Established in 1884 and operative for nearly a century, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma was one of a series of off-reservation boarding schools intended to assimilate American Indian children into mainstream American life. Critics have characterized the schools as destroyers of Indian communities and cultures, but the reality that K. Tsianina Lomawaima discloses was much more complex. Lomawaima allows the Chilocco students to speak for themselves. In recollections juxtaposed against the official records of racist ideology and repressive practice, students from the 1920s and 1930s recall their loneliness and demoralization but also remember with pride the love and mutual support binding them together—the forging of new pan-Indian identities and reinforcement of old tribal ones.

The Rapid City Indian School was one of twenty-eight off-reservation boarding schools built and operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to prepare American Indian children for assimilation into white society. From 1898 to 1933 the "School of the Hills" housed Northern Plains Indian children--including Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, and Flathead--from elementary through middle grades. Scott Riney uses letters, archival materials, and oral histories to provide a candid view of daily life at the school as seen by students, parents, and school employees. The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 offers a new perspective on the complexities of American Indian interactions with a BIA boarding school. It shows how parents and students made the best of their limited educational choices--using the school to pursue their own educational goals--and how the school linked urban Indians to both the services and the controls of reservation life.

For use in schools and libraries only. Fifteen year old John Cameron Butler, kidnapped and raised by the Lenape Indians since childhood, is returned to his people under the terms of a treaty and is forced to cope with a strange and different world that is no longer his.

A renowned activist recalls his childhood years in an Indian boarding school Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a “contrary warrior” by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike. Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions. But this book is hardly a dry history of the late boarding school era. Telling this story in the voice of his younger self, the author takes us on a delightful journey into his childhood and the inner world of the boarding school. Along the way, he shares anecdotes of dormitory culture, student pranks, and warrior games. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone’s shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than “a little bit of heaven.” Were all Indian boarding schools the dispiriting places that history has suggested? This book allows readers to decide for themselves.

Looks at the experiences of children at three off-reservation Indian boarding schools in the early years of the twentieth century.

Alongside sixty-two of Butcher's iconic photographs, "Light on the Prairie" conveys the irrepressible spirit of a man whose passion would give us a firsthand look at the men and women who settled the Great Plains.

Hope and love blossom on the untamed prairie as a young woman searching for a place to call home happens upon a Kansas homestead during the 1860s . . . A Town Called Hope, the inspiring series set in post–Civil War Kansas, is the creation of best-selling romance writer Catherine Palmer. In the fast-paced Prairie Rose, impulsive nineteen-year-old Rosie Mills takes a job caring for the young son of widowed homesteader Seth Hunter in order to escape the orphanage in which she was raised. Rosie’s naive view of love and her understanding of what it means to have a Father in heaven are quickly put to the test. Afraid of being wounded again, Seth struggles to freely open his heart—to his hurting son, to a woman’s love, and to a Father who will not abandon him. Together Rosie and Seth must face the harsh uncertainties of prairie life—and the one man who threatens to destroy their happiness. Prairie Rose launches a series sure to satisfy readers who expect solid biblical values in a wholesome, exhilarating romance.