1. Setting the Stage: Size and Scale of the Native American Boarding School Effort

(This is the Lesson Plan 1 for Rose Honey’s curriculum, “Indian Boarding Schools Along the Trail.”)

  1. Learning Objectives
    • Practice finding and interpreting Primary and Secondary Source materials.
    • Acquire the skills to compare and contrast source materials in order to develop an understanding of how these records can provide relevant details about history.
    • Calculate ratios and percentages from values found in historical documents and compare these values to parallel calculations within a school or community.
  1. Entry Questions
    • About how many Native American Boarding schools do you think existed between the early 1800s and the late 1900s?
    • How many of Native American Tribes were impacted by Indian Boarding Schools?
    • How long were Native American Boarding Schools in existence?
  1. Common Core Standards for 6th/7th grades
    • Grade 6 Mathematics Standards: Ratios & Proportional Relationships: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/6/RP/
      • MATH.CONTENT.6.RP.A.3: Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems, e.g., by reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double number line diagrams, or equations.
      • Math.Content.6.RP.A.3.c: Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100 (e.g., 30% of a quantity means 30/100 times the quantity); solve problems involving finding the whole, given a part and the percent.
    • Grade 7 Mathematics Standards: Ratios & Proportional Relationships:
      • CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.7.RP.A.2: Recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities.
      • CCSS.Math.Content.7.RP.A.3: Use proportional relationships to solve multistep ratio and percent problems. Examples: simple interest, tax, markups and markdowns, gratuities and commissions, fees, percent increase and decrease, percent error.
  1. C3 Framework Guiding Principles

Gathering and Evaluating Sources:

    • D3.1.6-8. Gather relevant information from multiple sources while using the origin, authority, structure, context, and corroborative value of the sources to guide the selection.
    • D3.2.6-8. Evaluate the credibility of a source by determining its relevance and intended use.
  1. Activities

A. Activity 1: Looking at Boarding School Sources

This activity focuses on looking up information through secondary and primary sources including census records, boarding school enrollment records, and other sources in existence to find relevant values related to Native American boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Documents will be utilized to glean qualitative and quantitative information that will then be analyzed to gain some understanding of the size and scale of Native American boarding schools targeting Tribal populations.

    • Step 1: Students utilize census records and other historical informational records to discover how many Native American peoples were estimated to live in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Note: See digital map in resources below to use as a reference.
    • Step 2: Students research Native American Boarding School Records to discover the number of children attending boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.
    • Step 3: Students will fill out a table that includes as many values as they can find for Tribal population totals and Boarding school attendance totals for each decade between 1860 and 1960.

Resources for this Activity:

      1. Native Land Digital (2018). Retrieved from: https://native-land.ca.
      2. National Archives (Summer, 2006). Native Americans in the Census, 1860-1890. Retrieved from: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/summer/indian-census.html.
      3. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (2020, September). US Indian Boarding School History. Retrieved from: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/education/us-indian-boarding-school-history/.
      4. S. History Through Census Data (January, 2016). History 90.1: Topics in Digital History. Retrieved from: https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/censushistory/2016/01/25/native-americans-and-the-census/.
      5. Paisano, E. L. (1993). U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census: We the First Americans (1993). Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/wepeople/we-5.pdf
      6. http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools
      7. FamilySearch (2020). Indigenous Tribes of the United States. Retrieved from: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Indigenous_Tribes_of_the_United_States. [Note: an account is necessary for access to SOME records on this site.]
      8. Family Search (2020). Indigenous Peoples of the U.S. School Records. Retrieved from: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Indigenous_Peoples_of_the_United_States_School_Records
      9. Censuses of American Indians (2020). United States Census Bureau. Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/history/www/genealogy/decennial_census_records/censuses_of_american_indians.html

B. Activity 2: Scaling to My Community

Students will research sources found in Activity 1 to find values for calculating ratios and percentages that are relevant to Native American communities and boarding schools. Then, students will make equivalent calculations that are relevant to their community or schools in order to contextualize the impact that Native American boarding schools have had and continue to have on Tribal communities today. Students will fill out a table like the following with the values that they found in their research:

U.S. Census Count of Tribal Peoples Number of Tribal Children in Boarding Schools
Census Year Total School Year Total
1860 339, 4212
1870 313,7122
1880 306,5432 1880s 62006
1900 230,3064 1900 20,0003
1910 262,3554  
1920 261,0005 1925 60,8893
1930 362,0005
1940 366,0005
1950 377,0005
1960 552,0005 1960 100,00033

Note: Footnote citations in the table are from the numbered records in Activity 1 for this lesson.

Number of Students in My School Equivalent Percentages
[YEAR from above]
[YEAR from above]

 

    • Step 1: Choose a decade and find the total number of Tribal peoples that are on record to be living in the U.S. during that time.
    • Step 2: For that same decade, how many Tribal children (in the U.S. or in a specific Tribe) were in attendance in Native American boarding schools?
    • Step 3: Calculate the percentage of people who attended boarding schools in that decade.
    • Step 4: Make this calculation for a few decades for the purpose of making comparisons.
    • Step 5: Think of the population of your school as equivalent to the population of Native Americans in the decade you chose. Ask students the question: If the students in our school were all Native American and lived in the decade we are looking up, how many of your schoolmates would probably be attending a boarding school instead of going to school with us? Have the students calculate the equivalent number of people in your school who would have attended boarding school if you all lived during that particular decade.

Example Calculation:

U.S. Census Count of Tribal Peoples Number of Tribal Children in Boarding Schools
Census Year Total School Year Total
1900 230,3064 1900 20,0003 

Percent of children who attended boarding schools in 1900: (20,000/230,306) x 100% = 8.68%

Number of Students in My School Equivalent Percentages
350 1910
[YEAR from above]

Number of students who would attend boarding school if my school was the equivalent of the population of Native Americans in 1910: (x/350) x 100% = 8.68% x = 30.38

Answer: About 30 students from my school would have to attend boarding school if we were living in 1910.

C. Activity 3: Boarding Schools in Depth

Students will explore a boarding school in detail and answer some questions about the school. They will take the information they learned from Activity 1 and 2 and have a discussion with a small group of fellow students.

    • Step 1: Choose a school or a few schools from the Boarding School Map.
    • Step 2: Click on the link(s) that are available, and read the materials that are available.
    • Step 3: If the links provide limited information, search for more information on the school.
    • Step 4: Answer the questions in Part 1 of the Listening, Thinking, Talking document for Lesson 1: Setting the Stage.
    • Step 5: Get together with a small group of students to take turns listening to and sharing your perspectives to each of the questions in Part 2 of the Listening, Thinking, Talking document.

Listening, Thinking, Talking

For Lesson 1: Size and Scale of the American Indian Boarding School Effort

Part 1: Individual Thinking

●      For the boarding school(s) you explored, what is the number of Tribal children who attended this/these schools? (Sometimes this information is not readily available.)

●      What Tribes did children who attended these schools belong to? Look up the homelands for these Tribes and consider the distance that children traveled from their homes to the school.

●      What do you notice about how the Native American population count and Tribal boarding school counts change from year to year?

●      Do you think that these values are accurate? Why or why not?

Part 2: Group Listening & Discussing

●      What did each of you notice about the population differences for Tribal people as the decades progress? What are some possible reasons for this?

●      Do you think that the resources where you found these values are reliable?

●      Are the counts of Native American people and boarding school students accurate? What could make them inaccurate?

●      Why were boarding schools built for Native American communities at distant locations, instead of building schools for Native American children to attend where they lived with their families?
  1. Learning Evaluation
    • Formative: Name two new things that you learned from the activities in this lesson.
    • Formative: Is the size of the boarding school effort larger or smaller than you thought?
    • Formative: What is the hardest thing to understand about what we have learned? (This might be something that the student has difficulty understanding, such as why something happened the way it did, or the question may be focused on something that is not clear to the student).
    • Summative: How can you connect the calculations that you completed in Activities 1 and 2 with the boarding school that you explored in Activity 3?
    • Summative: What are some historical, social, and economic factors that contributed to the Native American Boarding School efforts?
  1. Resources for Lesson 1

A. Boarding School Lesson 1 Activities Download

B. Map of Boarding Schools Along the Trail

C. Boarding Schools Along the Trail Companion Document