Why were Native American kids required to attend boarding schools?

Students on the campus of the Haskell Institute, Lawrence, Kansas. Photo by J.L. Morris. License: Public Domain from the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

Note: The second half of this episode includes descriptions of child abuse.

In the spring of 2021, UnTextbooked producer Gavin Scott read a headline that made his heart sink. The remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered buried in a mass grave near the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. Over the next few months, more mass graves were found outside of other Canadian residential schools.

Before they died, these children had been part of a program of forced assimilation. For more than a century, thousands of indigenous children in Canada were required to attend residential schools. The purpose of these schools was to teach them English and encourage them to behave more like white settlers. Survivors of the residential school system say the environment was often harsh. Lots of kids ran away, and some didn’t survive their time at school.

Producer Gavin Scott is Native American, and even though he didn’t have a personal connection to the Canadian residential schools, he knew that the United States had also operated boarding schools with similar intentions. But Gavin didn’t really learn much about this history when he was in school. He wanted to know how these schools operated and how they affected the lives of students that attended them.

In this episode of UnTextbooked, Gavin interviews Dr. Brenda Child. Dr. Child is a scholar of American Indian studies, and she wrote the book Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families 1900-1940 after reading hundreds of letters written by students, families, and administrators at the Flandreau Indian School and the Haskell Institute. Gavin also interviews his Great Aunt, Babe, about her experiences attending Haskell and the Concho Indian School as a child.

Book: Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families 1900-1940

Guest: Dr. Brenda Child, Professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota

Producer: Gavin Scott

Music: Silas Bohen and Coleman Hamilton

Editors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman