By Malina Seenarine
When visitors enter the “Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories” exhibit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, they are met with images of hundreds of sad and somber faces. Continuing on, more eerie details emerge — little bunk beds, American-style clothes, and a chalkboard that reads: “What is a citizen?”
The exhibit chronicles how Native children were forced from their homes to attend special boarding schools created to assimilate them into Western culture. Some photos are in black and white while the others are in color with the students sporting graduation caps and gowns, highlighting the generations of Native Americans who were exiled from their families and cultures.
Children were forcibly stripped of their indigenous identities, school employees took away their clothes, cut their hair short and gave them new names. They would punish them if they spoke their native language.
The exhibit highlights these acts of cruelty through photos, artifacts and quotes.
One quote by Fred Kabotie, a member of the Hopi tribe who attended the Santa Fe Indian school reads: “When you first started attending school, they looked at you, guessed how old you were, set your birthday and gave you an age. Then assigned you a Christian name. Mine turned out to be Fred.”
The U.S. government-funded Native American Boarding Schools era began in 1860 and ran until 1978. During this time, it is estimated that there were more than 300 boarding schools spanning 30 states and accommodating over 60,000 children. Assimilation through education began long before the boarding schools were built. In 1819, the U.S. Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act, which called for Indigenous students to undergo American-style education.
The issue of government-run boarding schools for Native Americans drew mass media attention in May 2021 when the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found at a former Indian boarding school in Canada. In the months that followed, hundreds of remains were found at these Canadian-government funded boarding schools. Recently, an investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland highlighted the abuse that Native American children endured at the hands of federally run schools in the United States, including beatings and solitary confinement. The report also found burial sites at 50 of the former boarding schools.
While recent media coverage of the issue may make it seem that boarding school abuses were newly uncovered, Native-run news sites have long been writing about the issue.
“We’ve been reporting on this for years,” said Mark Trahant, the editor-at-large for Indian Country Today and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe. Indian Country is a multimedia news site that serves Indigenous communities.
The Away from Home exhibit is a recent update from the previous, Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, which opened in 2000. The reason for the update was to “augment both the content and presentation of the original exhibition to reflect the lessons that it inspired,” according to one exhibit poster.
Before and after photographs were commissioned by Richard H. Pratt, founder of one of the first boarding schools to prove that the schools were successful in “civilizing” the students. When the students arrived to the school following their long journeys from home they would be photographed by Choate. Once the process of cutting their hair and changing their clothes was over, the Native students would again be photographed.
Because of the harsh conditions at the boarding schools, it was common for students to run away. One school in Phoenix had over 700 students. Every month 10 to 20 of them ran away.
The U.S. government has never given a formal apology for these policies.