Indigenous Institutionalization in the United States

by

Sarah Whitt

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0029

Introduction

The history of Indigenous institutionalization is global; it could be periodized in several ways. This article addresses the rise of institutions that claimed to educate, care for, reform, or “uplift” Indigenous people, with a focus on the Progressive-era United States. With social reformers’ efforts to manage populations deemed to be “in need,” the late nineteenth century saw the proliferation of diverse institutions that aimed to mitigate perceived social ills—criminality, moral decay, and unemployment are notable examples. Alongside the development of this institutional network, the turn of the twentieth century also heralded the proliferation of racialized discourses, ideologies, and practices that positioned Indigenous people as inherently deviant and deficient, which in turn informed the establishment of institutions that targeted Indigenous people specifically. Boarding Schools in the United States sought to divest Indigenous children and youth of their Indigeneity and replace their worldviews with Euro-American values and mores. Federal agendas and policies also sought to acculturate Indian people to hard manual labor and other menial tasks in the public and private sectors—see Labor. The early twentieth century saw some of the most abysmal health conditions on Native reservations, and facilities such as sanatoria, hospitals, and even the so-called Canton Asylum for Insane Indians were founded to address widespread disparities in health and well-being among Indigenous populations. Medicalized discourses and dominant gendered ideologies also seized upon Indigenous people in spaces of spirituality or religion and informed their confinement or institutionalization in facilities that aimed to correct perceived deficiencies. This essay also considers Indigenous experiences of institutionalization in carceral sites such as prisons, while remaining attentive to substantial differences in the practices and protocols of institutions with diverse aims. This essay also considers the role of art and culture in Indigenous experiences of institutionalization—as a site or as a means of obtaining truth, healing, and justice for survivors. While many institutions that targeted Indigenous people for removal, confinement, or incarceration were expressly designed for Indigenous populations, not all of them targeted Indigenous people exclusively; this essay also addresses Indigenous institutionalization within and among facilities intended for the general American public in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Experiences of institutionalization leave a lasting legacy among Indigenous survivors, their descendants, and Native nations today; often, survivor accounts express how these histories of institutionalization have been detrimental to the integrity of tribes and their well-being. However, as the diverse, Indigenous-centered works here reflect, these experiences were anything from uniform. Indigenous people also found myriad ways to resist and refuse institutionalization, using all of the resources at their disposal.

Boarding Schools in the United States

In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, federally-funded, off-reservation residential institutions, or boarding schools, became key sites of Indigenous institutionalization. Within these facilities, several objectives prevailed. The founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (discussed in Carlisle Indian Industrial School) marked a renewed governmental effort to “civilize,” Christianize, and forcibly assimilate Indigenous people through English-only instruction and indoctrination into Western values and mores; in subsequent years, more than twenty-five other facilities would further these objectives. Child 1998 documents the complex experiences of Indigenous people who attended the Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota, drawing upon hundreds of letters and other archival materials. Lomawaima 1994 offers an intimate look at the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma through complex and nuanced oral history interviews. Cobb 2000 also centers Indigenous perspectives in an examination of the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaws, which was administered by the Chickasaw Nation rather than the US federal government. Such works document in finite detail the complexities of life in residential institutions modeled after Euro-American prerogatives, while highlighting the myriad ways that Native people adapted, resisted, and modified these institutional spaces to serve their own needs. Gilbert 2010 similarly exemplifies how boarding school experiences could paradoxically strengthen Indigenous identities through the author’s examination of Hopi athletes at the Sherman Institute in Southern California. Gram 2016 offers a unique treatment of Pueblo student experiences in New Mexico, with chapters addressing such complex themes as community responses to Euro-American schooling and competing views of Indigenous emplacement in the Southwest. Trafzer, et al. 2006 provides important perspectives on a diverse array of residential institutions; essays challenge trauma-centered narratives of Indigenous cultural erasure and showcase the diversity of Indigenous experience, which could sometimes include finding joy in these otherwise hostile environments. Other works provide top-down analyses of shifting federal objectives and policies that guided the development and implementation of boarding school curricula and attendant regimens. Adams 1995 offers a foundational overview of the federal Native American boarding school system, focusing on the design of the institutional network from the standpoint of policymakers as well as Indigenous responses to assimilationist efforts. Ellis 2008 highlights the shifting priorities of policymakers and institutional agendas at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School in Oklahoma, which followed the archetypal curriculum of book-learning and industrial training for Kiowa youth. Jacobs 2009 offers a pathbreaking analysis of Indigenous child removal, highlighting interconnections between white female reformist efforts in both the United States and Australia. Vučković 2008 addresses the Haskell Institute in Kansas, detailing enrollees’ experiences of health and well-being, the curriculum, and selective accommodation of institutional prerogatives.

• Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

  Offers a sustained overview of the conceptualization, development, and implementation of US policymakers’ agendas within the federally-funded Native American boarding school system. Chapters engage US federal Indian policy along with Indigenous responses to federal attempts to eradicate their lifeways, and replace them with Euro-American values and mores. Adams also highlights the interrelationship between settler colonial objectives of Indigenous land dispossession, forced assimilation via boarding school, and disciplinary structures that seized upon Native people, bodies, and worldviews in complex ways.

• Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

  This seminal boarding school studies text provides an intimate look at the complexities of Indigenous experience away at school, focusing on the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota. Chapters draw upon a robust collection of letters of correspondence written by enrollees and sent home, along with other archival materials, to showcase the diversity of student experience in these institutional environments and how they navigated difficult circumstances.

• Cobb, Amanda. Listening to Our Grandmother’s Stories: Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaws, 1852–1949. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

  This intimate portrayal of a Euro-American–style seminary founded and run by the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma is inspired by the experiences of Cobb’s grandmother, Ida Mae Pratt Cobb. Cobb weaves together diverse archival sources and knowledge of the Chickasaw language to tell a powerful story of young Chickasaw women’s experiences of hope, empowerment, disappointment, education, and Chickasaw identity at Bloomfield.

• Ellis, Clyde. To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

  Draws upon a diverse array of archival sources and interviews with former enrollees in this portrayal of the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, founded in 1893 in Southwestern Oklahoma for the assimilation of Kiowa children. In much the same vein as other early boarding school scholarship, this text offers information about Rainy Mountain’s assimilationist objectives, the uneven implementation of federal agendas, and Kiowa students’ responses to life at this federally-funded residential facility.

• Gilbert, Matthew Sakiestewa. Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902–1929. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1dfnrpp

  This important text provides an Indigenous-centered portrayal of life at the Sherman Institute (Southern California) in the early years of the twentieth century. Gilbert draws upon his own community knowledge and lived experience of Hopi lifeways in narrating a history of Hopi experience at this famed boarding school. Themes addressed in this work include the ways in which sports and athleticism provided Hopi people such as Lewis Tewanema with an outlet to express pride in their identity.

• Gram, John R. Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.

  Departs from much early boarding school studies scholarship which centers Indian officials’ dominance over tribal communities to craft a history of Indigenous agency at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools. As Gram reveals through close engagement with oral histories and under-examined archival sources, Pueblo peoples indigenous to the Southwest exercised significant influence over school life, secured relative power for the tribes involved, and ensured the maintenance of Pueblo cultures and lifeways whenever possible.

• Jacobs, Margaret D. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

  This foundational text highlights the transnational reach of the Native American federal boarding school system in the United States, and its influence in Australia. Jacobs’s pathbreaking analysis highlights the efforts of white female reformist intervention into Indigenous lives and processes of Indigenous child removal, focusing on the development of national policies and practices designed to further settler colonial objectives in these disparate geopolitical contexts.

• Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

  In this important and foundational work, Lomawaima draws on oral history interviews conducted with former enrollees who attended the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma in the early mid-twentieth century. As these oral histories reveal, Chilocco students retained complex feelings of pride for their alma mater even as they registered difficult experiences of heartache, longing for home, discipline and punishment, and assimilationist objectives that attempted to efface their identities.

• Trafzer, Clifford E., Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. Indigenous Education. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

  This early anthology provides a nuanced look at diverse student experiences at many different Native American boarding schools. Chapters focus on elements of Indigenous experience such as illness and death, carving out moments of joy, negotiating built environments designed for the constant surveillance of student populations, and indoctrination into Christianity and Catholicism at religious-run institutions. Contributors to this classic text include well-known boarding school historians and scholars of Indigenous history.

• Vučković, Myriam. Voices from Haskell: Indian Students between Two Worlds,1884–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

  Follows a familiar format of boarding school studies scholarship to offer an overview of student life at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Chapters include in-depth and even-handed analyses of many different elements of Indigenous experience, including “Coming to Haskell,” “Rituals and Recreation,” “Health and the Body,” and “Accommodation and Resistance.” Vučković draws upon familiar sources in this classic work, including letters of correspondence, institutional ledgers, and other boarding school documents.