EXHIBITS
Intermountain Indian School: Native American Boarding Schools
Native American Boarding Schools
Off-reservation boarding schools for Native Americans date back to the 1800s. The federal government and military used them to destroy Native culture by trying to force Native American children to assimilate into the mainstream. Richard Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the boarding school movement, claimed he had to “kill the Indian to save the man.” Children were given new names, had their hair cut off, were punished for speaking Native languages, and spent more time in forced labor than in the classroom. Nearly 200 overcrowded, malnourished students died of disease at Carlisle alone. Pratt’s program left a generation of Native Americans with mental health issues and difficulty fitting in either on the reservation or in mainstream culture.
Financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and published by the Institute for Government Research, the 1928 Meriam Report brought these abuses to light. Many people were outraged to learn about the conditions the children faced. Subtitled, “The Problem of Indian Administration,” the Meriam Report initiated a slow but certain change in Native American education.
By the time Intermountain Indian School opened in 1950, the government was practicing its termination policy, which called for an end to federal assistance for Native American nations and reservations and pushed Native peoples to integrate with mainstream American culture. The goal of boarding schools in the 1950s, then, was to prepare the next generation of Native Americans to participate in U.S. society without government support. Some earlier practices, like enforced haircuts, still continued for a time, but the worst abuses were dying out. Most teachers at Intermountain sincerely cared about their students and wanted to help them reach their full potential.
Termination proved to be both illegal in light of the treaties the United States had signed and impractical in the face of the realities of reservation life. In 1969, the Kennedy Report declared Native education “a national tragedy—a national challenge” due to the underperformance of federal and state schools serving Native students, which spurred further reforms.
During the years that Intermountain operated, the school and the boarding school system in general became increasingly sensitive to Native American issues and supportive of Native culture. In the last decades of the school’s existence, many Native youth chose to attend Intermountain over other options. Some had friends or family there, and they liked the supportive programs the school offered as well as the opportunities to participate in competitive sports and to attend a school where, as Native Americans, they were not a minority.
Until the day it closed, Intermountain School would face criticism, but many of the students had a positive experience with the school.