Thomas Indian School
Thomas Indian School, also known as the Thomas Asylum of Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, is a historic school and national historic district located near Irving at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in Erie County, New York. The institution was first esatablished in 1855 by missionaries Asher Wright and his wife Laura Wright in respose to the need to care for the orphaned and destitute Seneca children on the reservation. The complex was built in about 1900 by New York State as a self-supporting campus. Designed by the New York City firm Barney and Chapman, the campus contains the red brick Georgian Revival style main buildings and a multitude of farm and vocational buildings.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Numerous works address the stories of former residents of Native American boarding schools in Western New York and Canada, such as Thomas Indian School, Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, Southern Ontario, Haudenosaunee boarding school, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the impact of those and similar schools on their communities; and community efforts to overcome those impacts. Examples include: the film Unseen Tears: A Documentary on Boarding School Survivors, Ronald James Douglas' graduate thesis titled Documenting ethnic cleansing in North America: Creating Unseen Tears, and the Legacy of Hope Foundation's online media collection: "Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools".
