The Catholic Native Schools Project and Saint Patrick’s Mission Indian School: The History and Legacy of Catholic Indian Boarding Schools in Oklahoma, 1890s–1960s

This presentation – related to the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, Diocese of Tulsa, and St. Gregory’s Abbey’s “Oklahoma Catholic Native Schools Project” – presents a case study of Catholic boarding schools in Oklahoma / Indian Territory during the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Operated by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions from the 1880s-1960s, St. Patrick’s Indian Mission School in Anadarko was one of a dozen Catholic boarding schools for Native American children in Oklahoma, home to one-third of the Native American population at that time. This paper, in particular, focuses on the tension or relationship between the school’s assimilationist education – and its consequences which produced cultural genocide across generations – and local Native communities like the Caddo, Comanche, Osage, and Kiowa who utilized the school as a means for their own communities’ ends. These communities’ appropriations of the school ranged from employment opportunities and medical care to politically lobbying and cultural-linguistic retention. Finally, the presentation grapples with the legacy of the St. Patrick’s school in the twenty-first century in the wake of the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School in Canada and the recent release of the U.S. Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, particularly as it relates to dangers, violence, and mortality. The presentation will conclude with a brief update about the status and findings of the “Oklahoma Catholic Native Schools Project.”