Chemawa Indian School
The second Indian boarding school to be established, Chemawa Indian School is the oldest continuously operating Native American boarding school in the United States. Its graduates number in the thousands. At its peak of enrollment in 1926, it had 1,000 students. New buildings were constructed in the 1970s on a campus near the original one, where at one time 70 buildings stood, including barns and other buildings related to the agricultural programs.
During the 2023-24 academic year, it continued to serve students in the ninth through twelfth grades. It has primarily served students of tribes from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
History
Establishment
The Chemawa Indian School was a product of the ideas of the 1870s, when the American government sought to end its ongoing conflict with the Native American population through cultural assimilation. Following the ideas of military officer Richard Henry Pratt and the perceived successful establishment of the Carlisle Indian School near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, funding was provided for a boarding school for American Indian children in the American Pacific Northwest.
In contrast to earlier belief that Native Americans were inherently "uncivilizable," Pratt argued for immersive education as a mechanism to assimilate and integrate the various pre-Columbian peoples into modern society. Schools established under Pratt's influence were deliberately located far from Indian reservations as a means of isolating students from traditional cultural folkways.
An initial site was developed on four acres of land near Forest Grove, Oregon with a budget of $5,000 appropriated. With Indian affairs part of the bailiwick of the War Department, US Army Lieutenant Melville Wilkinson, secretary to General Oliver Otis Howard, was tapped to lead the project. Wilkinson, with the help of eight Puyallup Indian youths, began construction on first campus buildings in 1880.
The first class enrolled at the Forest Grove Indian and Industrial Training School consisted of 14 boys and 4 girls from Washington state, 17 of the Puyallup nation and one Nisqually boy. Curriculum was determined by gender, with boys were taught painting, baking, drafting, machining, masonry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, and carpentry — artisan skills considered important for successful rural life. Girls were steered towards mastery of the "domestic arts".
New location
Owing to poor drainage, an inadequate inventory of land for agricultural education, and spurred by the 1884 destruction by fire of the girls' dormitory, officials began to investigate an alternative site for the school elsewhere in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Three sites were proposed, including a 100 acre parcel of heavily timbered land near Newberg, a 23 acre site near Forest Grove, Oregon with 75 more acres of pasture land located a few miles away, and 171 acres of partially cleared timber land five miles north of Salem. The Salem site was selected owing to its proximity to state government and the location's favorable inventory of land.
Construction at the Salem site began in 1885. Initial temporary wooden buildings were later razed to make way for more permanent brick structures. On June 1, 1885, the Chemawa Indian School was opened with approximately half of the students moving to the new location and half staying behind in Forest Grove owing to lack of space at the new facility. On October 1, 1885, John Lee was named superintendent of the new "Salem Indian Training School". Construction of three new buildings was shortly completed at the Salem campus and after a winter of separation the remaining students from Forest Grove were moved to Salem.
The first graduating class completed the sixth grade in 1886. Courses were subsequently added expanding education through the tenth grade. In 1900, the school had 453 students, making it the largest of its kind in Oregon.
With an expanded land inventory, increased attention was paid to agricultural training, including dairy farming, animal husbandry, and crop farming, the byproduct of which provided food for later use.
A school library provided reading material. Students could participate in sports of basketball, baseball, and football, competing against Anglo high schools and colleges of the region. By 1913 there were 690 students enrolled, including 175 Alaskan Inuit children.
Period of growth
By 1922, the Chemawa campus had 70 buildings, mostly of wood frame construction but others made of brick. Acquisition of adjacent land brought the total area held by the school to 426 acres (1.72 km).
Peak enrollment at Chemawa came in 1926, when the school counted nearly 1,000 students.
Curriculum was expanded to include the 11th and 12th grades were added to the curriculum with all grades below 6th were dropped and in 1927, Chemawa became a fully accredited high school.
Depression era through the 1950s
The school was threatened with closure in the early 1930s, as the government sought economies during the Great Depression. Interested journalists and Oregon's delegation to the U.S. Congress lobbied with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep it open, and it continued with 300 students.
Lawney Reyes, who attended the school in 1940–1942 (as did his sister, Luana Reyes), devotes two chapters of his memoir White Grizzly Bear's Legacy: Learning to be Indian to his experiences there. He wrote that his consciousness of being "Indian" was largely formed through his conversations with other students.
He also wrote:
"I did not experience any harsh restraint against Indian culture or tradition at Chemewa. Generations of Indians before me had already felt the full force of that practice. I learned that in earlier years, speaking the Indian language had been forbidden. White authority had dealt harshly with Indian dancing, singing, and drumming. Students were not allowed to braid their hair or wear any ornaments with Indian design motifs. During my time, efforts to teach the white way were still in force, but attempts to abolish or restrain Indian culture were past. The practice of Indian culture, however, was not encouraged or discussed."
During the 1940s and 1950s a special program for Navajo students was initiated and efforts made to attract Pacific Northwest students, including those from Alaska.
In the late 1970s, Chemawa moved to a new campus on adjacent land, with most of the original brick buildings destroyed after the shift. By 2017 the new campus was fenced.
Chemawa today
Student body
Circa 1988, 50% of the students in one year were not enrolled in the next and its students frequently moved between various educational systems.
Academics
Chemawa Indian School has been accredited through Northwest Association of Accredited Schools since 1971.
Partnership with Willamette University
In 2005, Chemawa Indian School formed a partnership with Willamette University, a private liberal arts college in Salem. Willamette undergraduates, along with Chemawa peer tutors, provide tutoring to students four nights per week on the Chemawa campus.
2003 student death
Operations at the Chemawa Indian School were investigated following the death in December 2003 of a 16-year-old student from Warm Springs, Oregon. She died of alcohol poisoning after being locked in a detention cell after being found intoxicated on school grounds. The Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior, together with the U.S. Attorney's office in Portland, Oregon investigated the incident. They found officials at fault.
This and other incidents at reservation detention facilities nationwide were the subject of hearings in June 2004 before the Indian Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate. The Inspector General of the Department of the Interior noted poor conditions in BIA facilities, the lack of suitable BIA detention facilities for juveniles, high rates of suicide in existing facilities, and failure to report deaths as required, among other problems. He noted that facilities run by the tribes were often in better condition despite similar funding problems and understaffing.
National Register of Historic Places
Former names for the school include Forest Grove Indian and Industrial Training School, United States Indian Training and Normal School, Salem Indian Industrial and Training School, and Harrison Institute.
In 1992 the school's Colonial Revival-style hospital and four other early structures were listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as the Chemawa Indian School Site. These buildings were surviving brick structures on the school's "old campus"; the older buildings were demolished after the school moved to the adjacent "new campus" in the late 1970s. The Chemawa Cemetery is the only part of the old campus still intact.
Cemetery and unmarked graves
Children at such boarding schools often suffered from epidemics in the dormitories of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (incurable in the early 20th century), influenza and trachoma. As was the case for most residential Indian schools, Chemawa initially maintained a cemetery for students who died during their time at the school. No longer used for student burials after 1940, the cemetery was razed in 1960, with an incomplete set of grave markers later replaced based on school records.
In 2016, numerous unmarked graves of students were reported to have been found at the Chemawa Indian School Cemetery. Marsha Small, a North Cheyenne graduate student at Montana State University, used ground-penetrating radar to scan the site, finding hundreds, if not thousands of unmarked graves by comparing data to the 200 documented grave sites.
Small published her findings in her thesis, A Voice for the Children of Chemawa Cemetery (2015). She is concerned with raising awareness in general about the graves, but also with protecting the cemetery from potential damage from a freeway interchange planned nearby.
Notable alumni
- Spade Cooley - bandleader, "King of Western Swing"
- Frank LaPena - Nomtipom-Wintu American Indian painter, printmaker, ethnographer, professor, ceremonial dancer, poet, and writer.
- Bob Greene - Makah elder and veteran of World War II
See also
- Off-reservation boarding schools operated by the BIE
- Off-reservation boarding schools operated by tribes
- American Indian outing programs