Photo: U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks during a “Road to Healing” event, Friday, Jan. 20, 2023, at the Gila Crossing Community School in Laveen, Ariz. During seventh grade at Phoenix Indian School, Pershlie Ami signed up to go on what the school called an “outing” — promoted as opportunities for Native American students to
Photo: Chilocco Indian School in north-central Oklahoma was a federal off-reservation boarding school established to house, civilize, Christianize and educate Native American youth Bipartisan efforts to create a federal commission to explore and repair the legacy of the nation’s notorious Indian boarding schools have hit a stumbling block over subpoena authority. The obstacle came last
Children at Havasupai Indian School in Cataract Canyon, Arizona, in 1901. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress) When the Phoenix Indian School was established in 1891, the top federal administrator considered it a budgetary win to send Native American children to boarding schools to enforce assimilation into white society. “It’s cheaper to educate Indians
In the early 1930s, Robert Carr, a member of the Creek Nation, was expelled for “incorrigible behavior” from Chilocco Indian Agricultural School near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. By the time he was 21, Carr had been incarcerated in three different institutions. He died in a Kansas state prison where he was held for stealing $30 worth