Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories

Traveling Exhibit from the Heard Museum

American Indian boarding schools and scholarship is a story that must continue to be shared and is central to remembering the nation’s past and understanding its present.

On Nov. 20th at 6 pm at the Civic Center Library Janet Cantley, curator at the Heard Museum and Rosalie Talahongva, alumnus of the Phoenix Indian School at Civic Center will present the program on the history of the Indian Boarding Schools from1879 to today.

Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories is the updated installation of the long-running Boarding School exhibition at the Heard Museum. Since opening in 2000, Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience has become the Heard Museum’s most thematically powerful exhibition. Over the past two decades, interest in American Indian boarding schools and scholarship about the subject has increased. It is a story that must continue to be shared and one that is central to remembering the nation’s past and understanding its present.

Generations of students attended boarding schools before advocacy efforts—that included students and alumni—succeeded in reforming them, closing them, or offering other school choices. Boarding schools were designed to change American Indians, and they had many long-lasting impacts, but American Indians also changed the schools.

This exhibition is made possible by a grant by The National Endowment for the Humanities and an anonymous donor.

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