Hopi Boarding Schools: The Education That Tried to Erase a Mesa

Federal Indian boarding school policy reached the Hopi mesas in the eighteen eighties with a simple and stated goal: to eliminate Hopi culture within a generation by removing the children. The method was removal to residential institutions where Hopi language, ceremonial dress, prayer, and practice were prohibited and punished.

Children were taken to Keams Canyon, to the Phoenix Indian School, and in some cases as far as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of the flagship institutions of the federal boarding school system. The Carlisle motto, coined by its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, was to kill the Indian and save the man. This was the explicit policy rationale. The institutions designed to implement it operated with federal funding for decades.

In eighteen ninety-four, a group of Hopi leaders at Oraibi, the settlement on Third Mesa occupied continuously since at least eleven hundred CE, refused to surrender their children to the federal school agents. They were not passive resisters. They physically blocked the agents. Federal troops were brought in. The men who led the resistance, nineteen in all, were arrested and transported to Alcatraz Island in California, where they were imprisoned for several months. Several received sentences. Their refusal is documented by the federal government's own records.

The policy failed in its stated goal. Hopi language, ceremony, and cultural practice survived. The villages on the mesas are still inhabited. The children who returned from the boarding schools often came back knowing English and having experienced the federal system from the inside, knowledge that Hopi communities used in subsequent negotiations with the federal government.

The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office documents this history in Hopi-authored materials available through hopiculturalpreservation.org.