Hopi Boarding Schools and the Language They Tried to Extract

Federal Indian policy in the eighteen eighties operated on a single theory: that Indigenous people could be assimilated into American society if their children were removed from their communities and educated in English. The mechanism was the off-reservation boarding school, and for the Hopi, the nearest was Keams Canyon School, established on the reservation in eighteen eighty-seven. Later, children were sent to the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico and to institutions as far away as Pennsylvania.

Children were taken from their families at ages as young as six. At the schools, speaking Hopi was punished. The specific punishments varied by institution and era but included physical discipline, denial of meals, forced labor, and public shaming. The schools ran on a military model: uniforms, drills, English-only instruction, and a systematic effort to replace Hopi cultural identity with something the federal government found acceptable. Students who returned to their villages after years of this treatment often found themselves between two worlds, not fully at home in either.

Some Hopi families refused to send their children. Federal agents sometimes came to collect the children by force. Families who resisted could be arrested. The nineteen oh six Oraibi Split, which permanently divided Old Oraibi into two factions and remains one of the defining events in modern Hopi history, was partly driven by a dispute between those who would cooperate with boarding school demands and those who would not. The division that resulted has never been fully healed.

Hopi language revitalization efforts today confront the generational gap the boarding school era created. Fluent speakers are predominantly elderly. Younger generations are learning the language as a second language from elders, a different relationship to a mother tongue than the one the boarding schools interrupted. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office documents this effort and its stakes.

The language survived. It did not survive intact.