recollections
and memoirs of American Indians, and many of these authors
related their
experiences at school.5 Native American scholars BrendaJ.
Child, K. Tsianina
Lomawaima, and AmandaJ. Cobb have also drawn on oral
stories and written
records of their own family members, some of whom attended
the Bureau
of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools, including Flandreau, Haskell,
and Chilocco;
others enrolled at the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw
Females.
Although scholarly works seldom appeal to the public, a

singular spark
of imagination can propel the leap from academia to the wider
populace.
During the 1980s, innovative historian Sally Hyer and San
Felipe Pueblo
elder Frank Tenorio pooled their ideas to compile a unique
history of the
Santa Fe Indian School (1890) that would appeal to the Pueblos
and to the
public. This oral history project relied on Santa Fe Indian
School students,
who interviewed numerous alumni of the school, enabling the
Santa Fe
Indian School to celebrate its centenary with a popular exhibit
that featured
a remarkable collection of photos accompanied by quotations
drawn from
the recorded stories.
A decade later, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, opened
a
more comprehensive exhibition on Indian boarding schools-
"Away from
76
American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1 920s
Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-
2000" [2000-
2005]. Crafted by Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and
K. Tsianina
Lomawaima, all of whom have written on Native issues, the
Heard exhibit

provided an intense visual experience for thousands of museum
visitors.
Although the exhibit catalog dips into the history of earlier
boarding schools
introduced by missionaries in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth
centuries, its primary focus remains the more recent era. Since
"Away from
Home" does not venture beyond the BIA schools, it also skirts
the vibrant
seminaries and academies of the five. Southeast nations of
Indian Territory.
Educational centers like the Cherokee Female Seminary
remained thriving
institutions from the mid-nineteenth century forward, until the
federal
government closed them with Oklahoma statehood in 1907.6
Since most of the memoirs and much of the scholarship in this
field,
including the museum exhibits, restrict their focus to the federal
boarding
schools during a confined era-primarily from the 1870s through
the1930s,
and occasionally to the present-the cumulative impact of this
emphasis has
persuaded the general public that the Indian boarding school
remained
almost exclusively a BIA institution that arrived in Indian
Country at the end
of the so-called "Indian Wars." From the 1970s to the present,
this narrow
perspective has gained popular momentum.
For the general public a capsule definition of the American
Indian

boarding school might sound like this: the first Indian boarding
schools
opened in the late nineteenth century. These schools came under
the thumb
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which snatched Indian
youth from
their families without their parents' consent. As soon as the BIA
had taken the
children to school, it forced them to remain there for many
years. At school,
they could speak only English-no Native languages; they had
their hair cut;
they had to dress and behave like whites; and they kept the
schools running
through their own labor. Many Indian students ran away from
the schools;
if the BIA police caught them, they received severe punishment.
When they
finally returned home, man), of them went "back to the
blanket."
Although this definition contains considerable truth, it has
major faults.
It disregards the schools run by the Southeast nations removed
to Indian
Territory and the schools established by missionaries and other
religious
educators. Even within its narrow focus on the early federal
Indian schools,
it does not address features that complicate the federal
experience, lending
it a certain ambiguity. It fails to acknowledge those Indians who
chose to
attend boarding schools or whose families asked that boarding
schools find a
place for their children. 7 It ignores the innovations introduced

by the Indian
students themselves, which altered the educational blueprint
designed by the
Indian Office." It also disregards the emergence of English as a
lingua franca,
a remarkable link that meant students could communicate,
despite the matiy
languages that separated them.
Hence, a more nuanced account of the federal boarding schools
between
the 1880s and the 1920s reveals a history with many layers.
Still, a more inclu-
sive view of Indian boarding schools, one that ranges from the
eighteenth
century through the early twentieth, poses a more intriguing
framework of
77
analysis. In this broader context the uniqueness of each
boarding school
seems to defy comparison. Yet beneath the surface surprising
commonali-
ties connected the experiences of students at these diverse
Indian boarding
schools, whether they were located in the East or the West, in
the colonial era
or the late nineteenth century. For the students the connective
links extended
well beyond the basic bond of immediate physical removal from
family,

home, and community. Beyond the physical isolation from
home, these
Native boarding school students were thrust abruptly into a
foreign culture.
In each school the staff demanded that new students learn to
conform to a
Euro-American style of child rearing, which relied on physical
punishment; a
Euro-American expectation of gender roles, which ignored
gender role prac-
tices of Native nations; and English-only instruction in Euro-
American history,
religion, and cultural values.
Torn from their familiar environment, the students' sudden
immersion in
a foreign milieu prompted them to recreate some semblance of
their former
cultures. Submerged in a culture of military discipline that was
enforced
by the staff and some of their fellow students, the uprooted
Indian youths
searched their own wits and their cultural memory to exert some
influence
over their daily lives. In the early twentieth century, Ojibwe
youth enrolled in
Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, forced the hand of one
school super-
intendent by remaining in their communities for the wild-rice
harvest, an
important early fall event. The superintendent finally conceded
that Haskell
could not begin classes until October, after the Ojibwe families
had harvested
the wild rice.9

Once settled in their schools, Indian youth established a student
network
based on kinship or other ties created at school, and they
retained remnants
of their own oral cultures by telling stories, praying in their
own languages,
and forming a covert system of communication that set them
apart from most
of the school staff.10 Nicknames for staff helped the students
retain their
separate identity. At Phoenix Indian School Pima student Anna
Moore Shaw
recalled how she and her friends placed their matron into a Pima
cultural
context. Fearing her use of the "strap," they dubbed her
"Ho'ok," the witch
who inhabits a Pima story. When they heard her coming into the
dorm, they
frantically whispered, "Ho'ok, Ho'ok," and jumped into their
beds to avoid
the strap." "Outwitting the system," recalled one of
Lomawaima's Chilocco
alumni, "was a skill developed through student collaboration
and practiced
with pride. It drew students together as it pitted them against
the system, and
it was fun."12
Within the hundreds of Indian boarding schools across North
America
and through the centuries that these institutions remained an
educational
option, the dialogue between Indian youth and the boarding
schools they
aftended played out in endless variations. Yet the connective
themes for these

institutions-the removal from home, the imposition of a foreign
culture,
and the students' skill at matching their wits to take a stand
against the
system-remained a constant presence.
In order to recast the perception of Indian boarding schools, I
intend
to move beyond the restrictive confines of federal Indian
boarding schools
78
American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1 750s-I 920s
during the height of their power. Since a number of scholars
have already
explored the role of Native youth enrolled in these institutions
between 1879
and 1940, I will move beyond this specific era by searching for
the common
threads that linked the students attending the three schools
mentioned
above. The eighteenth-century school, located in Lebanon,
Connecticut, was
Moor's Indian Charity School; the nineteenth-century
institution, located in
Tahlequah, Indian Territory, was the Cherokee Female
Seminary; and the
final institution, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the Santa
Fe Indian
School (SFIS).
I have selected these boarding schools for several reasons.

Cumulatively,
they represent three different kinds of direction-the first by a
minister, the
second by an Indian nation, and the third by the US Indian
Office. They
also represent multiple Indian peoples-Algonquian and Iroquois
in the
Northeast; Cherokee in Indian Territory; and largely Pueblo in
the Southwest,
although Santa Fe Indian School enrolled some students from
other tribes,
primarily Navajo, Apache, and Ute. Finally, the three
institutions represent
the changing worldviews of the dozen or more generations of
Natives and
Euro-Americans involved in American Indian schooling
between the mid-
eighteenth century and the present.
The boarding school experience has not been limited to North
America.
One only has to reflect on the powerful film Rabbit Proof
Fence, set in Aboriginal
Australia, to be reminded of boarding schools' broader impact.
When one lives
within different cultures, one begins to think comparatively.
After living and
teaching abroad intermittently for several years, I wrote an
essay comparing
the experiences of American Indian youth in boarding schools
with those of
Scottish and English youth sent to boarding schools. Although
the contem-
porary world tends to focus on peoples' differences, my own
multicultural
experience has encouraged the opposite: I search for

universality within
different cultures. Pointing out contrasts can be an exercise in
extracting the
obvious, since differences often appear on the surface.
Discovering similari-
ties, however, can require more intensive study. If we accept
this premise, then
searching for the universal in the boarding school experience
will require
more energy than pointing out the differences, but in the end the
search for
universality may have its own rewards: it may bring a new
understanding of
the experiences-both their differences and commonalities-of
those many
Native American youth who attended these educational
institutions.
With this challenge in hand, I propose to address the issues in
the
following manner. Initially, I will describe the three schools,
depicting each
within its unique historical context, its students and their tribes,
and its staff, its
teachers, and those who provided the funding. These capsule
sketches should
highlight some of the differences among the schools. Then I
will search for
those elusive similarities that may prove more difficult to find.
Finally, I will
attempt to draw some conclusions. I hope that my search will
reveal that some
aspects of the children's experiences linked their lives through
the genera-
tions, across Indian Country, and among the different tribes
themselves.

79
MOOR'S INDIAN CHARITY SCHOOL, 1754-1769
When twenty-four-year-old Samson Occom left his studies in
Lebanon,
Connecticut, to begin a decade of teaching and preaching as a
Presbyterian
minister among the Montauk Indians of Long Island, he left a
singular imprint
on his mentor, Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. That
imprint
would later emerge as Moor's Indian Charity School. As
Wheelock's first
Indian student, Occom had excelled. He had learned to read
English, Latin,
Greek, and a little Hebrew. The primary reason that he did not
attend Yale to
further his theology studies was because he had exhausted his
eyes during the
four years of preparation.1 3 Less than a decade after Occom's
departure, two
Delaware students left their Christianized New Jersey
community, bound for
Lebanon, where their arrival at Wheelock's home in December
1754 marked
the opening of Moor's School.
By British standards Moor's School was an outright success.
Inspired by
the Great Awakening, the intense religious revival that swept

through the mid-
eighteenth-century colonies and affected the lives of thousands
of people,
including Occom and Wheelock, Moor's School capitalized on
the religious
enthusiasm that prompted colonials to open their pocketbooks.
Before it
shifted locations to become the core of Dartmouth College,
founded by
Wheelock in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1769, Moor's School
had achieved
a singular position as the largest private Indian charity boarding
school in
British colonial America. During its sixteen-year tenure in
Lebanon it boasted
a total enrollment of approximately sixty-five Indian charity
pupils, of whom
sixteen were girls and young women, plus a smaller number of
English colo-
nial charity pupils.
14
By the standards of its Native American pupils and their
communi-
ties, however, .Moor's School did not fare as well. As director
of the school,
Wheelock earned many critics among tribal communities. About
the time that
he moved the school to Hanover, the Oneida Nation displayed
its hostility
to Wheelock's style of Indian education by abruptly
withdrawing the Oneida
children from the school. 15 Other individual Indians who had
attended the
school also broke off relations with Wheelock. Samson Occom

was one of
these disillusioned figures. When Occom returned from a tour of
England,
Wales, and Scotland in the 1760s, a tour on which he had
embarked to
raise funds for the school, the Mohegan minister discovered that
Wheelock
intended to use the hard-earned British sterling to open a
college for English
youth: "The Indian was converted into an English School," he
remarked
bitterly. In response to this betrayal Occom, once Wheelock's
prize pupil,
permanently severed relations with his former mentor.1 6
Initially, Algonquian students attracted to Moor's School found
its prox-
imity to their communities appealing. Following the two
Delaware boys, other
Algonquians enrolled from Montauk, two of whom were
Occom's brothers-in-
law; still others came from the Narragansett community in
Rhode Island and
from other Native communities in Connecticut itself, including
the Mohegan
and the Pequot. In the early 1760s the first Iroquois students
arrived. They were
recruited by Occom and his brother-in-law David Fowler,
whojourneyed north
80
American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1 750s-i 920s

to visit the Haudenosaunee (League of the Iroquois) villages, a
grueling trip
of about three hundred miles. On one of these trips Occom
recruited Moor's
School's most famous student, Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea). A
Mohawk,
Brant was brother-in-law of Sir William Johnson, the influential
Irishman who
served as trader to the Mohawk and British northern
superintendent of Indian
affairs. A decade later Brant turned his back on the colonial
nonconformists
(Congregationalists and Presbyterians) like Wheelock, who had
schooled him
for two years in Lebanon, and led the Iroquois warriors who
fought as allies
of the British during the American War for Independence.17
Regardless of its
successes or failures, the location and influence of Moor's
School placed it in
the thick of the action in the 1760s and 1770s.
When the Indian boys arrived on Wheelock's doorstep, they
often came
with little preparation. Yet they quickly discovered their
academic training
would be similar to that of the young English charity scholars
continuing on to
Yale or the College of NewJersey (Princeton). Relying on the
unique precedent
set by Occom, Wheelock assumed that the Indian pupils would
see the merit in
reading "Tulley, Virgil, and the Greek testament."1 8 Oddly,
this heady learning
contrasted sharply with the other half of each school day, when
Wheelock

required the Indian boys to work on the school farm, a task
dignified with the
title "Husbandry." With only two exceptions the Native students
showed little
interest in farm chores, and one Narragansett parent even
chastised Wheelock,
"To work two years to learn to farm it, is what I don't consent
to, when I can as
well learn him that myself and have the prophet [sic] of his
labour."' 9
In a similar fashion the Indian girls who entered Moor's School
discov-
ered that they, too, must earn their keep. Delegated to nearby
homes in
Lebanon, where they learned "the arts of good House wifery,"
the girls served
as servants, possibly as virtual slaves. As females living within
the English colo-
nial world, they learned that their academic accomplishments
were deemed
less significant than those of their male counterparts. They
attended school
only one day a week for instruction in "writing &c., till they
should be fit for
an Apprenticeship, to be taught Men's and Women's Apparel."
Like their
female English counterparts in New England, they were taught
subjects that
would assist their husbands' needs because Wheelock remained
convinced
that their presence augured well for future wifely
companionship for their
Indian missionary husbands.
20

This scenario fit the ideal world that Wheelock envisioned for
his Native
pupils. He imagined the Indian boys as future missionaries who
would leave
Moor's School with their wives, their training augmented
perhaps by some
college course work, and move into the mission field. But
Wheelock's dream
never came to fruition. Only one of the sixteen female students,
Hannah
Garrett, a Pequot, married another Native student, David
Fowler, and Fowler
became a teacher rather than a missionary to the Indians; later
he also severed
his ties with his former mentor.
As director of Moor's School, Wheelock immersed the Native
pupils in
the eighteenth-century Calvinist worldview, an instruction that
was so intense
it led one of the Indian girls to confess, "I have no peace of
conscience." The
moral strictures accepted by the English communities of the
region in the
81
aftermath of the Great Awakening proved too demanding for
these young
Natives, who had already been taught to abide by the ethical
codes of their

own people before moving to Lebanon. In Lebanon-away from
home and
kin group-they wavered between the spiritual enthusiasm that
Wheelock
encouraged and the "frolicks" that tempted them in the nearby
tavern in
the "commpany of Indian boys & girls." 21 In the end the
postschool pattern
of those Indian charity students for whom records are available
suggests that
although they adopted a syncretic religion, they preferred to
live within their
own communities, as far away from the English communities as
possible.
CHEROKEE FEMALE SEMINARY, 1851-1909
On the surface the Cherokee Female Seminary appeared to be
the antithesis
of the eighteenth-century Moor's Indian School. Its life span far
exceeded
that of Moor's School. Founded by the Cherokee Nation in
1851, it remained
a viable entity until Oklahoma statehood, despite intermittent
closures forced
by the Civil War, fires, and financial difficulties. When the
federal government
assumed control of the seminary, it created the institution that
would eventu-
ally become Northeastern State University. Unlike Moor's
School, Cherokee
Female Seminary did not come under the direction of
missionaries, nor did
the seminary intend to change the worldviews of the majority of
its students.
Still, beneath the surface it may have shared more with the

eighteenth-century
institution than at first appears.
The two Cherokee seminaries-Male and Female-served as the
top tier of
the Cherokee National Education System, established when the
people began
to recreate their lives in Indian Territory. As the elite
educational institutions
of the Nation, the seminaries symbolized simultaneously the
persistence of
the Cherokee Nation and the divisions that tore the fabric of
Cherokee society
following the arrival of the English and, later, the Americans.
The early nineteenth century witnessed the erosion of Cherokee
society
as the people began to disagree over the nature of Cherokee
values. The
growing impact of the so-called mixed bloods, those who
favored accul-
turation and descended from marriages between Cherokee
women and white
men, forced the nation to reconsider its future path. By the early
1830s,
already divided between the traditionalist majority and mixed-
blood minority,
the Cherokee nation reached a crisis point-the acculturationists
favored
immediate removal west of the Mississippi, whereas the
traditionalists wanted
to remain on ancestral lands. The fraudulent Treaty of New
Echota, signed in
1835 by seventy-five members of the "Treaty Party" out of a
population of about
sixteen thousand, proved a hollow victory, leading to the

wrenching losses on
the eight-hundred-mile trek to the West during the winter of
1838-39.22
Most historians of the Cherokees have described this split by
adopting
the dichotomy of "traditional" vs. "progressive" or "full blood"
vs. "mixed
blood."23 But historians Theda Perdue, William G.
McLoughlin, and Julia M.
Coates have offered a different analysis, which largely
discounts the signifi-
cance of blood as a distinguishing feature. They argue that the
categories of
mixed blood and full blood were determined not by blood but by
the nature
82
American Indian Boarding School Experiences, I 750s-1 920s
of the relationship between the individual and Cherokee culture.
McLoughlin
writes that "the difference between a full-blood and a mixed-
blood was not
biological or ancestral; a full-blood meant someone whose
cradle language
was Cherokee.... A mixed-blood was a Cherokee whose cradle
language was
English and.for whom it remained the first and only language.
Over time the
difference between these two groups came to include many
aspects of lifestyle,
values, and norms."24 Adding a contemporary perspective,

Coates observes
that "Cherokees may call a Cherokee of mixed racial heritage a
'fullblood' if
that person speaks Cherokee and is steeped in Cherokee world
view."
2 5
When the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory created a
national
school system, its schools echoed these divisive worldviews of
its people, who
continued to respond in different ways to the gnawing issue of
Cherokee
values and the pressures for acculturation. The children of the
full bloods
who were enrolled in Cherokee Nation schools generally
attended the
"common schools," which taught basic reading and writing in
English. Since
these children, who came from "conservative" families, entered
school with
little, if any, English at their command, and their instructors
generally knew
little, if any, Cherokee, the mixed results attracted criticism
within the Nation
and led to some efforts to teach literacy in Cherokee as well. 26
Despite the
criticism, the common schools attested to the Cherokee Nation's
desire for
education for all of its citizenry. Although they served only
those families who
could not afford or who refused to send their children to the
seminaries, at
the same time they provided free, formal education for more
than two-thirds

of Cherokee youth. 2 7 While neighboring Arkansas and Kansas
enrolled fewer
than 10 percent of their school-age children in the late
nineteenth century,
the Cherokee Nation supported almost one hundred common
schools.
28
At the other end of the spectrum lay the seminaries. Their
enrollment
numbers revealed their elite status. Compared with the common
schools,
which enrolled as many as twenty-eight hundred pupils in a
single year (1876),
the Cherokee Female Seminary's total enrollment during its
entire life span
of some forty academic years was perhaps three thousand
pupils. Although
the Male Seminary boasted a higher total enrollment, it also
suffered lower
average attendance.
29
With a handful of exceptions almost all of the students at the
Female
Seminary were Cherokee. In addition, most had been raised in
acculturated
families. Some of them had 1/16 Cherokee blood; a few had as
little as 1/128
Cherokee blood. Many of these students had grown up in the
prosperous
region of the nation where it had built the seminaries, in the
vicinity of the
capital at Tahlequah. Their families were reasonably well off.

Still, they were
generally not among the wealthiest Cherokees, who often sent
their children
outside of the Nation to be educated. John Ross, for example,
sent his chil-
dren to the east for their schooling.
In the post-Civil War years, when the Cherokee Nation was
recovering
from the devastation of this era, it managed to reopen the
seminaries. At
this time the Board of Education made a decision that fractured
the social
and cultural milieu that characterized the prewar Female
Seminary. In order
to incorporate the children of poor families, the board added
two pre-high
83
school levels-a "primary department" for grades one through
five, and a
"preparatory department" for grades six through eight. Initially,
these new
students were almost exclusively charity pupils, and while some
of their
expenses were covered through separate seminary funds, they
also had to
work to earn their keep. When they arrived, these pupils
brought a very
different understanding of what it meant to be Cherokee.
Generally reared

among conservative families in remote regions of the Nation
where there was
no access to the common schools, they were full bloods, both by
blood and by
culture, and their first language was Cherokee.3 0
Most of the acculturated students enrolled in the secondary
program
did not speak the Cherokee language, nor did they know much,
if anything,
about traditional Cherokee culture. But the apparent mixed-
blood vs. full-
blood dichotomy of the student body was far from clear-cut. For
example,
some secondary students who were categorized as full bloods
had been raised
in prosperous families, where they learned little of traditional
culture. Still
others, especially the Cherokee primary students who worked
for their board
and rooms, had not been exposed to the influential elite of the
Cherokee
Nation, who showed a distinct preference for white culture.
SHence, while the Cherokee Female Seminary catered primarily
to the
daughters of Cherokees who advocated acculturation, the
presence of a
minority of traditional students meant that the internal divisions
mirrored the
external divisions within the larger Cherokee society. The
seminary within was
like the Nation without. The antagonisms that divided the
students hinged
on their diverse opinions of the seminary's academic and
cultural goals.

Like its male counterpart, the Female Seminary looked to the
East Coast for
its prototype. It adopted the curriculum and deportment taught
at Mount
Holyoke, introduced to the seminary by its teachers, who had
graduated from
the Massachusetts institution. Although the seminary remained
in the heart of
the Cherokee Nation, its secondary students studied English,
Latin, algebra,
geometry, physics, botany, and physiology. The teachers taught
history that
focused on the youthful United States. Cherokee history and
culture were
conspicuous by their absence.
By emulating this eastern model, the teachers, most of the
students, and,
indeed, the leadership of the Cherokee Nation underlined their
stance on
the proposition that "white" was superior. By contrast, when the
full bloods
or traditional students encountered the seminary's heavy
emphasis on white
culture, they found it a troubling experience. Because of their
unfamiliarity
with English and their lack of academic preparation, on arrival
these students
quickly discovered they would be consigned to the third floor,
among the
primary students, even though they were often much older.
Their lack of
ready income reinforced a pervasive sense of inferiority. They
could not afford
party clothes or after-dinner snacks. Nor could they expect
much sympathy

from the white, largely eastern, teachers, who did not
understand their
traditionalist position within a predominantly acculturated
milieu. According
to the dictates of the Cherokee Female Seminary, "the white
way was the
only acceptable way." 3' Those who flourished in this
environment went on
to marry mixed-blood Cherokee or white men, and they
achieved respected
84
American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1 750s-I 920s
positions in Cherokee society or supplied the constant need for
teachers at
the common schools. Like their counterparts at the Cherokee
Male Seminary,
their position within the Cherokee Nation was assured.
SANTA FE INDIAN SCHOOL, 1890 TO THE PRESENT
Like its predecessors in Connecticut and in the Cherokee
Nation, Santa Fe
Indian School would dramatically influence the lives of its
students. Unlike its
predecessors, Santa Fe came to represent the aggressive vigor of
the federal
boarding school era. The rise of the federal schools came
directly on the
heels of the military defeat of Indians in the late 1870s and
1880s. Carlisle
Indian School, the catalyst for these institutions, opened its

doors in 1879,
only thirty-nine months after the last Indian victory at the Battle
of the Little
Big Horn. One decade later, the first Pueblo Indian children
entered the
Santa Fe Indian School, built on the outskirts of New Mexico's
territorial
capital. Shortly after the school opened, in December 1890, the
Seventh
Cavalry's massacre of Lakota families at Wounded Knee Creek,
South Dakota,
marked the last military encounter between Natives and the US
Army. With
the end of centuries of Native military resistance, highlighted in
New Mexico
with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Indians turned to other forms of
resistance,
responding to new versions of colonialism. During this
transition era of
1869 to 1900, sometimes known as the Gilded Age, Congress
and the Indian
Office launched an assault on Indian sovereignty. Designed to
merge Native
Americans into mainstream society, it employed three tactics-
individual
land ownership through allotment, prohibition of Native
religions and other
civil rights, and federal schooling of Indian children. In this
context Santa Fe
Indian School was in the vanguard of the new approach.
Alumnae who described their experiences at Santa Fe testified
that they
did not put up any resistance during their schooling. A former
student from
San Juan Pueblo recalled, "In June, I think, my parents come for

me in a
wagon. We had no choice about coming to school. We were told
to go to
school, and that was it. At that time I guess we were so
obedient. We didn't
question anything." 32 In retrospect, however, the Pueblo
Indians of New
Mexico, whose children formed the majority of the students at
the school, did
engage in a long-term form of resistance, one that hearkens
back to the plan-
ning for the Pueblo Revolt. Known for their persistence and for
maintaining
a position in spite of vigorous opposition, the members of the
nineteen
Pueblos of New Mexico, through their overarching government,
known as
the All Indian Pueblo Council, gained control of Santa Fe
Indian School a
little less than a century after it was founded by the US
government. How that
happened remains intrinsic to the full history of the school, but
it also links it
to the other Indian boarding schools described above.
In the early years-1890 to 1929-the Santa Fe Indian School
emulated
the federal policy of assimilation by relying on military
discipline and a
mainstream American curriculum. From 1900 until the late
1920s the Indian
Service poured very little money into its schools, and, like
Phoenix Indian
School, Albuquerque Indian School, Haskell Institute, Chemawa
(Oregon),

85
and others, Santa Fe was "an overcrowded and under-funded
institution
with pervasive military discipline and a curriculum that
emphasized manual
labor."3 3 Like the other boarding schools, it crowded the
children into
dormitories, which became conduits for contagious diseases.
Daily marching
dominated student lives. One Santa Clara Pueblo woman
recalled, "I
remember when I first went there they used to drill us. Drill us
to the school,
drill us to the dining room, and drill us back to the dormitory....
We were
just like prisoners, marching everyplace."
3 4
Student labor kept the school afloat, but in spite of student
efforts most of
the former students who were interviewed recalled that they
never had enough
to eat unless they were assigned kitchen duty. "That was the
place where I had
a chance to at least have an extra bite of bread-in the kitchen," 3
5 One-half
of each day they carried out tasks that the Indian Service
considered relevant
to their gender; the other half of the day they were in the
classroom, where

they learned English, reading, and writing from Euro-American
teachers. "We
spent eight years in school here [and then we] went home," a
Sandia Pueblo
man recalled. "At that time the parents thought that if you could
speak a
little English and read and write a little, you were educated
enough to stay
home and go to work."3 6 Santa Fe boys worked in the fields,
the dairy, and
the bakery, and in shops where they learned shoe- and harness-
making and
carpentry. Girls learned "domestic science," according to the
contemporary
dictates of mainstream America. Reflecting on her lack of
ability, one student
recalled, "They tried me in the kitchen-of course I was a
horrible failure
there. They tried me in the dining room-I guess I was a terrible
waitress and
table setter and dishwasher, so they threw me out of there. Even
in the laundry
I was a miserable failure and scorched everyone's clothes."
3 7
Although Santa Fe shared commonalities with other federal
boarding
schools, particularly in the West, it remained unusual because
of its prox-
imity to the Pueblos, especially the Keresan and Tanoan Pueblos
located
along the Rio Grande. The nature of Pueblo society influenced
the milieu
of the school. A San Juan woman suggested, "I think some of
the teaching

our parents gave us: to be tolerant, to not be overly aggressive.
Being of that
mind really made a difference. I knew how to do without. I
knew how to be
moderate. And I knew how to obey."'3 8 Pueblo families and
clans reinforced
these values each summer when most of the children-except
those who
were orphaned-returned home to their villages, stepped back
into their
Indian clothes, and shared their traditional foods-Indian corn
bread, beans,
squash, green-chili stew, melons, and wild fruit and vegetables.
39 Students who
ran away from the Santa Fe school did so because they missed
their families,
the traditional food, and the ceremonial dances and annual
"feast days."
The proximity of Santo Domingo Pueblo, which lay downriver
about thirty
miles from the school, encouraged students from different
tribes-who were
already well acquainted with its popular August 4 feast day-to
flee to Santo
Domingo from Santa Fe.
Between the 1930s and the present, Santa Fe Indian School
remolded
itself in a variety of ways. During the 1930s it added an art
program under the
auspices of the Indian New Deal, where students from the
Pueblos and other
86

American Indian Boarding School Experiences, I 750s-i 920s
tribes found abundant encouragement to paint scenes from their
own Native
cultures. Prominent Indian artists, such as Pablita Velarde
(Santa Clara),
Pop Chalee (Taos), and Gerald Nailor (Navajo), emerged from
those years.
During the termination era that followed World War II the
school retreated
from the multiculturalism approach of the Indian New Deal. By
the early
1960s the federal government had closed the school, sending its
students
downriver to Albuquerque Indian School and opening its doors
in 1962 to
the newly founded Institute of American Indian Art. In the
1970s, with the
demise of the physical plant at Albuquerque and the passage of
the Indian
Self-Determination Act of 1975, the All Indian Pueblo Council
(AIPC) took
the initiative to contract with the federal government. The AIPC
would direct
the Santa Fe Indian School itself, serving as the first example of
tribal-federal
contracting under the new legislation. In September 1981 Santa
Fe Indian
School reopened to a student body of about 450 pupils. The
school had come
full circle, and it was finally in the hands of the people who
sent their children
to Santa Fe for an education.
SIMILARITIES

Several threads link the experiences of the students who
attended these three
institutions. Not surprisingly, the students who derived the
greatest sense
of satisfac tion during their years of study were those who
agreed with their
institution's goals. As long as Samson Occom and his brother-
in-law David
Fowler believed in Eleazar Wheelock's educational plans, they
were quite
willing to carry them out. Their dissatisfaction arose when they
disagreed,with
his approach. Then they retreated to their own Native
communities and the
values they had learned there. At the Cherokee seminary the
acculturated
students who accepted the "white-is-superior" concept found the
seminary's
approach matched their needs. The school's curriculum
enhanced their
desire to learn about white education and deportment. Pablita
Velarde, the
Pueblo student who failed at the domestic science tasks, found
little appeal in
Santa Fe Indian School until it introduced the art program
during the 1930s.
Then she excelled.
The relevance of the curriculum and the physical work
associated with
the schools also form a common thread. At each school the
nature of the
curriculum affected the students quite strongly. For Samson
Occom and a
few of the Indian youth at Moor's School, Wheelock's demand

for knowledge
of Latin and Greek seemed to make some sense. But when
David Fowler and
other Algonquian students traveled to the Iroquois villages
during the 1760s
to serve as schoolmasters, they quickly discovered that their
preparation was
inadequate. Soon after their arrival they realized what they
should have been
taught at Moor's School, and it was not Latin and Greek. As
director, Wheelock
never considered the option of teaching the Native languages,
such as the
languages of the Iroquois nations, nor did he consider that he
should have
taught the boys how to farm rather than merely assigning farm
chores to the
reluctant scholars; he would have served the future
schoolmasters far better
had he encouraged their communities to teach them how to live
off the land.
87
When they arrived in the Iroquois villages, none of the former
Algonquian
pupils knew how to hunt, how to trap, or how to survive without
the ameni-
ties they had enjoyed at the school. Hence, they never had
enough to eat. If
the curriculum for the boys seemed inappropriate, the training
for the girls

proved equally ineffective. Although Moor's School taught
tailoring skills to
some of the girls, they found no need for this craft in their own
villages, and
those who tried to survive in the English communities
encountered strong
prejudice against Indians, which sent them back to their own
communities.
By.contrast, instruction in English, which occurred at each of
the schools,
remained relevant. At Santa Fe it served as a lingua franca for
the students.
The Pueblos spoke a number of different languages; and the
Navajo and
Apache spoke variations of Athabascan. At the Cherokee
Female Seminary
English served the purpose of the acculturated students, but it
remained an
embarrassment for the Cherokee full bloods, since their
monolingual status
assigned them to an inferior position. English aided the students
during
their years at Moor's School because they came from a mixed-
language back-
ground, but it did not serve the schoolmasters in the Iroquois
villages because
most of the Iroquois-except for some of the Mohawk-spoke
little English.
A further link among the schools addresses the issue of
students' aware-
ness of their own traditional culture. At the Cherokee Female
Seminary the
full bloods knew their culture and their language. Like the
Pueblo students,

these Cherokees were comfortable with their own identity.
Unlike the Pueblos,
however, they remained a minority at the seminary and
consequently could
not retain. that level of comfort at school. For the Cherokee full
bloods the
seminary's focus on "white" culture may have served as a more
severe shock
than the Anglo environment at Santa Fe Indian School because
at Santa Fe
the Pueblos, unlike the Cherokee traditionalists, remained the
majority, and
all of the students there came from strong Indian cultural
backgrounds. My
research suggests that Moor's School was more problematic
because the
Indians who attended the school came from varying
backgrounds in terms
of cultural awareness. Some of the Algonquian villages had
already adopted
Reformed Calvinism. By contrast, the Iroquois, and especially
the Mohawk,
had been exposed to the presence of Anglican missionaries, but
they had
retained stronger Native spiritual traditions. Catholicism, which
had reached
the Iroquois via the French and the Huron, had also exerted
considerable
influence, but it did not appear to affect those Iroquois students
who attended
the Protestant Moor's School.
40
The proximity of these boarding schools to the students' own
communi-

ties also shaped their attitude toward the schools. For the
Navajos and Apaches
who enrolled at Santa Fe, the return journey to their distant
camps remained
difficult for many decades. By contrast, the Pueblos, who lived
as close as
thirty miles away in villages like Santo Domingo, knew that
they would return
to their communities during the summer. This promise offered a
degree. of
security. In like fashion most of the Iroquois students, with the
exception of
Joseph Brant, did not remain for a lengthy time at Moor's
School because
of the vast distance, both cultural and physical, that separated
their homes
from an English-run boarding school located in Connecticut.
For some of the
88
American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1 920s
Algonquians, who were already partially Christianized and lived
closer, the
school held their attention for several years.
Finally, the schools shared a common thread in the nature of the
relations
among the students themselves. Often this relationship proved
far more signif-
icant than the relationship between students and teachers,
reinforcing the
concept of a vibrant student network that involved skilled

tactics of commu-
nication and evasion. 4 1 This did not always lead to unanimity
of purpose,
since rifts among the students proved common. The issue of
conservative
vs. acculturated Indians was not limited to the Cherokee
seminary, where it
remained an obvious source of dissonance. It also appeared at
Moor's School,
where it erupted when a fight broke out between an Iroquois
student and an
Algonquian student, who accused the Iroquois of being a "white
eyes." The
Iroquois student, reputedly, was a son of the Irish trader
William Johnson and
an Iroquois woman. The fight, which took place during a time
when Wheelock
was away from the school, reportedly lasted the better part of a
day.
4 2
At Santa Fe Indian School a sense of camaraderie enabled the
students to
survive the lengthy school year, but the significant number of
students, espe-
cially Pueblos, who were related to each other helped to
reinforce this bond.
The same held true at the Cherokee Female Seminary, where
staff permitted
several of the students who were related to share a room. It also
occurred at
Moor's School, which attracted two or more children from
single families,
such as the Montauk brothers of Occom's wife. In spite of the
acculturation or

mixed-blood issue that divided some of the students, the
strength of kinship
and other ties among students, often formed after they arrived,
suggests that
the students' relationships with each other may have influenced
their lives
more profoundly than any other aspect of their boarding school
experience.
CONCLUSION
The multiple threads linking Indian boarding schools from the
eighteenth
century through the twentieth suggest that even though the
students' experi-
ences differed in accordance with their unique circumstances,
some common
ground can be found among the Natives enrolled at all three
institutions. The
relevance of the curriculum and the physical workload for the
students; the
background cultural knowledge that they brought from their
own commu-
nity; the proximity of the boarding school to their homes and
tribal lands; and
their crucial alliances with other students, especially those
siblings, cousins,
and other relatives who shared kinship ties-all of these themes
suggest that
the students introduced an indispensable yet common asset to
each of the
schools. They arrived with their own cultural view of the world,
a view that
retained its presence during the years when they were ostensibly
immersed in
a boarding school environment. In each situation they reshaped

their schools
in ways that we have not yet fully grasped.
Although the students who remolded these educational
institutions may
have been widely separated by culture, location, and generation,
their stories
reflect a measure of universality. Because of these
commonalities, they shared
some of the experiences of their counterparts who lived in other
times and
89
other places. These experiences-homesickness, the institutional
environ-
ment that the students themselves modified, and their efforts to
resolve the
clash, or the similarity, between Native values and the values
taught at the
school-all served to forge a hidden bond that linked the Indians
at Moor's
School, the Cherokee Female Seminary, and the Santa Fe Indian
School. By
contributing to this student bond, however tenuous, the
American Indian
boarding schools gained a common ground. Across the
generations, the
Indian youth who found themselves at boarding school,
regardless of the
circumstances, contributed to an educational stream that they
made their

own: it bore the stamp of their cultures and their tribes, it
demonstrated
their ability to negotiate the foreign ways taught at the boarding
schools,
and, in certain instances, it suggested their talent for drawing
those unwitting
foreigners into the circle of their own worldviews.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the multiple sponsors of the
32nd Annual
Symposium of the American Indian, "Cultural Journeys: Four
Centuries
of American Indian Education," held at Northeastern State
University,
Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 14-16 April 2004, where I delivered a
draft of this
paper. It has been considerably revised since that presentation.
NOTES
1. Samson Occom, "Diary," vol. 1, 84, in Dartmouth College
Archives, Hanover,
New [4ampshire [hereafter cited as DCA].
2. This comment appeared in the student newspaper Cherokee
Rose Buds, 1
August 1854, 2, as cited in Devon A. Mihesuah, Cultivating the
Rosebuds: The Education of
Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press,
1993), 39.
3. Student is quoted in Sally Hyer, OneHouse, One Voice, One
Heart: Native American

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