DBQ – Indian Schools

Native American Cultures NY & NE
Indian Schools
READ THE ENTIRE ASSIGNMENT BEFORE BEGINNING
Complete Parts 1 & 2.
Historic Background:
“The boarding school experience for Indian children began in 1860 when the Bureau of Indian
Affairs established the first Indian boarding school on the Yakima Indian Reservation in the state of
Washington. These schools were part of a plan devised by well-intentioned, eastern reformers
Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast, who also helped establish organizations such as the Board of
Indian Commissioners, the Boston Indian Citizenship Association and the Women’s National
Indian Association.
By the 1880s, the U.S. operated 60 schools for 6,200 Indian students, including reservation day
schools and reservation boarding schools. The reservation day school had the advantage of being
relatively inexpensive and caused the least opposition from parents. The reservation boarding school
spent half a day teaching English and academics and half a day on industrial training. Regimentation
was the order of the day and students spent endless hours marching to and from classes, meals and
dormitories. Order, discipline and self-restraint were all prized values of white society.”
American Indian Relief Council: History and Culture: Boarding Schools
http://www.nrcprograms.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools

Part 1 Directions: Analyze the documents and answer the short-answer questions that follow
each document on a separate piece of paper (TYPED)

Document 1:
American Indian Relief Council: History and Culture: Boarding Schools
“The goal of these reformers was to use education as a tool to “assimilate” Indian tribes into the
mainstream of the “American way of life,” a Protestant ideology of the mid-19th century. Indian
people would be taught the importance of private property, material wealth and monogamous