Presbyterian Historical Society revisits Tucson Indian Training School records

Staff repair harmful language and enhance description of student experiences in the collection

by Presbyterian Historical Society staff | Special to Presbyterian News Service

Tucson Indian Training School students, 1937. Pearl ID: islandora:362723

In the winter of 2023, a team of archivists at the Presbyterian Historical Society began the process of reparative description on the records of Tucson Indian Training School. Over the next six months, they worked not only to remove outdated and harmful language, but to enhance the descriptions of students so that their full names, tribal affiliations, and experiences are better represented in the collection.

Reparative description is the practice of critically examining and ultimately adjusting the way an institution describes or characterizes marginalized groups, paying particular attention to instances where our description inflicts harm, spreads false narratives, or minimizes past and ongoing injustices. This work began in earnest at the Society at the beginning of 2023, when the Reparative Description Committee formed and committed to developing policies and workflows for a more inclusive approach to describing collections.

After first testing their workflow on the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Christian Education Department of Colleges and Theological Seminaries and National Japanese American Student Council Records, the committee began reviewing additional collections that might be candidates for reparative description work. When they read the collection guide (a document that provides historical background and describes collection material) for the Tucson Indian Training School, the committee immediately recognized that outdated terms were used to refer to the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Tohono O’odham (Papago) people. Upon further reflection, the group noted that the lived experiences of these Indigenous groups were erased and misrepresented through omission and under-description rather than through outdated language alone.

Throughout the 19^th century, Christian denominations and the United States government worked together to enact their agendas of cultural assimilation, conversion, proselytization, and evangelization upon American Indian/Indigenous peoples. Building upon the Rev. Charles H. Cook’s proselytization and missionary efforts in Sacaton, Arizona and in the Pima Agency, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Home Missions (BHM) moved to open a contract mission school (a federally supported Christian boarding school) in Tucson, Arizona, targeted at converting “Papago” (Tohono O’odham) and Pima (Akimel O’odham) children to Christianity and assimilating them into white American society.

The Tucson Indian Training School — originally The Indian Industrial Training School — opened at a temporary location in early January 1888, then moved to a permanent location later that year. The records of the school, originally transferred to the Presbyterian Historical Society in 1967, were first arranged and processed by Society archivists in 1973.

Fifty years later, members of the Reparative Description Committee began their work to recontextualize the history of the school and lift up the experiences of the students in the collection’s descriptions.

Knowing that Indigenous students’ names had been inconsistently and inadequately recorded, sometimes under aliases or with traditional names misspelled, staff verified and transcribed the students’ full names and tribal affiliations from their original applications, added date ranges for materials contained in each folder, and noted the presence of photographs and personal correspondence, when applicable, on the physical folder titles and in the collection inventory online.

Page from one of the last issues of “Escuela News,” a Tucson Indian Training School periodical, 1960. Pearl ID: Pearl ID: islandora:370335

During this process of repairing the Tucson Indian Training School records, the committee also came across over 300 photographs pertaining to the Tucson School in a separate collection (the Support Agency photographs). These photographs have been digitized and made available in the Society’s new online collection, Indigenous peoples of North America history. Along with the photographs, which document student life at the Tucson Indian Training School, the online collection includes student registers and an issue of “Escuela News,” a Tucson Indian Training School periodical.

In the wake of repairing the Tucson Indian Training School records, the Committee has created a process to evaluate connections between repaired collections and other PHS collection guides, catalog records, and digital archival content. They hope this process will guide them when they begin reviewing additional collections for repair this fall.

Read an in-depth analysis of the Presbyterian Historical Society’s work repairing the Tucson Indian Training School records. Visit the Indigenous peoples of North America history collection in Pearl Digital Collections.