Their young faces are the first thing to greet you. Hundreds flash across a screen, in photos as far back as 1879 or as early as 1990. Who are they? They’re the Native children who went to boarding school.

These photos are part of the Heard Museum’s newly re-opened exhibit, “Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories.”

“It’s that strength and resilience that our people had,” said Patty Talahongva, an adviser for the exhibit and curator of the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center. “Every one of them has their own story, and it’s a direct result of government policy.”

Two U.S government policies lead to the creation of boarding schools across the country, the Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819 and the Peace Policy of 1868. The boarding school policy was adopted to “implement cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children,” according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

The legacy of the boarding school policy can still be felt today, according to the coalition, through the loss of language, culture and tradition as well as high rates of physical, sexual, drug and alcohol abuse among Native Americans.

The Heard Museum reopened the exhibit this month after it closed last summer. The original exhibit, “Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience” opened in 2000.

After 18 years, it was time for an update, said Janet Cantley, curator at the Heard Museum, and now it’s the only exhibit in the country to tell the full story of Native American boarding schools.

“We’ve added a lot to the story, and we have put things into better perspective,” Talahongva said.

New features of the exhibit include 16 interviews from boarding school students and interactive screens where guests can view a map of the schools across the U.S., timelines and photo galleries.

“This is definitely the best exhibit on boarding schools I’ve seen in the whole U.S,” said Christine Diindiisi McCleave, exhibit adviser and executive officer for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. 

The coalition is a non-profit organization made up of over 100 Native and Non-Native people, Tribal Nations and organizations dedicated to addressing the ongoing trauma created by boarding schools.

“This was a U.S. policy to deal with the ‘Indian problem,’ and I love that the Heard has addressed that head-on. They call it out,” she added. “That’s huge for us as Native people.”

It is part of U.S. history

Native American boarding schools housed and educated thousands of Native youth starting in the late 1800s. In the beginning, it was often a brutal and sometimes fatal experience. 

Native children were taken from their homeland and sent to boarding schools hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their family. They showed up wearing traditional clothes and hairstyles only to have their clothes taken, often burned, to be replaced with a military uniform.

Their hair was cut short and the kids were required to abandon their Native languages and customs, along converting to Christianity. They were baptized and often given birthdates and a new name.

“That was the start of the assimilation process,” Talahongva said.

“Kill the Indian. Save the man” is how Lt. Col. Richard H. Pratt talked about the education of Native Americans. Pratt was the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, which opened in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was the first non-reservation Native American boarding school in the U.S. His words played a vital role in its development and others across the country.

“Ultimately to ‘kill the Indian’ was to remove (and) eliminate Indigenous people as Indigenous people. Meaning that we would forget all manners of being Indigenous,” said Jennifer Nez Denetdale, associate professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. “We were supposed to be like white-American citizens, take on their morals and values. That has been for many of our people very debilitating, painful and traumatic.”

In the first 20 years of the boarding school policy, 20,000 Native children were taken from their families, according to the coalition. The number tripled to 60,889 in 1925, and by 1926 nearly 83 percent of Native school-age children were in boarding schools.

“This is American history, not just Native American history. This is part of what this country’s done. What it was founded on,” McCleave said.

Native kids were in boarding schools across the country, including Arizona. 

Boarding schools in Arizona

Seven, that’s how old Marie Reyhner was when she started boarding school in the 1950s. She is now 73 and still remembers how painful the experience was. 

Just seeing the building for Leupp Boarding School, about 45 miles east of Flagstaff, was enough to make her cry. It was the first time Reyhner was away from her family. 

“Everything was cold,” she said, recalling crying on her first night there. “I was so lonesome after my mom left. All I could think of was home.”

She was given “English” clothes she got from the church. Her long hair was cut and she cried through the whole experience.

“I didn’t want my hair cut,” Reyhner said. “It was a bitter experience.” 

Arizona had 51 boarding schools, the second-highest number in the country, according to the coalition, and 21 modern-day boarding schools remain open today.

The states most famous school was Phoenix Indian Industrial School. It opened in 1891 and closed as the Phoenix Indian School in 1990. It was located at what is now Phoenix Steele Indian School Park. Three historic buildings are all that remain.

“The Phoenix Indian Industrial School was definitely the largest government-run boarding school in the Southwest,” Talahongva said. It served thousands of students, kindergarten through 12th grade.

The school wasn’t meant for the students to have any real educational experience. It wasn’t a place gearing kids up for college or providing them resources to succeed in life.

“It was meant to be a cheap workforce,” Talahongva said. The boys were taught trades and girls were taught domestic skills. “It was not a true educational institution (and) that is why the name was the Phoenix Indian Industrial School.”

Students farmed in the morning and went to basic instruction in the afternoon. They were taught how to speak English, how to write and simple math, but nothing too intensive, Talahongva said.

The first class graduated 10 years after the school was established. Upon graduation, the Native men knew one trade, and Native women knew how to cook, clean and take care of someone else’s house.

“That was the standard of education,” Talahongva said. “Their level was they can function in this trade, and as a housekeeper.” 

It’s a complicated question to ask what it was like going to Phoenix Indian School, Talahongva said. “Everyone’s experience was different.”

Generational experiences 

In the beginning, many experiences were brutal and tragic, Talahongva explained. “Kids died here from loneliness, heartache, illness and accidents. A lot of their bodies were never returned home.”

Over time, rules started to change. Gradually, the military uniforms went away, she said, and the kids were no longer forced to march all over campus.

Going to boarding school became normalized, Talahongva said, because the government was no longer forcing kids to go. Families now had a choice.

“Once the choice was left up to the individual families, that is when that pride started to take place,” she said.

Talahongva is from the Hopi nation, and ended up at Phoenix Indian School her junior year in 1978, alongside her younger sister Rosalee.

“My mother hated sending us to boarding school because she knew that the educational standard was not that great,” she said, but they went because there was no high school on the reservation during that time.

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Talahongva’s experience at the Phoenix Indian School ended up “profoundly” changing her life.

“When I came to school here, I landed my very first job as a paid journalist,” she said.

At 16, Talahongva said she was hired to write stories for the Phoenix Gazette in the Teen Gazette section about Phoenix Indian School.

“They’d never had a correspondent from Phoenix Indian,” she said, and her first article was “Phoenix Indian School a tribal melting pot.” She made $33 for that story.

“That launched my career as a journalist,” Talahongva said. “Who would’ve ever thought that coming to Phoenix Indian School.”

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‘We’re not assimilated’

The Native kids who were told to never speak their Native languages often didn’t listen.

It’s a history of integrity, Talahongva said, because when the kids didn’t listen it resulted in punishment, and in some cases, corporal punishment.

There was actual “physical abuse if they were caught speaking their languages,” she added, but the kids found always found a way.

“They simply took it underground,” she said, and they would start speaking in their Native languages when adults weren’t around, so they couldn’t be punished. “They kept their language alive.”

Proof that they kept that language alive even during boarding schools surfaced when “the same government that said, ‘English only’ ended up turning to our people.”

During World War I, the U.S. government turned to Choctaw nation, Talahongva said, and asked them to create a code in their language to send out military messages.

“They were able to do that because they still spoke their language fluently and now those boys could also speak English,” she added. 

The same thing happened during World War II, Talahongva said, when more than 30 different tribes were asked to create a code. The most famous were the Navajo Code Talkers, who were enlisted by the U.S. Marines in 1942.

Boarding schools started out military-like, but over time things started getting better, Talahongva said, because of the children, not the teachers or administrators.

“We have changed today, but we’re not assimilated,” Talahongva said. “We’re not by any means assimilated to the point that the government wanted us to be assimilated.”

For instance, the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center is located inside an old building from the boarding school, and it is dedicated to serving Native communities. 

The building was built in the 1930s by the very students who went to school there, Talahongva said, and it was later used as an elementary school and music room. Those students were not encouraged to go to college.

Yet, Talahongva said, there are several Native families who rent the conference room to celebrate their graduating students. 

“We’re in a building where the kids were not expected to go to college,” she said, and now, years later, Native people gather here to celebrate graduations. “That’s changing the story. That’s really putting this building to good use that truly would benefit our people. So, take that, government.”

Do you have a story to share about Native American boarding schools? Reach reporter Shondiin Silversmith at [email protected] and follow her Twitter @DiinSilversmith. Silversmith covers Indigenous people and communities in Arizona.

Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2019/02/26/heard-museum-phoenix-exhibit-showcases-native-american-boarding-schools/2854259002/