Created circa 1904 at the Pine Ridge Agency Day School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota. This collection includes 13 drawings. All but four are accompanied by short handwritten essays regarding the scene, and most are signed by the artist who created them. These were probably produced as a class exercise in composition and penmanship. Included are pictures of children's homes, the Red Cloud Indian School, and a buffalo hunt. PLEASE NOTE: NAA staff has asked simply for transcriptions of the text contained in these pages; please do not describe the images, thank you.
A number of day schools for Oglala children were created at the Pine Ridge Agency by federal officials and missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of the U.S. federal Indian education system. Under the guidelines of the United States government, Indian children were to begin their "formal education" at local day schools, progress to reservation boarding schools around the age of ten, and leave their tribal homelands for further schooling only after they had exhausted their reservation's resources. These policies and educational plans aligned with the United States' campaign in the nineteenth century to "civilize" American Indians and assimilate them into American culture by replacing Native culture and language with mainstream American religious teachings and English. This was meant to "save" Native peoples from their primitive way of life. In reality, these policies had broad cultural repercussions. Thousands of Native families were forcibly separated from their children, individuals were stripped of their cultural identities, and physical, mental, and emotional abuse was pervasive in Native boarding and day schools. These drawings from the Pine Ridge Agency, now held in the National Anthropological Archives, are a good example of the kind of educational exercises taught in these day schools, and provide a glimpse into this larger history of Western imperialism imposed through education. If you'd like to learn more about the history of U.S. Indian education policies--and the ways in which Native communities are working to raise more awareness of this history and heal from boarding school trauma--visit the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition online .