American Indian Schools

When superstar athlete Jim Thorpe and football legend Pop Warner met in 1904 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, they forged one of the winningest teams in American football history. Called "the team that invented football", they took on the best opponents of their day, defeating much more privileged schools such as Harvard and Army in a series of breathtakingly close calls, genius plays, and bone-crushing hard work.

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school. These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever heard before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.

Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a "contrary warrior" by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone's shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than "a little bit of heaven."

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.

The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man."

In 1903, over 300 Indian children from across America lived at the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School in a remote, isolated valley in Montana. Among the children were a handful of teenage girls, many who had only lived in tepees. They quickly learned to play basketball and resoundingly crushed all opponents, including men's and women's university teams. After the games, the girls recited Shelley and Longfellow, played mandolins and violins, sang, danced, and pantomimed.