Blue Canyon Day School Case Study

As a result of these practices some schools became synonymous with death and disease. When a smallpox epidemic struck Blue Canyon Day School located in the Navajo Nation, agency officials feared the death of children, knowing that if a child died at the school, the Navahos would immediately declare the building shinkie, or devil haunted, and remove their children. A shortsighted and expedient policy of filling schools beyond their intended capacity or overworking the children in manual work programs cost hundreds of students their lives as epidemics swept through dozens of schools (DeJong, 2007).
In a limited effort to compensate for poor health conditions, the Department of Indian Affairs increased the number of physicians, from seventy-four to eighty-three, nurses, from eight to twenty-seven, and matrons, from three to twenty-one, in the employ of the Indian Service by 1900. But this achieved little in addressing the central underlying causes of ill health, such as strict military discipline, inadequate diets, regimentation, routinization, and overcrowding (DeJong, 2007).
An anonymous reformer neatly summated the situation: "Of what use is education to an Indian with consumption? An Indian child learns to read and write, contracts trachoma, is sent home and goes blind. How does that education benefit the blind Indian?" Dr. L. Webster Fox, an outspoken reformer and physician from Philadelphia, expressed himself more conservatively when he noted: "the work of the Indian Service does not make a good showing"(DeJong,