Life in Indian boarding schools in Oregon and across the country was traumatic and violent. Students were stripped of their culture, abuse was rampant, and escapes were commonplace. Native students in Oregon faced hardship in Oregon’s boarding schools, where they were transported across the country.
Imagine for a moment that you are a child again. Let’s say you’re 11 years old. A government official comes to your house and tells your parents that they have to send you to a new government boarding school or food will be withheld not only for your family but for all the families in the neighborhood. Your family will therefore have no choice but to send you to boarding school.
When you get there, you abandon all the clothes you were wearing and end up wearing the strangest clothes you’ve ever worn. You have to change your hairstyle, learn a whole new language, and are forbidden to speak the language you grew up with. It is also forbidden to follow family traditions. They have to eat new foods and are forced to live in crowded dorm rooms full of sickness and disease. Shortly after arriving, he witnesses one of his boarders dying of tuberculosis and another child in the dormitory being beaten and shackled as punishment for speaking his native language. Then you think about running away and going home to your family. problem? Those who escape are caught, dragged back to school and beaten. The first time they run away, they are caught 320 miles from the school.
It sounds like some kind of dystopian nightmare, something out of a post-apocalyptic novel or movie. This nightmare is not yours, but it is a very real nightmare from Oregon’s past. Oregon has many disturbing stories to tell, and this is one of them.
“Education” aka erasing culture and opening land for settlers
The first Spokane students arrive at Forest Grove Indian School in 1881. Five of the students in this photo had died by 1888, just seven years later. Photo from Pacific University Archives.
You may have seen the recent news about a number of unmarked graves being discovered at Indigenous “boarding” schools in Canada. The more Canadians sought answers, and the more research was done, the more graves of Indigenous children were discovered – schools sent to ‘educate’ and ‘civilize’. These are the children who were required to attend the school. Thousands of Indigenous children in Canada have gone missing over the years after being forced to attend Indian residential schools. That news seems far away from the United States, and more specifically from Oregon. But Oregon also had 12 Indian boarding schools.
Sign up for our monthly email packed with local travel inspiration and fun travel ideas. In each newsletter, we share upcoming events, new activities, popular dining spots, and great travel ideas.
Maybe Oregon’s history still feels far away to you. You may be asking, “Why am I bringing this up now in 2024?” The past is the past. You’re not trying to make me uncomfortable, are you? In answer, I strongly believe that if we don’t learn about the past, history is bound to repeat itself over and over again. I don’t know about you, but this is a piece of history I don’t want to see repeated in the future. This traumatic past continues to impact today the descendants of the Native American children who lived through this horrific period in Oregon’s history.
Why were Native children forced to attend Indian boarding schools in Oregon?
1892, Yainax Subgency School in southern Oregon. Photo from the Klamath County Museum Facebook page.
In the 1800s, people were told that in order for Native children to integrate into civilized society, they would need to attend boarding schools to be educated in the white man’s way. The people who worked at these boarding schools probably felt that they were doing a necessary job and that what they were doing was right and good. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is quite complex and heinous.
Back in 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior released an investigation report on federal Indian boarding schools in the United States. This report details some truly awful things about the history of Indian boarding schools and why they existed in the first place. “This report confirms that the United States directly targeted American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children in pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation that coincided with Indian territorial deprivation.” Deprivation refers to individual or Native Hawaiian children. It is the act of depriving a group of people of land, property, or other property. At that time, children were forced into these schools for two reasons: cultural assimilation and land grabbing.
The report also states that “Federal Indian boarding schools separate children from their reservations and families, strip them of their tribal traditions and customs, force them to completely abandon their native language, and prepare them to never return to their homelands.” It was designed to.” people. “
Between 1819 and 1969, there were 408 government-funded boarding schools in 37 states and territories, including 12 in Oregon.
Malnutrition, death, abuse, and erasure of tribal culture
Shoemaking at the Forest Grove Indian Training School, 1882. history. Social Research Library, bb003866
As previously mentioned, Native American parents in Oregon were forced to send their children to tribal boarding schools (in Oregon and across the country). Reservation agents were allowed to withhold supplies and food and send children to school if tribes did not comply. In many cases, once children are sent to boarding school, they never see their parents again.
Life in Indian boarding schools in Oregon and across the United States was harsh and included abuse and child manual labor. At two schools on the Klamath Indian Reservation in southern Oregon, only three hours of the day were allotted for actual instruction. Five hours of the day were allotted for forced manual labor, with children performing tasks that would today be considered a violation of child labor laws, such as cooking, cleaning, working in the fields, and mending clothing. Children in these schools had no free time to play, be children, or pursue their interests. Their only rest was sleeping at night.
In many boarding schools across the country, two or three children were forced to share one bed at a time, making it impossible to even get a break from sleep. The dorms were crowded and filled with sick children. In schools in Oregon and other states, poor nutrition (a diet low in fruits and vegetables and high in sugar and structure) and overcrowding led to high student death rates from diseases such as measles and tuberculosis.
According to a report by the Ministry of Home Affairs, “the prevalence of physical, sexual and psychological abuse, disease, malnutrition, overcrowding and lack of medical care in Indian boarding schools is well documented.” Rules such as caning, flogging, withholding of food, slapping, and solitary confinement were strictly enforced in schools, and even physical punishment of older children against younger children was strictly enforced. The report also said rule violations were often met with public punishment in front of a group of children, even if only one child broke the rules. Many Native American boarding schools across the United States are located on the grounds of old military installations, and given that the children here were often organized into units to conduct military operations, these schools were often organized into military units. It’s not surprising (albeit horrible) that it was run like this. drill.
To combat runaways, children were sent as far away from home as possible.
Indian Training School in Forest Grove, Oregon. Jason Lee (1803-1845) via sos.oregon.gov.
Indian boarding schools in places like Oregon often saw children fleeing abuse and attempting to return to their families. To combat this, “by-reservation” boarding schools were established across the country. One of them opened in Forest Grove, the second off-reservation school in the country. Children were sent from outside the state to the Forest Grove school, and children from other Oregon Indian tribes were sent to far-flung places such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (where the motto was “Let the Indians Go!”). A man who killed people to save others. In 1900, nine Klamath children from southern Oregon were sent there. Two of them escaped, traveling nearly 320 miles before being captured and brought back to the school.
A child is separated from his family, given a new name, forced to wear new clothes, forcibly deprived of his culture, forced to work long hours of manual labor, and beaten and otherwise abused. It’s no wonder that people often try to escape violent and traumatic things. This was the environment they were forced into in Indian boarding schools across the country.
A reservation school in Forest Grove, Oregon, opened in 1880, and in just five years, 40 students died, many from illness. According to the Department of the Interior’s report, only 19 schools in the United States they investigated were responsible for 500 deaths of indigenous children. There are more than 408 government-funded schools in the United States and more than 1,000 federal and non-federal institutions, including asylums, orphanages, and day care centers, primarily involved in the education of indigenous children. If there were 19 schools, there is no telling how much more deaths would occur. The death toll alone is estimated at 500. Suddenly, news stories coming out of Canada don’t seem so long ago. According to the report, “the Department’s investigation has already identified marked and unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 different schools across the Federal Indian Residential School System,” but more may be identified as the investigation continues. The report said they expected to be found.
What happened to the surviving students at the Indian boarding school in Oregon?
Ezra Woodward, his son Walter, and the students Woodward called the “Farmer Boys.” Provided by Oregon Hist. Social Research Library, 015539
Children at Oregon’s boarding schools were often punished by being forced into shackles. They were beaten and suffered injuries to their bodies and faces. In 1927, one group of female students set fire to a dormitory at the Klamath Agency School in southern Oregon, presumably in an attempt to shut down the school (one of them was successful). Life in these schools was a traumatic experience for both girls and boys, and research now suggests that boys attending American Indian boarding schools may epigenetically transmit their trauma to their offspring. It is suggested that there is.
Boys in these schools are more likely to become victims of sexual abuse, especially if they are fluent in English, and this is due to additional stressors that may have caused epigenetic changes in their DNA. Just one, and may be contributing to chronic disease in Native Americans. It affects today’s population and has influenced several generations.
So why are we exposing this horrific history to the light of day now? The past is the past, right?
Because we cannot prevent this from happening again to our nation’s children, and Native American families across the country continue to suffer. This page of Oregon history is terrifying. Yes, you should feel sick. Everyone should feel sick. It should make you uncomfortable and sad, but I would like to prevent this history from repeating itself here again if possible.
