Loretto and Native American Boarding Schools
Posted on October 1, 2021, by Eleanor Craig SL
Now that directorship of the Heritage Center is in the capable hands of Ayla Toussaint, I have time to write occasional pieces of Loretto history for the Community. As there are more questions all the time about Loretto’s involvement with Native American boarding schools, I’ll start with this article about Loretto’s first boarding school for American Indians, for the Osage Nation. For the next article I’ll write about Bernalillo, N.M., our only other boarding school for which we accepted federal funds to teach Native Americans. Of course, I will be delighted to share further resources with any readers who wish to read more.
As Loretto was beginning on the Kentucky frontier in 1812, native peoples were rapidly being driven west of the Mississippi. We have no records of the sisters interacting with American Indians in Kentucky. Rev. Charles Nerinckx met Osage people in Missouri in 1824 among the Jesuits at Florissant, and arranged for some of the girls to be sent to Bethlehem, Loretto’s convent school at St. Mary’s on the Mississippi. There is no documentation showing the girls ever arrived.
Not until 1847 do we read of Loretto teaching American Indians. In that year four sisters responded to an urgent request from the Jesuits who themselves had been begged by the Osage for schools for boys and girls. Soon two schools were established at Osage Mission in southeastern Kansas Territory. These schools prospered, but for just 20 years. In 1867 the Osage people were forced to relocate to Oklahoma, and Quakers were designated by the federal government to conduct the federal boarding schools for Osage children.
In 1915 Loretto was again asked to teach Osage children. In that year Mother Katherine Drexel invited Loretto to take charge of St. Louis Industrial School, the private boarding school for Osage girls which Drexel built at Pawhuska, Okla., in 1887. It had been staffed first by Franciscans and then by Drexel’s Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Loretto conducted St. Louis School from 1915 to 1942 when Drexel’s community again had enough sisters to staff it. St. Louis closed in 1949.
Also in Pawhuska, Loretto taught at the parish school, Immaculate Conception, from 1918 to 1942. This, however, was a day school with tuition paid by parents and not all pupils were of the Osage tribe.
Osage Nation members even today cherish memories of Loretto teachers and attribute the continuing Catholic faith in the Nation to the Sisters of Loretto.