Gendered Curriculum and the Outing Program of the Fort Bidwell Indian School

In 1898, the Fort Bidwell Indian School opened in Fort Bidwell, California. During the time of operation, primarily Pit River and Northern Paiute children from Modoc County were sent to the school. At Fort Bidwell, boarding school curriculums forced gender and family roles on students, but were missing the pivotal elements of family, community, and nurturing. Furthermore, this curriculum disrupted understandings of “gendered roles” and forced children to fit into ideas that settlers deemed as “civilized.” Still, children resisted these ideas of gender and sometimes used them to their advantage. Western curriculum not only acted as a part of the structure of settler colonialism but complicated the narrative that the government simply created boarding schools to assimilate Native children into American society. This paper discusses the ways the gendered curriculum and the outing program developed within Fort Bidwell Indian School. Although focusing widely on gender, this research will foreground violence against Indigenous women and attempts to counter this violence by rooting itself in Indigenous feminism. Indigenous women's lives and authority within their kin networks came under attack when settlers arrived on their lands, especially during the boarding school era. Settlers robbed Indigenous women of the chance to caretake for their families and their children. Furthermore, settlers disrupted family structures and networks when they took children from their families, which was apparent when the children returned. In this research, the Fort Bidwell Indian School acts as a case study for a way to understand how the United States Empire functioned to “kill the Indian, and save the man.”