The Echo in the Washroom

Behind a scene in the television show 1923 lies the brutal history of “purification” in North America’s Indigenous boarding schools.

There’s a scene in the Paramount television series 1923 that leaves many viewers with a feeling of deep unease. Teonna Rainwater, a young Native American girl, stands naked with other new arrivals in a cold, sterile washroom. Under the severe gaze of a Catholic nun, she is forced to undergo a lesson in how to bathe. Every step—from taking the soap to scrubbing specific parts of her body—is commanded and scrutinized like a military drill. For a child accustomed to the privacy of family and the familiarity of a stream, the moment is bizarre, invasive. One viewer, writing on an online forum, described the scene as “incredibly weird,” speculating that its purpose “was to show how much absolute control they had over the students, down to the time to bathe”.

That intuition is devastatingly correct. The scene, a fleeting moment on screen, is not a dramatic flourish but a window into a century-long history of systemic trauma that spanned the United States and Canada. It depicts not just harsh discipline, but a carefully engineered ritual of colonial conquest. This ceremony was performed on tens of thousands of Indigenous children, and it was their first lesson upon arriving at boarding school—a lesson in stripping, shame, and submission. Historical records and the heartbreaking testimonies of survivors confirm that this kind of compulsory, guided bathing, often accompanied by a “delousing” with harsh chemicals like kerosene, was standard operating procedure at these institutions of “civilization”.

But the primary objective of these procedures was never hygiene. They were a foundational act of violence in the colonial project of assimilation, the first physical step in realizing the infamous maxim of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man”. Pratt’s philosophy was not a metaphor; it was a practical, operational directive. It treated the child’s body as a battlefield and their cultural identity as a disease to be eradicated. In this war, the washroom was the first front line.

To understand what happened in the boarding school washroom, one must first understand why the schools existed. They were not educational institutions in the modern sense, but machines of cultural annihilation, built through a partnership between the state and the church. In the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs worked with Catholic, Episcopalian, and other Christian denominations; in Canada, the Department of Indian Affairs similarly managed its vast network with the churches. For the government, the church lent a veneer of moral and spiritual legitimacy to the policy of assimilation, framing it as a divine mission to “civilize.” For the church, it was an unparalleled opportunity to “save” the souls of Indigenous children.

The product of this state-church collaboration was a system modeled on military barracks.¹¹ Many schools were even built on the grounds of decommissioned military forts. A student’s life was governed by the rigid schedule of bugles and bells, with every activity, from waking to sleeping, conducted in formation, marching, and under inspection.¹⁵ This militarization was designed to crush individual will and instill absolute obedience. In such a system, the body is the fundamental unit of discipline. An intimate act like bathing was therefore transformed into a public, supervised drill.

For a child, the nightmare began the moment they arrived. The intake process was a series of rapid, multi-sensory shocks designed to swiftly dismantle their sense of self. The first step was almost always the cutting of their hair. In many Indigenous cultures, long hair holds profound spiritual significance, symbolizing personal strength, wisdom, and a connection to the Creator and one’s ancestors. Hair is often cut only in times of mourning. To forcibly shear a child’s braids was not just a haircut; it was a deep act of cultural desecration and spiritual violation. Victor Newman, a survivor, recalled his experience at the Sechelt Residential School at age seven: “Most of us have long hair,” he said. “And now, you get to the school and then they just shave it all off. It just makes you feel like you want to crawl in the corner and stay there”.

The haircut was often paired with a more humiliating procedure: delousing. Survivor testimonies repeatedly mention having their hair and scalps doused or powdered with toxic chemicals like kerosene (also called coal oil) or DDT.² The smell was acrid, the burning sensation unbearable. “They did cut it (hair) right away,” recalled survivor Annie Plante, “they combed in kerosene, really burned”.³ The practice was not only physically painful but psychologically branded the children as “dirty” and “infested,” a profound act of dehumanization.

Then came the scene depicted in 1923, but in its brutal, real-life version. Children were herded into communal showers, stripped naked under the watchful eyes of nuns, matrons, or other staff, and taught the “proper” way to wash. A Lakota survivor described the process vividly:

“Then in the next line, they give you a brush and they tell you, ‘Go take a shower, scrub your elbows and knees ankles, wherever there’s dirt,’ or I guess darkness, because they want to scrub Indian off us. Then when we’re done scrubbing ourselves, we’ll go and get inspected, and if they find some dark area, we’ll have to go and scrub. A lot of times you scrubbed until you’re bloody”.

This testimony lays bare the true purpose of the bathing ritual. It was not to teach a hygienic practice unfamiliar to the children, but to establish an absolute hierarchy of power. By forcing a child to cleanse their own body in a specific, painful manner, the school authorities extended their control into the most private sphere of the self. Stripped, inspected, and commanded on how to touch their own skin, the children’s sense of privacy and bodily autonomy was obliterated. The only lesson being taught was this: Your body is not your own. It belongs to the institution.

The final step in the ritual was a complete replacement of identity. The children’s traditional clothing, beadwork, and personal items were confiscated, sometimes burned before their eyes.² In their place, they were issued ill-fitting, military-style uniforms. At the same time, they were stripped of their given Indigenous names and assigned an English one, or sometimes just a number.⁶ In a matter of hours, a child from a specific nation, with a unique family and heritage, was remade into a standardized, anonymous ward of the state.

This obsession with ritualized cleansing took place against a broader ideological backdrop. The Victorian-era colonial mindset inextricably linked physical cleanliness with moral superiority, spiritual purity, and racial progress.²² Indigenous peoples and their ways of life were systematically portrayed as “filthy” and “unsanitary,” providing a moral justification not only for the seizure of their lands but for the forcible re-education of their children. Soap advertisements reframed colonial violence as a benevolent act of teaching cleanliness, part of the “white man’s burden” to lighten the “dark corners” of the Earth.²⁵

The paradox, however, was deadly. This fixation on ritualized cleansing stood in stark contrast to the actual sanitary conditions within the boarding schools. These institutions, meant to be paragons of “civilization,” were rife with systemic failures. Chronically underfunded, mismanaged, and neglectful, the schools were often squalid.¹⁴ Dormitories were overcrowded and poorly ventilated, sometimes lacking proper plumbing.²⁷ Food was not only insufficient but often rotten.²⁹

This systemic neglect turned the schools into breeding grounds for disease. Tuberculosis, trachoma, influenza, and measles ran rampant, leading to staggering mortality rates.³¹ Many schools had their own cemeteries to bury the children who never made it home.³²

The most irrefutable evidence of this fatal paradox comes from the work of Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, the chief medical officer for Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs. In a 1907 report, Bryce revealed the shocking statistic that the death rate for students in the schools he surveyed was 24 percent.³⁴ At one school with precise records, the death rate among former students reached 69 percent.³⁴ Bryce was clear: the “almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis,” a disease spread by the schools’ “old-fashioned buildings, their very varied and imperfect methods of heating and an almost complete lack of knowledge of the meaning of ventilation”.³⁴

Bryce’s report caused a brief media stir, but government and church authorities suppressed his findings.³⁸ Duncan Campbell Scott, the head of Indian Affairs, rejected Bryce’s calls for reform, and Bryce was eventually pushed out of public service.³⁸ The situation was no better in the United States. To keep the recorded death tolls down at Carlisle, its founder, Pratt, initiated a policy of sending critically ill children home to die.³²

The obsession with an external, ritualized cleanliness, paired with a profound disregard for the internal, systemic filth, reveals the true nature of the colonial hygiene agenda. It was never about the health of Indigenous children. It was a performance of power, a theatrical “purification” that asserted the colonizer’s superiority while masking the deadly environment created by their own neglect.

The scars left by the intake rituals were not merely physical; they were etched deep into the psyches of the survivors. From a psychological perspective, these ceremonies contained all the core elements of child abuse: physical assault, emotional abuse, and neglect.⁴¹ This kind of inescapable, agonizing experience at the hands of authority figures is a classic precursor to Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), with its attendant symptoms of anxiety, depression, dissociation, and a profound distrust of human connection.⁴³

The loss of bodily autonomy is central to this trauma. In the bathing ritual, a child’s body was completely controlled by others, their boundaries violated, their shame put on public display. This experience can sever the healthy relationship between an individual and their own body, leading to long-term issues with body image, a fear of intimacy, and a persistent feeling of being “dirty” or “broken”.⁴¹

There is a disturbing psychological link between the imposed cleaning rituals of the schools and the compulsive cleaning behaviors some survivors exhibit in adulthood. Research on trauma and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suggests that compulsive behaviors, particularly cleaning, can be a coping mechanism.⁴⁵ For someone who was taught, through violence, that they were inherently dirty, compulsive cleaning in later life can be an attempt to regain a sense of control over an environment that once felt completely out of control.⁴⁵

The trauma of the boarding schools did not end with the survivors. It was passed down to their children and grandchildren in a process known as intergenerational trauma.⁴⁹ Survivors, having learned only harsh discipline and emotional suppression, often lacked the parenting skills nurtured in a healthy home, inadvertently perpetuating cycles of abuse and neglect.⁵⁰ The shame associated with their bodies and their culture was also transmitted. And emerging research in epigenetics suggests that extreme trauma may even leave a biological imprint, altering the stress-response systems of subsequent generations.⁵² The echoes from the washroom reverberate through families to this day.

Despite the overwhelming power of the boarding school system, Indigenous children and their families were not passive victims. They resisted, with courage and ingenuity, from the very beginning.

The writer Zitkála-Šá (“Red Bird”) vividly described her fight against having her hair cut: “I resisted. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck… I cried and shrieked in my anguish, ‘No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!’”.⁵⁴ Her cry was the silent scream of thousands.

Families also fought back. Some parents hid their children in the woods to evade the Indian agents and priests who came to take them away.⁵⁵ When abuse was discovered, some parents took action. The father of Joe Wheeler, a survivor, pulled him out of school after learning he had been beaten and forced to eat soap.⁶ Another father, William Papatie, confronted church authorities after his son was sexually assaulted, refusing to let him return.⁵⁵

Within the school walls, children developed their own strategies of survival and resistance. Running away was a common, though perilous, act of defiance.⁶ A more subtle but equally powerful form of resistance was the secret preservation of culture. Though forbidden on pain of punishment, children continued to speak their languages in secret. Peg Deam, a Suquamish elder, recalled how some Sioux boys at the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School would pretend to be drunk, knowing they would be handcuffed to cots in the same room. There, they could safely speak their language and teach each other traditional songs.⁵⁶

Today, thanks to the work of bodies like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the U.S. Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, this buried history is finally coming to light.⁵⁷ The testimonies of survivors, coupled with cultural moments like the scene in

1923, are forcing a broader reckoning. That “incredibly weird” feeling that viewers experienced was the perception of a profound historical injustice. To acknowledge the reality of these rituals, and the intent behind them, is the first, indispensable step toward understanding their enduring legacy and moving toward a future of genuine reconciliation.

References

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