More than 357 U.S. Indian boarding and day schools were founded by federal officials and missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of the U.S. federal Indian education system. Under the guidelines of the United States government, Indian children were to begin their "formal education" at local day schools, progress to reservation boarding schools around the age of ten, and leave their tribal homelands for further schooling only after they had exhausted their reservation's resources. However, the enaction of this policy diverged from its intentions, ultimately removing children as young as six (or possibly younger) from their reservations and placing them in institutions far away from their families. These policies and educational plans aligned with the United States' campaign in the nineteenth century to "civilize" American Indians and assimilate them into American culture by replacing Native culture and language with mainstream American religious teachings and English. This was meant to "save" Native peoples from their primitive way of life. In reality, these policies had broad cultural repercussions. Thousands of Native families were forcibly separated from their children, individuals were stripped of their cultural identities, and physical, mental, and emotional abuse was pervasive in Native boarding and day schools. This trauma has been passed intergenerationally and continues to affect American Indian and Alaska Native communities today.
In their attempts to maintain funding for the institutions, school leaders often produced propaganda materials, which make up some of the Smithsonian’s collections related to Native Boarding and Day School history today. These materials include “before and after” pictures of students whose clothing was taken and hair was cut, as well as group photographs of children in military-style uniforms. The collections also include materials, such as newspapers, advertisements, and publications meant to communicate the “success” of the schools. Other boarding and day school materials held in Smithsonian repositories can be traced back to collecting practices of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropologists and scientists. In what is now termed, "salvage anthropology," many ethnologists and other researchers traveled to Native communities to collect information on American Indian cultures and languages, believing that American Indian and Alaska Native nations were "disappearing," and thus needed to be "studied" as a racial group. Native cultural objects were collected - or often taken without permission of the communities or under false pretenses- photographs and recordings were made, and information on languages and customs was recorded in fieldnotes. Sometimes materials were commissioned by anthropologists, who offered payment or other compensation to Native individuals for works of art, clothing, or other objects, while some collections were willingly gifted by tribal communities. It's important to note, however, the power imbalance inherent in these historical interactions between ethnologists and American Indian and Alaska Native communities skews any “consent” related to the acquisition of these materials from Native individuals to white anthropologists and scientists. We must recognize the complex - and often negative - history of federal museum collecting of cultural materials. Because of this fraught history, efforts have been made (and continue) within the Smithsonian to correct inaccurate collection descriptions, repatriate cultural objects and ancestral remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGRPA), revise access policies for Native materials, and collaborate directly with American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and individuals. To learn more about ongoing efforts within the Smithsonian related to Native American collections and collaboration, to find out more on the Smithsonian's policies on sensitive content, or to tell us how to improve and better describe these collections, please contact one of our repositories.
Native people are still here and working to reclaim and revitalize the languages and cultures that boarding schools attempted to strip away. In order to heal, we need to learn more about this period of history and raise awareness about it in our schools and communities. As you explore these collections and learn more about the schools, we invite you to check out contemporary healing initiatives led by Native communities, such as the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, who helped Smithsonian staff write and aggregate this information.