The groundbreaking exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience draws on first-person recollections, memorabilia and the writings and art of four generations of Indian school alumni to examine the commonality of the boarding school experience. A powerful display that explores an important era in American history, the exhibition incorporates historic images, music, sound, oral histories, memorabilia and video to immerse visitors in the story being told by the people who lived it.
Remembering Our Indian School Days celebrates the spirit of survival. Originally established to “civilize” American Indians into mainstream society, Indian boarding schools became a shaping force of a national American Indian identity. “This is not just a part of American Indian history; it is an important element of American history in its entirety,” says Margaret Archuleta, curator of the exhibition, which opened in 2000 and has become one of the museum’s most popular and moving presentations. “Indian or not, this exhibit is an important examination of our society both past and present.”
1879 to the 1990s
Federally run Indian boarding schools became a key element of the widespread national effort to “Americanize” American Indians beginning in the late 19th century. The BIA’s first official boarding school, Carlisle Indian School, was established in 1879 in Carlisle, Penn. Because a comprehensive listing has never been created, the actual number of Indian boarding schools is unknown. The number of Indian boarding schools established since 1879 is estimated to be in the hundreds. Today, four BIA boarding schools – Chemawa Indian School at Forest Grove, Ore., Sherman Indian School at Riverside, Calif., Flandreau Indian School at Flandreau, S.D., and Riverside Indian School at Anadarko, Okla. – are currently in use.
Indian boarding schools have operated parallel to the mainstream educat ...More...
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