"No Place to Go": The Thomas Indian School and the "Forgotten" Indian Children of New York

In recent years, Indian boarding schools have received increased attention, and with good reason. Historians have singled them out as one of the most destructive agents of the heavy-handed and clumsy federal policy of forced assimilation that removed Indian children from their reservations, their language, and their culture.¹ However, these studies have overlooked the fact that children were removed from their parents' custody and care for reasons other than acculturation and with consequences that extended beyond the loss of their traditional ways of life. Families suffering from death, disease, divorce, and destitution often entrusted their children to boarding schools until conditions at home improved. Whether they were committed by authorities or their parents, Indian children often served lengthy and even indeterminate internments at the schools, during which time their families disintegrated under the pressures of poverty, disease, violence, and alcohol abuse. When they were finally released, they were either estranged from their parents or left with "no place to go." Having been raised under the regimen and routine of institutional life and all but forgotten by their families, they left the schools harboring feelings of resentment and abandonment, and without the self-esteem or skills necessary for survival in a world from which they had been isolated and were ill-prepared to enter. All of this added up to a powerful formula for self-destructive behavior that would replicate itself generation after generation on reservations across the country.

Nowhere were these tragic consequences more evident than in the case of the Thomas Indian School on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York State. For more than one hundred years, thousands of Indian children from across New York were sent there with little hope of reuniting with their parents or siblings, let alone with their culture, language, or way of life. Because missionaries founded Thomas as an orphanage, it has not received the same attention as the better-known federally funded boarding schools. Nevertheless, it predated and lasted longer than many of those schools, and it affected many more generations of Indian children from the reservations of New York, where the scars it left are still visible today. Thus, the story of the Thomas Indian School is not only about the destruction of Indian language and culture usually attributed to boarding schools. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, about the dissolution of Indian families in the face of the changes that swept their reservations in the first half of the twentieth century, leaving Indian children vulnerable and dependent upon Indian boarding schools for their very survival. For these reasons, it offers an excellent opportunity to examine a forgotten segment of the boarding-school population and one of the most overlooked but tragic legacies of the boarding-school system.

Despite the increasing interest in Indian education, particularly the destructive effects of boarding schools on Indian culture and language, the Thomas Indian School has escaped notice even though it served more than two hundred students per year and was founded in 1855, more than two decades before the first federal boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.² Most studies have focused almost entirely on the large, federally funded and operated, off-reservation schools west of the Mississippi that were modeled after the school Col. Richard Pratt founded in Carlisle in 1879. Schools such as Flandreau in South Dakota, Chiloco in Oklahoma, Haskell in Kansas, Phoenix in Arizona, and many others were created by the federal government to bring the "beneficent" influences of the Carlisle experience closer to the large Indian populations west of the Mississippi. Nevertheless, Indian children were still shipped off to schools hundreds or thousands of miles away from their families and traditional ways of life. Once there, they were systematically shorn of their hair, their traditional clothes, and their languages. At best, they returned to homes where they were neither comfortable nor welcome. At worst, they died alone in distant places, all in the name of the misguided and destructive policy of assimilation, which some have termed "cultural genocide."

However, by focusing on the...