page_title: Chemawa Indian School
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Chemawa Indian School / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Chemawa Indian School, McBride Hall, 5495 Chugach Street Northeast, Salem, Marion County, OR CALL NUMBER: HABS ORE,24-SAL,1C- NOTE: Survey number HABS OR-129-C DIGID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hhh.or0042 CONTROL #: OR0042 LOC card text: "5495 Chugach St, N.E. Red brick on concrete foundations with wooden and stone trim, rectangular with center and end projections 114' (sixteen-bay front) x 35', two-and-a-half stories, hip and gable roofs with pedimented gable ends and gable dormers, denticulated cornice, three-bay hip-roof entrance porch with wooden railing, double doors with fanlight, segmental arched window heads with stone sills, brick belt course at sill level of each floor; dormitory, main stair with classical details. Built 1902; alterations to interior, n.d.; demolished 1978. 4 ext. photos (1977), 6 int. photos (1977). Also see Chemawa Indian School (OR-129). Card prepared 1979."
context_page_description: Chemawa Indian School 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. In 2005, it continued to serve ninth through twelfth grades. It is sometimes referred to as Chemawa High School. It has primarily served students of tribes from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
  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. Former names for the school include United States Indian Training and Normal School, Salem Indian Industrial and Training School and Harrison Institute. 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.
context_section_description: The history of the Chemawa Indian School dates to the 1870s when the U.S. Government pursued a policy of assimilation of Native Americans. Based on the theories of Captain (later Brigadier General) Richard Henry Pratt and perceived success at the Carlisle Indian School near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the government authorized a boarding school for Native American children in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It was the second such school. Pratt's philosophy was to use immersive education to assimilate and integrate the Native American population into mainstream society. This was in contrast with the government's earlier philosophy, which assumed that Indians were inherently different from whites, and that no education could "civilize" them. The schools founded under Pratt's influence were deliberately located far from Indian reservations, in order to separate the students from traditional ways of life.
  A site was chosen at Forest Grove, Oregon on four acres (16,000 m²) of land rented from Pacific University. Lieutenant Melville Wilkinson, a member of the United States Army and Secretary to General Oliver Otis Howard, was in charge of the project, as Indian affairs were administered by the War Department. $5,000 was provided to start the school. 
  Lt. Wilkinson, with the help of eight Puyallup Indian youths, began construction on the buildings in 1880. The first  class of students consisted of fourteen boys and four girls. All the students came from the State of Washington, seventeen from the Puyallup Indian reservation on Puget Sound and one boy from the Nisqually Indian reservation. Students' curriculum was determined by gender. The boys were taught painting, baking, drafting, machining, masonry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, carpentry, and wagon making, artisan skills considered important to the rural environment of most reservations. Girls studied a collection of skills classified as the "domestic arts".
  Prior to 1883, the United States Congress planned to appropriate a larger amount of funds for the Chemawa Indian School. Several factors led to the search for a new site for the school, including local resistance to the school, a need for more land in order to rear livestock and cultivate crops to teach farming skills, and the destruction by fire of the girls' dormitory in 1884.
  At this point, officials looked at the temporary leased nature of the land, as well as the poor drainage, and began considering alternative sites around the Willamette Valley. Three sites were donated for the new school. Newberg, Oregon offered 100 acres (400,000 m²) of heavily timbered land, 23 acres (93,000 m²) near Forest Grove, Oregon with a pasture parcel of 75 acres (304,000 m²) approximately four miles (6 km) away from the main site, and 171 acres (692,000 m²) partially cleared, sparsely timbered land in Salem, Oregon, served by a spur of the main railroad through the Willamette Valley. School officials chose the Salem site since it was close to Oregon's capital and had the most land.
  In 1885, the school moved to the site five miles (8 km) north of Salem and began construction. The first buildings were made of wood, and 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. On October 1, 1885, John Lee became superintendent of Chemawa Indian School (then known as Salem Indian Training School). After a winter of separation, and after staff and students finished construction on three new buildings on the campus, he withdrew the remaining students from Forest Grove and reunited them all on the Salem, Oregon campus.
  The first graduating class completed the sixth grade in 1886. Subsequently, courses were added through the tenth grade. In 1900, the school had 453 students; it was the largest of its kind in Oregon with a federal budget of $57,182.62. The emphasis at that time was on vocational education, considered appropriate to students' needs after returning 
caption: Inside stairway of McBride Hall
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