The Thomas Indian School and the "Irredeemable" Children of New York

By Keith R. Burich

The story of the Thomas Indian School has been overlooked by history and historians even though it predated, lasted longer, and affected a larger number of Indian children than most of the more well-known federal boarding schools. Founded by the Presbyterian missionaries on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, as it was formally named, shared many of the characteristics of the government-operated Indian schools. However, its students were driven to its doors not by Indian agents, but by desperation. Forcibly removed from their land, Iroquois families suffered from poverty, disease, and disruptions in their traditional ways of life, leaving behind many abandoned children.
The story of the Thomas Indian School is the story of the Iroquois people and the suffering and despair of the children who found themselves trapped in an institution from which there was little chance for escape. Although the school began as a refuge for children, it also served as a mechanism for "civilizing" and converting native children to Christianity. As the school’s population swelled and financial support dried up, the founders were forced to turn the school over to the state of New York. Under the State Board of Charities, children were subjected to prejudice, poor treatment, and long-term institutionalization, resulting in alienation from their families and cultures. In this harrowing yet essential book, Burich offers new and important insights into the role and nature of boarding schools and their destructive effect on generations of indigenous populations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815653585

Book preview

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In the Shadow of Kinzua: The Seneca Nation of Indians since World War II

Laurence M. Hauptman

A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634–1635: The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, revised edition

Charles T. Gehring and William A. Starna, trans. and eds.

Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works

Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu, eds.

Munsee Indian Trade in Ulster County, New York, 1712–1732

Kees-Jan Waterman and J. Michael Smith, eds.;

Kees-Jan Waterman, trans.

Planning the American Indian Reservation: From Theory to Empowerment

Nicholas Christos Zaferatos

Reading the Wampum: Essays on Hodinöhsö:ni’ Visual Code and Epistemological Recovery

Penelope Myrtle Kelsey

The Rotinonshonni: A Traditional Iroquoian History through the Eyes of Teharonhia:wako and Sawiskera

Brian Rice

Copyright © 2016 by Syracuse University Press

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All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burich, Keith R., author.

Title: The Thomas Indian School and the irredeemable children of New York /

Keith R. Burich.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, [2016] | Series: The Iroquois and their neighbors | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048155| ISBN 9780815634546 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815634362 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815653585 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Thomas Indian School (Iroquois, N.Y.) | Off-reservation boarding schools—New York (State)—History. | Indian students—New York (State)—History. | Iroquois Indians—Education—History. | Iroquois Indians—Cultural assimilation—New York (State) | Indian children—Abuse of—New York (State)—History. | Iroquois children—New York (State)—Social conditions. | Indians of North America—Education—New York—Cattaraugus Indian Reservation. | Indians of North America—Cultural assimilation—New York (State) | Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.)—History.

Classification: LCC E97.6.T4 B87 2016 | DDC 371.829/97550747–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048155

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the generations of Indian children from New York who spent their youth at the Thomas Indian School simply because they were Indians, and spent the rest of their lives tormented by the injustices of their incarceration and treatment. Without their stories, the book would not have been possible, and it is out of respect for their privacy and dignity, and that of their families, that their names may be withheld or altered. They have suffered enough.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.An Overwhelming Majority of the Indians Are Poor, Even Extremely Poor

2.Things Fall Apart

3.Conceived in Hope, Born of Despair

4.Crippled, Defective, and Indian Children

5.Up to This Day, I Ain’t Nothing

6.No Place to Go

7.Everyone Has Forgotten Me Though I’m Gonna Die

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.Aerial photograph of the Thomas Indian School

2.Iroquois Six Nations, ca. 1720

3.Map of New York with location of Indian reservations, 1890

1. Aerial photograph of the Thomas Indian School. Courtesy of the Perrysburg Historical Museum, Perrysburg, New York.

1. Aerial photograph of the Thomas Indian School. Courtesy of the Perrysburg Historical Museum, Perrysburg, New York.

Preface

With its long, tree-lined driveway, carefully manicured landscape, and stately Georgian buildings all surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland, it looked more like a country estate than an Indian boarding school. The focal point of the campus was the administration building, which was at the center of a semicircle with four dormitories on either side linked by a covered walkway. There was a school building, a cafeteria, an infirmary, a gymnasium, an outdoor swimming pool, a residence for faculty and staff, dining facilities, and buildings for shops and equipment. Surrounding the main campus were the farm buildings with their massive barns and their silos rising above the landscape, numerous sheds and storage buildings, and chicken coops and livestock pens. There was a barber shop for the boys, a hair salon for the girls, a dental clinic, and even a post office. Altogether, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children was a self-contained and self-supporting community isolated from the temptations and dangers of the outside world. However, the idyllic pastoral setting and impressive buildings and grounds could not wipe away the tears and sadness of generations of children who passed through the doors of Salem during its 102-year history.¹

The story of the Thomas Indian School, or Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children as it was originally named, has been overlooked by history and historians even though it predated, lasted longer, and affected a larger number of Indian children than most of the more well-known federal boarding schools. Founded by the Presbyterian missionaries Asher and Laura Wright on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children opened its doors in 1855 to Indian children from the several reservations throughout New York. From its modest beginnings with ten children huddled in the Wrights’ mission house, the asylum would grow with 2,470 orphaned, abandoned, or destitute Indian children passing through its doors during the next 102 years. Unlike children in Indian schools under the supervision of the federal government, Thomas Asylum students were driven there not by Indian agents but by desperation as defeat, removal, disease, loss of land and population, and poverty disrupted native families, communities, and traditional ways of life.

Despite its lengthy history and consequent influence on generations of Indian children in New York, the only scholarly study of the Thomas Asylum is Marilyn Irvin Holt’s Indian Orphanages.² Although it began as an asylum for orphaned and abandoned children as its name implied, it was also a school under the supervision of the New York superintendent of instruction. The office had established Indian schools on the several New York reservations beginning in 1846, and as such, it was the first and only state-run Indian boarding school. As a school, it operated much like other Indian schools with the same goal of acculturating and assimilating Indians into the larger population. This was to be accomplished by subverting and supplanting traditional native culture through education, Christianization, vocational training, a rigid system of regimentation, and a strict disciplinary regime that controlled every aspect of the students’ lives. It also shared many of the same policies and practices of other boarding schools, such as the half-day system, with children going to school for half the day and working the other half. More important, all of the schools were founded on the underlying belief that Indians could be, in Laura Wright’s words, redeemed. That is, they were capable of being educated, Christianized, trained, and assimilated into the larger society. Or, as Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School believed, Indian children were a blank page upon which the salutary influences of civilization could be imprinted.³

By the end of the twentieth century, a long overdue interest in Indian education, and Indian boarding schools in particular, was generating a great deal of scholarly attention. Most of that attention has been focused on the federal boarding school system, which began in 1879 with Pratt’s experiment in Indian education in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Studies such as David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction have examined the history of that system, including its motivations and methods, its tragic consequences, and the remarkable resilience that Indians have shown in resisting what amounted to centuries of efforts to eradicate their distinctiveness as peoples and cultures. Other scholars have filled in the details of that history by examining individual schools such as Flandreau, Chiloco, Rapid City, Rainey Mountain, Sherman, Chemawa, and the other schools that came to make up the Indian educational system.⁴ These studies are replete with the now familiar stories of Indian children being torn away from their families, shorn of their locks, dressed in white man’s clothing, punished for using their native languages, and all too often dying lonely deaths far from their homelands. To be sure, there were differences between on-reservation and off-reservation schools, missionary and government schools, and boarding schools and orphanages.⁵ Nevertheless, these studies have concluded that all such schools served as agents of deculturalization by divesting Indian children of their language, culture, and heritage.

However, these studies have overlooked the fact that Indian children were often removed from their parents’ custody for reasons other than forced acculturation. Families suffering from death, disease, divorce, or destitution often turned to boarding schools to care for and even raise their children. Indeed, the Meriam Report of 1928,⁶ which surveyed conditions on reservations and at boarding schools across the nation and is credited with bringing reform to the Indian education system, found that the deplorable conditions on reservations forced boarding schools to assume responsibility for housing Indian children who either had no families to care for them or had families that neither could or would care for them. In addition, the report concluded that the boarding school experience had destructive effects not only on Indian children but on families, communities, and reservations as well. In short, the Meriam Report traced the problems associated with Indian boarding schools to conditions on the reservations that the boarding schools only helped to perpetuate and exacerbate. Viewed in this light, the Thomas Indian School offers a different model for understanding the nature, role, and effects of the boarding school experience.

The deteriorating conditions on the reservations in New York, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, produced more and more broken homes, broken families, and broken lives, and sent more and more children to the asylum. As the school’s population swelled to more than two hundred by the first decades of the twentieth century, the inadequacy of its facilities and finances became apparent. These worsening conditions also suggested that the school was failing at its original mission to redeem and elevate its students, and to send them back to have a beneficial effect on their families, communities, and reservations. Instead, many students succumbed to the conditions that drove them to the asylum in the first place.

The crush of needy children, the school’s failure to have an ameliorative effect on its students or the reservations, and its financial problems convinced authorities that a change of direction was needed. When the Wrights were forced to abdicate their control over the institution in 1875 due to financial exigencies, the state decided to move supervision of the school from the New York superintendent of public instruction to the state’s Board of Charities, which was responsible for charitable or eleemosynary institutions, including poor houses, reformatories, and lunatic asylums. As a result, the children at Thomas were no longer students but inmates and wards, and were categorized as defective. In other words, they were considered incapable of caring for themselves, as were cripples, epileptics, and mentally deficient children. The Board of Charities and school officials believed that Indians’ inherited traits befitted them for only the most menial agricultural and domestic employment back on the reservations. In short, they were irredeemable simply because they were Indians. Consequently, rather than acculturation and assimilation, the goal of the school became isolating the children for as long as possible from the degrading influences on the reservation. This included restricting visitation rights and keeping the children at the school from infancy to adulthood, which necessarily alienated them from their parents and communities, and cemented their dependency on the institution.

Such a hardening of policies was possible due to both the vulnerability of the children and their families, and the racial assumptions about the inferiority of Indians that permitted the state to treat Indian children differently than white children from similar circumstances. Indeed, the changes instituted at Thomas under the Board of Charities were made at the very time that the board itself was finding alternatives to institutionalization, such as foster care, for non-Indian dependent children. Coincidentally, in the wake of the findings and recommendations of the Meriam Report, the federal government was moving away from off-reservation boarding schools in favor of on-reservation public day schools. In short, the students at Thomas were treated differently not only from non-Indian children from similar circumstances in New York, but also from other Indians at government-run boarding schools. The fact that they were treated differently just because they were Indians was not lost on the students and only served to convince them of their inferiority and that of their parents, families, and cultures. Once released, they were unable to navigate the world outside the institution and instead succumbed to self-destructive social, psychological, and behavioral disorders that disrupted native families and communities. These disorders were subsequently transmitted from generation to generation down to the present.

The story of the Thomas Indian School did not begin in 1855, nor did it end in 1957 when the school’s doors finally closed. It is the story of the Iroquois people stretching back to their first contact with Europeans and reaching all the way to the present. It is the story of the suffering and despair of the generations of orphaned, abandoned, and destitute Indian children who found themselves trapped in an institution from which there was no escape simply because they were Indians. It is the story of the destructive effects of this incarceration, often from infancy to adulthood, not only on the children themselves but on generations of Iroquois families and communities. It is the story of scars that are still visible on the reservations in New York. The Thomas Indian School’s unique story offers new and important insights into the role and nature of boarding schools and their effect on generations of indigenous populations. It is a story that deserves and needs to be told.

Acknowledgments

Iwant to thank those survivors of the Thomas Indian School for taking me into their confidences and sharing their life stories with me. I also want to thank the staffs of the New York State Archives, the Seneca Nation Library, and the Center for Western Studies of Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for their assistance.

I want to extend my special appreciation to Dr. Richard W. Smith of Ohio Wesleyan University for encouraging me to enter the history profession, Dr. Donald G. Mathews of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for helping me in so many ways to complete my doctorate, and most importantly to my wife, Mary, for her encouragement, support, patience, and consummate editing skills in the completion of this book.

1

An Overwhelming Majority of the Indians Are Poor, Even Extremely Poor

Indian boarding schools have been singled out by historians as one of the most destructive agents of the heavy-handed and clumsy federal policy of deculturalization. The model for this type of school was Richard Henry Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which was founded in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Indian children educated at those schools were forcibly removed from their reservations and systematically stripped of their language, their culture, and their heritage. They served lengthy internments during which they were subjected to harsh and humiliating discipline. In the process, they experienced what Marcelo Dascal termed the colonization of the mind, or the inculcation of a sense of inferiority in the mind of the colonized either through coercion or persuasion but always founded on the assumed superiority of the technology, knowledge, religion, and culture of the white man. Whatever the mechanism through which this sense of inferiority was transmitted, its effects were long lasting and not easily erased, went beyond the conquest and exploitation of human and natural resources, and were enforced through overt and covert forms of discrimination, making use of socioeconomic rewarding or punishing, and sheer violent coercion.¹ The purpose was to produce a self-perpetuating subjugation by dividing Indians against themselves, cultivating among them a hatred of themselves as Indians and coercing them to reject their native identity, culture, and heritage.² Nowhere were these insidious and malignant effects more visible than at the Thomas Indian School on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York.

Federal schools that carried out deculturalization policy have received the bulk of scholarly attention on the subject, and this focus on federal institutions makes sense. During their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were the most numerous and heavily enrolled Indian schools and, therefore, the most visible and the most notorious. As late as 1928, the Meriam Report, which most scholars have cited as the death knell of the federal boarding school system as it was envisioned by Pratt and others, concluded that boarding schools remained the mainstays of the government policy of educating Indian children, even as the number of children attending reservation day schools increased. For several years now the general policy of the Indian Service has been directed away from the boarding school for Indian children and toward the public schools and Indian day schools. . . . It is, however, still the fact that the boarding schools, either reservation or nonreservation, is the dominant characteristic of the school system maintained by the national government for its Indian wards.³ However, there was a long history of efforts to educate and civilize the Indians preceding Pratt’s school at Carlisle. In fact, the federal boarding schools were founded on the principles and methods that had been hammered out at missionary schools over the course of more than two centuries.

From the very beginning of the French and English colonization of North America, educating and civilizing Indian children were principle concerns of the colonists. As early as 1611 the Jesuits in French Canada established boarding schools along the St. Lawrence. In 1619 the Virginia Company encouraged its colonists to take Indian children into their homes to educate them, and, of course, convert them to Christianity. The British wanted to establish a Protestant bulwark against Catholic expansion from French Canada to the north and the Spanish to the south. However, imperial interests ran afoul of the interests of the colonists, who viewed the Indians as savages and obstacles to expansion, while the Indians also resisted efforts to Christianize and civilize them. As a result, efforts to proselytize among the Indians were uneven and difficult to sustain.⁴ Nevertheless, by the latter half of the seventeenth century John Eliot had established his Praying Towns in Massachusetts to separate Indians from the influences of both their savage brethren and the equally pernicious influences of the white man, and Virginia had established boarding schools for Indian children within its borders.⁵ However, both were possible only after the Indians in those areas had been subjugated. Only then could the process of colonization through education and conversion proceed.

Ultimately, as Europeans migrated west, and especially after the religious enthusiasms of the Second Great Awakening erupted early in the nineteenth century, missionaries from nearly every denomination were dispatched to compete for Indian souls and to save the savages from themselves and the white man. For its part, the new government of the United States was content to allow missionaries to assume the burden of civilizing the savages. In 1819, Congress appropriated ten thousand dollars for the creation of the Civilization Fund, which was to be expended on missionary activities among the Indians. The uneven results of these early efforts, the corruption in the Office of Indian Affairs, and costly Indian wars forced President Grant to announce in 1869 his Peace Policy, which formally turned Indian education over to the missionaries. The Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Lutherans, and other evangelical churches responded by establishing missions where children were housed with the missionary families until schools could be built.⁶ It was in these mission schools, first established east of the Mississippi and then transferred to the west along with most of the eastern tribes, that the formula for educating and civilizing Indians was forged.

For example, it was the missionary belief in the value of hard work that shaped the development of the half-day system, with the students attending school for half the day and working the other half. The work performed by the boys provided training in agriculture and animal husbandry, while the girls received instruction in domestic skills, including cooking, sewing, and cleaning. And, of course, those schools were founded and staffed by devout and devoted evangelicals. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, they believed that Christianization, along with education and hard work, was necessary for the salvation of the Indian in this world and the next. To be sure, the missionary schools differed from government-run schools in that they did not always insist on English-only education. They also were intended to train native ministers, who would be better able to proselytize among their own people in their own languages.⁷ Nevertheless, Indian children entering the missionary schools received the same treatment that later generations of children would receive at the federal boarding schools. They were scrubbed, shorn of their braids, stripped of their traditional clothes, forced to eat the white man’s food and speak the white man’s language, and subjected to a rigid disciplinary regime.