Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Captain Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle, 1880⁵

Boarding schools for Indians have a lengthy history in the United States, dating back to colonial times when seventeenth century Jesuits established missions so as to “civilize an ignorant people and lead them to heaven.” In the mid-1600s Harvard College had an Indian school on its campus as did Hanover (later known as Dartmouth College) in the eighteenth century. Prior to the founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879, missionaries of various faiths had established religious schools near Indian settlements and on reservations in the Greater Southwest. Most of these were known as day schools.⁶

Carlisle, established by a stern Christian, an ex-army officer and former Indian fighter named Richard Henry Pratt, was the first off-reservation boarding school. It was located in what was previously a military installation—the Carlisle Barracks that had once been a training center for the US cavalry. Carlisle became the prototype for other off-reservation schools. By 1902 the government had established 25 off-reservation boarding schools, including a dozen institutions in sites in Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Montana. The Santa Fe Indian School, established in 1890, served mostly students from Southwestern tribes, as did the Phoenix, Arizona, and Riverside, California schools. By the beginning of the twentieth century nearly 18,000 students out of 21,568 were enrolled in either reservation or off-reservation boarding schools.⁷