About

The PSIG Project

The PSIG Project was founded in July, 2020, with the intention of learning about the students who attended the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls and their experiences at that school. The Project began as a faculty-led research endeavor within the Tulsa Undergraduate Research Challenge. 

The Project’s first stage of research has focused on the papers of Alice Mary Robertson, who was Director of the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls before being appointed Supervisor of Creek mission schools for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then being elected to the United States Congress. Robertson was born in 1854 at the Tullahassee Manual Labor School (Tullahassee Mission) in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Indian Territory (now Tullahassee, Oklahoma), into a family of white missionaries to Native peoples: her grandfather, Samuel Austein Worcester, was missionary to the Cherokees, her parents William Schennk Robertson and Anna Eliza Worcester Robertson were missionaries to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

The Robertson and Worcester family papers, which fill more than 66 boxes in the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library Special Collections and include Alice Robertson’s papers, contain a wide and eclectic range of documents relating to Presbyterian mission schools, general missionary outreach, and Muscogee (Creek) Nation history, along with many other topics. A significant number of documents are in the Mvskoke language, and we look forward to working with the MCN’s Historic and Cultural Preservation Department to translate some of these. This will necessarily be a slow process. Our researchers have been sifting through the Collection’s vast corpus of materials to gather information about the identities of the school’s students as well as the school and its curriculum.  

We are continuing with this research in Special Collections while gathering information from several online and on-site archives as we write short biographies of every PSIG student we have identified. These archives include the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Indian Pioneer Papers, state and parish records, newspapers.com, and ancestry.com.

We are eager to consult with descendants of PSIG students who would like to share family information about their ancestors and/or learn what information we have gathered.

A Word About Our Priorities and Purview:  

Our guiding principle for this project is to keep the young women who attended PSIG (or Nuyaka, Tullahassee, and other mission schools in the same network) at the center of our attention. We want to learn who these young women were, what their experiences were like at school, and how their lives unfolded. We want to honor their memory.  

This principle governs how we address larger questions that we are often asked about the history of Native boarding schools and the impact of colonialism, including land theft, on Indigenous peoples.  

Colonialism was a ubiquitous aspect of the lives of all these women, as present as the air they breathed, the ground on which they walked. The methods and effects of colonialism were multiple and vast, including loss of language, land, culture, and indeed life itself, with effects ongoing today.  

We try to let these girls and young women lead us in telling their stories. This can be challenging, because so much of documented history erases women in general, and especially Native women. For example, once a woman married in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, her life events were recorded under her husband’s name – her first and last name literally replaced with his.  

In the spirit of centering these women, we report on the effects of colonialism when they directly manifest in the documents we find. As a result, we describe events such as land theft when we encounter them in the documents, and we are happy to share those documents with others, but that is not our focus. Our goal is to shine a light on their lives, which were much larger than any ways in which they were exploited and victimized.  

When we have first-hand accounts from the students about school, we reference specific details to document student responses to educational experiences and try to avoid making large generalizations based on individual experiences. There is no one boarding school story; there is not even one PSIG story. Every woman who attended PSIG, or schools connected with PSIG, has her own story, which our group is devoted to finding and telling.