1092 - Fort Sill Indian School

The history of an Indian School in the Fort Sill area spans over 100 years, from its inception as a Quaker-run boarding school in 1871 to a nonsectarian institution intended to “Americanize” Native American children. The Quaker school was attached to the newly created Fort Sill Indian Agency and lasted until 1878 when the school and agency were moved to Anadarko leaving the agency school abandoned.

The Fort Sill Indian School opened 13 years later on March 20, 1891 in an area not far from the old Agency. Over time, the Fort Sill Indian School grew to be a thirty-building campus, complete with on-site housing. Its enrollment increased from twenty-four students in its first year to more than three hundred students in the 1970s. Fort Sill’s student body was primarily Native Americans of western Oklahoma–Comanche, Apache, Caddo, Kiowa, Delaware, and Wichita. However, this changed in the years following World War II, when Navajo from New Mexico and Arizona began to be admitted.

Students who attended Fort Sill came away with mixed emotions, ranging from downright hatred to enduring fondness. Some loathed the rigidness and military-like discipline the school inflicted. Cruel punishments would often be given, such as the whipping of children if they spoke in anything but the English language. However, others looked back on Fort Sill Indian School with fondness. One Navajo student said “the best time of my life was here.” Another credited the school for helping him “move up in the world.” Regardless of their opinion of the school, anthropologist Sally McBeth wrote in 1983 that the boarding school seemed to create a “strong cohesive unity” among Native American students. The children bonded, looked out for each other, and refused to let go of their Native American status despite the government's attempt to grind it out of them.

Perhaps it is this unity that motivated Native American leaders to lobby the government to keep the school open, as it faced closure due to a lack of finances, which was seen as a failing of the American government to keep up on their promises. Regardless of their efforts, the Fort Sill Indian School closed in 1980. The school’s lack of success in its goal of assimilating indigenous tribes into the country remains an important piece of Native American history and proof of their resilience.