Stealing

Lit tl e
Moon
Stealing
Lit tl e
Moon
The Legacy of the
American Indian
Boarding Schools

Dan SaSuWeh Jones

New York
 Text copyright © 2024 by Dan SaSuWeh Jones
Foreword copyright © 2024 by Denise K. Lajimodiere

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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data

Names: Jones, Dan C., 1951– author.

Title: Stealing Little Moon : the legacy of the American Indian boarding schools /
Dan SaSuWeh Jones.
Description: First edition. | New York : Scholastic Focus, 2024. | Includes bibliographical
references. | Audience: Ages 8 and up | Audience: Grades 4–6 | Summary: “Little Moon There
Are No Stars Tonight was four years old when armed federal agents showed up at her home
and took her from her family. Under the authority of the government, she was sent away to a
boarding school specifically created to strip her of her Ponca culture and teach her the ways
of white society. Little Moon was one of thousands of Indigenous children forced to attend
these schools across America and give up everything they’d ever known: family, friends, toys,
clothing, food, customs, even their language. She would be the first of four generations of
her family who would go to the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. Dan SaSuWeh Jones
chronicles his family’s time at Chilocco—starting with his grandmother Little Moon’s arrival
when the school first opened and ending with him working on the maintenance crew when
the school shut down nearly one hundred years later. Together with the voices of students from
other schools, both those who died and those who survived, Dan brings to light the lasting
legacy of the boarding school era. Part American history, part family history, Stealing Little
Moon is a powerful look at the miseducation and the mistreatment of Indigenous kids,
while celebrating their strength, resiliency, and courage—and the ultimate failure of the
United States government to erase them.”—provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024003743 (print) | LCCN 2024003744 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781338889475 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781338889499 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Chilocco Indian Agricultural School—History—Juvenile literature. |
Off-reservation boarding schools—United States—History—Juvenile literature. | Indians of
North America—Cultural assimilation—History—Juvenile literature. | BISAC: JUVENILE
NONFICTION / Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | JUVENILE
NONFICTION / History / United States / General
Classification: LCC E97.5 .J66 2024 (print) | LCC E97.5 (ebook) |
DDC 371.829/97—dc23/eng/20240214

Printed in Italy 183

First edition, September 2024

Book design by Maeve Norton

 To the four women whose stories made this book
possible: Elizabeth Little Cook Pensoneau Hernandez
(Little Moon There Are No Stars Tonight), Velma
Louise Pensoneau Jones (Full Moon), Donna Colleen
Jones Flood (Heal with Water), and Denise Michele
Jones Ponds (Little Moon There Are No Stars Tonight,
after her great-grandmother). For the lives you’ve
led, the incredible hardships you’ve endured, and the
wisdom you’ve passed down to all your children.
 Foreword

In these pages, Dan SaSuWeh Jones will tell you a story about his
family. It is not just any family story. It covers four generations
of an American Indian family of the Ponca Nation in Oklahoma.
They lived through an era that many of you never knew existed
called the boarding school era. This era lasted about one hun-
dred years, from 1869 through the 1960s, but its impact would
last long after. During that time, United States government
agents took young Indian children from their families and sent
them to boarding schools far away. The children were forced to
abandon their Native heritage and to take up the ways of white
people. They were punished if they refused.
The boarding school era is one of harsh reality, horror, and
sorrow. Tragically, the consequences of this era continue to
affect thousands of American Indians today. I know this because
I am the daughter of boarding school survivors. I grew up in a
family in which both my parents and grandparents were sent to
boarding schools. It took me many years to understand why my
parents parented my siblings and me the way they did. We were
never hugged or told “I love you.” We were disciplined the way
my parents were while at boarding school, with verbal abuse
and often by the belt. Over the years, I had heard my parents

ix
mention being sent to boarding schools, but I never connected
their discipline style toward us with their school experiences.
Later, as a teacher, I decided to record my parents’ boarding
school stories. My father had attended Chemawa Indian School
in Oregon, while my mother had gone to Stephan Mission
School in South Dakota and to Wahpeton Indian School in
North Dakota. My parents spoke of emotional cruelty, hunger,
physical and spiritual abuse, and extreme loneliness. I learned
that when they were very young, they were made to leave their
own parents and the homes they loved. They had to live full
time at a school where they had few clothes and little food. They
were commanded to march everywhere as if they were little
soldiers. The teachers were strict and often had short tempers.
The students were punished for doing things such as asking for
more food to eat. Or being late for dinner. Or even speaking a
few words of their own language.
After listening to my parents, I came to understand. My
brothers and sisters and I were disciplined the way they were
disciplined while at boarding school. That meant being hit with
a belt, being ordered to kneel in corners, and being verbally
abused. Those teachers were the only parents my mother and
father knew. I believe my parents did the best they could, con-
sidering the trauma they had experienced.
When I became a college professor at the University of
North Dakota, I continued my quest to learn more about what

x
happened to students like my parents who attended boarding
schools. Soon I found myself traveling throughout North and
South Dakota and Minnesota, recording the stories of former
students who attended such schools from the 1920s to the 1970s.
I learned that most of them had been subjected to the same
cruel treatment my parents and grandparents had experienced.
For that reason, today they are no longer called former boarding
school students. They are called boarding school survivors.
I spent the next ten years interviewing survivors, listening
closely to their stories as their voices broke, their eyes welled
with tears, and their hands shook with frustration and anger at
their memories. I often had to take long breaks because it was
such emotionally draining work. Their stories are documented
in my book Stringing Rosaries.
During my time as a professor, there came a call from
national Native American leaders. They asked for anyone who
was already working to heal or help others heal from boarding
school trauma to form a new organization, named the National
Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS).
The organization was formed in 2011. I am honored to be one
of the original founding members and past board president.
NABS is a ­Native-​­led coalition. Its members give support to sur-
vivors and descendants of Native American boarding schools.
The coalition is an organization of about 800 individuals. For
more than a decade we have used our combined voice to educate

xi
others about the truth of the federal Indian boarding school pol-
icy and the devastating consequences of that time period.
That education continues in the book you are about to read.
Stealing Little Moon by Dan SaSuWeh Jones, is a story unlike any
other I have read during my years of research and writing about
boarding schools. In it, you will discover the story of a family
that survived not one generation of boarding school experiences
but four. The stories are sad, insightful, and compelling. They
are infuriating. Sometimes they are hopeful. Those experiences
began with Dan’s own grandmother, Elizabeth, in the year 1885.
She was just four years old. I wept for little Elizabeth and the
other tiny children as they were pulled from their parents’ arms.
I cheered for their courage and their determination to live.
Finally, I witnessed the strength of human spirit that endures
in the families of boarding school survivors. That spirit allows
them to speak out today, and to heal.
—​­Denise K. Lajimodiere,
Turtle Mountain Band,
Chippewa (Ojibwe)

Cofounder, National Native American

Boarding School Healing Coalition

Poet Laureate of North Dakota

xii
 Introduction

In 1884, Takare of the Wichita Indian Tribe of Oklahoma was

the first child to die at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School,
a place that would become intricately tied to my family. It was a
defining moment in a place that was already building a painful
and complicated history. Takare was stolen at a very young age
from her parents and people by the United States government
and sent to Chilocco in ­north-​­central Oklahoma, then part of
the Indian Territory. There, she was called Take Care, a bitter
irony given her tragic fate. The US government had established
Chilocco and other boarding schools in order to force young
Indian children to abandon their heritage. Officials believed
that, gradually, American Indian cultures would die out. There
would be no more Indian wars, no different beliefs. Everyone on
the American continent would be the same.
Many other young children would share Takare’s fate in the
years to come, both at Chilocco and at other boarding schools
across America. This is their story. These children symbolize
centuries of grave mistreatment of American Indians and their
culture by white colonizers who invaded our continent. From the
beginning of time, we have known our land as Turtle Island.
The colonizers later named the continent “America.”

xiii
 To all the children of Turtle Island who were mistreated,
we owe a debt. It is our duty to acknowledge their stories and
engrave them in our memories. It is my commitment and labor
of love to bring these stories to you, because it honors the chil-
dren, their families, and their heritage. And because the stories
are personal to me.
I am the third generation of my immediate family to attend
and work for the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, which
opened in 1884.
From its first classes to its last one in 1980, it operated for
almost one hundred years to the day. During much of that time,
my family attended the school. My grandmother was in its earli-
est classes, then came my mother and her siblings, my brother
and sisters, and finally one of my nieces attended the last year
the school was open. While I did not attend the school myself, I
worked there at different times throughout my life, first in main-
tenance and then as a security guard who lived at the school
after it was closed.
Throughout this book, I share the stories of my family and of
others to explore the bigger story of the Indian boarding schools.
As you read, think about your own first days at preschool or kin-
dergarten. You probably couldn’t wait to go home after school
to be with your family. But for thousands of American Indian
children who were stolen from their parents, they could not go
home in the afternoon. Some never went home again. At the

xiv
school, each day was long and hard. Disciplinarians ordered
the children to rise early; to march everywhere they went; to
eat scanty, ­insect-​­infested food; and to cook and clean. Students
were severely punished if they spoke their native language or
practiced their beloved cultural rituals.
In the early period, from 1884 to 1935, a single boarding school
might house several hundred children. If a child like Takare died
while at the school, the body might not be sent home. There was
no way to preserve a body, and many families lived too far away
for it to be delivered. In fact, many parents never even knew of
their child’s death. Today, if you were to walk the grounds of an
abandoned boarding school, you would likely find a cemetery
filled with unmarked graves. Such cemeteries have become
sacred places to American Indians. Generally, the nearest tribes
will try to care for them, but the cost of upkeep is great. It has
been our request that the US government take responsibility for
the care of Native American burial grounds. As you read this
book, you will see why.
Culture makes us who we are. It is something humans have
been exchanging since the world began. The beauty of culture
is how we all do the same things in a different way, and how we
learn from one another. Italian food without tomatoes from the
Americas and spices from India would not be the Italian food
we know today! That’s just one example of how the exchange
of culture influences us and makes our lives more interesting.

xv
Arts, dance, and religion are other examples. Our different prac-
tices and beliefs impact each of us in deep and spiritual ways,
and we must respect that. We learn from one another, and we
are better for it. The consequences of disrespecting and dimin-
ishing other cultures are horrific.
To intentionally destroy another culture is also to remove a
greater opportunity to live in a healthier world. Take, for exam-
ple, the American Indians’ relationship with Nature. We believe
we are inseparable from our surroundings. For two hundred
years, white leaders in the United States considered the natural
world as something to take from. They overlooked the conse-
quences. Eventually, America used up or destroyed its valuable
resources, leaving future generations without. Finally, the gov-
ernment had to start passing laws to stop people and industry
from wasteful and destructive practices. In many cases, it was
too late and too little. Today, slowly, the American outlook is
shifting toward this ancient American Indian belief: Take only
what you can replace. Hold a spiritual connection with Nature
as its caretaker. If the white leaders of the new United States had
listened to the people who had cared for the land for thousands
of years, they might have recognized the value of those cultural
beliefs. We might live in a stronger, healthier, and more ­self-​
­sufficient nation today.
Despite the deep and troubling nature of this topic, I have
taken on the challenge of writing about it because it is a story

xvi
that must be told and heard. History books and classes will not
teach students about the boarding school era, even though it
existed for over a hundred years, well into recent times. Why
do we know so little about this era? Perhaps because it brought
so much loss to societies both American Indian and white.
This network of government schools was designed to wipe out
American Indian culture and replace it with white ways. While
Indian cultures ultimately survived, they suffered damage,
beginning with individuals. Forced to leave their families to
attend the schools, children had to disown their language and
rituals, and they were brainwashed into adopting white ways.
Whether or not they “obeyed” the rules, the children were
abused emotionally and physically by the administrators and
teachers. After they returned home and married, many passed
on this abuse to the next generations. During the era and con-
tinuing today, dedicated tribal members have worked to heal
our people and reinstill our ways in new generations. Thanks to
these leaders, our strong and ancient cultural connections, and
our ­deep-​­rooted spiritual beliefs, we have survived. And once
again we are thriving.
In this book you will experience the anguish faced long ago
by other young people your age. Imagine their world. They were
forced to abandon their native language for English. They had to
follow Christian practices that had nothing to do with their own
spirituality. Many generations of American Indians suffered

xvii
these and other abuses that brought devastating consequences
to our cultures.
I will tell their stories and those of my own family members.
As you read, you can draw your own conclusions. You’ll meet
my grandmother Elizabeth; my mother, Velma; her brother
Edward; her half sister, Otilia; and her half brothers Francis and
Daniel; my sisters Donna and Esther; my older brother, Mike;
my first cousin, whom I call sister, Charmain; and my niece
Denise. There were others, too, like my first cousins and sisters
Betty and Darlene, who experienced Chilocco. In the end, they
certainly all survived. They also thrived.
Eventually, even the government had to face the reality of its
actions. By the late 1920s, ongoing reports of abuse and deplor-
able conditions had leaked out from the schools to government
ears. Such news prompted a deep government investigation.
The resulting Meriam Report came out in 1928 and exposed
unspeakable conditions. It also made three recommendations:
to abolish courses that taught only European American val-
ues; to keep young children at home, in local day schools; and,
within communities, to give American Indians the education
and skills they needed to live. By 1935, the youngest children
were going home. Schools were losing attendance. Some closed.
Sadly, many stayed open. European American values remained
in place. Students still learned to be white. Abuse continued.
Still, the Meriam Report had opened a new era of awareness.

xviii
Indian communities celebrated their cultures and held on to
them more tightly. They watched and waited. By the 1950s, stu-
dents and leaders of Indian Nations began to push back. They
demanded that the schools allow them to speak their languages
and celebrate their heritage. They spoke out at rallies and pro-
tests to inform the American public of the horrors many students
experienced. They stood steadfast in their pride. Finally, some
schools started to introduce American Indian culture into their
curriculum. There were language classes or pageants in which
students wore tribal dress and performed traditional dances.
Later, schools allowed the male students to grow their hair long
again, a cultural and spiritual custom.
This book honors Takare and every child who followed her.
It explores what it was like to be an American Indian child dur-
ing the boarding school years, from 1884 to 1980, as well as the
depth and richness of our heritage. Its cultures and beliefs are so
complex that white society could not understand them enough
to cherish them. This is a story of sadness. But it is also a story
of hope. Above all, it is a story of the amazing resilience of the
human spirit.

xix
 CH AP TER ONE

Kill the Indian in Him: A History

All residential boarding schools were created with the same

intention: to forcibly assimilate, or integrate, American Indian
children into white European culture. Many schools treated stu-
dents with extreme cruelty. Others had better reputations. The
Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma that my fam-
ily attended was a Quaker school. For the most part, its students
reported good experiences. Still, the teachers were stern, and
rules were rules that everyone had to follow. Chilocco, along
with Haskell Institute in Kansas, are the only schools I know of
out of over four hundred that have active alumni groups today.
I see that as a sign that many students made lasting friendships
at both institutions, and they still hold reunions where they tell
stories and laugh. This is far different from the experiences chil-
dren had at many other schools.
The history of the earliest American Indian schools begins
four hundred years ago with mission schools. They were estab-
lished by Spanish colonizers along the West Coast of North
America in the early 1600s. Not long after, in the northeastern

1
United States, British colonizers established Harvard University
in 1636 to train Puritan ministers. Then, in 1655, they added the
Indian College to bring Christianity to the surrounding Native
people. The idea was that Indian students would live at the col-
lege, go to lectures, and dine with English students. Then they
would return to their tribes to spread their new knowledge and
Christian teachings. Only a handful of Indians attended the
college before it was torn down in 1698. But Harvard had set
the stage for future American Indian boarding schools. Those
schools would be constructed by the US government and often
turned over to religious groups to administer. The schools’
duties would be the same: to teach white ways to Indian stu-
dents, including converting them to Christianity. Some two
hundred years of isolated efforts to educate and convert Indians
would pass before such a system was established.
After 1865 and the end of the US Civil War, many people
wanted to start new lives in new places. They immediately
looked toward the American West. The lands they wanted to
“settle” had already belonged to American Indians for thou-
sands of years, and these original people did not plan to part with
their homelands. Not only did the lands have deep ancestral and
spiritual meanings, but they were rich with natural resources,
including buffalo and other wildlife that provided food, cloth-
ing, and shelter. The Indians fought the white intruders, and

2
the ongoing conflict became known to the government as “the
Indian Problem.” Eventually, the stronger US forces prevailed.
Starting in the late 1870s, the government began taking away
tens of millions of acres of Indian lands to sell to white set-
tlers. Tribes were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes
and relocated to small government reservations. Still, American
Indians pushed back. Skirmishes continued throughout the
West.
During this time, a US Army captain, Richard Henry Pratt,
began an experiment. Pratt had served in the Civil War, then
later in the Indian Wars on the Western Frontier. In 1875, he was
ordered to bring captured American Indian warriors from the
West to be exiled at Fort Marion, Florida. Once the prisoners
arrived, Pratt was assigned to work with them. He determined
that by reeducating the warriors to white ways, he could make
them contributing members of white society. He gradually
developed a program that compelled the prisoners to learn the
language, wear the clothing, and practice the customs of white
people. The warriors were trained to work in jobs such as pick-
ing oranges or operating sawmill equipment. This process was
called forced assimilation. The warriors were supported by the
white community and soon lived in modest houses and worked
at ­low-​­wage jobs. Their warrior spirit seemed to be taken out of
them. The US government deemed the program a success.

3
 Richard Henry Pratt.

Pratt later flaunted his pride. Speaking to a group of Baptist

ministers, he compared his plan to a kind of religious bap-
tism. The best way to civilize Indians, he said, was to “immerse”
them in white society and keep them there “until thoroughly
soaked.”
Then Pratt had another idea. Since the assimilation program
seemed so successful for adults, he thought it could be even
more successful for children. Children would be less resistant
to new rules. Children would more easily adapt to a new life-
style. Children would carry traditions that were white instead
of Indian, and they would pass those traditions to new genera-
tions. Pratt determined that government boarding schools could

4
train young children to do all this. They would grow up speak-
ing the white language, practicing white culture, and following
white rules. Pratt theorized that if both whites and Indians had
the same kind of background and outlook, people would live
peacefully. The “Indian Problem” would be solved.
Why didn’t the government simply send enough troops to
destroy the Indian populations? Once the tribes were cornered
on reservations, it would have been relatively easy for the sol-
diers to carry out such a genocide. Government leaders thought
about this. They decided it was more humane to carry out “cul-
tural” genocide, or reeducation to white ways. It was also a
matter of expense. The US Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz
calculated that the cost to kill a single Indian warrior in battle
would be about one million dollars. To educate one child over
an ­eight-​­year period, then send them back to their tribe to help
reeducate others or to blend in to the white world, would cost
only $1,200.
In 1879, Pratt opened Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the
first ­off-​­reservation federal boarding school. It would be run
like Fort Marion, only with children. Young students would be
forced to learn white ways from their earliest years. Pratt would
later state his motto, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
He convinced Congress that by stripping Indian children of
their heritage and cultural practices, he could turn them into
“civilized” citizens who could live among the “best classes” of

5
white Americans. They would become part of white society.
Gradually, Indian society would die out.
Did anyone ask our people what we felt? After all the loss
and trauma our Elders had experienced throughout the nine-
teenth century, they could not believe that now the white men
would take their children, too. As author David Wallace Adams
wrote in his book Education for Extinction, “the white man had
concluded that the only way to save Indians was to [culturally]
destroy them, that the last great Indian war should be waged
against the children. They were coming for the children.”
And come they did. Government agents entered reservations
in North and South Dakota to take the first group of children,
120 in all, to Carlisle. The school was established on the grounds
of an old military base outside Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It had
once housed Revolutionary War soldiers and later Civil War
soldiers. The government had chosen this site partly because it
was on a railroad line and convenient for transporting children
across the country. They wanted a school that was hundreds,
even thousands, of miles from the western Indian reservations.
By separating the students from their families and traditions,
the children would more easily adopt white culture. Officials
also wanted a place close enough to Washington, DC, so that
they could visit frequently to monitor the school’s progress.
The first students arrived at the school at midnight on
October 6, 1879. They had journeyed some 1,500 miles from the

6
 ART

Student body assembled on the Carlisle School grounds.

Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations in South Dakota, travel-

ing first by horse, then steamboat, and finally by train. Their
arrival was planned for the middle of the night so that local resi-
dents would not come out to gawk. But even in the darkness, a
crowd waited. These were the first of more than ten thousand
young American Indians who would pass through Carlisle
over the next forty years. They would come from 142 tribes
across the nation, including Sioux, Cherokee, Chippewa, and
Alaska Natives.
Luther Standing Bear, of the Lakota tribe, was in this first
arriving class. He later wrote of his apprehension: “I could think
of no reason why white people wanted Indian boys and girls,

7
except to kill them . . . I thought we were going East to die. But so
well had courage and bravery been trained into us . . . in going
East I was proving to my father that he was honored with a brave
son.” Along the way, he and other boys sang brave songs so they
could meet death “according to the Lakota c­ ode—​­fearlessly.”
Luther survived and adapted to the white world.
Run like a military institution, Carlisle required the Indian
students to cut their long braids, to take “American” names, to
dress in drab US military uniforms, to speak only English, and
to march wherever they went around campus as if they were lit-
tle soldiers. Each student was even assigned a military ranking.
For the children, the act of being ripped from their families had
been traumatizing. Now these new rules added distress to their
overwhelming grief. And each new rule isolated the children
more and more from the culture and families that had taught
them the basic concepts of respect, generosity, and love.
Imagine being told how to act and what to believe by a people
who have moved you from your land to a faraway place. Their
beliefs, actions, and morals do not resemble yours at all. But
you are told that their outlooks and ways of life are better. They
are the only ones that work. You might be surprised that both
American Indians and white Americans shared the golden rule,
“Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” But
the rule seemed to mean different things to each people. Indians

8
shared their lands and helped white men’s culture flourish.
White men took the land for their own and attempted to erase
American Indian cultures. Now the children had to suffer the
consequences of the Indians’ generosity.
The immediate changes in the students’ appearances would
have shocked their Elders. These were recorded in ­before-​­and-​
a­ fter photographs. Young Hastiin To’Haali, of the Navajo, or
Diné, Nation, attended Carlisle from 1882 to 1886. His “before”
photograph shows a young man with flowing hair, who is ele-
gant in full Native dress. His “after” picture is of a boy with a
shorn head, in a drab military uniform. In both pictures, his
eyes brim with sadness. After Hastiin To’Haali and the other
students were made to change their outward appearance,
they were given a pointer and told to point to a blackboard
scribbled with American names. The one they chose was then
hung around their neck. Hastiin To’Haali chose “Tom.” His
last name would become “Torlino,” a misspelling of his Navajo
name. When he left Carlisle in 1886 and returned to his home
in Coyote Canyon, New Mexico, Tom took up his family’s long-
standing work in ranching. He used his education to help others
in the Navajo tribe communicate with the white community.
But he never again regained his full status as an Indian. He was
called Hastiin Bilagáana (meaning “white person” in Navajo) for
the rest of his life.

9
 Luther Standing Bear as a child (top)
and after arriving at Carlisle (bottom).

10
Hastiin To’Haali as he entered Carlisle in 1882 (top)
and Tom Torlino as he was known in 1885 (bottom).

11
 In the eyes of Pratt and other administrators, students like
Luther and Tom were success stories. They excelled in English
language, writing, music, the arts, and sports. Pratt made sure
that the officials in Washington saw this. He invited them to
Carlisle to attend student band concerts and sports events. He
established a school newspaper for white supporters to read. In
it, students reported on their excellent experiences at Carlisle,
whether they were true or not. Pratt even turned a classroom
into a photography lab to document his so‑called success in
pictures. Not only did he take ­before-​­and-​­after photographs of
every student, but he ensured that photographs documented
classroom experiences, concerts, sports, and happy interactions
with the staff. Pratt easily sold Congress on a project to open
similar schools throughout America. Carlisle would become the
model for more than four hundred other boarding schools.
­ ff-​­reservation boarding school in the United
The second o
States, Chemawa Indian School, was founded just a year later,
in 1880, on the West Coast. That school was run by Pratt’s for-
mer colleague at Fort Marion, Lieutenant Melville Wilkinson.
First situated in Forest Grove, Oregon, the school was moved a
few miles south to Salem, where it stands today. Children from
nearby tribes, mainly the Puyallup Indians of Washington’s
Puget Sound, were not only the first enrolled, but they also
built the school. Later students came from as far away as New
Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska. Chemawa, like Carlisle, trained

12
 Chemawa Indian School students in their
­military-​­inspired uniforms.

students as if they were in military boot c­ amp—​­it was “run by

the bell.” Gradually, the young Indians’ culture, language, and
family ties faded.
Soon, ­military-​­minded schools sprang up across the nation
modeled after Carlisle and Chemawa. By 1885, schools included
Haskell in Kansas, Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico,
and Genoa Indian School in Nebraska. In the 1890s, more
schools would open their doors in Phoenix, Arizona; Sherman,
California; and Flandreau, South Dakota. Enrollment began

13
immediately. Government Indian agents would tour the homes
of nearby Indian reservations and forcibly take children from
their families to live at the schools. If families refused, there
would be penalties. Tabatha Toney Booth, of the University of
Central Oklahoma, wrote in her research paper Cheaper Than
Bullets, “Many parents had no choice but to send their kids,
when Congress authorized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs
to withhold rations, clothing, and annuities of those families
that refused to send students . . . Sometimes resistant fathers
found themselves locked up for refusal. In 1895, nineteen men
of the Hopi Nation were imprisoned to Alcatraz because they
refused to send their children to boarding school.” American
Indian communities tried to save their children. Parents taught
them to hide when agents came near. Native police refused to
help the kidnapping agents. Still, the United States government
was stronger.
This new system of schools complemented the l­ong-​­existing
mission schools that had been started by Christians, Unitarians,
and other religious sects. But they all worked toward the same
goal. Whether ­government- or ­church-​­run, they all wanted to
“civilize” the Native people, meaning to make them like the
white man.
The school that would educate my own family members was
established in 1882. Government officials wanted a grand agri-
cultural school in Indian Territory, today known as the state

14
of Oklahoma. More than 8,000 acres of land that had once
belonged to the Cherokee reservation was set aside by the gov-
ernment to fulfill this vision. Officials wanted the school to be
close to Kansas so it could serve both the Ponca and Pawnee
reservations. When they assigned Major James Haworth as
the superintendent, he pushed back. Weren’t the schools sup-
posed to be far away from reservations so that students wouldn’t
be tempted to run away and return home? Or so their parents
wouldn’t want to visit constantly? But the government insisted.
Haworth searched for the perfect building site. At last, on the
banks of Chilocco Creek, on the remotest possible piece of land,
in the middle of empty, ­tall-​­grass prairie, he found it. Soon lime-
stone dug from local quarries and hauled to the site was lifted
into a structure that towered ­three-​­and‑a‑half stories above the
prairie. Steps led eight feet up to a massive porch. The school
held classrooms and dormitories for 150 students. There was
an enormous kitchen, dining rooms, and staff dorms. The only
building for miles around, Chilocco’s lights shone like a beacon
across the prairie at sunset. It was ready.
In late January 1884, several wagons holding 100 children
from Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes drew up
to the entrance. Soon they would be followed by children from
the Ponca and other nations. The Chilocco story had begun.

15
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