Assessing Responsibility for the Death of Indian Residential School Students

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WASHINGTON –

Editor’s Note: This report reveals information about illness and death at Federal Indian Residential Schools that some readers might find triggering or upsetting. Discretion towards sensitive groups is advised.

On June 16, 1913, Pauline Peazzoni, a 13-year-old Maidu from the Sierra Nevada in Northern California, lost her battle against the “white plague”, tuberculosis.

She had spent seven months at the Mont Alto Sanatorium in Pennsylvania. A former U.S. Forest Service camp, it was now a cluster of cottages, public baths, and an infirmary in the middle of a mountain-top forest – a place Pennsylvania was sending troops to. tuberculosis patients destitute for treatment or to die.

Mount Alto Sanatorium for tuberculosis, Pennsylvania: view of cottages, ca. 1920-1940. Image 582201i Collection courtesy of Wellcome.

Industrialization and the resulting increase in immigrant populations in the late 19th century led to waves of pandemics – cholera, typhoid, diphtheria – but none has terrified Americans more than tuberculosis (TB), which could attack the lungs, lymph nodes or abdomen. Sometimes called consumption or consumption, it was a leading cause of death in the United States until the development of antibiotics in the 1940s.

“Two views of a nurse looking for white plague victims to stop the spread of contagion to others.” December 27, 1913. The Ogden Standard (Ogden City, UT).

Science has long known that infectious diseases thrive in dark, humid, dusty and airless conditions. In 1865, the New York City Council of Hygiene and Public Health studied housing conditions and concluded that improved sanitation could reduce mortality by 30%.

In the early 1900s, the Red Cross and the newly formed American Lung Association launched aggressive public health campaigns on cleanliness and hygiene; by 1910, at least 65 open-air schools were operating in the United States

Undated photo of an outdoor classroom in New York City, as part of an effort to fight the spread of tuberculosis.

“Hungry wretches”

On May 7, 1880, Montana’s Benton Weekly Record reported that the Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan tribes were starving under horrific living conditions at Fort Assinniboine.

“The barrels of garbage around the quarters of the soldiers and officers are besieged day and night by crowds of starving miserable people,” writes the correspondent, “and the putrid carcasses of animals that have died of disease are stripped of every particle of flesh for relieve strong feelings of hunger.

In their annual reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, most office workers and doctors downplayed substandard conditions on reserves. But some were more truthful.

Newly appointed Blackfeet Agency agent in Montana RA Allen reported in 1884 that “the little children… were so emaciated that they did not seem possible to live long, and many of them have since passed away. .

Shoshone Indians at Fort. Washakie, Wyoming Indian Reservation. Chief Washakie (left) extends his right arm, 1892

Infectious diseases thrived on reserves. In 1898, Blackfeet physician ZT Daniel reported that “almost all Indian children” were infected with tuberculosis.

Many blamed the Indians themselves, citing ways of life, cultural traditions, Indian blood level, or genetic weakness.

“Civilized people in any good climate don’t die at such a rate,” RJ Taylor wrote to the Yankton (S. Dakota) agency.

But Washington Matthews, a U.S. Army surgeon who had spent decades working with tribes, scoffed at the claim. In his 1886 report for the Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, “Consumption Among the Indians,” he used statistics to demonstrate that tuberculosis deaths were highest among Indians who had been “civilized.” , that is, forced “to get used to the food and habits of an alien race.” “

Congress in session at the United States Capitol, after 1890.

In the dormitory

In 1891, Congress authorized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to create regulations requiring Indian children to attend residential schools and allowing reservation agents to withhold rations and other benefits from any parent refusing to comply.

“No student should be transferred unless he is in good health and in good health,” reads the new “Rules for Indian Schools” from the Indian Bureau.

A doctor examines a student at Carlisle Indian School Hospital. Undated, courtesy of: Cumberland County Historial Society.

“Students should be examined by reserve physicians, who would certify that they are physically healthy,” said Dartmouth College historian Preston McBride, who documented at least 1,000 deaths at four residential schools from 1879 to 1934 and spoke with VOA in June. “And then again, by school doctors, on arrival.”

But these exams were rarely complete and often lasted only a minute or two, “long enough to record a student’s height, weight and pulse,” McBride said.

Physician’s Certificate of Good Health for Carlisle Indian School student David Cabay (Chippewa Nation).

Bureau of Indian Affairs “rules” admitted that “fragile, unhealthy and positively ill” students had slipped into schools through the cracks.

“School officials didn’t always separate them from other students,” McBride said. “There is some evidence that in some cases students with TB should share beds with healthy students. “

“Benches and shake-houses”

The 1886 report to the commissioner contained several grim reports on the conditions of the residential schools.

“No arrangement for sanitation has ever been made,” wrote Fort Stevenson Industrial School in North Dakota, George W. Scott. “The kitchen slops found a receptacle in a hole a few rods (about 3 meters) from the kitchen.

Students and teachers, he added, were getting sick from drinking contaminated water.

Meanwhile, Horace Chase, superintendent of the Nebraska Genoa Industrial School, had similar complaints: “All water for any purpose is brought into the building by bucket or tub, and in the same manner, should it be performed. Sufficient means are not and cannot… be provided for bathing purposes.

Temporary buildings at Chemawa School, 1885, WP AndersonOregon Historical Society, 0335P151

And the Forest Grove Indian Training School – the second off-reserve Federal Residential School – was moving from its original location in Forest Grove, Oregon, to the nearby town of Chemawa, where residents were crowded. in “raw slums and temporary shake-houses.” , which they had built themselves.

The health of the students, according to the new principal of the school, was “as good as one would expect”.

“There have been 510 cases treated by the doctor, but of those, only 6 died at school and 2 after returning home,” he wrote, reflecting a practice observed in many schools consisting of to send sick children home to die.

Tuberculosis sanatorium buildings, Phoenix Indian School ca.1890-1910.

As David H. DeJong noted in a 2007 article for the American Indian Quarterly, “Unless They Are Kept Alive,” Indian Commissioner William Jones ordered an investigation into the health of Indians in 1903 and called on schools to step up their efforts to identify students and improve building conditions.

But agencies were slow to implement the change. Records from the Carlisle School indicate that Pauline Peazzoni had previously lost her mother and sister to tuberculosis and suggest that she may have been infected when she arrived at the school. In 1907, the “frail and delicate” girl was placed on an “outing” with a white family in Bucks County, 200 kilometers from the school.

The Carlisle School doctor’s report for Pauline Peazzoni on her return to school after a five-year discharge indicates an advanced stage of tuberculosis.

By the time she returned to Carlisle in June 1912, her illness had advanced. She was hospitalized in Carlisle for four months, then transferred to Mont Alto to live out her last days.

As VOA reported in June, residential school surveys in 1922 and 1928 showed that residential school conditions had, in some cases, only worsened.

The task ahead

In May, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Nation in British Columbia announced that using ground penetrating radar (GPR) they had found the remains of more than 200 students at Kamloops Indian Residential School – news that stunned the public but came as no surprise to the First Nations, Native Americans and Indigenous peoples of Alaska who for decades have spoken of missing students and deaths in residential schools.

FILE – In this April 23, 2021 file photo, Home Secretary Deb Haaland speaks during a White House press briefing in Washington.

This prompted Home Secretary Deb Haaland to launch a nationwide inquiry into the plight of boarding school students in the United States. The findings are due for release in April 2022.

But will we have full accounting?

Frank Vitale, a historian who consults the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center at Dickenson College, said the outlook for VOA could be slim.

“Boarding schools in the United States were run by a number of different groups, including the federal government and various religious organizations,” he said. “And they were run in different ways in different places and different periods of history, until the 1960s.”

Record keeping was uneven, so individual accounting will be difficult and will involve looking not only at student information files, but also at financial records, school annual reports, and administrative correspondence.

Carlisle Indian School Cemetery in the 1930s, after the graves were moved from their original location. Courtesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

“For example, we looked at the daily attendance records at Carlisle and noticed that a student had dropped out for an unknown reason that had not been recorded,” Vitale said. “So we went digging and finally found a financial record that showed a coffin had been purchased around the same time.”

Vitale believes that while following up on these students is important work, focusing too narrowly on blaming misses the most important questions:

“What do the statistics tell us about the Native American experience in the 19th and 20th centuries? ” He asked. “And how does their suffering and death from tuberculosis relate to the larger system of US imperialism?” ”

NOTE: In Part 4 of this series, VOA will examine the impact of boarding schools on students, their families, tribal communities and their descendants.

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