Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories: Web Resources

Away From Home examines an important and often unknown period of American history. Beginning in the 1870s the U.S. government aimed to assimilate American Indians into “civilized” society by placing them in government-operated boarding schools. Children were taken from families and transported to far-away schools where all signs of “Indian-ness” were stripped away. Students were trained for servitude and many went for years without familial contact—events that still have an impact on Native communities today.

The Goodhue County Historical Society is the first organization in Minnesota to host the traveling exhibit.

Honoring the Children, Giving Voice to the Legacy

Department of the Interior Releases Investigative Report, Outlines Next Steps in Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government operated boarding schools for native children: many were forced to go.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will speak with survivors of Native American boarding schools as part of a tour called "The Road to Healing." Her department found that between 1819 and 1969, the federal government operated or supported more than 400 schools.

U.S. Department of the Interior released a more than 100-page report on the federal Indigenous boarding schools designed to assimilate Native Americans in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.

Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart describes historical trauma as “…the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land and vital aspects of culture.” The American Indian holocaust: Healing historical unresolved grief.

Survivors of schools in the US spoke with scholars about their experiences of cruelty, neglect, and cultural degradation.

Book digitized by Google from the library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive

Tens of thousands of Native American children were removed from their communities and forced to attend boarding schools where they were compelled to change their names, they were starved and whipped, and made to do manual labor between 1819 and 1969, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Interior found.

After her mother died when Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier was just four years old, she was put into a Native American boarding school in South Dakota and told her native Lakota language was “devil’s speak.”

'Kill the Indian ... Save the Man'
Listen: Two part report

Six rows of white tombstones––each belonging to a child who died while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School––stood firmly in the dewy Pennsylvania grass, bearing the names of children who lost their lives while being forced to assimilate to a new world.

Stiya: A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home: founded on the author's actual observations. By Embe [Marianna Burgess]

'I won't let them take my dignity': Survivors of Native American boarding schools speak out'

Native American Boarding Schools (also known as Indian Boarding Schools) were established by the U.S. government in the late 19th century as an effort to assimilate Indigenous youth into mainstream American culture through education. This era was part of the United States’ overall attempt to kill, annihilate, or assimilate Indigenous peoples and eradicate Indigenous culture.

We Support and Strengthen our Indigenous Community for a Better Future

The Indigenous Institute of the Americas is a nonprofit organization founded by Intertribal Elders who were deeply committed to preserving the Traditional knowledge of American Indian people from the north pole to the south pole. Our organization is an all-volunteer powerhouse founded in the 1980s in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.

The National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944, is the oldest, largest and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization serving the broad interests of tribal governments and communities.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is the first and only national organization whose purpose is to advocate on behalf of Native peoples impacted by U.S. Indian boarding school policies.

Beginning in the 1870s, the US government attempted to educate and assimilate American Indians into “civilized” society by placing children—of all ages, from thousands of homes and hundreds of diverse tribes—in distant, residential boarding schools.