Government Documents
List of federal Indian boarding schools as of April 1, 2022. by Call Number: ONLINE or WWW Gov Docs I 20.2:SCH 6/12/LISTPublication Date: 2022Directory of off-reservations boarding schools in the United States. The initial work of the Department of the Interior (DOI) Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative has focused on the creation of a comprehensive list of Federal Indian Boarding Schools (FIBS).
Books and e-books
Carlisle Indian Industrial School : Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations
The Carlisle Indian School (1879-1918) was an audacious educational experiment. Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founder and first superintendent, persuaded the federal government that training Native children to accept the white man's ways and values would be more efficient than fighting deadly battles. The result was that the last Indian war would be waged against Native children in the classroom. More than 8,500 children from virtually every Native nation in the United States were taken from their homes and transported to Pennsylvania. Carlisle provided a blueprint for the federal Indian school system that was established across the United States and also served as a model for many residential schools in Canada.
Indian school : teaching the white man's way
In 1879 eighty-four Sioux boys and girls became the inaugural group of students to be enrolled at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Carlisle was the first institution opened by the federal government for the education of Native American children. Michael L. Cooper examines the Indian Schools and tells the personal stories, often in their own words, of several young students, including Zitkala-Sa, who wrote, "Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God."
American Indian education : a history
In this comprehensive history of American Indian education in the United States from colonial times to the present, historians and educators Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder explore the broad spectrum of Native experiences in missionary, government, and tribal boarding and day schools. This up-to-date survey is the first one-volume source for those interested in educational reform policies and missionary and government efforts to Christianize and "civilize" American Indian children.
Boarding school blues : revisiting American Indian educational experiences
The first volume of essays ever to focus on the American Indian boarding school experience, and written by some of the foremost experts and most promising young scholars of the subject, Boarding School Blues ranges widely in scope, addressing issues such as sports, runaways, punishment, physical plants, and Christianity. With comparative studies of the various schools, regions, tribes, and aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia, the book reveals both the light and the dark aspects of the boarding school experience and illuminates the vast gray area in between.
Kill the Indian, save the man : the genocidal impact of American Indian residential schools
For five consecutive generations, from roughly 1880 to 1980, Native American children in the United States and Canada were forcibly taken from their families and relocated to residential schools. The stated goal of this government program was to "kill the Indian to save the man." Half of the children did not survive the experience, and those who did were left permanently scarred. The resulting alcoholism, suicide and the transmission of trauma to their own children has led to a social disintegration with results that can only be described as genocidal.
To show what an Indian can do : sports at Native American boarding schools
The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture on them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sports in their lives.
Education at the Edge of Empire : Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico's Indian Boarding Schools
For the vast majority of Native American students in federal Indian boarding schools at the turn of the twentieth century, the experience was nothing short of tragic. Dislocated from family and community, they were forced into an educational system that sought to erase their Indian identity as a means of acculturating them to white society. However, as historian John Gram reveals, some Indian communities on the edge of the American frontier had a much different experience--even influencing the type of education their children received. Shining a spotlight on Pueblo Indians' interactions with school officials at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools, Gram examines two rare cases of off-reservation schools that were situated near the communities whose children they sought to assimilate.
Sovereign Schools : How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation
For centuries indigenous peoples in North America have struggled to preserve their religious practices and cultural knowledge by educating younger generations but have been thwarted by the deeply corrosive effects of missionary schools, federal boarding schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation schools, and off-reservation public schools. Martha Louise Hipp describes the successful fight through sustained Native community activism for public school sovereignty during the late 1960s and 1970s on the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes' Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak
Boarding School Voices is both an anthology of mostly unpublished writing by former students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and a study of that writing. The boarding schools' ethnocidal practices have become a metaphor for the worst evils of colonialism, a specifiable source for the ills that beset Native communities today. But the fuller story is one not only of suffering and pain, loss and abjection, but also of ingenious agency, creative syntheses, and unimagined adaptations.
Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute's Outing Program, 1900-1945
Native Students at Work tells the stories of Native people from around the American Southwest who participated in labor programs at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. The school placed young Native men and women in and around Los Angeles as domestic workers, farmhands, and factory laborers. For the first time, historian Kevin Whalen reveals the challenges these students faced as they left their homes for boarding schools and then endured an outing program that aimed to strip them of their identities and cultures by sending them to live and work among non-Native people.
Open Internet Collections
- Digital Public Library of America -- American Indian Boarding SchoolsThroughout the nineteenth century, boarding schools were established to educate and assimilate American Indian children according to US cultural standards and values. These schools, predominantly run by Christian missionaries, were often funded by the federal government and worked to “civilize” Native American children, forcing many to abandon their names, cultures, and identities in the process. This collection of photos and documents shows what life was like for the many children enrolled in American Indian boarding schools.
- Library of Congress -- Native American Education: Topics in Chronicling AmericaAssimilation of Native American culture through "Indian Schools" led to controversy and backlash. This guide provides access to materials related to "Native American Education" in the Chronicling America digital collection of historic newspapers.
- Jesuit Boarding SchoolsStatement from the Society of Jesus and their role in American Boarding Schools. Contains a list of the schools they operated and dates.
- Interactive Digital Map of Indian Boarding SchoolsFrom The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, this interactive map, which was created in partnership with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, documents the location of boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada. You can find information and locations for all 523 known Indian boarding schools in the United States, as well as known Indian residential schools in Canada.