Chemawa Indian School is a Native American boarding school in Salem, Oregon, United States. Named after the Chemawa band of the Kalapuya people of the Willamette Valley, it opened on February 25, 1880 as an elementary school. Grades were added and dropped, and it became a fully accredited high school in 1927, when lower grades were dropped. In 2005, it continued to serve ninth through twelfth grades. It is sometimes referred to as Chemawa High School. It has primarily served students of tribes from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.The second Indian boarding school to be established, Chemawa Indian School is the oldest continuously operating Native American boarding school in the United States. Its graduates number in the thousands. Former names for the school include United States Indian Training and Normal School, Salem Indian Industrial and Training School and Harrison Institute. At its peak of enrollment in 1926, it had 1,000 students. New buildings were constructed in the 1970s on a campus near the original one, where at one time 70 buildings stood, including barns and other buildings related to the agricultural programs.HistoryThe history of the Chemawa Indian School dates to the 1870s when the U.S. Government pursued a policy of assimilation of Native Americans. Based on the theories of Captain (later Brigadier General) Richard Henry Pratt and perceived success at the Carlisle Indian School near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the government authorized a boarding school for Native American children in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It was the second such school. Pratt's philosophy was to use immersive education to assimilate and integrate the Native American population into mainstream society. This was in contrast with the government's earlier philosophy, which assumed that Indians were inherently different from whites, and that no education could "civilize" them. The schools founded under Pratt's influence were deliberately located far from Indian reservations, in order to separate the students from traditional ways of life.
