American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Charlie Twiss, a mixed-blood Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, enrolled in the Rapid City Indian School in 1909. Founded in 1898, the government boarding school existed to detribalize Indian children and prepare them for assimilation by teaching them English and basic vocational skills. When Twiss enrolled, Rapid City housed students from six to twenty years of age, including relative Dora Twiss, who entered Rapid City in 1903 at age six. His enrollment was against Indian Bureau regulations, for Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp (1905-1909) had ruled earlier that year that Indian children were to go to day schools through the primary grades, and from the day schools graduate to reservation boarding schools. Only the most advanced students, ages fourteen and older, were to be enrolled in off-reservation boarding schools like Rapid City. Charlie Twiss nevertheless attended Rapid City until 1911, when overcrowding at the school led Superintendent Jesse F. House (1904-1922) to cut enrollment by sending home underage students. Twiss, eleven years old and in the first grade, was returned to Pine Ridge and enrolled in a reservation day school.