Chemawa Indian School

Chemawa Indian School /tʃɪˈmɑːwə/ is a Native American boarding school in Salem, Oregon, United States. Named after the Chemawa band of the Kalapuya people of the Willamette Valley, it opened on February 25, 1880 as an elementary school. Grades were added and dropped, and it became a fully accredited high school in 1927, when lower grades were dropped.
The second Indian boarding school to be established, Chemawa Indian School is the oldest continuously operating Native American boarding school in the United States. Its graduates number in the thousands. At its peak of enrollment in 1926, it had 1,000 students. New buildings were constructed in the 1970s on a campus near the original one, where at one time 70 buildings stood, including barns and other buildings related to the agricultural programs.
During the 2023–24 academic year, it continued to serve students in the ninth through twelfth grades. It has primarily served students of tribes from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
The Chemawa Indian School was a product of the ideas of the 1870s, when the American government sought to end its ongoing conflict with the Native American population through cultural assimilation. Following the ideas of military officer Richard Henry Pratt and the perceived successful establishment of the Carlisle Indian School near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, funding was provided for a boarding school for American Indian children in the American Pacific Northwest.
In contrast to earlier belief that Native Americans were inherently "uncivilizable," Pratt argued for immersive education as a mechanism to assimilate and integrate the various pre-Columbian peoples into modern society. Schools established under Pratt's influence were deliberately located far from Indian reservations as a means of isolating students from traditional cultural folkways.
An initial site was developed on four acres of land near Forest Grove, Oregon with a budget of $5,000 appropriated. With Indian affairs part of the bailiwick of the War Department, US Army Lieutenant Melville Wilkinson, secretary to General Oliver Otis Howard, was tapped to lead the project. Wilkinson, with the help of eight Puyallup Indian youths, began construction on first campus buildings in 1880.
The first class enrolled at the Forest Grove Indian Industrial Training School consisted of 14 boys and 4 girls from Washington state, 17 of the Puyallup nation and one Nisqually boy. Curriculum was determined by gender, with boys taught painting, baking, drafting, machining, masonry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, and carpentry — artisan skills considered important for successful rural life. Girls were steered towards mastery of the "domestic arts".
Owing to poor drainage, an inadequate inventory of land for agricultural education, and spurred by the 1884 destruction by fire of the girls' dormitory, officials began to investigate an alternative site for the school elsewhere in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Three sites were proposed, including a 100 acre parcel of heavily timbered land near Newberg, a 23 acre site near Forest Grove, Oregon with 75 more acres of pasture land located a few miles away, and 171 acres of partially cleared timber land five miles north of Salem. The Salem site was selected owing to its proximity to state government and the location's favorable inventory of land.
Construction at the Salem site began in 1885. Initial temporary wooden buildings were later razed to make way for more permanent brick structures. On June 1, 1885, the Chemawa Indian School was opened with approximately half of the students moving to the new location and half staying behind in Forest Grove owing to lack of space at the new facility. On October 1, 1885, John Lee was named superintendent of the new "Salem Indian Training School". Construction of three new buildings was shortly completed at the Salem campus and after a winter of separation the remaining students from Forest Grove were moved to Salem.
The first graduating class completed the sixth grade in 1886. Courses were subsequently added expanding education through the tenth grade.
In 1900, the school had 453 students, making it the largest of its kind in Oregon.
With an expanded land inventory, increased attention was paid to agricultural training, including dairy farming, animal husbandry, and crop farming, the byproduct of which provided food for later use. Chemawa also had cultural activity organizations similar to most large schools of the era, including a 30 member choir and a 25 member band. The band was not part of the regular school program of instruction but rather met for practice before or after school, four times a week. The school also conducted military drill and parade activities.
A school library provided reading material. Students could participate in sports of basketball, baseball, and football, competing against Anglo high schools and colleges of the region. By 1913 there were 690 students enrolled, including 175 Alaskan Inuit children.
By 1922, the Chemawa campus had 70 buildings, mostly of wood frame construction but others made of brick. Acquisition of adjacent land brought the total area held by the school to 426 acres (1.72 km).
Peak enrollment at Chemawa came in 1926, when the school counted nearly 1,000 students.
Curriculum was expanded to include the 11th and 12th grades were added to the curriculum with all grades below 6th were dropped and in 1927, Chemawa became a fully accredited high school.
The school was threatened with closure in the early 1930s, as the government sought economies during the Great Depression. Interested journalists and Oregon's delegation to the U.S. Congress lobbied with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep it open, and it continued with 300 students.
Lawney Reyes, who attended the school in 1940–1942 (as did his sister, Luana Reyes), devotes two chapters of his memoir White Grizzly Bear's Legacy: Learning to be Indian to his experiences there. He wrote that his consciousness of being "Indian" was largely formed through his conversations with other students.
He also wrote:
During the 1940s and 1950s a special program for Navajo students was initiated and efforts made to attract Pacific Northwest students, including those from Alaska.
In the late 1970s, Chemawa moved to a new campus on adjacent land, with most of the original brick buildings destroyed after the shift. By 2017 the new campus was fenced.
Circa 1988, 50% of the students in one year were not enrolled in the next and its students frequently moved between various educational systems.
Chemawa Indian School has been accredited through Northwest Association of Accredited Schools since 1971.
In 2005, Chemawa Indian School formed a partnership with Willamette University, a private liberal arts college in Salem. Willamette undergraduates, along with Chemawa peer tutors, provide tutoring to students four nights per week on the Chemawa campus.
Operations at the Chemawa Indian School were investigated following the death in December 2003 of a 16-year-old student from Warm Springs, Oregon. She died of alcohol poisoning after being locked in a detention cell after being found intoxicated on school grounds. The Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior, together with the U.S. Attorney's office in Portland, Oregon investigated the incident. They found officials at fault.
This and other incidents at reservation detention facilities nationwide were the subject of hearings in June 2004 before the Indian Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate. The Inspector General of the Department of the Interior noted poor conditions in BIA facilities, the lack of suitable BIA detention facilities for juveniles, high rates of suicide in existing facilities, and failure to report deaths as required, among other problems. He noted that facilities run by the tribes were often in better condition despite similar funding problems and understaffing.
Chemawa School athletic teams compete in the OSAA 2A-2 Tri-River Conference.
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Former names for the school include Forest Grove Indian Industrial Training School, United States Indian Training and Normal School, Salem Indian Industrial Training School, and Harrison Institute.
In 1992 the school's Colonial Revival-style hospital and four other early structures were listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as the Chemawa Indian School Site. These buildings were surviving brick structures on the school's "old campus"; the older buildings were demolished after the school moved to the adjacent "new campus" in the late 1970s. The Chemawa Cemetery is the only part of the old campus still intact.
Children at such boarding schools often suffered from epidemics in the dormitories of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis (incurable in the early 20th century), influenza and trachoma. As was the case for most residential Indian schools, Chemawa initially maintained a cemetery for students who died during their time at the school. No longer used for student burials after 1940, the cemetery was razed in 1960, with an incomplete set of grave markers later replaced based on school records.
In 2016, numerous unmarked graves of students were reported to have been found at the Chemawa Indian School Cemetery. Marsha Small, a North Cheyenne graduate student at Montana State University, used ground-penetrating radar to scan the site, finding hundreds, if not thousands of unmarked graves by comparing data to the 200 documented grave sites.
Small published her findings in her thesis, A Voice for the Children of Chemawa Cemetery (2015). She is concerned with raising awareness in general about the graves, but also with protecting the cemetery from potential damage from a freeway interchange planned nearby.