

Above: A detail of the host iron used at St. George’s Indian
School, from 1888 to 1936. Below: An early photo of the main school
building. Courtesy of the Archives of the Archdiocese of Seattle.
A common task for religious sisters well into the twentieth century
was the making of hosts. Using wheat and water only, the Sisters
prepared a dough which was rolled very thin and pressed flat in a host
iron. The iron was then placed in a hot oven until the hosts were
cooked. Various designs, from the simple to the elaborate, could be
pressed into the hosts, particularly the large host which was used by
the priest celebrant. The host iron featured here dates to the late
nineteenth century and was used by the Sisters of the Third Order of St.
Francis of Philadelphia at St. George Indian School just outside Tacoma.
St. George Indian School owed its beginnings to Father Peter Hylebos,
the pioneer priest of Tacoma. Hylebos was, by all accounts, a very
decisive personality. When he became the first resident pastor of St.
Leo’s Church, Tacoma’s first parish, many of his parishioners were
members of the Puyallup and other tribes. They had been baptized years
before by missionaries like Archbishop F. N. Blanchet and Father
Chirouse. Now, these native peoples were vanishing before his
eyes: decimated by disease, marginalized by the new dominant culture,
and forced ever further from their native lands by the influx of white
settlers. In lamenting their fate, Father Hylebos quoted the words
of the Puyallup Chief Stanup: "There are three times as many
Puyallups down under the ground in our graveyard as there are standing
here.... Two years ago you could see a house here and there between the
trees, now you can only see a tree here and there between the houses."
Not long after his arrival in Tacoma, Father Hylebos traveled east,
to Washington DC and then to Rome, in search of support for the Indian
tribes of Puget Sound. In Rome, "Divine Providence almost directly
guided him to Miss Katharine Drexel," he later wrote (describing his own
journey in the third person). Drexel would not long afterwards establish
a religious community especially dedicated to the service of African
American and Native American people. She provided Father Hylebos with
generous financial support—more than $4,000 annually for many years—and
also recommended a lay teacher, Esther Stevenson, who would devote her
life to the school. With additional help from the Bureau of Catholic
Indian Missions in Washington DC, grants from the government, and the
support of a group of Franciscan Sisters from Philadelphia, “St.
George's Industrial School for Indians” soon became a reality.
The Sisters arrived in October of 1888: “a feeling of loneliness
stole over the hearts of the missionaries as day after day the rain
poured down and the clouds obscured the blue heavens.” The school was
ready for occupants on October 16, and the first class was held on
October 26.
At that time, assimilation was the government’s policy in dealing
with native tribes. The goal was not the preservation of the history and
culture of these tribes, or their survival as a people, but rather their
total assimilation into the dominant culture. St. George Indian
School was characteristic of this philosophy. It was a boarding
school, so children were separated from their families and tribes and
completely immersed in a new way of life. They came from many different
tribes—Puyallup, Yakima, Tulalip, Muckleshoot, among others—and spoke
many languages. At St. George, only English was spoken and the use of
native languages was forbidden in the classroom. The school was also a
working farm, and children learned trades: the Sisters taught the
girls to cook, sew, and raise chickens, while the chaplain, Father De
Decker, helped the boys learn to handle horses and cows, clear land,
build fences, and plant and harvest crops.
Faith was at the heart of all that happened at St. George’s.
The records of the school give witness to many baptisms and First
Communions. The visits of Bishop Junger for Confirmation were a special
treat. The boys of the school built a small bridge and a new road on
purpose to make the Bishop’s visits to them easier (the road was
appropriately named the “bishop’s road”). In 1895, the children
helped build a stone grotto on the grounds, in which was placed a statue
of Our Lady of Lourdes, a gift from Mother Katharine Drexel. Father
Hylebos described the procession: “The boys headed the festal march,
holding aloft a banner of St. Joseph. The girls followed, two by two,
carrying a banner of the Blessed Virgin. Next came four large girls,
dressed in white, carrying on their shoulders the statue.... Sisters
from St. George’s School followed, singing the litany alternately with
four priests of nearby towns. Last came several young Indian girls,
dressed like little angels, and strewing flowers where the Blessed
Sacrament was to pass.... the occasion... made a lasting impression on
the minds of all present.”
St. George’s School continued to thrive into the 1920s, and was a
prominent Catholic presence in Tacoma, even sponsoring a booth at the
Alaska-Yukon Exposition in 1909—the handiwork of the boys and girls was,
according to Father Hylebos, much admired. But with the Great
Depression, funding dried up and Bishop Shaughnessy, dealing with
massive debt, closed the school in 1936.
In 1944, in a letter to the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions,
Shaughnessy wrote that financial concerns were not the only reason for
closing St. George’s. The whole policy of assimilation—which, under John
Collier, Roosevelt’s Director of Indian Affairs, was being
dismantled—was a failure. “The school was located nowhere near any tribe
of Indians,” Shaughnessy wrote. “Hence the little children were deprived
of family life and unnecessarily so while the actual schooling that they
received was too often ill fitted toward attaining the purpose to which
it should have been directed.”
The school buildings endured for many years and served various
purposes until 1971, when the property was razed for the construction of
Gethsemane Cemetery.
Corinna Laughlin, Pastoral Assistant for Liturgy
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