Small archive of material sent by a teacher at the Tucson Indian School, George H. Wadleigh, to his wife in Los Angeles, consisting of two three pages letters sent in 1891 and an apparently unique copy of the school's holiday newsletter, "Christmas at the Indian Training School, Tucson, Arizona" documenting the celebrations for 1890.
The Tucson Indian School, founded just two years earlier in 1888, was created for the purpose of educating and assimilating members of the local Akimel O'odham and Tohono Oʼodham tribes, with Howard Billman - the future chancellor and later president of the University of Arizona - serving as its initial superintendent. Billman apparently hired Wadleigh as a teacher and "disciplinarian", as he describes himself in the letter from February 22, 1891, providing a detailed account of the brutal use of corporal punishment on one of the students:
I am not quite settled after having a fracas with the boys. This is nothing new. Our boys bath house + washroom is down on the girls side... Sundays they will always bother most as they will make it a loafery place + flirt with the girls. I ordered a big boy that I have had my eye on for a week or more away from the door and he wouldn't go. I took hold of him but he is bigger than I and he proposed to resist. I pulled on him a while but suddenly I changed my tactics and ran him back into a bath tub. Then I pounded him a while. When he got up he didn't seem in a hurry to go out so I took a broom stick to him, and if he had been a white boy I should feel sure I hurt him some, but as it is the result may be in doubt this particular. This is my first row with this particular - and I always begin light - throw grass as it were. I think he aware my eye is on him at least - next time I'll do him up worse.
Included with one of the letters is an unrecorded single-sided newsletter produced at the school shortly after the holidays, "Christmas at the Indian Training School, Tucson, Arizona". Measuring 14" x 8" and printed on highly friable paper though quite well preserved, the newsletter includes two accounts written by students: one is credited simply to Mattie, and is a thank you letter written to those who sent gifts to the school, with another, similar letter written by Antonio B. Norries.
While the use of corporal punishment in American Indian boarding schools is widely known, candid first-hand accounts such as this are unusual and significant as records of the generations-long effects of the violence used to maintain a policy of forced assimilation. The newsletter, while clearly edited, and only briefly allowing for the children to speak directly, also provides scarce first-person accounts from indigenous students at the Tucson school, made all the more significant as this appears to be the only extant copy.
