The Chippewa girls from Turtle Mountain arrived in Denver as young as 6.
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 students were perceived as orphans or “incorrigible.” They were often called savages and compared to witches, “suggesting that they needed to be controlled, managed and subdued,” according to the Colorado Encyclopedia, a historical database housed under History Colorado.
The institution, in its early years, did not keep the girls safe. The state in 1898 investigated the penal school for abuse, finding staff routinely handcuffed defiant girls to the walls.
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. They were designed to strip Indigenous children of their history, culture and way of life.
A History Colorado report released last year documented at least 65 children who died at Colorado’s two most prominent boarding schools, in Grand Junction and outside Durango. Other children faced neglect, unsanitary conditions, forced labor and even sexual abuse.
However, two of Colorado’s Indian boarding schools — Good Shepherd and the State Industrial School for Boys in Golden — operated within metro Denver, although they are lesser known today, as limited research exists about them.
“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.
Through interviews and archival materials, The Denver Post sought to document life at these two metro-area schools that have received far less attention. Though they were not built specifically for Indigenous children, these so-called industrial schools provided ample opportunities to indoctrinate Native kids into the American way of life through religion, homemaking and military training.
“‘Schools’ in any context is a misnomer,” said Raven Payment, co-chair of the Denver American Indian Commission. “These were assimilation concentration camps.”
Colorado’s efforts to study Indian boarding schools
Ernest House Jr., senior policy director and director of the American Indian/Alaska Native Program at the Keystone Policy Center, is a Ute Mountain Ute tribal member.
As the former executive director of the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs, House knows there is keen interest from tribal nations for the state to continue researching Colorado’s Indian boarding schools.
There is still much to uncover about the Front Range’s boarding schools, House said. He hopes to learn more about the State Industrial School for Boys and Good Shepherd Industrial School for Girls, but the state will need to continue its efforts to expose the truths of Colorado’s Indian boarding schools for that to happen.
“Hopefully that will be able to give us more insight,” House said.
The tailor shop at the Colorado State Industrial School for Boys in Golden, Colorado. (Colorado State Industrial School Ninth Biennial Report, 1897-98)
The state’s largest effort so far to examine the grim history of Native American boarding schools in Colorado was published last year in a 140-page report that 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.
The report briefly mentioned the State Industrial School for Boys and Good Shepherd Industrial School for Girls, but in nowhere near the detail devoted to the other institutions.
“Unfortunately, what I’ve written out there in the world is kind of the extent of our knowledge,” said Norton, who authored the History Colorado report. “We haven’t really continued the research since the report went out.”
That report was the culmination of a 2022 House bill directing History Colorado to study Colorado’s federal Indian boarding schools with an emphasis on the former Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School.
The research comes amid national efforts to reckon with the country’s government-sanctioned cultural genocide of the Native population through boarding schools, which took root in the late 1870s.
The 2021 discovery of 215 unmarked graves by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia sparked a search among tribes and researchers for marked or unmarked gravesites holding the remains of Indigenous children.
That discovery prompted U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet member in American history, to launch a full review of this country’s own legacy of Native American boarding schools.
“As a state agency, we have pivoted to talking about what our findings were, analyzing where we are (and) talking with partners, and we haven’t really started on that next phase of drilling down into the different schools or into the 1920s and on,” Norton said. “That really needs to be looked at.”
Good Shepherd Industrial School
Elizabeth Byers, a social reformer, established the Home of the Good Shepherd for Homeless Girls in 1885.
The school — first operated out of a hotel in Denver, followed by moves to Aurora and, in 1900, to a location near Morrison — was run by the Benedictine Sisters, a local Catholic Church branch dedicated to reforming delinquent and orphaned girls.
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.
The school also held a contract with the state of Colorado, which needed a reform institution for girls to supplement the State Industrial School for Boys in Golden.
Norton could not definitively say why the Chippewa girls were sent to Colorado, but surmised that there was a direct connection between the Catholic Church on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and its sister school in Denver.
“These Chippewa students were perceived as either orphans or incorrigibles and were removed from the standard boarding and day school system,” the report noted.
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.
The Chippewa girls ranged in age from 6 to 17, according to attendance reports reviewed by The Post. For some of the students, the institution included notes about their academic skills.
Some could “read and do a little writing and arithmetic.” One girl knew the alphabet, the documents showed, and was listed as “stupid” in arithmetic.
“They never expected or had ideas that children in any of these types of institutions would go into higher education,” Norton said. “At this period of time, that even meant high school.”
Good Shepherd, which became the State Industrial School for Girls in 1895, suffered from chronic funding issues.
While the boys’ school received $1 per ward per day, the girls’ school received only 50 cents per ward per month, the Colorado Encyclopedia noted. Some counties refused to pay at all, causing the girls’ school to fall into debt and leading to a coal shortage at the school in 1898.
The students received three hours of schooling per day, with the rest of the time spent on honing homemaking skills. They worked in the kitchen, cooking bread, cakes, pies and fritters. They repaired clothes and bedding.
All were required to attend Sunday school and sermons.
Eventually, the girls were paroled to a Christian family for a year to serve as domestic servants. The program “intended to model virtuous womanhood as well as provide cheap labor to wealthy Denver families,” the Colorado Encyclopedia states.
Little is known about the specific experiences of Native children at the school, but the activities and curriculum likely mirrored that of traditional Indian boarding schools, Norton said.
“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.”
Good Shepherd, under a series of names, served as an Indian boarding school until “as late as 1914,” according to a federal inventory of Colorado’s Native schools. The institution, however, lived on as part of the state’s juvenile justice system and is now the Mount View Youth Services Center in Lakewood, according to the Colorado Encyclopedia.
Raven Payment and Shannon Alcott-Trujillo, co-chairs of the Denver American Indian Commission, said it’s hard to stomach the lack of information on the Native girls who went to this school.
School, they said, is really just a euphemism for what these institutions actually were.
“Education was ancillary to assimilation and forced labor,” Payment said. “They’re being enslaved, they’re being abused. Whether it was reformatory or just a school, it was all without consent.”
For Payment, an Ojibwe and Kanienkehaka citizen, the Good Shepherd attendance records hit close to home.
Three of the last names on the attendance roster share a name with a friend of hers from the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
Informing her friend “was like telling her someone had died,” Payment said. “It’s very much a piece of your heart.”
Woodworkers in the manual training department, top left, The machine shop, top right, the laundry facility, bottom left, and the seventh grade school room, bottom right, at the Colorado State Industrial School for Boys in Golden, Colorado. (Colorado State Industrial School Thirteenth Biennial Report, 1905-06)
State Industrial School for Boys
The Colorado State Industrial School for Boys, which operated from 1890 to 1926, served as a youth detention center.
The Golden facility — now known as the Lookout Mountain Youth Services — was not set up for the sole purpose of housing Native youth. In fact, Indigenous involvement at the school was minimal, though there’s no thorough accounting of how many Indigenous children passed through its doors.
Inmates at the State Industrial School may have run afoul of the law or committed other infractions.
“If there are few extant records relating to the lived experiences of students at the industrial and agricultural schools, then there are no records regarding the experiences of Native youth who were removed from the system altogether and placed into the mainstream penal system,” Norton wrote in the state’s 2023 report.
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.”
Norton’s report showed two 17-year-old runaways from Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School were detained in 1900 in Durango after a “crime spree.” They likely would have been sent to Golden.
The school — or juvenile prison — ran similarly to other industrial and agricultural institutions: military-style curriculum that emphasized discipline, along with academics and industrial training, the state report found.
Along with schooling, the boys learned farming, masonry, blacksmithing, printing, woodworking and tailoring.
“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 1897 biennial report.
The boys played baseball, football and marbles and sang songs at school gatherings. Some, though, ran away, the reports showed.
Teachers instilled discipline through military exercises, and inmates attended Sunday services and Christian holidays.
“Many boys come to us with very limited ideas of personal cleanliness, moral purity or religious culture,” administrators wrote in the 1897 report. “Many are diseased mentally, morally and physically, and require skillful attention.”
Just as with Indian boarding schools, the State Industrial School faced accusations of abuse and neglect, Norton said.
These schools would have served the same purpose as those institutions: instill American values, only with more discipline.
Officers quarters, left, and the main building at the Colorado State Industrial School for Boys in Golden, Colorado. (Colorado State Industrial School Ninth Biennial Report, 1897-98)
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The detention centers may have also sped up the process of stripping Native children of their legal status as American Indians, 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.
More research, though, is needed to fully understand the role of state institutions in assimilating Native children, she wrote.
The Colorado legislature passed a new bill this past session that will devote more resources to continue the research into Colorado Indian boarding schools. The legislation, HB24-1444, allocated $368,500 annually to History Colorado through 2027.
The bill noted there are still outstanding archival and physical research questions that need to be answered about the state’s Indian boarding schools. The research must be in partnership with Native people, according to the bill.
“In order to heal from the generational trauma, we must confront the past and shed light on the hidden cruelty,” the bill’s text reads.
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