Digitization Project Reveals History of Quaker-Run Native American Boarding Schools

Two images, captured just three years apart, reveal Tom Torlino’s staggering transformation.

The first was taken in 1882 as Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, first entered the Carlisle Indian Industrial School near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the aged photograph, Torlino, wearing traditional dress, looks beyond the camera as his dark hair tumbles past his shoulders.

The young man pictured in the second image, captured in 1885, is nearly unrecognizable. Likely a work of early photo studio trickery, Torlino’s skin tone appears noticeably lighter. A stuffy collar and tie have replaced the numerous silver crosses that previously adorned his neck, and his once free-flowing shock of hair has been cropped and neatly parted.

Torlino’s side-by-side photographs have proliferated across the internet as the country has begun to grapple with a period of its history in which the federal government brandished education as a weapon in an attempt to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” as Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle’s founder and longtime superintendent, declared in 1892. Though the images of Torlino's transformation fail to fully reveal the cruelty, rampant abuse, and even death that tens of thousands of young Native Americans like him were forced to endure at more than 500 schools across the nation at the turn of the 19th century, they are emblematic of the assimilation goals established by officials and faith groups who operated them, including Quakers.

Now a new effort, supported by a $124,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, is shedding light on Quaker involvement in the boarding school era by digitizing more than 20,000 documents contained within the collections of Haverford and Swarthmore College. The project is a collaboration between both colleges and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), a nonprofit formed in 2012 to address the lingering trauma caused by the nation’s boarding school policies. It aims to bolster a publicly available digital archive that NABS launched on April 30.

“When [NABS] started, we knew that there was primary source documentation out there that is easily reachable, like at the National Archives and Records Administration. The material there is all public record,” says Stephen R. Curley, NABS’ director of digital archives. “But then on the other side of the coin, there are all sorts of private collections and academic libraries with collections the public just doesn't know about.”

NABS’ work to create an accessible online archive of documents detailing the operations of North America’s boarding schools intensified, Curley says, when worldwide news broke in 2021 about the discovery of the remains of 215 children on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, the largest school in Canada’s own boarding school system.

As they sought documents from religious groups to bolster NABS’s archive, Curley and colleague Sam Torres, the organization’s deputy chief executive officer, turned to Quaker historian and former Haverford Friend-in-Residence Paula Palmer in order to learn more about Quakers’ involvement in the U.S.’s boarding schools. Quakers, Curley says, significantly influenced President Ulysses S. Grant’s Peace Policy, the misguided legislation that gave rise to the boarding schools. But records of their operations are scattered and less well-known, leaving them understudied.

“As you can imagine, boarding school-relevant records exist in various locations and repository contexts throughout the U.S. The nature of surveying where material might exist can be very chaotic,” Curley says. Most, he adds, are available through federal resources, like the National Archives, or through churches. “Beyond that, the runner-up is academic institutions like Haverford and Swarthmore that steward manuscripts of schooling institutions that were oriented towards a larger missionizing project.”

Sarah Horowitz, Haverford’s curator of rare books and manuscripts and directs the library's Quaker and Special Collections, notes that Haverford and Swarthmore are well-positioned to provide critical insight into the operations and legacy of nine Quaker-run schools in Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania thanks to documents sent back to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting by Philadelphia-area Quakers. These include a wide array of reports, journals, photographs, and other administrative and financial records. While they have been studied by both scholars and those interested in writing about Native American history, this is the first time they’ll be digitally accessible to the broader public.

“We take access very seriously, and having a digitization strategy is part of that. I was particularly excited to work with NABS on this project because they bring both a lived experience and an expertise to this work that we at Haverford can’t,” Horowitz says. “It's really important to have them lead these types of projects so that we can make these documents available with the appropriate context and in conversation with materials from other religious groups and government agencies that were also running these horrible boarding schools.”

In March, Horowitz and the libraries welcomed Curley and a three-person scanning team NABS hired through the grant to process the documents. The efficient operation, Curley says, yielded scans of 22,221 documents that are now being cataloged and prepared for upload into NABS’ digital archive. Curley says he expects the Haverford and Swarthmore documents to be available in late 2024 and is considering pursuing additional grant funding that will enable even more documents to get processed.

Tsinni Russell, an archival assistant at the Denver Public Library and a graduate student at the University of Alabama, traveled to Pennsylvania as a member of the scanning team. Like many Native people, the process was intensely personal for Russell, who is Navajo and has family members who attended boarding schools. Over the four weeks he was present on both college campuses, Russell spent nearly eight hours each day loading books, documents, and photographs onto an overhead scanner. But as his time wound down, issues with the scanners allowed him more time to engage with the materials beyond cursory glances as he operated the equipment.

“What sticks out to me about these materials — and the boarding schools in general — is just how bureaucratic and thought-out everything was. It’s distressing to read,” Russell says. “It wasn't all new to me because I had been studying and researching [boarding schools], but, still, every now and then it just hit me. I had to take a walk for 10 or 15 minutes to just clear my head before getting back to it.”