The Stickney Indian School ran in northern Whatcom County from 1892 until 1914. Over that period it had a variety of locations and of names: Stickney Indian Boarding School, the Stickney Industrial Boarding School, the Stickney Memorial Home and School, the Stickney Home Indian Industrial School, and the Stickney Home. It differed in several ways from better-known Indian boarding schools, both governmental and religious, around Washington and the United States. Originally started in the home of a Nooksack tribal leader and later run mainly by members of the Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, it garnered more indigenous support than many of its counterparts and arguably may have done less harm. Most of its students were members of the Nooksack Tribe, though some were from closely related groups in the Canadian Fraser Valley and some from Lummi. Never large, the school had at most 50 students and usually fewer. Class sizes and funding dwindled after the first decade of the twentieth century, and the enterprise became a day school in 1911 before closing in 1914.
Sparring Over Schools and Souls
Missionaries began work in what is now Whatcom County in the 1850s with the energetic activities of Father Eugene Chirouse (1821-1892), based in Tulalip. He established the St. Joachim Chapel, which is still in use on the Lummi Reservation, in 1861, and started a popular Catholic day school there a few years later. Farther east at Nooksack, it was the Methodists who had more success, beginning in the late 1870s with Rev. Charles Montgomery Tate (1852-1933), who came south from his mission in British Columbia. Tate was fluent in Halkomelem, which is closely related to the Nooksack language Lhéchelesem. He established a mission in Nooksack where services and camp meetings were attended by tribal members and whites.
Religious schools for native children were initially eligible for federal funding in addition to their denominational support. The first official Methodist school for Nooksack children was allocated $108 per student in the 1880s. Support like this helped the U.S. in its overall initiatives to inculcate indigenous children in white culture and education, and it provided some access to literacy in areas, including Whatcom County at that time, where at the time Indian children were rarely allowed to attend public school with whites. It also led to disputes both religious and political. Government boarding schools were a source of jobs and political patronage that some administrations were loathe to share with churches, and feuding denominations jockeyed for influence on reservations. These conflicts were played out in the lives of Native families.
In Whatcom County, Indian Agent C. C. Thornton had planned to pull a group of older students out of the Catholic day school at Lummi in 1892 and send them to the Chemewa government boarding school in Salem, Oregon. He said he had recruited close to a dozen students who wanted to attend and had their families' permission. "Since the selection was made," he wrote in a report to Thomas Jefferson Morgan (1839-1902), the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, "and up to a month past, the chosen children frequently inquired of their teacher when they were to be taken, and were impatient on account of the delay" (Sixty-First Annual ..., 154). But when the time came to collect the children for transport to Oregon, none could be found. Thornton concluded that Father Jean-Baptiste Boulet (1834-1919), the Canadian-born priest assigned to Lummi, had joined with some influential tribal members to coerce families into withdrawing their consent. Thornton's proposed solution to this "outrageous and treasonable interference of this foreign missionary" (Sixty-First Annual ..., 155) was to ban Boulet and his allies from the reservation and call in both police and army to enforce government control.
Meanwhile Boulet published his own account in the Catholic News in New York, which was reprinted by his adversaries in the 1892 Report to the Indian Affairs Commission:
"The Lummi Indians, whom I visit every six weeks or so, have a large day school averaging more than eighty boys and girls, and taught by a capable Catholic teacher. An inspector visited said school last week and said that in July 15 of the largest pupils of this school would be taken away and sent to an Oregon Indian industrial training school, which is far from being in the odor of sanctity ... too much freedom among the sexes and followed by many breaches against chastity. Graduates of this school are generally proud, haughty – polished heathens. The Lummi Indians, being all good practical Catholics, are not willing to let their children to their inevitable perdition. They are threatened with force and they do not know what to do" (Sixty-First Annual ..., 156).
Morgan, a Civil War veteran and Baptist cleric, was indeed a member of the League for the Protection of American Institutions and the American Protective Association, both anti-Catholic organizations, but Boulet's suspicions went further than religious difference: "I think the Government, or rather Preacher Morgan, wants to excite these peaceful and industrious Indians to resistance in order to have a pretext to open this much-coveted reservation to the surrounding greedy whites" (Sixty-First Annual ..., 156). Boulet's charge rang true for some of the white residents in the area. Percival Jeffcott (1876-1969), a local historian and member of one of the earliest settler families in Whatcom County, wrote in 1949 about one documented land grab at Bertrand Creek northwest of Lynden around 1873: "It was the old story all over again – the white man's inhumanity to the Indian, the stronger oppressing the weak. Try as we will, we cannot justify the act. No matter how pressing the settler's demand for new land, the Indians were on the location first and their rights, considered from all angles of justice, should have been respected" (Jeffcott, 40).
A Tribal Perspective
The Lummis and Nooksacks were of mixed minds about outside education, but many came to believe that their children would need to learn the skills of the newcomers in order to navigate their changed situation and exercise their treaty rights. Among the Nooksacks, one Methodist convert was Louis (or Louie) George, who lived in the village of Kwánech (now part of Everson) near the Methodist mission. In the early 1880s he opened his home on his allotment as a school. On April 27, 1973, Nooksack tribal member Ella Reid told an interviewer: "I guess he had a fairly good sized house. And the children first went to school there and the parents helped, supplied food. And [it] probably got too small. But anyway they decided they should have a real school house instead of just going to a family's house" (Northwest Tribal Indian Oral History ..., No. 33).
The tribe constructed a separate school building near George's home. According to Jeffcott, the school grew to more than 20 students and had a two-story dormitory by 1885, but after George's death, the project lost its momentum. Jeffcott cites "lack of cooperation on the part of the older Indians" (Jeffcott, 19), but he also mentioned on the white side "a vacillating policy, largely caused by changing the missionary and teacher so often that no fixed policy of instruction was possible" (Jeffcott, 19). In 1888, the school administration was turned over to a national group, the Methodist Woman's Home Missionary Society (WHMS), which had stronger financial backing, including access to federal funding.
Another Nooksack leader, Selhameten Yelewqaynem (Yelkanum Seclamatan according to some sources; he was commonly called Lynden Jim), had land nearby and offered it to the Methodists for a school. He had close ties to the early white settlers and was known both for his leadership among his people and his assistance to newcomers. The new school opened as the Stickney Memorial Home and Industrial School on February 15, 1892. Its first general manager was Lydia Hill Daggett (1823-1901) of the WHMS. Other staff members included Flora E. Jerome, teacher, and Mrs. E. M. Drew, matron. It was named for a wealthy Methodist donor from Albany, New York. Mary Ellen Dowling Stickney (1829-1902) gave a reported $1,400 to honor her deceased husband, Leander Stickney, a partner in Bacon, Stickney & Co., spice, baking powder, and coffee merchants.
The school planners agreed that it should be a boarding school rather than a day school in order to serve students from a wider area. The location was also farther from existing Nooksack settlements by design. Local officials had suggested that more distance would reduce "troublesome interference" (Jeffcott, 19) by some of the students' parents. Shortly after opening, Daggett held a meeting with parents of prospective students. She recounted some of their questions (though not the staff responses): "How long will they have to go to school before they get a diploma? If they come to school can they go home to see parents? If sick can we come see them? If they get consumption, what will you do with them?" (Daggett, 3).
Daggett was on hand only part of the first year, but with the new building came a period of staff continuity. J. H. Stark and his two daughters, Mattie (also known as Mary) and Alice, ran it from 1892 until 1900, receiving at the outset $30 a month toward room and board, plus an additional $10 per person. The intention was to become self-sufficient in food, possibly make additional money selling produce, and train the male students to be farmers and the females to be settler-style housekeepers and seamstresses.
Reports of the school's early years showed an unusual degree of unity between school staff and Nooksack families: "Well, it was nice," recalled Louisa George (b. 1894) in an oral history interview in 1980 ("Louisa George Interview"): "I enjoyed being there but, of course, when you first get with white people you're kind of afraid. You're afraid of the white because they're different from us Indians. But we soon got used to them and stayed there a whole term – about nine months … it was nice – just like home. We were fed good and they took care of us well … Each one had little jobs of their own." Louisa continued: "We had a cook, and we didn't have to do anything about the cooking and the dishes." George said students were disciplined for speaking Nooksack among themselves, although not, as at the Tulalip school in Marysville, by having their mouths washed out with soap and a toothbrush. The two years she spent there were the extent of her schooling, and she said "I didn't learn nothing" ("Louisa George Interview").
By the second year the school had two acres under cultivation, under the supervision of John Hamilton Carr (1849-1922), with additional land cleared of timber for pasturage. Attendance was down to five students at beginning of term, however, as federal funding had stopped, and there was a waiting list of children hoping to come. Finances had improved enough by the end of the year to house between 15 and 25 students, and a $50 donation from Mrs. Stickney went to expenses for clearing more of the land to grow vegetables. The Lynden Pioneer Press proclaimed that the "dusky protégés are making as rapid progress as can be expected" but lamented that the current students were mostly too young to help with farm work. "They are naturally more or less artistic, enthusiastic lovers of the beautiful in nature and art, and take to drawing and writing more readily than to other branches of education" ("Stickney Home ...").
Like the writer for the Pioneer Press, the correspondents for the WHMS Annual Report felt confident in generalizing about the Nooksacks' priorities and prospects. Their report for 1893-1894 rang of anticipatory nostalgia as it asked for contributions to continue turning tribal members into homesteaders: "We shall not long have our Indians as they are. Above all other races we are indebted to them. How they loved our magnificent plains and glorious mountains – ours now, once theirs!" (Thirteenth Annual ..., 86).
Frequent flooding and the labor of clearing forested land made farming challenging. Staff and students tried other initiatives toward self sustenance in the first years, especially as they waited for their small commercial fruit orchard to mature. In 1897, for example, they tried raising Angora goats. The school closed out the decade with a newly painted building (thanks to another donation from Mrs. Stickney), garden produce valued at $100 for the year, and an average attendance of 16.
In 1900, toward the end of the Starks' residency, Dr. Emily C. Miller visited the Stickney School. Miller had come from Fort Simcoe on the Yakama Indian Reservation, where she was a missionary and educator with the WHMS. Her report sounds idyllic:
"The island is like a beautiful picnic-ground in summer, and the children are happy in the freedom of home. Although the oldest of the sixteen pupils is only twelve or thirteen years old, they help a great deal; and as there is a family of nineteen, with only the two Stark sisters to do the work of the house, make clothes for the children, teach the school and all the industries, besides canning fruit, etc., for the winter, the help of the little ones is appreciated.
"The boys help make the garden, where they raise enough vegetables to supply the Home, though one year the seed was washed out by freshets three times. ... They make enough hay to keep three cows through the winter. The Woman's Home Missionary Society owns one, Indian Chief Jim gives the use of another, and Mr. Stark owns the third. The children have all the milk and cream they want [Indians seldom eat butter], and plenty of plain food, well cooked, and served three times a day. They are bright and interesting, affectionate and well-behaved. I have never seen any better Indian children. Morning and evening they take part in family worship, sing hymns, and recite Scripture, as though they delighted in it ...
"Both the young ladies who are employed by the Woman's Home Missionary Society are refined Christian ladies, but they do the work of common servants uncomplainingly. Paid for nine month's work, both they and their father must do much extra work during vacation, as the property must be cared for, the garden, fruit, etc., as well, and the house-cleaning done" (Tomkinson, 163-164).
Like other reports of the school over the years, it has little to say about the academic work being done there. Classes came later in the day, after worship and farm and household chores, and staff rosters tended not to list teachers as a stand-alone category. Some years later the Bellingham Herald, in an admiring article from 1908, did say that students "use the same books that are studied by white children and are taught that which will raise them to a higher development of character" ("Stickney Industrial Home ...," 34).
Under New Management
The Stark family left the Stickney School at the end of the summer of 1900, because both Alice and Mattie were getting married. Eliza C. Sulliger, a pastor's wife from Port Townsend, recruited Rev. and Mrs. Frederick J. Brown of the Oregon Conference, and they arrived at the Stickney School that fall. Reverend Brown also preached for the community on Sundays, using an interpreter for the Lhéchelesem speakers along with hymns in both languages. Robert Hawley, a son of an early settler family on the Nooksack, attended some of those services. In his memoir some forty years later, he included a phonetic rendering of an eighteenth-century hymn sung "in the native Nooksack tongue" (Hawley, 68).
Despite the death of Mrs. Stickney in 1902, the WHMS found enough financial support to put an addition on the school building, build a barn, and expand the number of acres under cultivation. "The ability shown in sewing done by little seven-to-ten-year-old Indian girls might be envied by many women" (Twenty-First Annual ..., 210).
The Browns' tenure ended when Mrs. Brown fell ill, and by the fall of 1904, Alice O'Connor was superintendent. The highest enrollment figure, 50 students, occurred under her watch in February 1906, when the school had four staff members. O'Connor was assisted by her niece Elsa Hall as matron; George Hall as a farmer; and a Miss Walker as evangelist. Staff reported that, "Indians have never before manifested so deep an interest in the work nor been so willing to contribute towards its success" ("Twenty-Fifth Annual ...," 125). One of the factors in this popularity was that Elsa Hall was a dressmaker. She taught the girls to make their own dresses, and pretty, new fabric was provided at no charge. The children also learned to make bread, so the kitchen was popular even for the boys: "Mrs. O'Connor, the superintendent, says that the Indian children are so domestic in their tastes that if permitted to do so they would be down in the kitchen at five o'clock in the morning ready for their lessons in domestic science" ("Twenty-Fifth Annual ...," 125). The annual cost of keeping a student was $50.
Challenging Times
The Stickney School had survived, with varying degrees of financial stress, from 1892 until 1906-1907, when floods damaged the grounds and marooned the residents. "The beginning of the year at Stickney Memorial Indian Mission was full of disaster and discouragement," wrote the WHMS Annual Report for 1907:
"Missionaries and Secretary had planned for great things and prospects for a successful year seemed bright. From October first to the middle of November there were five great floods, the Nooksack River overflowing its banks and sweeping away costly bridges and doing great damage throughout the country. Stickney Mission suffered great loss in vegetables, fruit, foot bridge, and general damage. November Fifth one of the workers wrote as follows:
'During the summer all the underbrush and logs and sticks on the river front had been cleared away. But the river had overflowed its banks and great trees came sweeping in the yard with the tide, with logs great and small. All this will have to be cleared away again. The water entered the front yard and rose eight inches on the side of the house. The folks remained up much of the night, measured the water every hour, and tied the boat within thirty feet of the door, ready to make their trip off the island if necessary.
'All the vegetables that were in the south garden were covered with water and the garden a mud patch. Over two hundred cabbages, large and sound before the rain, are all spoiled. The root cellar was full of water and all that had been gathered had to be dried and put in the house. This week another overflow started and after 10:30 P.M. we found the goats, drove them into the new barn, brought the cows, calves and pigs all into the inclosure. After 2 A.M. the wind changed and it grew cooler and the river went down. The new bridge was swept away for the third time within three weeks.'
"A few days later another letter was received, saying: 'We are in another great flood, water stands around our door; pigs, cows, and calves in wood shed; goats and horses in the barn ... We have not forded the river for a month, as it is so dangerous. The high water has changed so many of the fording places that very few are safe. The great bridge being built west of us went out again yesterday for the third time. So you see the rivers have been and still are wild and are so very swift'" (Twenty-Sixth Annual ...," 128).
It was a rough winter all around. Without the bridge, the nearby channel of the Nooksack River had to be crossed by boat. Two staff members, O'Connor and Calvin Moricle, were part way across in January 1907 when they were caught between two ice floes and pushed toward the main river. They clung to a rope thrown by neighbors until the floes could be chopped into movable chunks and the boat hauled to shore. Soon after that, O'Connor announced that Stickney Island was too soggy for her, and she took a drier job on the Navajo Reservation. Lydia Rouls (1871-1963), a graduate of the Indiana State Teachers College who had been a missionary on a reservation in Ukiah, California, took over as superintendent. By Christmas, she was forced to send 13 children home for lack of funds and by March 1908 the school stopped taking boarders. Children who lived close enough continued to attend classes in the church.
After consulting with Yelewqaynem, Rouls decided to relocate the school to Everson. A new Stickney Day School was completed on September 1, 1909, on property sold by J. Vis. Twenty-five children were enrolled there in 1909-1910. Rouls deeded the original property back to Yelewqaynem for a dollar.
Among the reasons for declining enrollment was that Nooksack tribal population had continued to dwindle since the first European contact brought a series of epidemics that hollowed out tribal communities. The general belief among whites was that disease and assimilation would soon eliminate the tribe. When Yelewqaynem died in 1911, the Lynden Tribune called him "probably the last head man of the vanishing remnant of the peaceful Nooksacks" ("Chief Jim...").
During that 1910-1911 school year, five children were transferred from the Stickney day school to the public schools. Staff wrote that "the boys prefer the public school, because, as one boy said, 'there are more boys and a baseball nine'" ("Thirty-Second Annual ...," 108). That same year plans were made to send one Nooksack teenager to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Rouls explained the transition in the WHMS's Twenty-Eighth Annual Report:
"Hon. Francis E. Leupp in his last 'Report of Indian Affairs' says that the non-reservation boarding school, 'has passed the height of its usefulness, and henceforward must be tolerated only as a survival and allowed to disintegrate by degrees.' So we are trying to keep abreast of the times … From the standpoint of the child the new plan is best, for it fosters the love of home in a way that the boarding-school could not do. In the early days, when the Indian home was a tepee or a mere hovel, one place was as good as another to Indian child. But there has been advancement in house and home life. The tepee or the hovel has given place to the frame house, sometimes with five rooms. The Indian child no longer leaves a hut, a squaw, and papoose when he goes to Stickney Home, but he leaves his momma, pappa, and little brother and sister; and he longs to see them and gets homesick just as your child would do if he had to be away from home the greater part of the year" ("Twenty-Eighth Annual ...," 134).
By 1913 the Nooksack Tribe had only about 175 known members, perhaps 10 percent of its pre-contact population, and many of them wanted to move to Canada. Hence, in 1913-1914 the decision was made to close the Stickney School. Rouls made arrangements to enroll the remaining children in the public schools. The last matron, Mrs. Gilbert, the wife of a pastor and a trained nurse affiliated with the WHMS, would continue to visit Indian homes in the community. Rouls herself continued a busy community life as a teacher and Everson postmistress.
The original Stickney school building was torn down in 1921, and although the dredged channel creating the "island" filled back in, the name continues in the Stickney Island Road, which winds through farmland between Lynden and Everson. The exact location of the final day school in Everson is unknown. The Nooksack Tribe now has an estimated 2,000 members, a few hundred more than the estimated population before European contact.
