Abstract
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Christian missionaries and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) established residential schools whose primary aim was to assimilate Indigenous American youth into mainstream Euro-American culture. BIA schools modeled after the Carlisle Indian Industrial School established by the U.S. Army officer Richard Henry Pratt sought to extinguish any glimmer of Indigenous identity. This was done by separating children from their families and communities, stripping their clothes and cutting their hair, and punishing them for speaking their own languages or practicing traditional rituals or ceremonies. The curriculum focused on domestic training for girls and agricultural training for boys, and included little academic instruction. Boarding school was a dangerous place for many children who faced physical and sexual abuse and even death from accidents and disease. Another problem was perpetually inadequate government funding that led to poor school facilities, overcrowding, malnourish- ment, disease, and periodic school closings.
This paper seeks to elucidate how the political aims of the U.S. government played out in different schools, and how Indigenous people asserted their agency in different situations. In northern Idaho, for example, the Presbyterian minister Henry Harmon Spalding founded the Nez Perce Indian Mission and School in 1838, while the competing Jesuit priest Joseph Cataldo established a mission in 1874 where he also taught children. Cataldo then formally established a Jesuit school in 1902 and orphanage in 1926. And between 1902 and 1957, the mission school, which remained in operation until 1968, grew into a complex contain 22 buildings. In the same community, a boarding school was established in 1885 in buildings converted from the recently closed Fort Lapwai. The government boarding school operated until 1912, three years after the consolidation of local school districts into a single high school system — the first of its kind — where Indian and non-Indian children were integrated