Revisiting the Hopi Boarding School Experience at Sherman Institute and the Process of Making Research Meaningful to Community

In the early 1900s, U.S. government officials began sending Hopi pupils from northeastern Arizona to Sherman Institute, an off-reservation Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. At Sherman, the Hopi pupils received instruction in several disciplines and occupations, including language arts, math, industrial work, and domestic training. While the author of this essay has published extensively on Hopis at Sherman in the past, he uses this opportunity to revisit the topic by describing the path he took to study this history in graduate school. Relying on personal recollections, secondary sources, historical newspaper accounts, and interviews he conducted with former Hopi students, the author highlights the ways his research moved beyond the archive and into village communities to create a history that was both useful and meaningful for his people.