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Edwin L. Chalcraft was born on November 13, 1855 near Albion, Illinois, where he lived until his marriage to Alice Pickering on October 13, 1880. In 1881, they visited her brother in “Squak Valley” (now Issaquah), near Seattle, Washington. Edwin started an office of civil engineering and Alice became a teacher at the first “Squak Valley” school.

In 1886, an economic downturn induced Chalcraft to enter government service as Superintendent of the Chehalis Indian Reservation and Boarding School, seventy-five miles southwest of Seattle. He worked there until 1889 when he became superintendent of the Puyallup Agency near Tacoma. In 1894, the couple moved near Salem, Oregon and Chalcraft became the superintendent of the Chemawa Indian Training School.

He was dismissed from the school in 1895 and between 1895 and 1900 Chalcraft worked as a surveyor and managed a grocery store and a shingle mill at Mt. Vernon, near Seattle. The Indian Agency reinstated Chalcraft in 1900 and sent him to the Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming. Soon thereafter, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs appointed Chalcraft as Supervisor of Indian Schools in which position he visited and inspected schools across the country. In 1904, he successfully requested to be reassigned to the Salem Indian Training School at Chemawa, Oregon; in 1911, the Agency Commissioner again transferred Chalcraft, this time to the James Male Academy in Oklahoma and again in 1914 to the Siletz Agency in western Oregon as superintendent. He retired in 1925 and he and his wife returned to live in Seattle.

Between 1819 and 1969, the United States operated boarding and day schools which directly targeted American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children in a policy of cultural assimilation which coincided with the taking of Indigenous peoples’ territories. In schools operated by the federal government and churches, children were often forcibly removed from their families, forced to change their names, and forbidden from speaking their languages and practicing their traditions. Many children died while in the custody of these schools from infectious diseases; many suffered physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual abuse; many children never returned home and the government and churches that ran these schools did not inform their families of what happened to them. For more information, please see The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.