Chemawa and What Was Taken

A few miles north of downtown Salem, on Chemawa Road, stands the oldest continuously operating Native American boarding school in the United States. Chemawa Indian School opened on February twenty-fifth, eighteen eighty, in Forest Grove, Oregon, as a federal experiment in forced assimilation. Five years later it relocated to Salem. The name Chemawa comes from the Kalapuya people who had lived in this valley before the school was built on their ancestral lands.

At its peak enrollment in nineteen twenty-six, one thousand students from tribes across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska lived and studied here. The federal government's goal was explicit: strip children of their tribal languages, cultural practices, and identities, and replace them with Euro-American values. Students were often taken from their families by force or coercion. Those who spoke their Native languages on campus faced punishment.

The human cost was severe. Records indicate that hundreds of students died at Chemawa, primarily from tuberculosis and influenza worsened by overcrowding and poor conditions. Research using ground-penetrating radar has identified possibly hundreds of unmarked burial sites on the campus grounds. A Department of the Interior report released in July twenty twenty-four found that at least nine hundred seventy-three Native American children died in federal boarding schools nationally.

Note: the full documentary record of deaths, conditions, and abuses at Chemawa is still being researched, and figures in historical sources vary. What is established is that significant harm was done over the school's decades of operation.

Chemawa remains open today as a Bureau of Indian Education high school, serving Native students from across the country who choose to attend. The school now operates under very different principles than those that founded it. But the graves remain on the grounds, and the descendants of those who did not come home are still seeking answers.