Reflecting on the ‘cultural annihilation’ of Indigenous youth
‘Away from Home’ brings a
personalized touch to history
BY KATHERINE LACAZE
It’s a tragic part of American his-
tory that many people are familiar with:
the forced removal of Indigenous chil-
dren from their homes only to be placed
in boarding schools where they were sub-
jected to intense conditioning intended to
erase their cultural identity.
If You Go
‘Away From Home: Native American
Boarding School Stories’
Clatsop County Heritage Museum, 1618
Exchange St.
10 a.m. to 4 p.m., daily until May 25
$5 per person
However, “Away from Home: American
Indian Boarding School Stories,” a tem-
porary exhibition at the Clatsop County
Historical Society’s Heritage Museum,
personalizes the complicated narrative
of atrocity, trauma, resistance and trans-
formation in a way that is poignant and
educational.
“It very much humanizes it,” said Chel-
sea Vaughn, the museum’s curator.
“Away from Home,” which opened at
the Heritage Museum on April 6 and runs
through May 25, is a traveling exhibition
developed by the National Endowment of
the Humanities, Mid-America Arts Alli-
ance and NEH on the Road. The Heri-
tage Museum applied to be a seven-week
host for the exhibition during its five-year
tour to different locations throughout the
U.S. This will be the only appearance of
the exhibition in the Pacific Northwest in
2021.
Featuring the exhibit is a unique oppor-
tunity for the Heritage Museum, Vaughn
said, adding, “We are a smaller, rural
museum that often doesn’t house exhibits
of this stature.”
‘Cultural annihilation’
In 2000, the Heard Museum in Phoe-
nix, Arizona, opened “Remembering Our
Indian School Days: The Boarding School
Experience,” an exhibit which centered
on the same subject. “Away from Home”
is an update and expansion of that origi-
nal work, with a focus on representing dif-
ferent perspectives and the varying experi-
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Cumberland County Historical Society
The student body of Carlisle Indian School in March 1892.
ences of Indigenous children.
The boarding school system originated
in the early 1800s in the form of mission
schools — run by religious denominations
with support from the federal government
— that were typically located in or near
tribal communities.
By the late 1800s, then-Commis-
sioner of Indian Affairs Carl Schurz deter-
mined it was more cost-effective to enroll
a child for eight years of schooling than to
kill them in warfare. The boarding school
system became an impetus to shift from
“actual annihilation to cultural annihila-
tion,” Vaughn said.
The first school was established in Car-
lisle, Pennsylvania. By 1902, there were
25 federally operated facilities, including
Chenawa Indian School in Salem.
Thousands of children were taken from
their families and communities through a
variety of methods, from coercion to actual
kidnapping, and placed in faraway board-
ing schools, where they were assigned an
Anglo-Saxon name and a number.
“Away from Home” combines the
voices and personal stories of multiple
people affected by this violent ethnocen-
tric practice. Students often had no familial
National Archives and Record Administration
See Page 5
Children pray before bedtime at Phoenix Indian School in June 1900. Students were forced to
convert to Christianity at the boarding schools.