New list of Native boarding schools with Catholic affiliation includes Yakima school
A list of Native boarding schools affiliated with the Catholic Church includes more information about a boarding school operated in Yakima by the Sisters of Providence from 1889-96.
The list from Catholic Truth and Healing provides details about 87 Catholic-run Native boarding schools in 22 states. It appears on a new website compiled and refined by a group of archivists, historians, concerned Catholics and tribal citizens, according to a news release.
They created it to share information for survivors of Native boarding schools, their descendants and tribal nations, the release said.
The newly released list expands and corrects information available about Catholic-operated schools that appear on previous lists of Federal Indian Boarding Schools published by the U.S. Department of the Interior and by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
More than 400 Native boarding schools established or supported by the U.S. government were known to have operated across the country starting in the early 19th century and continuing in some cases until the late 1960s. A study of Native boarding schools by the U.S. Department of the Interior released in May 2022 identified deaths in records for about 20 of the schools.
Yakima County had a Catholic-operated boarding school in what was then North Yakima and a government-operated boarding school at Fort Simcoe outside White Swan. The Fort Simcoe school operated from 1861 until 1920. Efforts continue to learn more about the boarding school there, including ground-penetrating radar to locate all known and unknown unmarked graves on the 196-acre Fort Simcoe Historical State Park.
North Yakima school
The Sisters of Providence operated the boarding school for Native children in what was then North Yakima as part of St. Joseph’s Academy. The main school building faced Fourth Street and stood on the northeast corner of North Fourth Street and East Lincoln Avenue. The school building for Native children, which included a wing each for boys and girls who boarded there, faced North Naches Avenue and stood about midway between East D Street and East Lincoln Avenue, according to Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from the time period.
It opened in April 1889 and closed in July 1896 after the Sisters of Providence learned that their government contract was canceled, according to a history of St. Joseph’s Academy. The academy continued to operate until 1969.
“The sisters did not assign the Yakama ministry a name in their records and saw it as a division of St. Joseph’s Academy rather than a separate school,” states information about the boarding school on the new website. “Externally, the school was known as St. Francis Xavier, most likely named such by the Jesuits who ran the parish.”
A number of the Native children at the school in North Yakima came from Kittitas County. An August 1889 article in the Yakima Herald noted that in a story about the school.
“On Monday Father Garrand and a couple of the sisters escorted twenty-two of the scholars to their homes in Kittitas County,” it said. “The Indian school maintained at Yakima by the Catholics closed on Saturday last for a vacation of two months.”
The new list from Catholic Truth and Healing includes the name or names of each school, location, dates of operation, the Catholic diocese or dioceses) in which it operated, the tribal nations impacted (as listed in historical documents), and the religious order or orders) that ran and/or staffed each school.