PHOENIX — The Heard Museum’s boarding school exhibit, which debuted more than 25 years ago and describes the experiences of Native Americans in federally operated, off-reservation schools, has become the most visited gallery at the museum.

Through black-and-white photographs and first-person accounts, “Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories” chronicles the U.S. government program beginning in the 1870s to assimilate Native American children into White American society by transporting them far away from their homes to boarding schools.

Each year the central Phoenix nonprofit museum honors the experiences of the thousands of indigenous children ripped from their communities to attend schools where many were abused and thousands died with a national day of remembrance.

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, more than 60 people gathered at the museum to hear the personal stories of two former students, Felicita Cromwell Bonito and LouVina Maho.

“We're all gathered here in solidarity to honor the children who were scattered throughout different boarding schools and never came back,” said Maho, an enrolled member of the Hopi Tribe, who was crowned the 1968 Miss Stewart Indian School in Stewart, Nevada. “I know this is a solemn occasion, but I still want us to pray that things like this never happen again.”

She described events that Native American children had to endure in the early days of the boarding schools, including times when police or government officials took the children away without their parents’ consent.

“My sister relayed to me that they (parents) put some of the children in these big clay storage pots, which the museum has some of, and covered the top so they would not be taken,” Maho said.

After the children were taken, their hair was cut and their traditional clothing was disposed of, replaced by uniforms.

The day of remembrance for U.S. Indian boarding schools was created in 2021 and participants traditionally wear orange shirts in honor of Phyllis Webstad, a former student who has said that when she was 6 years old she wore a new orange shirt bought by her grandmother to her first day at St. Joseph’s Mission residential school in British Columbia, Canada. School authorities made her exchange the shirt for a school-issued uniform. 

While the Heard’s boarding school exhibit opened in 2000, it has evolved over the years to include more information, more art and more personal stories.

“There's even more people who are willing to share their stories,” said Patty Talahongva, chief programming and engagement officer for the museum. “It's so important because it gives the overall history of government-run boarding schools. It's important for people to go in there and start from that perspective, and then read up on their own about what else has been revealed in these last few years.”

Talahongva was on the committee that updated the Heard exhibit in 2017 and oversees public events such as the remembrance day. An enrolled member of the  Hopi Tribe, she attended the Phoenix Indian Boarding School until 1979. While there, she became a high school correspondent for The Phoenix Gazette and wrote several stories while getting paid.

It was this student journalism job that prepared Talahongva for her career as a journalist and news executive. Although her experience at the Phoenix Indian School was positive, she acknowledged this wasn’t the case for many students, including some members of her own family.

“My mother and my father, whose first language was Hopi, (went) to school and (were) punished for not knowing how to speak English immediately,” Talahongva said. “That's torture, and so they live with that.”

Talahongva also recounted stories of the early days at the boarding school, when children would be separated from their parents to perform labor and were often given little amounts of food and no health care. The boarding schools were “not real educational institutions” and didn’t encourage students to pursue higher education, she said.

The Heard exhibit strives to include a range of boarding school experiences and stories. 

“We have so many wonderful stories in there,” Talahongva said. “I say wonderful in the sense that there are people who are survivors who talk about how it didn't erase us. It didn't kill us all off. Our culture still remained intact. People need to come in and … learn the history.”

In 1975, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act began the process of giving tribes control of boarding schools, followed by the Tribally Controlled Schools Act of 1988.

Maho and Bonito, who was crowned Miss Phoenix Indian School in 1990, said their experiences were mostly positive.

Bonito said she made lots of friends and met people from different cultures, but she understands that every student has a different story, some more traumatic than others.

“My experience has been totally different from (LouVina’s) days, and I think every boarding school was a little bit different but similar with their experiences,” Bonito said. “My son also went to Chemawa Indian School, and his experience was also different.”

Maho recounted some of her most distressing times as a teenager attending Stewart Indian School, feeling restricted by some of the dating rules and strict bed-making policies. 

“We were fortunate that we got to attend when the corporal punishment was no longer practiced but since it was designed after a military regimen, a lot of those things stayed in place. They were real strict on us,” Maho said. “The only place couples could go to be with each other was to go around this square in the middle of the high school, and then you had a major in every corner watching you.”

According to a report released by the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2024, there were 417 boarding schools operated in 37 states.

They were run by Christian churches and the federal government. Arizona had the second-largest number of schools, 51, topped only by Oklahoma, which had 83 schools.

The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition cites research published in 1995 by David W. Adams that 83% of school age Native American children were in boarding schools in 1926.  

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.