A Recruiting Tour of the Sound
P.E. Brewer, a member of the Puyallup tribe, travels the Sound to recruit students for the Chemawa Indian School.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
P. E. Brewer, disciplinarian of the Harrison Institute, an Indian school at Chemawa, Or., is at the New England Hotel. Mr. Brewer is a member of the Puyallup tribe and a man of character and education, speaking English with an exactness and precision uncommon even among Anglo-Saxons. 'I am on a recruiting tour,' he said, last night, 'all around the Sound, taking children back to school with me. Counting one member of the Stikeen tribe from Alaska, who came here from Juneau to join me, I shall take back eleven pupils. Four of these are girls and seven boys. Two of the girls are from the Lummi reservation and two from Seattle. I have three boys from Port Madison and three from San Juan island.'
“One cannot predicate a truthful opinion of any tribe or class of men that shall be inaccurately or just.”
This reflects the complex and often painful history of the boarding school era, where education was provided by the state as an agent of assimilation. It serves as a reminder of the historical efforts to manage and reshape Indigenous lives through the institution of education.
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