10/01/2025
Our county is named after the Miami Tribe who were removed from their Indiana sacred land to Miami County, Kansas in 1846.
Did Miami people die in boarding schools?
Yes. We are aware of one Myaamia (Miami) person buried at boarding schools. Sadie S. Miles, from the Owl family who was removed to Miami County, Kansas and Oklahoma, passed away at Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1907. She was fourteen. “She was a great favorite with her companions, many of whom were overcome with grief when they learned of her death,” the Native-run newsletter reported.
That we are aware of one death does not mean that only one Myaamia person
Why boarding schools?
If Native American people were doomed to vanish, then radically transforming them would save them. At least, that was the basic rationale from the 1870s into the 1930s. One of the architects, Richard Henry Pratt, famously said in an 1892 paper “that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” More graphically, he wrote: “I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.” Like deportation and removal, like privatization and allotment, and like other harmful policies, assimilation via schooling was promoted as a benevolent solution to a persistent problem.
Source
Aacimotaatiiyankwi
Boarding Schools
July 9, 2021
