American Indian outing programs facts for kids
Native American outing programs were a big part of American Indian boarding schools in the United States. These schools were set up to teach Native American children, mostly from the late 1800s until World War II. The outing programs meant that students from these schools would go to live and work with European-American families. This often happened during the summer. The idea was for the children to learn English, useful skills, and the ways of the main American culture. Many of these boarding schools kept going into the 1960s and 1970s.
The government started these boarding schools by law in 1891. More were opened in the early 1900s. Their main goal was to teach Native American children English, math, reading, and the culture of white Americans. People at the time thought this was important for Native Americans to survive in modern American society.
Richard Henry Pratt started the first such boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in 1879. This school became a model for other government programs. Pratt also created the outing program. By 1900, many other American Indian boarding schools in the western U.S. had started their own outing programs, just like Carlisle's. These included schools in places like Salem, Oregon, Lawrence, Kansas, Riverside, California, Carson City, Nevada, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Most children in outing programs lived and worked with their assigned families for part of each day, and often for whole summers. Some children even stayed with these families all year. Usually, boys did farm work, and girls did chores around the house. Pratt said that children in these programs should be treated like family members, not just servants. But this rule was often not followed. For many children, being in an outing program meant long days of hard work with little time off. This kind of work was also common for children in farm families at the time.
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What Were Outing Programs?
For a long time, Native Americans had worked in white homes, sometimes even as servants or slaves. Native American children were sent to white homes to learn their ways even before the boarding schools. For example, in the 1700s, ministers in New England and Virginia brought Native American children into their homes to teach them.
Some American Indian boarding schools didn't have dorms for girls. So, these girls were sent to live with local families. There, they were also supposed to learn skills for running a home.
The Carlisle School's Outing Program
In 1878, the U.S. government decided to send a group of Native Americans, who were prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida, back to their homes. A general named Richard Henry Pratt convinced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to let him take about 15 to 17 young men to be educated at Hampton Institute in Virginia. The first formal outing programs in the U.S. began that year. Pratt thought these Native Americans would learn a lot by spending the summer with white farmers.
In 1879, Pratt decided that the Native American students should leave the Hampton Institute, which was mostly for Black students, to be closer to white people. With permission from the Secretary of the Interior, Pratt opened the first government-supported American Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
The Carlisle School's outing program officially started in 1880. Twenty-four children took part, but most of the families sent the children back to the school. The next year, 109 children joined the program, and only six families sent them back. By 1885, almost 250 children were in Carlisle's summer outing program, and over 100 stayed for the school year. The program grew quickly, reaching its highest number of 947 participants in 1903.
Other Outing Programs Across the U.S.
Between 1880 and 1886, the Bureau of Indian Affairs opened more than 100 American Indian boarding schools across the United States. Many of these were on reservations and were designed like the Carlisle school. The government passed laws to encourage these new schools to start their own outing programs.
In 1889, twelve boys from Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, were sent to work on nearby farms. This was the first official outing program in the western United States. By 1890, outing programs had also started at Haskell Institute (now Haskell Indian Nations University) in Kansas, Perris School (now Sherman Indian High School) in California, Carson School (now Stewart Indian School) in Nevada, and Fiske Institute in New Mexico.
In 1893, Phoenix Indian School in Phoenix, Arizona, began its outing program. It grew to be the second-largest in the country, with hundreds of children taking part.
Outing Matrons: Overseeing the Girls
The placement of girls in the outing system was managed by "outing matrons." These were agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They watched over the girls and the families they lived with. They also looked for wealthy families to host children and tried to find out if living situations were bad. However, outing matrons often couldn't stop or fix problems like abuse or neglect in the outing system.
Why People Supported Outing Programs
In the United States, the main goal of outing programs was to make Native American children fit into white American society. People who supported these programs hoped that Native American children would become "civilized" and "improved" by living in white homes. Supporters also argued that the children could become "useful" by being trained for jobs like servants or farmhands.
Why People Opposed Outing Programs
Richard Henry Pratt believed that outing programs focused on making children fit in were better than programs that just used children for labor. In his later years, Pratt criticized the work-focused outing programs common in the western U.S. However, problems and unfair treatment were found in both types of outing programs.
Major concerns about the outing system appeared early on. Some people worried that families who hosted Native American children might not be doing it to help, but to use and mistreat them. They thought that only less honest people would want to take Native American children into their homes. They were especially worried that families in the western and southwestern U.S. might not be as good and would not provide a safe home for the children.
Others were concerned about whether children in many outing programs were really learning anything useful, and about the lack of supervision. In 1926, a group called the Institute for Government Research (now Brookings Institution) asked for a big study of Native Americans' social and economic lives. In 1928, this study, called the Meriam Report, found that the outing system had mostly become a way to hire Native American children for odd jobs and housework, rather than truly training them. The report also noted that Native American children often earned very low wages for easy jobs with little oversight.
What Happened Because of Outing Programs?
Historian Margaret Jacobs says that the outing system did not succeed in making Native American girls completely fit into white society. She explains that Native American girls in outing programs often pushed back against being treated as servants. They also challenged the host families' attempts to "improve" them, showing their own independence. Many Native American girls in these programs did not accept the gender roles that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted them to. Instead, they kept the traditions of their own communities, while also adopting some of the new ideas of young people in cities.
However, another historian, Deirdre Almeida, argues that boarding schools and their outing programs helped to destroy the traditional roles of Native American women. Also, these schools and programs often limited the work skills of Native American women. This meant that for many, becoming servants in white homes was the only job choice they had when they returned home from boarding schools.
Schools with Outing Programs
- Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania
- Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon
- Phoenix Indian School in Phoenix, Arizona
- Haskell Institute (Haskell Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, Kansas
- Perris School (Sherman Indian High School) in Riverside, California
- Carson School (Stewart Indian School) in Carson City, Nevada
- Fiske Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico
