Indian Boarding Schools

Near Carson City, Nevada, off Highway 395 on Snider Avenue, is the location of the former Stewart Indian School. Small and medium-sized rough stone buildings and huge cottonwood trees punctuate the ground. Many of the buildings, still sturdy after more than eighty years, are currently occupied by various state agencies. The house of the former Superintendent now serves as a museum. As you walk along the buildings and follow paths of scrawny grass, sand, and gravel you come across dilapidated animal sheds, ramshackle laundry facilities, run-down machine shops, a tiny post office, an overgrown athletic field, a church with the symbols of various Native tribes along its outer walls, a huge assembly hall, but no playground. In spite of the cool shade and the seemingly serene atmosphere, it’s an eerie place. The apparent peace and quiet on a summer afternoon is deceptive. There is no ringing of happy children’s voices from years past echoing in the air. The first time I walked there in the shadow of the huge trees, I was reminded of - yes - the old brick buildings of the Auschwitz Stammlager.

The history of the Stewart Indian School goes back to the last century, when it was one of more than 300 similar schools in the US. In 1879, the Bureau of Indian Affairs created the first Indian boarding school. These institutions were intended to "educate" Native American children. What might have sounded benign and benevolent then - and to some perhaps even today - was nothing less than cultural genocide. Thousands of children of Native American peoples ages five to twenty were forcefully taken from their families and placed in these boarding schools, often hundreds of miles away from home. In these military-style schools, children of different tribes were randomly assorted. They were subjected to flogging and humiliation. The school curriculum consisted primarily of basic reading and math skills and virtually no exposure to the arts or the humanities. Instead, vocational skills (engine repair for boys and domestic skills for girls) were emphasized. Thus, an inexpensive future labor pool was ensured. In addition to the daily schoolwork, hard physical labor was a part of the curriculum in all Indian boarding schools. Yet, the food rations for the children were minimal and bordered on starvation. Worse, the Indian children were not permitted to speak their own languages or maintain their indigenous cultures. Forced to assimilate into a non-Indian culture and abandon their way of life, these youngsters became alienated from their own families and their own people. Contributing to the estrangement from time-honored Native traditions was the fact that children had to accept Christian beliefs and refrain from following their indigenous spiritual values. Generations of Native American children were thus subjected to physical, emotional, possibly also sexual, and certainly spiritual abuse. In 1892, Indian parents lost the legal right to keep their children from attending these schools. Congress enacted legislation that authorized government officials to use force, if necessary, to abduct Indian children from their families.
The following excerpts are from an interview conducted by Gina Jackson (a graduate student in the School of Social Work at the University of Nevada, Reno) with her grandfather, Ray Mills, a 84-year-old Lakota elder from the Pine Ridge Reservation. Mr. Mills went to several Indian boarding schools before coming to Reno in the early 1940s.

The transcript is the first in a two-part series on Indian boarding schools. In its Spring 2000 newsletter, CenterNews will carry a photo essay on the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada.

Viktoria Hertling

Interview With Ray Mills, a Lakota Elder

We lived on the Pine Ridge reservation ... 24 miles from Gordon, Nebraska on the ranch. I’m a Dakota Sioux and my family consisted of 11 kids. I’m the eighth one. I grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Father and Mother lived on a ranch, a pretty good-sized ranch. So all of us kids had to work there.
Well ... when you got to be 7, you were sent to the boarding school from the first to the eighth grade ... there was no way out. And I’ve seen kids that were picked up and taken by Indian cops ... this was during the horse and buggy days ... they were taken from their parents ... So when I was 7, I started school at the boarding school. And we had kids there that, you know, were crying at nights. But then if they started crying too much, they’d get a licking ... I’ve even seen that happen in the schoolrooms where a teacher would pick a girl up, take her through the doorway, and throw her down the stairs. And things like that happened at the school.

We had to live in dormitories and fix our beds military style. If they weren’t fixed right or something, they’d tear it all up and you’d have to start from scratch and do it all over again. We had to go to bed at approximately 9 o’clock. Everybody had to be in bed, and you had to be quiet. In the morning, at a quarter to six, somebody would come around with bells and you had to get up, and you had to get dressed, and get outside and line up. Then we’d march out to the field for exercise, for marching, and stuff like that.
We didn’t have no football at the time or nothing. We would go there and run around and exercise and come back and wash up. Then we would line up again to go to the dining hall to eat. We would march over there, and sit down, and then somebody would ring a bell; you’d bow your head, they’d ring the bell again, and that’s when you’d start eating. And then, before we started eating, we’d all get ready to grab stuff and get dishes of food and bring them back. So we’d start making sandwiches and putting them in our shirts to have during the day when you’re getting hungry. We were only allowed a certain time to eat, so you had to do it fast. And then we’d go from there back to the dormitory, and clean up, and get ready for school; and we still had to march to school, too.

We all had to join up with older kids for protection because some of us were small at the time and that seemed to be the only way ... So we protected each other ... We’d get food, you know, to feed the rest of them that didn’t get enough to eat or were hungry, so we shared pretty much all the food. If we got assigned to the meat house, which was a little butcher shop, we’d cut it (the meat) up and hide it in our shirts, and then take it and hide it [he laughs]. We were able to take it down to the river and cook it down there over the fire and eat it.

That also reminds me ... they used to have piles of potatoes that they gave to the hogs. We took those potatoes and got down to the river and put mud all around ‘em and threw them in the fire. We’d baked potatoes ... And sometimes, the parents would bring hotcakes over with beans. That was something we hardly ever got, especially the beans.

I lived 24 miles from the school. That seems very short, you know, but then in those days everybody was using a wagon and horse to travel. So the parents usually came about once a year, or sometimes twice, or else when you got out at the end of May. They came and got you and you would go home. During the school year ... kids who would run off, they’d catch them and bring them back. My brother ran off ... and as soon as he got home, somebody came and picked him up and brought him back to the school. I ran away too; but I didn’t get far because it was raining. And they brought me back. Those of us who ran away ... they took us and cut our hair completely off. They made us wear the dresses that the girls wore. And we had to wear those for 30 days. Then they locked us up ... usually they whipped us with a rubber hose, and also a leather tug ... you had to lay down on the chair then they’d give you about six licks with a rubber hose, and sometimes you were in a ball and chain. I’ve seen that ... or else just a chain on the ankles. I’ve also seen them put a chain on the wrist and chain kids to the bed so they wouldn’t run away. One time, one of the kids went out the window with a ball and chain, and that’s on the second story ... They couldn’t find him for a while; and finally, after several months, they were able to locate him. I guess his parents hid him and then they brought him back.

Another punishment that we got, too, was for running away ... we were given a 2 by 4 (or probably by 8 or maybe 10) and you had to put it over your shoulder, and you had to march between the boys’ dormitory and the girls’ dormitory. You had to march for a couple of hours, or maybe in the evening the same way ... back and forth with that 2 by 4 on your shoulder. And for talking your own language - if they caught you, they gave you a licking and made you kneel down; or other times, you’d just kneel down for what appeared to be a couple of hours ... But we had to keel down ... and you couldn’t sit down and kneel down at the same time. You had to raise up and just kneel, ‘cause if you sat down, somebody’d come by and kick you in the butt.

After I graduated from grade school, I had a choice of going to three Indian high schools. These were also boarding schools. I chose the one that was in South Dakota; but it’s clear across the state. We still had the same types of punishment there, too, and we had a jail underneath the gym that had bars on it ... After I graduated from high school, I came on through different states and then ended up in Reno.

When I first came to Reno, in 1945, they had a curfew for Indians; and that was from sundown to sunup. The Indians couldn’t be downtown or in any of the streets in town except south of the river; and that went back towards the Indian colony. Sometimes, just before dark, the cops would come by with billy clubs and they would start moving the Indians back over the bridge. So if somebody didn’t move fast enough, or protested or something, they would hit with that or push with the clubs and make them move. So they moved them on back; and after that, you couldn’t come back into town. A lot of times some of us were over by the university, which was another hangout because that was bare ground. We used to build a bonfire and stay there all night because we didn’t dare come through town.

Interview conducted by Gina Jackson