Chemawa Indian School research collection

Chemawa Indian School, located just north of Salem, Oregon, is an accredited high school with grades nine through twelve. It is one of four remaining off-reservation boarding schools funded and operated by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). Most of the students come from reservations and communities in the western United States, and some day students live in the Salem area. Enrollment at a BIE school requires membership in a federally recognized American Indian tribe or Alaska Native village.

Chemawa began in 1880 as the United States Indian Industrial and Training School on the campus of Pacific University at Forest Grove. The first eighteen “scholars” came from the Puyallup Reservation in Washington. By 1885, when the school moved to a new campus north of Salem, more than 300 children representing over forty tribes in Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and California had been enrolled at the school at Forest Grove. The new school was near a railroad station and post office named Chemawa, after one of the bands of the Kalapuya tribe that had lived in the area. Believing that the land would “belong to the Indians,” students provided both money and labor to purchase the first parcel of land, but the deeds conveyed ownership to the United States. Initially known as the Salem Indian Industrial and Training School at Chemawa, and briefly dubbed the Harrison Institute, (after President W.H. Harrison), the institution eventually became known as Chemawa Indian School.

In the early years, children were forcibly removed from their families to be sent to boarding schools, and there are many accounts of abuse and neglect. Studies on the impact of the boarding-school movement reveal that Indian families still suffer the consequences of the government’s assimilation programs. Boarding schools were also unintended models for cultural diversity and one of the vehicles for the persistence of Native identity. At Chemawa and similar institutions, children of many tribes were brought together. They united against school authorities, formed many lasting “Pan-Indian” friendships, and often sent their children and grandchildren to Chemawa.

Chemawa offered twelve grades by 1926. The next year, enrollment reached 1,100 pupils, although the recommended capacity was about half that number. Today the student body is between 300 and 400. By 1947, the school plant totaled 457 acres, with a landscaped campus, 35 acres of fruit trees, and a large farm where students raised chickens and pigs and operated a dairy. There were one hundred buildings, including administrative, academic, vocational, residential, and farm structures. In 1907, a hospital was built to serve the students and local Native people, particularly during the tuberculosis epidemic. The hospital burned in 1995, but the school cemetery still remains. Most of the more than 200 graves were for students—many Alaskans—who died from tuberculosis and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. As the Salem region grew, interstate and local highway expansion reduced the campus to less than 300 acres. In the 1970s, the original school buildings were demolished and a new campus complex was constructed. An Indian Health facility was also built. In 2009, construction began on a new dormitory to house 400 students.

Information from Reddick, SuAnn, “Chemawa Indian School,” Oregon Encyclopedia. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/chemawa_indian_boarding_school/

SuAnn Murray Reddick is an independent historian whose work has focused on Chemawa Indian School, the campus land and cemetery, and Pacific Northwest Native lands and treaties. With Cary Collins, she has published articles on these subjects in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, and the Pacific Northwest Quarterly. Reddick volunteered as historian at Chemawa between 1996 and 2011. She is currently writing the history of Chemawa land and continues to advocate for the campus land to be placed in Trust to benefit the tribes whose children attended the school. She has shared her findings on the school land history with the many alumni, ATNI, NCAI, tribal councils, legislators, local civic groups and other researchers. Since 2000, with the help of the late Richard Reed, archivist at Pacific University, Cary Collins, John T. Campbell, Eva Guggemos, and many others, she has compiled a comprehensive list of Chemawa children and others buried at the school cemetery, including names of those who may be in unmarked graves.

Her publications include: