Chilocco Indian Boarding School : tool for assimilation, home for Indian youth

Abstract

Chilocco Indian School, which opened in 1884, served the educational needs of American Indian students from all over the United States for nearly one hundred years. Its story is one of students and faculty working together to produce what was considered by many of its students one of the finest non-reservation federal Indian boarding schools in the nation. Its story is also a reflection of federal intervention, not always positive, in the education of Indian youth. Three works about Chilocco have been written to date. Larry Bradfield wrote a masters thesis that was a mainly administrative account from 1884 to 1955. Kimberly Tsianina Lomawaima wrote her doctoral dissertation, later published as a book, on the period from 1920 to 1940, based on oral histories. Dr. Leon Wall, former superintendent of Chilocco, in 1979 published a defense of his tenure at Chilocco. This project is an attempt to utilize administrative, federal government, and especially student accounts of Chilocco's nearly one- hundred-year history to reach some sort of balanced history of the school.