Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories is the updated installation of the long-running Boarding School exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ.
Since opening in 2000, Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience has become the Heard Museum’s most thematically powerful exhibition. Over the past two decades, interest in American Indian boarding schools and scholarship about the subject has increased. It is a story that must continue to be shared and one that is central to remembering the nation’s past and understanding its present.
Away From Home examines an important and often unknown period of American history. Beginning in the 1870s the U.S. government aimed to assimilate American Indians into “civilized” society by placing them in government-operated boarding schools. Children were taken from families and transported to far-away schools where all signs of “Indian-ness” were stripped away. Students were trained for servitude and many went for years without familial contact—events that still have an impact on Native communities today.
Much of the content in the current exhibition remains relevant and continues to offer a profound and powerful visitor experience. However, after two decades, the exhibition needed to be refreshed and augmented to tell this complex story. We will present new works of art, archival material, first-person interviews and interactive elements in an immersive setting to encourage visitors to have a personal and visceral connection to the topics explored.
Generations of students attended boarding schools before advocacy efforts—that included students and alumni—succeeded in reforming them, closing them, or offering other school choices. Boarding schools were designed to change American Indians, and they had many long-lasting impacts, but American Indians also changed the schools.
This exhibition is generously supported by The National Endowment for the Humanities, and in memory of Alice Brown Fleet (Creek/Seminole/Cherokee).
Audio tours of this exhibit are available in English and Spanish on our mobile app.
Discover the Exhibition
01. Introduction
Pratt’s Experiment in Education, The Trauma of Separation, Process of Civilizing, and Resistance
02. Journey and Arrival
Indigenous Education, ‘Americanizing’ American Indians, Manifest Destiny, Removal, Relocation, and Displacement
Advisory Committee
Meet the Advisory Committee comprised of Brenda Child, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Jon Reyhner, Charles “Monty” Roessel, and Patricia Talahongva.
Additional Resources
View a carefully curated list of materials available in the Heard Museum’s Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives, educational films, and more.
Exhibition History
Learn more about Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, which first opened at the Heard Museum in 2000.
Selections from the Exhibition
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Installation view of Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, 2026. Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. -
Installation view of Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, 2026. Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. -
Installation view of Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, 2026. Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. -
Installation view of Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, 2026. Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. -
Installation view of Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, 2026. Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. -
Installation view of Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, 2026. Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona.