“We are going to conquer the Indians by a standing army of school teachers.”

With these few words, in 1891 Merrill E Gates made clear the U.S. government’s intention in the Indian boarding schools: to conquer Native peoples. Government and religious proponents of forced assimilation of Native children had been working at this already for nearly a century. Now they would take the policy a step further by moving Native children hundreds, even thousands of miles from their homes to military-style schools, where they would be exhorted to “let all that is Indian within you die.”

Indian boarding schools were operated by churches and the federal government throughout the 19th century and long into the 20th. They varied greatly in the levels of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that the children suffered. But by one means or another, all the schools pressed children to abandon the cultural and spiritual traditions of their parents and adopt the identity and ideologies of the dominant European American society.

What did this mean for the children? The Native American Rights Fund wrote, “Cut off from their families and cultures, the children were punished for speaking their Native languages, banned from conducting traditional or cultural practices, shorn of traditional clothing and identity of their Native cultures, taught that their cultures and traditions were evil and sinful…. They returned to their communities, not as the Christianized farmers that the boarding school policy envisioned, but as deeply scarred humans lacking the skills, community, parenting, extended family, language, and cultural practices of those raised in their cultural context.”

Children in Kickapoo Village, Oklahoma, circa 1890. Friends ran Indian day schools and boarding schools here and in about thirty other locations.

There is mounting scientific and testimonial evidence that the trauma suffered by Native children in the boarding schools can be passed from generation to generation through social, psychological, and neurological processes. Native families and communities today continue to suffer from these wounds.

Native American organizations and communities are developing healing processes that draw on their own traditions as well as mental health modalities. As a founding member and past president of the board of directors of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, Jerilyn DeCoteau offers a slide presentation that lays out the history of the policy of forced assimilation, its immediate and ongoing impacts on Native children and their families, and the Coalition’s work to bring about healing.

To invite Jerilyn to speak, contact trr.support [at] friendspeaceteams.org.

The Coalition urges Christian denominations that were involved in the boarding school era to consider how they might contribute toward these healing processes. As a first step, they are asking the churches to undertake research and learn about their roles in carrying out the policy of forced assimilation. See their “Call For Papers: Churches’ Roles in the History and Continuing Impacts of the Boarding School Policy of the 19th and 20th Century.”

Paula Palmer responded to this call and, as Pendle Hill’s 2016 Cadbury scholar, conducted research on the roles Friends played in conceptualizing, promoting, financing, managing, and teaching in Quaker Indian boarding schools, from 1796 to 1938. She also visited the sites of eleven Quaker Indian schools in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. For her report on these visits, see her Field Research Travelogue, September 2015.
Paula is available to offer a slide presentation/discussion on her research findings.

• “The Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools: Facing Our History and Ourselves,” a slide presentation by Paula Palmer, Gail Melix, and Andrew Grant, recorded on November 15, 2022.
• “The Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: Facing our History and Ourselves,” article in Friends Journal, October 2016.
• “The Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: Facing our History and Ourselves,”chapter in Quakers and Native Americans, edited by Ignacio Gallup-Diaz and Geoffrey Plank. Leiden/Boston: BRILL, pp. 293-311
• “From Truth to Healing with Native Peoples: Listening is the Way,” a talk at the 2018 Friends General Conference Gathering
• An interview with Paula Palmer about the Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples workshops and her research on the Quaker Indian Boarding Schools, on Northern Spirit Radio.

To invite Paula to speak, contact trr.support [at] friendspeaceteams.org.

Steps to Support Healing: Some Recommendations

• Individuals and organizations can join the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition as allies.
• Learn more about the history and legacy of the policy of forced assimilation of Indian children through the boarding schools. Share what you learn.
• Support Native language education programs that help Native youth develop positive Indigenous identities.

Recommended reading:

• The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
• Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Reports: Volume 1 and Volume 2.
• Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. David Wallace Adams
• Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Paulette Regan
• Let all that is Indian within you die. Legal Review, Native American Rights Fund, Vol. 38, No. 2.
• Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors by Denise K. Lajimodiere
• Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940. Brenda J. Child
• Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. Ward Churchill
• “Intergenerational Trauma: Understanding Natives’ Inherited Pain,” by Mary Annette Pember

Recommended films:

• Our Spirits Don’t Speak English
• Something’s Moving
• Indian Horse
• Sugarcane

The taking and forced assimilation of Native children continues today through the fostering and adoption policies of many states, often in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Important films about this contemporary form of forced assimilation are:

• Dawnland
• Blood Memory

Churches can:

• Join the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition as an ally.
• Conduct and disseminate research on your denomination’s involvement as promoters, managers, teachers, and funders of Indian boarding schools.
• Through processes of reflection, dialogue, and repentance, develop and adopt official statements of acknowledgement and apology.
• In consultation with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the affected Native communities, take appropriate actions to make amends.
• Support tribal programs that teach Native languages.
• Support tribal programs for suicide prevention and cultural development for Native youth.
• Call on Congress to establish a National Commission to learn the truth about the historic and ongoing impacts of the boarding schools on Native families, and recommend actions that support redress, restitution, justice, and healing.