Over the past 150 years, the federal government operated over 400 boarding schools for Indigenous Native American children who were forcibly removed from their families. This was a tactic from the US Government to assimilate the Native American population, by removing children from their homes and culture. Children were forced to cut their hair (which was culturally seen as sacred personal power and strength) wear uniforms, forbidden from speaking their traditional language, and many suffered physical, mental and sexual abuse from authority figures at the schools. Many schools had graveyards associated next to them, as large numbers of children died from illnesses and horrific abuse. Over 150,000 Native American children attended boarding schools across the USA and Canada, and over 6,000 of them went missing or died on-site. My great-grandmother is a survivor from one of those boarding schools in Oregon.As a. As a Klamath Tribal member,, I'd like to share a story about revenge, resistance, and rebellion from our tribal history.

This is the story from Klamath Agency, Oregon where 4 young girls decided to burn it all down- and got their boarding school closed indefinitely.

In February of 1874, one of Oregon’s first government funded Indian Boarding Schools opened on the Klamath Indian Reservation in Southern Oregon. It was a cold winter, as the area had decent snowfall that was starting to melt. The Klamath Agency was established in 1866 as a base for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Agency of the Klamath Indian Reservation. The Klamath Agency Boarding School opened on February 2nd, with “10 or 12 boys and 2 girls” according to personal diary entries from a 54-year old carpenter, John Kuykendall, who worked at the Agency. His diary entries and transcripts from the era are held at the Oregon Historical Society today. 

Many Klamath children were sent off-reservation to boarding schools around the country, against their (and their parents) will. It was stated in a federal report from 1872 that “If the Indian children are allowed to reside and grow up with their savage parents while attending school, they will naturally absorb their parents’ habits… which do not harmonize or assimilate with the education received”. This blatant display of racism and intentional cultural genocide has made headlines in recent times, yet was completely acceptable at the time. “Kill the Indian to save the man” was a very common catch phrase that came forward from Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, one of the largest in the nation. 

The Klamath Reservation had 2 boarding schools, one in Klamath Agency and another at Yainix in Beatty, Oregon. Although many children were sent away to boarding schools across the nation, the site at Klamath Agency was particularly cruel from historical federal reports. In a federal inspection in 1890 of the Klamath Agency school, the report stated that one of the teachers “is in no way qualified for her position” and recommended firing the superintendent and his wife. “Their punishments were frequently severe to the verge of cruelty… they should not be allowed to have unlimited control over children of any race.” This is coming from an inspector that supported assimilation, which shows how horrific the abuse must have been.

The following year, in 1891, reports then stated that the school superintendent “resorted to shackles in extreme cases” while the matron inflicted “scars on different parts of the bodies of school girls, even on their faces and heads”. The amount of abuse and trauma is unfathomable. This generational trauma has rippled throughout the years down to present-day generations of Klamath people. I have felt these effects as our last fluent speakers of the language have now passed on, and our people are working hard to re-learn our culture, our language and the ways that were lost from traumatic assimilation due to boarding schools.

One of our last fluent speaking elders, “Sunflower” would go out to the same tree every day where nobody could hear her, and speak the language so she wouldn’t forget it, or get punished for speaking. She knew it was sacred, and it couldn’t be lost. She was one of the elders that held onto our culture and passed down her knowledge and wisdom long after surviving her time in the boarding school. 

By 1927, Klamath Agency Boarding school had over 200 Klamath Indian children enrolled and 2 separate dormitories, one for boys and one for girls. On the evening of March 30th, over 50 years after its opening, five rebellious young girls between ages 11-17 decided enough was enough. That evening, they snuck down into the basement of the girls dormitory, and lit a fire that spread quickly, and burned the sucker to the ground. Over 20 students were able to escape the school grounds, while many others were forced to fight the blaze that began to spread across the campus due to high winds. No student or instructor injuries were reported. It was estimated that there was over $40,000 in damages, which was noted in the front page of the Evening Herald Newspaper from March 31, 1927.

The brave girls who started the fire eventually confessed, who knows under what conditions of interrogation. Although no evidence of them getting a fair trial has been documented anywhere, or what type of punishment they endured. The superintendent, who was notably cruel, went to Washington D.C. to rally for the school to be rebuilt with hopes of keeping his twisted game of assimilation in motion, but he was unsuccessful in that venture. The Klamath Agency Boarding School was thus closed indefinitely, and those 5 Klamath girls who resisted assimilation will continue to be heroes in our tribe.