What were the studies defining as “positive results”?
A couple of references.
That first link doesn’t seem to work.
The first one gets me a “page not found” error on these boards. The second is a long read; might take me a while to get to it.
[Moderating]
Fixed the first link
(with apologies to the MPSIMS mods)
Thanks, @Chronos.
That seems, at first glance, to be a slightly different presentation of the same study done by the same people. Am I wrong about that?
Couldn’t say. I ran across them and they seemed to be fairly unbiased, so thought they may be of interest. For the vast majority, I don’t think the boarding schools, especially the ones outside of Alaska, were beneficial to the kids who attended them (or were forced to attend them). The cruelty and abuse is well documented. Some few talented children, especially those in competitive sports like Jim Thorpe had a more positive experience, but that was not the norm.
– The study seems to have been done because the State was considering re-instituting boarding schools instead of providing local high schools in Native communities, as they’d been required to do for some time (on the grounds that majority-white communities of similar or smaller size got their own public high schools while Native communities hadn’t been provided any.)
The study states that they didn’t have a representative sample to interview, and notes specifically that of course people who had died – including those who suicided due to their treatment – couldn’t be included in the interviews; and neither were the homeless or the incarcerated. So they’re saying straight out that the people with the worst outcomes were seriously underrepresented in the study.
Not surprisingly, some schools appear to have been much worse (or much better) than others; and often even students who had a terrible time overall liked some particular activities, and/or made some important friendships.
Some of the schools studied allowed students to speak Native languages outside the classroom. In many other such boarding schools this was forbidden; and allowing it speaks to a somewhat different attitude in those schools in Alaska which permitted it, as they appear to not have been trying to entirely destroy their students’ heritage and previous social connections; although there was no such instruction in the schools until the 1970’s. – note that at the worst school in the study students were routinely beaten for speaking their own language at all, even outside the classroom. Other students were used to do the beating, which doesn’t seem likely to have been good for the beaters, either (it reads that they were willing, but encouraging this behavior in teenagers doesn’t bode well for their adult lives; and some may have been apparently willing on the surface but in serious distress that they were afraid to express for fear of becoming on the receiving end of the beatings.)
It should be noted that some of the time period covered by the study was after attitudes in the wider society, and in the school system, were starting to change.
At least some of these students also apparently routinely went back home every summer, though some didn’t – one child described in the study was taken from her home at age 5 and wasn’t able to reconnect with her family until she was an adult; and this doesn’t appear to have been an isolated case.
The study also describes negative effects upon the families and communities of the children who were sent away to school; it wasn’t only the ones sent away who were often damaged, but also those who remained in the villages.
So overall – yeah. Some of the schools, even including some in this particular study, were absolutely awful. Some of them were a lot better. Even the best ones did some damage, though for some of the students the benefits may have outweighed the damage; though it’s difficult to balance possible damage to their villages as a whole.
And the alternative, of course, isn’t leaving children entirely uneducated in the wider culture. It’s providing decent basic education in both the wider culture and their traditional cultures, at home when they’re younger, and with the option of either what can be provided at home or boarding in larger villages/cities when they’re older – but as an option, chosen by the individual child and their families, and without attempts to sever the connection between the child and the Native culture. Some individuals will choose to reduce or sever it, of course; as do some individuals from any culture, including the current majority culture, if given the chance.
Investigation finds at least 973 Native American children died in US government boarding schools
The full report:
Volume 2: (just published final report)
Volume 1 (published in 2022):
Thank you for posting that.
I haven’t time to read it right now, but will try to get to it.
NPR article on the report:
The Washington Post puts it at three times that many [MSN repost of paywalled Post article]
A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has documented that 3,104 students died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970, three times as many deaths as reported by the U.S. Interior Department earlier this year. The Post found that more than 800 of those students are buried in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how, in many cases, children’s bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes.
The Post’s investigation found the deaths by drawing on hundreds of thousands of government documents that also revealed how children were beaten and harshly punished if they did not adhere to strict rules in the classroom — and in the fields, laundry rooms, kitchens or workshops where they often were forced to spend half their days.
“These were not schools,” said Judi Gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, whose relatives were sent to Indian boarding schools. “They were prison camps. They were work camps.”
The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition and accidents, records show.
More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures
I would guess that a huge number of kids who attended white schools also died because of infectious diseases.
I would guess it was a lot lower than the percentage who died at these schools. Malnutrition and crowding both increase deaths from infectious disease; and I expect children who became significantly ill at other types of schools were in most cases sent home.
I wouldn’t even begin to compare the two without actual stats saying so.
Those are the sorts of deaths you get when the authorities just don’t give a damn about the people under their “protection”.
There are still some boarding schools aimed at Native Americans, and their target clientele is kids who live in very isolated communities, so they aren’t spending more time on a school bus than they are in school. Parents choose to send their kids there; they live in cottages with houseparents in some cases, or in the community, especially if they have relatives; the kids can come home on the weekends and the parents can visit whenever they want. They are usually public schools, although I know of one that’s run by a Catholic order because there used to be a local thrift store that supported it. These schools also allow day students from the community, and have classes taught in native languages which may or may not be required.
This is NOT the same as the schools we’re talking about.