The Boarding School System: Numbers and Scope
The boarding school system that Zitkála-Šá was part of was not a small or marginal enterprise. Understanding its scale helps understand what she was up against and what her work meant in context.
At the peak of the system, in the early twentieth century, there were approximately 150 to 200 off-reservation boarding schools operating under federal supervision, along with numerous day schools on reservations. The off-reservation boarding schools — like Carlisle, White’s, and others — were specifically designed to be as far as possible from the children’s home communities, on the theory that distance from family and community was necessary for the transformation the schools intended.
The number of children who passed through the boarding school system over the decades of its operation is estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report of 2022 identified more than 400 schools that operated between 1819 and 1969. This is a system that affected multiple generations of Native families.
The mortality rates at some schools were alarming. Children died of tuberculosis, of influenza, of pneumonia, of homesickness-related illnesses that contemporaries recognized as physical manifestations of psychological and social disruption. Some schools’ death rates were high enough to be noticed even in the records of the era.
Children who died at schools were not always returned to their families for burial. Some were buried in school cemeteries, sometimes in graves that were not adequately marked or maintained. The investigation that identified children’s remains at more than fifty sites was documenting something that had been known within affected families and communities for generations but that had not been formally documented in the official record.
Zitkála-Šá was aware of the system’s human cost. She wrote about it. She investigated it. She advocated for changes in it.