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Historic place

Rapid City Indian School (now Oyate Health Center)

3200 Canyon Lake Drive, Rapid City, SD

A campus built in 1898 to strip Lakota, Cheyenne, and Crow children of their language and culture spent the mid-20th century as a segregated tuberculosis ward — and is now a tribally-run health center on the same ground.

📅 1898–present🏛️ Historic SiteRepurposedBuilt 1898
Open on the mapSlide back to 1898

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.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

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.

Connected places

Bear Butte (Matȟó Pahá)

Sturgis, SD
Lakota

Deadwood Main Street Historic District

Deadwood, SD
Lakota

Wind Cave National Park

Hot Springs, SD
Lakota

Tatanka: Story of the Bison

Deadwood, SD
Lakota

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Storybook Island

1301 Sheridan Lake Road · 783 m away
A free storybook-themed children's park built entirely on donated labor in 1959 has closed only once in its history — wh

Canyon Lake Dam & the 1972 Rapid City Flood

Canyon Lake Park, Canyon Lake Drive · 2.2 km away
On the night of June 9, 1972, a debris-clogged dam above downtown Rapid City gave way and sent a wall of water through t

Dinosaur Park

940 Skyline Dr · 2.3 km away

West Boulevard Historic District

803 West Boulevard · 3.0 km away
Rapid City's gold-boom elite platted a 190-foot-wide boulevard with a landscaped median in 1885, and more than 600 of th

Chapel in the Hills

3788 Chapel Lane · 3.6 km away
An exact hand-carved replica of Norway's 850-year-old Borgund stave church, built in the Black Hills in 1969 as the on-s

Art Alley

Alley between 6th & 7th St (Main to St Joseph) · 3.6 km away
What began as unsanctioned canvases hung on downtown brick walls in the early 2000s grew into a permit-managed, constant

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Sourceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_City_Indian_School