The Rapid City Indian School 1898 1933

The Rapid City Indian School was one of twenty-eight off-reservation boarding schools built and operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to prepare American Indian children for assimilation into white society. From 1898 to 1933 the "School of the Hills" housed Northern Plains Indian children--including Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, and Flathead--from elementary through middle grades. Scott Riney uses letters, archival materials, and oral histories to provide a candid view of daily life at the school as seen by students, parents, and school employees. The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 offers a new perspective on the complexities of American Indian interactions with a BIA boarding school. It shows how parents and students made the best of their limited educational choices--using the school to pursue their own educational goals--and how the school linked urban Indians to both the services and the controls of reservation life.

In 1883, 12-year old Canowicakte boarded a train on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, beginning a journey his friends said would end at the edge of the world. Raised as a traditional Lakota, he found Carlisle Indian School, with its well-documented horrors, was the end of the world as he knew it. Renamed Chauncey Yellow Robe, he flourished at Carlisle, developed a lifelong friendship with founder Richard Pratt, and went on to work at Indian boarding schools for most of his professional life. Despite his acceptance of Indian assimilation, he was adamant that Indians should maintain their identity and was an outspoken critic of their demeaning portrayal in popular Wild West shows. He was the star and technical director of The Silent Enemy (1930), one of the first accurate depictions of Indians on film. His life embodied a cultural conflict that still persists in American society.

From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and Tenochtitlán to the twenty-first century Oceti Sakowin encampment of NoDAPL water protectors, Native people have built and lived in cities—a fact little noted in either urban or Indigenous histories. By foregrounding Indigenous peoples as city makers and city dwellers, as agents and subjects of urbanization, the essays in this volume simultaneously highlight the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous people and politics. The authors—Native and non-Native, anthropologists and geographers as well as historians—use the term “Indian cities” to represent collective urban spaces established and regulated by a range of institutions, organizations, churches, and businesses. These urban institutions have strengthened tribal and intertribal identities, creating new forms of shared experience and giving rise to new practices of Indigeneity. Some of the essays in this volume explore Native participation in everyday economic activities, whether in the commerce of colonial Charleston or in the early development of New Orleans. Others show how Native Americans became entwined in the symbolism associated with Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C., with dramatically different consequences for Native and non-Native perspectives. Still others describe the roles local Indigenous community groups have played in building urban Native American communities, from Dallas to Winnipeg. All the contributions to this volume show how, from colonial times to the present day, Indigenous people have shaped and been shaped by urban spaces. Collectively they demonstrate that urban history and Indigenous history are incomplete without each other.

An in depth look at boarding schools and their effect on the Native students.

Winner of the 2019 Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology, the collaborative archaeology project at the former Stewart Indian School documents the archaeology and history of a heritage project at a boarding school for American Indian children in the Western United States. In Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, the team’s collective efforts shed light on the children’s education, foodways, entertainment, health, and resilience in the face of the U.S. government’s attempt to forcibly assimilate Native populations at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as school life in later years after reforms. This edited volume addresses the theory, methods, and outcomes of collaborative archaeology conducted at the Stewart Indian School site and is a genuine collective effort between archaeologists, former students of the school, and other tribal members. With more than twenty contributing authors from the University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada Indian Commission, Washoe Tribal Historic Preservation Office, and members of Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes, this rich case study is strongly influenced by previous work in collaborative and Indigenous archaeologies. It elaborates on those efforts by applying concepts of governmentality (legal instruments and practices that constrain and enable decisions, in this case, regarding the management of historical populations and modern heritage resources) as well as social capital (valued relations with others, in this case, between Native and non-Native stakeholders). As told through the trials, errors, shared experiences, sobering memories, and stunning accomplishments of a group of students, archaeologists, and tribal members, this rare gem humanizes archaeological method and theory and bolsters collaborative archaeological research.

The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools illuminates the relationship between the Dakota Sioux community and the schools and surrounding region, as well as the community’s long-term effort to maintain its role as caretaker of the “sacred citadel” of its people. Cynthia Leanne Landrum explores how Dakota Sioux students at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota and at Pipestone Indian School in Minnesota generally accepted the idea that they should attend these particular boarding institutions because they saw them as a means to an end and ultimately as community schools. This construct operated within the same philosophical framework in which some Eastern Woodland nations approached a non-Indian education that was simultaneously tied to long-term international alliances between Europeans and First Peoples beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Landrum provides a new perspective from which to consider the Dakota people’s overt acceptance of this non-Native education system and a window into their ongoing evolutionary relationships, with all of the historic overtures and tensions that began the moment alliances were first brokered between the Algonquian Confederations and the European powers.

Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival illustrates how settler colonialism propelled U.S. government programs designed to assimilate generations of Native children at the Stewart Indian School (1890-1980). The school opened in Carson City, Nevada, in 1890 and embraced its mission to destroy the connections between Native children and their lands, isolate them from their families, and divorce them from their cultures and traditions. Newly enrolled students were separated from their families, had their appearances altered, and were forced to speak only English. However, as Samantha M. Williams uncovers, numerous Indigenous students and their families subverted school rules, and tensions arose between federal officials and the local authorities charged with implementing boarding school policies. The first book on the history of the Stewart Indian School, Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival reveals the experiences of generations of Stewart School alumni and their families, often in their own words. Williams demonstrates how Indigenous experiences at the school changed over time and connects these changes with Native American activism and variations in federal policy. Williams's research uncovers numerous instances of abuse at Stewart, and Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival addresses both the trauma of the boarding school experience and the resilience of generations of students who persevered there under the most challenging of circumstances.

Currently, there are three approaches to studying American Indians: from how white Americans approach Indian studies, from the dynamics or exchange of Indian-white relations and from the Indian point of view. Donald Fixico, an American Indian, has been teaching and writing history for a quarter of a century. This book is the direct result of his experience as a scholar who 'thinks like an Indian' in an academic environment created predominantly by non-Indian thinkers. This book addresses current approaches to studying Native American traditional knowledge and acknowledges an Indian intellectualism that has up until now been ignored in studying Native American history. Written primarily from inside the Native world, but fully cognizant of the American cultures outside of that world, his unique voice speaks to a need for understanding the interior Native world: a world in which linear thinking is atypical and circularity is preferable.