Chilocco: Memories of a Native American Boarding School (2010)

Chilocco: Memories of a Native American Boarding School provides a very rare glimpse inside the educational institution that has been closed and completely inaccessible to the public for more than thirty years. The doors of the school opened to one hundred Native American students in 1884 under the direction of Major James Haworth and remained open until 1980, a span of nearly one hundred years. During that time, 18,000 students from 126 different Native American tribes attended. This book includes a few of the students memories of time spent on the 8,640 acre campus along with over one hundred and thirty historic pictures of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. The massive campus currently includes around 80 structures and because of its size and unoccupied state it is reminiscent of a ghost town. The many condemned and collapsing buildings has earned the school, once called "Prairie Light", a recurrent spot on the list for Most Endangered Places. In an effort to help with preservation, half of all royalties from this book have indefinitely been given to Chilocco National Alumni Association to be used for preservation of the campus.… (more)