Guide to the American Indian Institute Records

In 1915, Presbyterian minister Henry Roe Cloud (circa 1884-1950) founded the Roe Indian Institute, a college preparatory and Christian education/leadership high school for Native American/Indigenous boys and young men, in Wichita, Kansas. Cloud was born on the Winnebago Reservation (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska). He learned English while at the United States government-run Genoa Indian School (Nance County, Nebraska) and converted to Christianity at the Winnebago Reservation/Industrial School (Macy, Nebraska). He went on to attend the Santee Normal Training School, then entered Yale University in 1906, graduating in 1910 (B.A.) and 1914 (M.A.). He was the first Indigenous person to graduate from Yale. He became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1913.

Cloud and his adoptive parents, Reverend Walter C. Roe and Mary Wickham Roe, had been discussing plans to create the Roe Indian Institute since around 1910. Upon the school's opening in 1915, it was the only Indigenous-run high school in the United States. The school's first graduate was Harry Coons in 1919. Around 1920 or 1921, the school changed its name to the American Indian Institute (AII). In 1927, Cloud began the process of transferring administration of the school, its financing, and its property to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) Board of National Missions (BNM) Division of Schools and Hospitals. Cloud suggested a transition period of 3 years, with the school's Board of Trustees serving as an advisory group to the BNM. The school's last class graduated in 1937.