Katharine Drexel and Native American Boarding Schools
As part of her “Road to Healing” listening tour about the assimilationist Indian boarding school movement in America, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland stated in 2022: “The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies—including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old—are heartbreaking and undeniable.”1 Secretary Haaland is a citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna.
In the Native American Rights Fund’s 2019 report, “Trigger Points: Current State of Research on History, Impacts, and Healing Related to the United States’ Indian Industrial/Boarding School Policy,” the authors describe Christian church institutions in America as integral to the federal government’s efforts to subsume Native American culture into dominant white American society, through missionary work and industrial education.2 In the words of Richard Henry Pratt, founding director of the non-denominational Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, the federal boarding school movement aimed to “kill the Indian in order to save the man.”
This period of federally supported boarding schools started with the passage of the Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819. With the passage of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, funding for Native American boarding schools was severely cut, student enrollment dropped dramatically from its peak in the 1920s, and many schools closed. More institutions closed or were turned over to tribal control in the 1960s and 70s, as formalized with the 1972 Indian Education Act. The impact of the extended assimilation era continues to be felt by Native American communities reeling from “nearly two centuries of Federal policies aimed at the destruction of Tribal languages and cultures.”3
Learn more about this issue:
- National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
- Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022
Bryan Newland, United States Department of the Interior.
Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Native American Schooling
Estimates measure Katharine Drexel’s financial responsibilities as supporting more than 50 Catholic schools and missions for Native Americans funded by her large inheritance. Drexel’s money was distributed personally, via the work of her order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, or passed through the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. The exact amount of funds she committed to these schools is unclear, though Drexel estimated that she spent almost $6 million on Catholic schooling for Native American youth between 1895 and 1928 with another $5.8 million for African American youth education.4 Some report Drexel’s investment topping between $15 or $20 million during her life.5
According to the website Catholic Truth & Healing, only the following six schools were officially attributed to Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, though many additional schools received significant support from her:6
- Catherine Indian School, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1886–1998)
- Michael Indian School, St. Michaels, Arizona (1902–present [2023])
- Mary’s Industrial Boarding School, Belcourt, North Dakota (1884–1907)
- Augustine Indian Mission School, Winnebago, Nebraska (1909–present [2023])
- Louis School for Osage Indian Girls (renamed St. Louis Academy, 1942), Pawhuska, Oklahoma (1887–1949)
- Paul’s Indian Boarding School, Marty (renamed Marty Indian School in 1975), South Dakota (1922–present [2023])
She also funded and staffed Catholic religious instruction at the following federally run boarding schools:
- Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania
- Santa Fe Indian School (Dawes Institute), New Mexico
- Fort Defiance Boarding School (Navajo Industrial/Training), Arizona
- Chin Lee (Chinle) Boarding School, Arizona
Early Visits and Funding to the Reservations
Katharine Drexel and her sisters, Elizabeth and Louise, made three extended philanthropic trips to Native American reservations between 1885 and 1888. (See the photograph above from a trip the Drexel sisters took in 1888.) They were presented to Native American tribe members who gave speeches and demonstrated ceremonial dances. The Drexels spent time and sometimes lodged with the religious sisters and priests who staffed the existing Catholic missions and schools on the reservations. The extreme poverty on the reservations was also felt to some extent by the resident Catholic missionaries. Experiencing this deprivation firsthand led Katharine Drexel and her sisters to commit funds to support ongoing missionary and education work. Two years later, Katharine Drexel entered religious life.
When Katharine founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament of Indians and Colored People (SBS) in 1891, she committed SBS’s women religious to the work of proselytizing or reinforcing Catholic teachings to Native Americans through the order’s boarding schools, but by that date, Katharine had already been funding Catholic Native American schools for several years.
See this copy of a letter from Benedictine Father Thomas Burke to Katharine Drexel, June 15, 1890, announcing his order’s leaving their post running the St. Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico―a school built by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, in 1886, with funds from Katharine Drexel.
Following the Benedictine fathers leaving, the St. Catherine’s Indian School struggled to keep teaching staff for several years and temporarily closed until 1894, when the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament were given permission from the archbishop to staff the school themselves.7
In the letter, Father Burke comments on the hardships of living without basic resources and with inadequate funding. He also despairs at the federal funding contract requirement that schools provide labor experience through the “outing” system, popularized by Richard Henry Pratt at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Throughout the country, federally funded secular and Christian schools for Native Americans put an emphasis on domestic and manual labor. Under this system, administrators sent their students to work unpaid for white families and businesses in the surrounding communities as a way of reinforcing assimilation and learning skills. However, in practice, as reported in the 1928 Meriam Report, “outings” ended up as “hiring out boys for odd jobs and girls for domestic service, seldom a plan for providing real vocational training.”8
Katharine Drexel supported schools located both on and near reservation land across the country. Katharine believed that only through the application of Catholic religious belief and Western education would Native Americans survive as a people. This philosophy was supported by other white-run, 19th-century institutions like the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Indian Rights Association, whose original mission was “to bring about the complete civilization of the Indians and their admission to citizenship.” This approach was considered by many in the dominant white society as a compassionate stance.
At first, the Catholic-run schools Katharine and the SBS supported also received funds from the federal government. Some of this money was funneled from federally controlled tribal “trusts”―meaning that Native American communities were funding their own inadequate and unequal services while gaining no control over funding allocation or use. Rampant anti-Catholic sentiment and political pressure led to a dramatic decrease of government financial support. Shortfalls were covered largely through a combination of tribal funds, Lenten collections, and Katharine Drexel’s own resources.
“From a Friend of the Indian Missions”
It was widely known that Saint Katharine Drexel’s commitment to the cause meant that she could be relied upon to send funds to troubled institutions. As federal funding dried up due to increased anti-Catholic bias―exacerbated by the influx of Catholic immigrants from Europe at the end of the 19th century―and a steady move towards public schooling, Katharine Drexel’s funds were increasingly called upon to keep Catholic schools for Native Americans afloat. Drexel built schools, funded chapels, supported building improvements, and provided staff to schools and missions serving Native American communities.
Funds might be sent “From a Friend of the Indian Missions” or listed in reports as “received from other sources,” though the identity of their patron was an open secret. Through the shrewd use of her financial resources, she wielded a great deal of unacknowledged power in the male-dominated Catholic church.
Catholic Supplementary Education at Federal Boarding Schools
One example of Katharine Drexel’s impact on Catholic education for Native American youth was her financing and staffing of supplementary education at the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Concurrently, SBS built and staffed the St. Katharine’s Hall School for Colored Children at the St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. In the pamphlet below, St. Patrick’s Father H. G. Ganss (“on behalf of the Catholic instructors”), detailed the additional “rules” and religious obligations governing broad aspects of Carlisle’s Catholic students’ lives, presumably for the school administration.
Saint Katharine Drexel also assisted at least one former Carlisle student, Albert H. Nash (1880-1918) of the Winnebago Nation, by paying tuition and expenses for his studies at the Drexel Institute ca. 1900.
(Coming Soon!) Click here to read about Nash and learn about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School students who went on to attend the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry in its early years.
Into the 20th and 21st Centuries
Following the publication of the Meriam Report in 1928, which declared the era of Native American boarding schools a failure, government support waned and attendance dropped. Saint Katharine suffered a serious heart attack in late 1930s, which led to her retirement as superior general of the SBS. Due to changes in the tax code and Katharine’s resistance to breaking her father’s will regarding the use of her inheritance, Drexel’s fortune was depleted by the mid-20th century.
Most remaining Native American boarding schools closed during the last half of the 20th century. A few of these schools remain open, under tribal control, such as St. Michael Indian School, in Arizona, founded by Katharine Drexel in 1902, and the St. Francis Indian Mission School, in South Dakota, which, though founded in 1886 by Jesuits, received significant funding support from Katharine Drexel.
Today, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament work to further their mission of social justice, ministry, and education in Native American, African American, and marginalized communities.
1 Department of the Interior Releases Investigative Report, Outlines Next Steps in Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. U.S. Department of the Interior: Press Releases, 2022.
2 Brett Lee Shelton, “Trigger Points: Current State of Research on History, Impacts, and Healing Related to the United States’ Indian Industrial/Boarding School.” Native American Rights Fund (2019): 5.
3 Bryan Newland, “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report.” (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, 2022): 4.
4 Veiled Leadership: Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Race Relations. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 2023: 10.
5 Amanda Bresie. Veiled Leadership: Katharine Drexel, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Race Relations. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 2023): 45.
6 School funding data from Bresie, 2014, 12. Additional school data from Brenna Cussen Anglada et al. Catholic Truth & Healing: Catholic-operated Native Boarding Schools in the United States pre-1978 (2023).
7 Sister Consuela Marie Duffy, Katharine Drexel: A Biography. Cornwells Heights, PA: Mother Katharine Drexel Guild, 1966: 188.
8 Lewis Meriam, Meriam Report: The Problem of Indian Administration. Baltimore, Md.: Institute for Government Research (Brookings Institution) / Johns Hopkins Press, 1928: 389.