In oral histories, Utes share their memories of Uinta Basin boarding schools

By Courtney Tanner and Sheila R. McCann
The Salt Lake Tribune

Most of the time, he and his brother would dig holes under the fences that surrounded the boarding school in the small town of Whiterocks, on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.

“We’d take off,” he recounted. “We’d make for that hole, and we’d walk or run or bum a ride, anyway we could get home from there.”

It happened again and again. One April, he said, his parents — who were forced to enroll their kids — took the brothers back to the school. “That night we was back home,” Harris said. “We never stayed.”

Harris, who was Ute and born in the 1890s, also went to the second boarding school that operated on the reservation, in nearby Randlett, for a short time before it closed.

He spoke to an interviewer in 1968 as part of the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Program; such interviews are some of the only accounts of what students experienced, in their own words, in the Uintah boarding school in Whiterocks and the Ouray boarding school in Randlett.

Here are excerpts from many of the Ute oral histories in Utah; find more information below about the collections and where to find them. The name spellings used here are as they appear in the transcripts.

Doris Duke Collection

Muse Harris

Box 8, No. 195
(also Box 9, No. 282)

Muse Harris talks about how he “didn’t take too much schooling” at the federal boarding schools at Whiterocks and Randlett. He was transferred to a public school in Vernal, and finished classes there through the eighth grade. He said he regretted not learning as much as he wanted to.

Harris recounted: “If I had any more grades why I wouldn’t been here now. I might’ve been in the White House. Well, I didn’t learn much, but I’m a kind of funny, I can tell a story and remember pretty good, but by jimminey, I’m not right up qualified like I should be. I know now what I should’a done. But I’ll tell ‘ya, all you kids, by jimminey, if you want to make good, you just go to school and finish up. Don’t quit just as soon as you pass on from the eighth grade.”

“The knowledge of the white people.”

Conner Chapoose

Box 1, No. 1-11 (5, 7, 8 include discussion of boarding schools)

Interviewed in 1960, Connor Chapoose described the transition for Ute kids from the boarding school at Whiterocks, which closed in 1952, to the public schools in the Uinta Basin.

Families in the tribe, he said, “pretty much faced that we have to go to school, that the law meant for us to go to school and to acquire, to get to know the knowledge of the white people.”

ut the public school districts didn’t effectively serve Native children. Chapoose said Ute students often sat in the back of the class and got called “dumb” by their white peers. White parents, he recalled, also told their kids: “Don’t you play with that filthy Indian.”

The result, he felt, was that Ute kids didn’t do as well in school they should have, and could have.

A look at Head Start

Ina Lou Chapoose and Marrietta Reed

Box 4, No. 65

Ina Lou Chapoose and Marrietta Reed, (sister and daughter of Connor Chapoose) worked at the Head Start program to help Ute kids learn better in school. They describe having story time, songs and crafts that worked well for Native students. About 15 were enrolled at the time, in 1969.

Chapoose said Ute parents “have now come to realize how important education is to our children.”

“I was pretty young.”

Hal Albert Daniels Sr. and Hal Albert Daniels Jr.

Box 4, No. 66

Hal Albert Daniels Sr. attended the boarding school at Whiterocks, starting when he was 5 years old.

“I was pretty young,” he said in the 1967 interview. “… They just built them great big buildings they used to have up there — the boys’ dormitory and the girls’ dormitory, then the boys’ room.

He then went to a boarding school in Grand Junction, Colorado, for a year in 1893. And after that, he was transferred to the Carlisle Industrial Boarding School in Pennsylvania.

“And you got a lot of discipline there,” he said. “They had a lot of it.”

“My, how sad I was.”

Ethel Daniels Kolb

Box 8, No. 229

Ethel Daniels Kolb said she went to the Whiterocks school for a short time before also being transferred to Carlisle.

“A wagon picked me up at the farm, and we went as far as Wells Station, between Myton and Nine Mile,” she said. “My, how sad I was thinking of Mother and Mentora alone on the big farm, and I wouldn’t see them again for five years. You know we had to stay that long when we went away to school.”

The first three weeks at Carlisle, she said, were the worst. “I cried a lot and wanted to go home so badly, but of course I couldn’t,” she said. She mentioned learning to sew there. She also noted other Ute students there with her: Dick Quip, Laura Taylor, Lottie Sireech, Robert Ouray and Fred Mart. Sireech died at Carlisle.

“Boarding schools are fine, when you get over being homesick,” Kolb said in the 1968 interview. “I know we learned a lot and met lots of other people.”

“They … just let them pass.”

Cecelia Panteloon Lambeth

Box 11, No. 366

Cecelia Panteloon Lambeth in 1968 recalled attending Whiterocks and talked about her teachers there, all of whom she said were white. They included Mrs. Wapstock (sic), Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Phillips.

Lambeth said she attended school there through the fourth grade and then transferred to a school in Salt Lake City for a year. “That was the last time I ever went to school,” she said.

The interviewer asked Lambeth if her parents were resistant to sending her to school.

“They were just the old Indian type that didn’t, they didn’t have any education themselves, either, and they just didn’t, I guess they didn’t care whether we went to school or not,” Lambeth responded.

She noted her parents didn’t speak any English.

Lambeth also said she thinks the boarding schools, as well as the public schools, didn’t know how to teach Native kids.

“A lot of these Indian children down here went to school and they never learned anything, in fact, they, I guess the teachers didn’t like too much time with them,” she said. “They just, you know, just let them pass. I know some young men and women down there that went to as far as eleventh grade or on up, and they just, they can’t hardly read.”

But she said she considered education what the Utes needed most. “Yes, I think Indians have just as good a chance as a white person has, if they have the education and the training for the job,” Lambeth said.

“How our people lived.”

Linda Pawwannie and Clarice Pawwannie

Box 11, No. 371

In 1968, Clarice Pawwannie (sic) said she had heard about the mistreatment of Ute students by their teachers in the public schools, but her daughter, Linda, didn’t experience that.

Linda talked about attending Union High School and planning to go to college with her friends. But she said she would’ve liked to learn more about “how our people lived and stuff before” while she was in school.

“We have lost true identity.”

Marietta Reed

Box 11, No. 372
(also Box 17, No. 605)

Marietta Reed, who worked in the Head Start program, also said she wanted more Native curriculum in schools.

“I feel in a way we have lost true identity as Indians,” she said in 1970. “We were the first people that were to be here on this earth, as I have gathered. And I think it would mean a lot because in some way our young children have lost their identity as the Indian people.”

Reed said she was worried about youth no longer knowing about their culture.

“We should continue to teach our Indian children to speak the Ute Indian language,” she said. “And so many of our young people have forgotten. They have even forgotten how to talk it. Some of them don’t even know anything about Ute Indian people.”

She urged the Ute Tribe to work with the schools. Reed mentioned some Ute kids participating in the Latter-Day Saint Placement program, but she felt schools were a better place for them to learn.

She said there is still “the feeling that we are not quite welcome in the non-Indian society as of yet,” but she hoped it could be addressed through education.

“I want to go where there’s Indians.”

Joseph Pinnecoose

Box 17, No. 603

Joseph Pinnecoose was a Ute student in the public schools who later went on to attend Brigham Young University.

But his time at BYU was a challenge, he told an interviewer in 1970, and he flunked out. “It seemed that I couldn’t get any help all that time,” he said.

He said he wanted to try another college where there were more Native students like him.

“I want to go where there’s Indians,” Pinnecoose said. “I would like to go to a school in South Dakota, but I don’t know. It really makes me feel like being around Indians more, rather than being around with the Anglo.”

Pinnecoose also encouraged public K-12 schools in the Uinta Basin to teach Ute culture and history. But he said traditional songs and dances should be kept only within the tribe.

“We’re Indians, and we’re not going to share our culture, only to show it,” he said. “But we should keep our culture within us, not spread it all over the place among the white people.”

“We really have to … help these kids.”

Katherine Jenkins

Box 17, No. 606

Katherine Jenkins noted in her interview that she saw education improving for her kids in the public school system: “And I guess, this goes to show that we really have to put our efforts in ourselves to help these kids in every way we can, so that they can get better education than we did when we were little.”

“Most of all, concentrate on your work.”

Glenna Jenks

Box 17, No. 628, 629

Glenna Jenks talked about being an A student in public schools. She said it took hard work and diligence and propelled her to later win the title of Miss Utah Indian.

When the interviewer asked what advice she had for other Ute students, Jenks said: “Most of all concentrate on your work. No matter if people are picking on you or things like this. … No matter if your skin is one color or a different color. It’s just a matter of having faith within yourself. And you can do it.”

Jenks, who attended Brigham Young University, said she wanted to go to college so she could become a teacher and help Ute kids graduate.

Jenks said some Native children choose to go shoot pool instead of attending classes. “Maybe it is a type of inferiority that they have. I know sometimes I feel this,” she said.

She also mentioned a girl she went to school with, who sat at the back of the class and rarely participated. “And today I look at her, she’s adjusted sort of, she accepts her role as being a ‘D’ student, she accepts her role as being that inferior type of person.”

“The whole thing is so negative”

Margaret Eberly

Box 3 No. 57

Eberly was a non-Native who worked in education. During their 1967 conversation, interviewer Floyd O’Neil asked her: “Back to this idea of what we can do for them [young Utes] for education. Is the local high school doing the job?”

She answered: “I don't think so. … This isn't only a problem here in the Uinta Basin. I think it's nationwide. Where Indian history, you know, per se, like we expect these kids to go to school and read about how the Mormons came to Utah and you know, conquered the valley and were great and brave and true and beat off the Indians here, and succeeded, you know, I just can't see Indian kids being overly sympathetic to that idea.

“Most of them hate history and I don't blame them.”

She also thought there should be more efforts to integrate the Ute language into education, suggesting “conversational youth corps” in high school “for two reasons: Number one, one of the complaints is that the kids speak Ute in class to get back at the teachers and if the teachers have a working knowledge of the language it wouldn't do any good to speak Ute, and I expect that would clear up the problem.

“And the second thing is whether the money, whether we get it or not, it's a bilingual situation and you're helping relations all around.”

Some students spoke Ute at home and knew enough English to get by, she said, “but any word that is the slightest bit unusual that comes up, they don't know what it is. Most of the time, they won't tell you they don't know; they'll just pass right over it.”

At one point, she said, “a few of teachers got together and they decided the next kid who spoke up in Ute in class and got caught, he was going to get nailed against the wall. That's his words”.

A Ute teenager she knew “was the kid that did it. He spoke in Ute, and I guess they nailed him against the wall, whatever that means. He told me, he told me what he did, behaviorwise, but he didn't do anything, either, just sat there and vegetated for the rest of the year. He probably will again next year. So here's a kid getting penalized for speaking his own language.

“And besides not learning any Ute Indian history. Also, you know, what he speaks, [there] is something bad about that, too. The whole thing is so negative. I don't know how they expect — I don't know how these kids have learned as much as they have.”

For more information about Doris Duke project interviews with Ute members, you can search descriptions here.

• Oral History

How to find Ute oral histories

The University of Utah hosts the largest repository of oral histories from the Ute Indian Tri
be, in its portion of the national Doris Duke collection . The heiress and philanthropist Doris Duke funded seven universities, including the U., to record first-person narratives from Native people across the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Key to the U.’s effort was Floyd O’Neil of the U.’s American West Center.

Printed transcripts of the interviews are stored in the Special Collections of the U.’s J. Willard Marriott Library and available upon request. And librarians are currently working to digitize the collection , thanks to a recent grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. 

Special Collections also has the Ute Indian Oral History Project collection, which includes transcripts of tapes of interviews with 18 members from 1982 to 1985. The interviews included questions about their values, religious and family traditions, education and other topics.

Some interviews with Utes from Utah are included in other oral history collections at the U., and some are available online. For the Everett L. Cooley oral history project, for example, the late Ute spiritual leader and retired Episcoplal Rev. Quentin France Kolb in 1997 shared chilling memories of discipline at the Uintah Boarding School.

And researcher Kim Gruenwald included transcripts from several interviews in the draft for her thesis project on Ute education for Utah State University in 1989 . Those include conversations with Forrest Cuch, Gloria Thompson and Bob Chapoose. Cuch’s mother went to the Whiterocks boarding school, and he later experienced discrimination in the public schools; Thompson experienced the same. Chapoose attended the Whiterocks school. 

“They didn't even try to teach us.”

Larry McCook

Box 2, Folder 5

Born in 1945, McCook attended both boarding schools and public schools.

“I didn't like Union High School because of the prejudice there and we didn't learn anything,” he said in 1986. “We could sit in the back — and make it with zzzs. They just didn't pay any attention to us. They thought we were ignorant. They didn't even try to teach us. So we played that role of being ignorant, of being gullible. They thought of us as gullible.

“And we played the role. And that's the way it was. We'd go into class.

Even if we tried, we'd be discounted, OK. And in all things we were discounted. Even in sports.”

“It was rather harsh.”

Francis McKinley

Box 2, Folder 6

Francis McKinley, born in 1920, said his mother had been born in Utah in 1892 and attended the Ouray boarding school at Randlett to about sixth grade.

“I think that's as far as it went. So she had about a sixth grade education,” he said. “And for her time, she was one of the better educated persons of the tribe, because a lot of people used to come by and have her write letters or read letters that they had received.”

“And then she usually talked about her boarding school days. It was rather harsh for Indian children who were in school for the first time,” he said, describing it as “militarily influenced, with the uniforms, with the discipline.”

But his mother focused on being taught to sew, to cook, to take care of a house and children, he said.

“I suspect that she spoke in positive terms about education more to influence me. To look at education in a positive way, saying that you need to learn English, you need to know what school demands are. Things aren't going to be the same. It's change and it changed dramatically in my lifetime and there are further changes that are going to take place. You have to be prepared for it.”

McKinley said his mother insisted he attend public schools and he did, including Alterra High School, which had since closed.

He later earned a political science degree at George Washington University and worked for the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., before returning to Utah to serve in leadership roles with the tribe. He later focused on Native education issues, including work with the Indian Education Center at Arizona State University.

“Hated it.”

Julius “Chunky” Murray, Jr.

Box 2, Folder 8

Julius Murray Jr. was born in 1940 in Fort Duchesne and attended the boarding school at Whiterocks as a young child. (His mother was Mary May LaRose Murray, who is mentioned by Ethel Grant and seen in a photo below.)

“I've heard all kinds of mixed stories about it,” interviewer Leslie Kelen said. “Did you like it?”

“Hated it,” Murray responded. “You're a prisoner in the school. … They had a bell to ring to get up. They had a bell to ring for breakfast. They had a bell when you were through eating. They had a bell when you went to school. They had a bell during recesses — they had a bell when school was out. Eh, you lived by the bell. We had no freedom.”

He remembered one friend, Robert Reed, who “was only there for a little while and he escaped.”

“How did he do that?” Kelen asked.

“He ran down the fire escape. They brought him back, but then escaped again. But they didn't bring him back the second time.”

Kelen, then the Oral History Institute director, said he “wasn’t following” when he asked what Murray learned at the Uintah boarding school — and Murray started listing his chores.

“What were the kinds of things that they taught you there? What were they aiming to make of you?” Kelen asked Murray, who had become a Uintah County deputy sheriff.

“Nothing, just general school,” he answered. “I was there working in the laundry. I worked in the kitchen, when I was older. I worked in the laundry room, I worked in the kitchen, scrubbing pots and pans, I got pretty good at that. And running the mop in the dormitory.”

Kelen was confused: “I'm not following something here — Now, they made you work there?”

Murray: “Um huh.”

Kelen: “As part of your education?”

Murray: “I guess. We done our own cleaning.”

Kelen later asked,”Was there any certain way you had to sit in the class?”

“No, just like any other classroom,” Murray said. “If you didn't pay attention, they got your attention with a stick. Always with a stick. A stick or a belt or a roll of keys, whichever hurt the worst.”

Their conversation continued:

“A roll of keys — how would that be used?”

“Slapped around with them, hit with them.”

“You mean a bunch of keys? That's pretty painful.”

“Yeah,” Murray said, “it got your attention.”

“I talked mostly Ute language”

Ethel Grant

Box 2 Folder 1

By the time Ethel Grant started school at Whiterocks in the early 1920s, school superintendents had been trying to make children there speak only English for decades.

But her memories shows the language was still a strong part of family life.

“I didn't know how to talk too much English, and I talked mostly Ute language,” she said in her 1982 interview. “And that was kind of difficult for me, because I couldn't understand too much, and my gratitude goes to my friend Mary May LaRose, because whenever the matron or the overseer or a teacher asked us, talked to us, we barely understood.

“I wasn't the only one, but there were a lot of us that went to school that just didn't understand English. [Mary May LaRose] was the one that told us in English (she translated in Indian) and said, she is saying that to you. She is asking you questions, or she's .. she wants to know.. and then we would have to answer Mary May Indian and then Mary May she told them in English.”

Her uncle, she said, urged children in the family to go to school.

"You go away to school, learn the white man's tongue, and then you'll qub elbows with them some day when you get your education,” she quoted him. “Some day our line, our reservation is not going to be the way it is as of now. It's gonna change. Days will come when you will have to stand up to protect your reservation.”

At Whiterocks school, Grant said, she learned “how to clean, real thoroughly. Because they inspected our work every Saturday, if they saw dust, we got — “

She apparently gestured, and the interviewer filled in: “You got knocked down.”

“Uh huh,” Grant agreed.

Grant later attended the Sherman Institute, an Indian boarding school in Riverside, Calif.

“The teacher catches you speaking Indian, that was it.”

Clifford Duncan

Box 1, Folders 7 and 8

Clifford Duncan, born in 1933, became a prominent Ute elder and spiritual leader. When he was growing up, he said in this 1982 interview, his father worked for the Uintah boarding school in Whiterocks as a janitor while Duncan was a student there. His father later worked for the irrigation system of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“As far back as I can remember the language that was used [at home] was Ute. Strictly Ute, and no English, whatsoever. Everyone that grew up in that home speaks the language today,” Duncan said.

“And in fact the very first few days of school was completely blank because the only word that I could speak was "yes", "no", "I don't know", I knew my name, that's it. So the rest I had to learn. I think everyone at that age who was growing up like that went through the same thing.”

His friends all spoke Ute, as well, he said.

“Everyone at that boarding school spoke the language. Very few of them didn't … As far as I can remember everyone at the school was using the Indian [language] — whenever they could get away with it. Let's put it that way. Because at the tail end where — where in the classroom you weren't allowed to speak Indian — you speak only English. And the teacher catches you speaking Indian that was it. You get a spanking. Maybe get a yardstick broken over your head. Or maybe they have you hold your hands up like this while the teacher goes at it, you know. That's the way it was.”

Duncan was a day student and walked to school with his father. When his parents each attended, though, “they were allowed to go home only maybe once or twice a year. That's the way it was before.”

In “One Voice Rising: The Life of Clifford Duncan,” by Duncan, Linda Sillitoe and George Janecek, he described discipline at the school.

“They did bodily harm, you might say, to students, taking belts to them, or whips. The teachers would do that. Quite a few Indian students would run away.

“When my aunt ran away from the boarding school in Whiterocks, they made her drag a stone sleigh with a rope on it from one end of the school grounds to the other. Then every time she would the end, they would put on a boulder. She would have to pull it to the other end; then they would put another boulder on it. Back and forth, every time it would get heavier.”

Overall, he said, “The boarding schools had a disciplinary feeling to them, a military technique to teach Indians discipline. School was used for assimilation purposes. They didn't allow us to talk Indian languages on the grounds. If students ran away from the school, they were severely punished. At that time there was still this idea that being sent away to school was to assimilate.”

“You learned to clean house.”

Nancy Pawwinnee

Box 3, Folder 1 and 2

Nancy Pawwinnee recalled the same environment in her 1983 interview.

“When I first went up there … it was kind of like a military school, Whiterocks. We had to drill, we wore uniforms, but that was just for the one year and my first year up there — that was about 1932. We had to drill, we had to march around, we had the captain that cracked the whip, and I mean cracked the whip too.”

She added: ”But then they kind of eased up on that. They finally did away with the military type of thing.”

She described getting up at 6 a.m. to work. “But it was good, it was fun to learn to clean your room, you learned to clean house.

“In fact they used to say that the best housekeepers — we had this principal that was up to Whiterocks when we were going up there — and he'd come around and he'd say — there was a lady that used live over here and he'd come to her house and he'd say, ‘You can always tell who went to boarding school.’ Come into her house, and she had a nice clean house. It was just a cabin but it was nice and clean all the time. But that's what he used to say. ‘You can tell who's been to boarding school.’”

She also described working at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, Calif. “I enjoyed my boarding school days,” she added. “It wasn't all that bad.”

“I certainly would not wish it on anyone.”

Quentin France Kolb

Box 3, Folder 1 and 2

Find his Everett L. Cooley oral interview online here.

Quentin France Kolb was born in 1924, a son of Ethel Daniels, whose interview is above, and Donal I. Kolb. He was interviewed in 1997 by Floyd A. O'Neil and Gregory Thompson.

He went to Uintah Boarding School at age 8, in third grade, he said, which was in the fall of 1932. 

“I was conflicted about it. It was during the Depression and things were really bad off at home,” he said.

“So it was nice to have three squares a day and a bed with clean sheets and clothing that was always clean. So that was something that was nice about it. I kind of felt good about that.

“But, I was terrified of leaving home, and I got very, very homesick and used to cry every night. I could see my mother and my father and my little sister lined up in chairs, waiting for me to be there.”

His next oldest brother, Devon, was also at the boarding school.

“Tell me about the boarding school,” O’Neil said. “Was it a kindly place?”

“Well, I think you know, that I had experiences of both kinds. Very cruel things happened to me there. Henry Wapsock was the disciplinarian. Mary, the matron, and being only eight years old, she sort of had most of the younger boys under her wing and was quite good to them.”

But, he added, “The older boys, my brother for instance, was caught one time looking across the aisle in church and had to run the gauntlet one day.”

Kolb explained: “He had to take his shirt off, be bare from the waist up, and the other boys would all take their belts and take him through this line.

“I remember also that he had to stand out on the porch without his shirt on. It was cold weather and he got sick.”

Kolb, whose father was white, said he faced “discrimination for boys like me from the full-blooded Indian boys. I was always very good in school, so I was a target. … It was an experience probably that I would not give up, but I certainly would not wish it on anyone.”

He was only there half of a school year: “I ran away at Christmas time.”

His family moved about that time to Myton.

“My older brother, who had been in [the boarding] school and had to stand out and got pneumonia, had had rheumatic fever the year before, so he was in very bad shape,” Kolb said. “ … He was in the hospital a lot of the time.”

His brother, he added, “did not get good care, and so, in 1934, in January, the doctor (I don't remember his name) wanted to take his tonsils out. He thought that there would be less chance of getting infections. In the process of taking his tonsils out, he gave him too much chloroform and damaged his brain.”

His family attributed the death to two things, the exposure at school and the poor care, he said.

Indian agency records from the 1933-34 school year show Kolb was then in public school, and his brother Devon was not attending school. A note to the side of his entry read: “Died 1/25/34/.”