The Good Shepherd school, founded in Denver nearly 140 years ago, was one of nine federally funded Native American boarding and day schools that once operated in Colorado, according to the state.
Lookout Mountain Youth Services Center, foreground, in Golden on June 14, 2024. The Colorado State Industrial School for Boys, considered one of Colorado’s Indian boarding schools, operated at this site as a youth detention center from 1890 to 1926. These 46 Indigenous girls were sent in the mid-1880s from North Dakota to the Good Shepherd Industrial School, where they would be trained as domestic servants: laundry, needlework, basket weaving and cooking.
“The faint glimpses of Native American children being sent to State Industrial Schools raises more questions than it does answers,” Holly Norton, Colorado’s state archaeologist, wrote in a recent article. The state’s largest effort so far to examine the grim history of Native American boarding schools in Colorado was published last year in athat largely focused on the abusive treatment of Native youth at two federally-funded facilities: the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School in Hesperus and the Grand Junction Indian Boarding School, also known as the Teller Indian School.
Records are spotty and sometimes conflicting, but the Native students from North Dakota were sent to Good Shepherd under a federal government contract over three years in the mid-1880s, Norton found in her report. It was not uncommon for Native children to be sent to schools far from their homes — a better way to break ties to their people and culture.
Good Shepherd, which became the State Industrial School for Girls in 1895, suffered from chronic funding issues. “Regardless of the model, these schools served a single purpose, and that was to strip Native culture from children and indoctrinate them with Euro-American values and practices,” she wrote in a recent article. “They were expected to abandon their Native lifeways — not to return to the reservation — and become members of the laboring class in the United States.”
Three of the last names on the attendance roster share a name with a friend of hers from the Turtle Mountain Reservation. The federal government in 1890 contracted with the State Industrial School to house an unspecified number of Indigenous children, who the report referred to as “inmates.” “We aim to have no idle boys, for the old adage was never more true than now that, ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do,’ ” according to the school’s
Just as with Indian boarding schools, the State Industrial School faced accusations of abuse and neglect, Norton said. All children sent to Industrial schools were legally classified by the government as orphans — even if they had living parents. This legal maneuvering would have helped “incorporate them into mainstream society, an ongoing goal of the American Indian education policy,” Norton wrote.
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