The Story
The federally run Rapid City Indian School opened in 1898; by the early 1900s roughly 650 children were enrolled, mainly from Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River, living under military-style discipline and forbidden to speak their languages. The school closed in the early 1930s and the campus reopened around 1938 as the Sioux Sanatorium, a segregated tuberculosis hospital, later the Indian Health Service's "Sioux San." In 2019 the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board took over management, renaming it the Oyate Health Center ("oyate" means "people" in Lakota); a new building opened on the site in 2023.
Surprising Facts
→ In 1908 the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs banned reservation student-recruiters nationwide after complaints about this school's tactics.
→ In 2014, sixteen tribes formally sought return of the site's land, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.
→ The 2019 shift to tribal management was the first time in the site's 125-year history it was run by Native nations, not the federal government.