Sherman Indian Museum : Names Project

The Names of Sherman Project hopes to add dimension to this history. By listing the actual names, home towns and tribes of students, the project attempts to recover the "humanness" lost in the hundreds of rosters, numbers and statistics. These names represent real people who came from real homes, with real hopes, dreams and disappointments. They just happened to live in a time when other real people in positions of power believed the best solution to a changing American culture was to gather these children together into a military boarding school, to change them, Americanize them, train them to become citizens within the culture in power. It seems that our countries leaders chose to ignore one thing: these children already had a culture. They already were Americans. It is a small offering on our part to publish the names of these students, to honor them as the individual boys and girls they were. We hope that this list will serve as a resource for genealogists and social historians, and as a celebration of ancestry, our own and others . Some of the names on these lists may not have been written, spoken, or even thought of in the last hundred years. It is our privilege to be able to restore them to memory.