Digital archive marks boarding school era
Database aims to show, preserve experiences of Native Americans
In a research room at the Pacific Alaska Region National Archives in Seattle, Denise Lajimodiere broke into sobs.
She scrolled through report cards and disciplinary records illuminating her late father Leo’s boarding school experience at Chemawa Indian Training School in Salem, Oregon. Then came the heartbreaking letters sent to school officials from the old Cree couple that raised Leo until he was taken away.
“They were, like, ‘Leo was sick when he left. How’s he doing?’ and, ‘Did he receive his Christmas package?’ ” recalled Lajimodiere, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota, retired education professor and North Dakota poet laureate.
Lajimodiere’s mother, uncle and grandfather were also sent to Native American boarding schools. All spoke little of their experiences. Tracking down documents that could share those details proved challenging: They were all over the place.
But a new digital archive could alleviate such challenges. Staff of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, have spent four years compiling and digitizing records from around the country. The materials offer a more complete picture of the experiences of those who attended such schools and the reasons the effects continue to reverberate.
“We are taking a big step toward honoring the history and strength of Native peoples and building a more just and equitable future,” said coalition CEO Deborah Parker, a member of the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, in a post announcing the launch.
Lajimodiere is among the coalition’s founding members. “There seems to be a strong need for people like me, their children and grandchildren, to know more about what their family members went through,” she said. “Finding these records is part of the healing.”
More than 500 federally funded Indian boarding schools operated in the U.S. throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many run by religious denominations that contracted with the government, the coalition said.
“Indian children were forcibly abducted by government agents, sent to schools hundreds of miles away and beaten, starved or otherwise abused when they spoke their Native languages,” the coalition notes on its website.
The goal was to erase their Indigenous identities while preparing them for menial jobs in American society. They were inspired by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder’s motto: “Kill the Indian in him, save the man.”
Students were stuffed into overcrowded dormitories and classrooms, and many suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect. Many died.
Lajimodiere said her uncle attended a school where nuns beat Native American kids with an inner tube for the slightest infraction. Her mother was locked in a closet for not speaking English.
“It was forced assimilation,” she said.
By 1925, a 2019 Native American Rights Fund report said, more than 60,000 Indigenous children had been placed in such schools, representing 83% of all Native American school-age kids.
The report cites Rainy Mountain in southwest Oklahoma, which opened with capacity for 50 students. Two decades later its population had swelled to 160 despite no additional living space.
By 1916, all but five of its 168 students had been diagnosed with trachoma, an infectious eye disease, after the Office of Indian Affairs refused to repair the school’s water system, the report said.
“Sadly, these circumstances were not unusual,” the authors wrote.
Lajimodiere said efforts and resources toward the archive project intensified after the reported discovery in 2021 of what was believed to be more than 1,000 Native American children’s remains at Canadian residential schools for First Nations students.
The claims prompted U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo whose grandparents went through the boarding school system, to launch an investigation into the enduring effects of U.S.-funded Indian boarding schools.
Still, locating, accessing and digitizing these records is laborious.
“I could work my entire life to digitize these records with a full team and we would barely scratch the surface,” said Fallon Carey, the archives’ interim manager.
Among the materials being scanned are more than 20,000 documents related to Quaker-run schools stored at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges. They describe Quaker policies of educating and working with Indigenous people and include records of Quaker organizations that provided funding or textbooks to boarding schools in addition to correspondence and journals kept by teachers and school supporters.
“They offer tantalizing glimpses into the experiences of Indigenous children and evidence of the harm caused by the forced assimilation tactics of these schools,” said Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, associate curator of Swarthmore College’s Friends Historical Library.
Though the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, in partnership with tribes, still operated more than 180 elementary, secondary and residential schools in 23 states as of 2018, the Native American Rights Fund notes the identities of those schools have changed. Gone are the paternalism and colonialism of decades past, replaced by “a worldview that acknowledges the inherent rights of Native people to lay claim to their tribal and personal histories.”
Nonetheless, the repercussions of their predecessors linger today. Households were destroyed. Some assimilated children returned to their communities as strangers, while others never returned at all. When Lajimodiere’s father came home from boarding school after four years, the old couple that raised him had died.
Lajimodiere has interviewed boarding school survivors around the U.S. She finds many elders have what she calls unresolved grief, relating experiences they’ve never shared before. “One elder said she hadn’t told anyone until she visited with me,” Lajimodiere said. “She said, ‘When was I going to talk about sexual abuse? At Thanksgiving dinner?’ It’s still impacting them today.”