“We Have No Tribes”: How Indigenous Boys Helped Close Philadelphia’s Indian Boarding School

My research provides a snapshot of late nineteenth century Indigenous resistance through a close study of Indigenous students at the Educational Home, one of two federally funded off-reservation Indian boarding schools in West Philadelphia. Its neighboring site, the Lincoln Institute, began as a home for orphaned sons of Union soldiers before becoming a federal Indian boarding school for indigenous girls in 1882. Likewise, the Educational Home became a school for Indigenous boys two years later. These two schools had the same mission of erasing Indigenous culture and languages from children by refusing to allow the children to speak their Native languages and only referring to them by Americanized names. This policy also took place at the more well-known Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the Hampton Institute in Virginia, but the Philadelphia schools did not receive the same scholarly attention until now. What also set these two Philadelphia schools apart from their contemporaries was their geographic location in a bustling urban center. In this article, I argue that the urban location of the Educational Home was crucial in understanding why the school closed much earlier than other federal Indian boarding schools. These students had the means of navigating city networks independently, bringing to light abuses and mistreatment to the Indian Rights Association, an organization that sympathized with their plight. Through autobiographies and student testimonies, this story highlights how these students recovered their agency and shuttered a piece of an oppressive system created by the federal government.