“How many high schools have cemeteries?” Preston McBride, assistant professor of history, asked as a Ph.D. student.
Too many, he learned.
For his dissertation, McBride read nearly 5 million pages of publicly available records to find out roughly how many indigenous children died in the most prominent Native American boarding schools—and why. His research now serves as the foundation for his forthcoming monograph on an understudied part of the colonization of the continent.
McBride is the fourth Pomona faculty member—and first assistant professor—since 2000 to receive the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, traditionally one of the most competitive programs in the country, with a 7% funding ratio.
The $60,000 grant will enable McBride to visit archival locations in San Francisco, Chicago and Fort Worth, Texas, to scour historical records from reservations in regions of the country with large indigenous populations.
His year of research will help him flesh out his manuscript, A Lethal Education, which he plans to submit to press by June 2026.
“The book was going to have some impact on the field before this, but the grant will give me the time, space and resources to make it a bigger deal,” McBride says. “I don’t know if there will ever be a time where scholars have covered all the [off-reservation] institutions, but I hope my work … will broaden our understanding of them.”
Sites of death
In colonial times, colonists used the earliest colleges—Dartmouth, Harvard, William & Mary—to convert indigenous people to Christianity.
“But they realize they’re not very good at it,” McBride narrates. “They don’t speak the language, and find indigenous preachers are much better at converting than Anglo ones, so their idea is, Let’s make these Indians our vessels to convert their own people.”
In 1879, Carlisle Indian Industrial School—a former Army barracks—was founded in Pennsylvania and subsequently filled with Native American youth collected, often forcibly, from reservations around the country by federal officials.
There, thousands of children learned the tentpoles of Anglo civilization.
By 1900, more than two dozen off-reservation institutions were open, with even more feeder schools operating underneath them.
“Most people talk about these schools in terms of the cultural erasure, the cultural genocide, the loss of language, loss of customs, traditions, clothing, hairstyles,” McBride says. “But all these schools had cemeteries. I thought to myself, ‘What sort of high schools have not only cemeteries, but massive cemeteries?’”
Students at these boarding schools tended to be between the ages of 14 and 21—generally the healthiest demographic. And they were dying at nearly 18 times the rate of white children not living in boarding schools.
While they operated before the first antibiotics were discovered, McBride says, the schools’ conditions contributed greatly to their lethality.
“Because these schools are underfunded, students are put in really poor conditions,” McBride adds. “You put a whole bunch of people into a small environment without adequate supplies—they're sharing beds, sharing toothbrushes, combs, utensils—so once somebody gets a disease, it very quickly propagates throughout the entire school.”
McBride’s dissertation covered the period between 1879 and 1934, and found that more than 1,000 students died at just the four major Native American boarding schools he studied.
How many then, he asked as a Ph.D. student and asks now, died at all the others?
“The schools are much more lethal than we think they are,” he says.
Hunting for answers
Despite going through 5 million individual records for his dissertation, McBride still wants for certain types of documents, and they’re out there, he says.
Late in his initial research he found a letter from a Native American father pleading with the superintendent of Haskell Institute in Kansas to not punish his child for running away. “They were running away from disease,” the father wrote in 1918, when the Spanish Flu Pandemic began ravaging the globe.
McBride estimates that one-third of boarding school students left at some point without permission, and documents from that time reveal just how frightened parents were of losing their children to disease, malnutrition or accidents.
Some tribes successfully fought to stop their children from going to these sites of death, as they called them. During his year-long NEH Fellowship, McBride hopes to uncover documents that shed light, give voice to and memorialize the children erased from history.
“Indigenous communities lost a lot,” McBride says. “Entire family lineages were wiped out, and the federal government often did not tell parents when their students died, so families never got the closure they wanted or needed.”
Many of the students who survived went on to become the first class of Indian intellectuals, McBride says.
They went to Ivy League schools and earned law degrees. They founded organizations like the Society of American Indians—the first national American Indian rights organization run by and for American Indians—and the National Congress of American Indians, which still represents American Indians and Alaska Natives today.
Occasionally, McBride contemplates the transcendent things those who died in Native American boarding schools would have done if given the same chance.
“They could have been leaders in their communities. Mothers, brothers, fathers,” he says. “It’s a sad story, but it’s one worth telling, and not for the sake of it being sad. At one point I call the loss of life ‘casualties in the making of the modern United States.’ In some ways, the government wants native peoples to go away—often through elimination by military force.”
“But if a student dies in a school,” McBride adds, “it’s the same outcome. In a lot of ways, these are students who were acceptable collateral damage to a larger federal project.”