The discovery of mass child graves at former Canadian residential schools has touched off a lot of conversations as people wake up to how horrible conditions were at these schools. But America operated many residential schools as well. Were these schools as deadly as their Canadian counterparts? Was Canada’s residential system especially atrocious? Or is there not enough evidence to say?
The word "murder" is a terrible word, but we are little less than murderers if we follow the course we are now following after the attention of those in charge has been called to its fatal results. (Inspector William McConnell, report to Secretary of the Interior, 1899)
Mortality at residential schools in the United States and Canada was very high. Certain pathogens, specifically tuberculosis and a non-fatal but debilitating eye disease called trachoma, became the scourge of the boarding school system. All this was known. Indian parents wrote frequent, frantic letters to school officials. Investigations revealed unsanitary, dangerous conditions. Students demand inquiries through petitions, and testified in congressional hearings. Change, however, came very slowly, at the cost of thousands of young lives.
In the U.S. schools received funding based on attendance numbers. Residential buildings and dorms, often dilapidated and lacking ventilation, were therefore packed with students in an attempt to increase funding. Written accounts detail a normative pattern of children sleeping two to a bed, with beds placed so close together they practically touched. No effort was made to separate sick children from the rest of the school population until they were very ill, and cost-saving measures meant students shared everything from towels to drinking vessels and utensils. Investigations found inconsistent/unavailable access to cleaning supplies like soap, and found insufficient access to, and maintenance of, communal toilets. Those same investigations found insufficient access to healthy foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, and widespread malnutrition, with students losing significant weight over course of a school year. Parents often wrote to the schools to express concerns, specifically about insufficient clothing, alarming rates of weight loss.
Boarding schools were many things. They were schools, yes, but they were also businesses. The schools depended on student labor in the fields to put food on the table, make and mend school uniforms, launder sheets, and repair buildings. This unpaid labor was allowed under the guise of workplace training, but it left kids exhausted. Survivors of the boarding schools, and diaries written at the time, often mention the tremendous, monotonous fatigue of morning classes followed by ceaseless manual labor in the afternoon (or all day depending on needs during harvesting or planting seasons).
Boarding schools were also, in many ways, reeducation camps that operated on strict schedules with military discipline and the constant threat of violence. The cumulative psychosocial stress of leaving home, having your hair cut (an act usually associated only with deep mourning in many Native American nations), being forced to abandon your native language, and abide by new strict rules, with physical punishment accompanying lapses, all the while being told your ancestors were irredeemable savages was a constant weight placed on very young shoulders. Survivors also report pervasive physical and sexual abuse.
By 1900 indigenous nations across the country associated the schools with death, and parents were convinced the schools ravaged their children's health. The unhealthy conditions of easy spread of disease among exhausted, malnourished, and highly stressed young hosts at residential schools made students more likely to not only catch infectious diseases, but also increased their mortality once they fell ill. At Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania 180 students are buried on campus. Another fourteen rest under headstones labeled "Unknown". Researchers believe an additional sixty or so students died on outings (low paid work placements in the surrounding community) or were sent home to die once they fell ill. Of the 73 Shoshone and Arapahoe students sent to boarding schools between 1881 and 1894 only 26 survived. Between 1885 and 1913, 100 students were buried in the Haskell school cemetery. The youngest was six. The average age at death was sixteen.
For more information...
Education for Extinction Adams and Boarding School Seasons by Childs are two very good introductions to the schools, and how students navigated their way through a genocidal system.