From Taken “Without Consent” to “Running Away from Disease”: Understanding Consent and Custody in US Off-Reservation Boarding Schools for Native Americans

Despite being largely absent from the historiography of forced migrations, American Indian boarding schools fundamentally transformed the landscape of Native North America, restricting Indigenous economies, migration patterns, and exchanges. They deserve a more thorough investigation under this rubric and this paper begins that process. The transfer of children to American Indian boarding schools is one of the largest known migrations of Indian peoples. Beginning in 1879, United States officials took hundreds of thousands of American Indian children from their families and tribal nations to boarding schools. American Indian boarding school officials—carrying out an assimilationist federal mandate established in 1879—frequently cajoled, threatened, bribed, committed fraud, persuaded, and forced students into attending boarding schools. The federal government also passed compulsory education laws and threatened to withhold food, rations, and other annuities if parents refused to comply. Even when the federal government passed laws mandating parental consent to limit illegal behavior, officials violated it with impunity.

This paper interrogates the legal mechanisms that the federal government deployed to ensnare hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children and young adults in its 400-plus boarding school system constellated across the country. It asks questions about legalities of consent, especially consent under duress, guardianship, and wardship.

It also highlights the limits of custody as Indigenous agency continued to push against rigid forms of custody and confinement. Indeed, despite being incarcerated for a minimum of three years, many students sought to escape the confines of the school before their enrollment expired by running away, failing to return from leave, being sent home sick, and through parental protest.