Hopi Boarding Schools: Children from the Oldest Towns in North America

The Hopi villages on the First, Second, and Third Mesas in northeastern Arizona have been continuously inhabited for over a thousand years. Oraibi, on Third Mesa, is generally considered among the oldest continuously occupied settlements in North America. The federal boarding-school system arrived at these villages in the eighteen eighties with a specific mandate: remove the children.

Federal agents and soldiers came to the Hopi mesas to collect children for the Keams Canyon Boarding School and later for the Phoenix Indian School and other institutions. Hopi parents who refused were subject to arrest. In eighteen ninety five, after Hopi leaders at Oraibi refused to send their children to federal schools or accept imposed land allotment, nineteen of those leaders were sent to military prison at Alcatraz. A decade later, in nineteen oh six, a separate factional conflict split the village, and federal agents again removed children from families aligned with the conservative traditional faction.

The Hopi objection to the boarding schools was not simply cultural conservatism. The Hopi religious and ceremonial system is complex, encoded in specific forms of knowledge that pass from elders to initiates through ceremonial participation. Children taken from the mesas at age six or eight and held in boarding schools until their mid-teens could not receive that transmission. The language, the ceremonies, the agricultural and astronomical knowledge that structured Hopi life were interrupted at the point of transmission.

The Heard Museum in Phoenix holds documentation of the Phoenix Indian School's history, including accounts from Hopi students and alumni. The University of Arizona Press has published Hopi community scholarship on the boarding-school era's consequences for ceremonial continuity.

The mesas themselves remain inhabited. Hopi people continue to maintain ceremonial life despite the interruption, drawing on knowledge that survived the boarding-school era in the memories of elders who had not been removed, in the documents that tribal historians have assembled, and in the ceremonies themselves.