Editing Sioux Sanitarium

Built in 1898, the building first served as one of twenty eight boarding schools for Native Americans in the country. It was known as the Rapid City Indian School or School of the Hills. The school was part of the government’s plan to turn the people they perceived as uneducated savages, into civilized people. People from the Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, and Flathead tribes were put in the school to be indoctrinated into the white man’s way of life. During thirty-five years of its history between 1898 and 1933, the Rapid City Indian School educated children in fourth through eight grades with occasional acceptances of students from lower grades, and in 1917, it extended its curriculum to the tenth grade. With their time regulated by bells and steam whistles, students at Rapid City spent half a day on academic learning and the other half on vocational training. Superintendent Jesse F. House (1904-22) had observed that proximity to the Rapid City public high school, the South Dakota School of Mines, and the Business College provided Indian students with a better educational environment at the Rapid City Indian School than at other Indian schools. Nevertheless, by 1920, the school had to end the practice of sending its graduates to these finer institutions because the students at Rapid City spent much of their time on vocational instruction "to keep the school running," and they could not master the academic subjects essential to pursuing a higher education The Rapid City Indian School was not an academically sophisticated institution and rarely produced well-educated or even vocationally well-trained students. The school did not fulfill the assimilation goals of the federal government. The Rapid City Indian School closed in 1933.