The Rapid City Indian School Chapter 1: Many Roads to Rapid

In this chapter it began by talking about how families were having a hard time sending their children away from their home to go to boarding schools, and also that children did not want to attend all white schools. At this time that the Rapid City boarding school was opened was about 20 years after the doors of Carlisle Boarding school had opened. So at this time the stories of abuse, homesickness and malnutrition were coming back to the parents and the parents had a hard time sending their children away to be treated this way. When parents became reluctant to send their children away the reservation agents started withholding rations form the resisting families.

                When the doors finally did open on September 20, 1898 it had a total enrollment of 100 students. A main reason for the enrollment and parental consent was the generosity of Superintendent Sam B. Davis who would pay parents generous travel allowances for anyone who brought their child to the school. One great thing that Rapid City did allow was that the school allowed families to stay together, at that time the boarding school would only educate children who were of fourth grade education and up. However, when boarding schools such as Chamberlain and Pierre began to shut down the families would not send them there unless the brothers and sisters were able to go to school together. So at that point Rapid City stated:  “that no child under fourteen years of age may attend school here, unless he/she is accompanied by an older brother/sister also attending”. Eventually, the school was forced to take children of all ages by the parents. Ignoring a the structure of educatining older students, because if reservation schools did not provide the education that they needed then the Rapid City school must.

 This school had a very frequent turnover rate in Superintendents. As a matter of fact the superintendent was from the day it opened in 1898 until 1933. At this time however Rapid City boarding school was a savior to a family in crisis. This school provided for more of a daycare than an actual school at times.

The Rapid City Indian School: Introduction

The introductory paragraph just gave mainly insight to the history of Native Americans during the time of the Dawes Act and the process of what happened there. It also gave a bit of a background about not only the Rapid City Indian School but also the other major and minor boarding school to pop up all over the United States. The one mainly talked about in the introduction was the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Along with talking about the schools the introduction also mentioned the authors a various other books that have been written about boarding schools and also the styles used by those authors. After all of that it started to give a brief history/background about the Rapid City Boarding School (who attended, from what reservation, number of years operated, etc.) not detail to significant just more brief glimpses. Then, the author gave us an insight on how he was going to go about explaining how he wrote the book and how he is going to present his information throughout the rest of the book.

Similarities: This introduction gave some of the same information as chilocco, how the treatment was, how it was underfunded.

Differences: In depth insight about other boarding schools,