“No T.B. has ever been cured by white man”

Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, was one school in a system of hundreds run or funded by the U.S. federal government as strategies deployed to obtain land, assimilate Native American peoples, and minimize Native nations’ sovereignty increasingly shifted to the classroom. Schools designed to eradicate Indigenous identities and supplant them with Euro-American ones became one of the federal government’s weapons of choice. Sherman and the other institutions were lethal. Sherman’s superintendents violated Indian Office health protocols, jeopardizing the health of the children and young adults in their custody. Declassified documents, many new to boarding school studies, also attest that, between 1902 and 1934, superintendents hid Sherman’s lethality by underreporting deaths, failing to report outbreaks, and sending ill children home to die. Extant sources reveal a complex picture of health at the institution. Diseases like influenza, measles, mumps, and typhoid fever were so deadly at Sherman because of environmental factors, comorbidities, and sequelae. School officials exacerbated the threat posed by these invisible enemies, while nonlethal diseases, outbreaks, and epidemics taxed the school’s ability to care for children in custody. Outbreaks also contributed to the higher incidence of tuberculosis, the most devastating disease throughout Indian Country, as it could more readily infect immunocompromised humans. The benefits of bridging the nexus between studies of health and Native American history reveal profound new understandings of the role of diseases in boarding schools. Newly opened archival collections, relentless sleuthing, and the historical epidemiological methodology employed here reveal Sherman to be significantly more lethal than previously understood.