Indian Subjects
Child, Brenda J., Bauer, William J. Jr., Klopotek, Brian, Borrows, John, Castellanos,
M. Bianet, García, María Elena
Published by SAR Press
Child, Brenda J. and Bauer, William J. Jr. and Klopotek, Brian. and Borrows, John. and Castellanos, M. Bianet. and García, María Ele
Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education.
Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2014.
Project MUSE. Web. 7 Jul. 2015. http://muse.jhu.edu/.
For additional information about this book
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781938645174
Access provided by University of California @ Berkeley (16 Aug 2015 04:39 GMT)
12
The Boarding School
as Metaphor
Brenda J. Child
For many in our society, the role of parenting was halted by boarding schools.
Our great-grandparents were prevented from being parents. Both my grandmother and my grandfather were sent away. Then their kids were brought up
in a regimented, abusive system of boarding schools. What that system has
done to our grandparents, our parents, and then to us and our children is put
holes in the fabric of our society.—Ingrid Washinawatok—El Issa
Over the years, thousands of Native children have learned the message that
is implicit in boarding school education: that Native people are children of
the devil who are condemned by God. This sense of worthlessness, of evil,
of unlovability because they were Native was turned inward, internalized,
becoming the root for some of the profound dysfunction later in life.
—Diane Wilson, from Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life
They are something tangible—mnemonic benchmarks—that, as with sites
of Australian Aboriginal mytho-geography, one can point to and say “it
happened there.” A visit to the school can provide a trigger or cue that takes
one back to the past almost as if there again—a redemptive pilgrimage to an
Aboriginal Auschwitz. Perhaps is it all a bit too easy.—Michael G. Kenny
The boarding school experience remains a burning historical memory for
American Indian people in the United States. This despite the fact that most
federal Indian boarding schools closed in the 1930s, or had by then adopted
policies that rejected assimilation and were more in tune with contemporary ideas about race and progressive education. While scholarly studies have
espoused resistance and resilience in the historical record of students who
267
survived an assimilationist education, boarding school is increasingly conceptualized by many American Indians as a uniquely Native usable past that
links tribal people of diverse backgrounds today to a devastating common
history, one that must be evoked, many argue, to understand our present
conditions and social problems. Boarding school is now the ancestor in a
direct genealogical line of terrible offspring—alcohol abuse, family and sexual violence, and other social dysfunction.
It is not necessarily the job of the historian to explain how Indian people today remember the past. But the intensity with which Indian people in
the present day explain and respond to the role of boarding school in the
broader history of their families and communities suggests that for many,
boarding school is also a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor for
colonialism. Perhaps, like the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee, the boarding
school as an institution is symbolic of American colonialism at its most genocidal. Boarding schools did, after all, align federal authority with the zealotry
of religious missions, and suppress Indian cultures in an English-only way
while opening the door to alienation from land and the extension of everyday Anglo-American culture into the lives and souls of Indian people. Not
to mention the important fact that for the boarding school system to become
established, it depended on those in power at the national and local level,
sometimes police, to abduct and remove children from their parents, ostensibly rendering them powerless. The introduction of boarding schools coincided with the end of the Indian Wars, and the most famous school, Carlisle,
was a former military establishment. The extraordinary part of the boarding
story emerges because Indians, even children, refused to act powerless.
Scholars including me have been fascinated by the complexity of Indian
people’s experiences with boarding school, examples of which range from the
Flandreau graduate who reminisced about his school as “my Shangri-la” to
countless others who were tolerant of school, without forgetting that many
students suffered—whether from loneliness, extreme prejudice, violence, or
even death. As key players in the boarding school narrative, Indian people
offered no single prevailing opinion, nor did they share a universal experience. At times, the views and actions they express in historical documents
or recollections contradict our deepest assumptions about an education for
assimilation. Case in point—federal archives reveal government officials
fielded an astonishing number of requests from children and families seeking
enrollment in boarding school. Moreover, it was not unusual for Indian families to effusively praise teachers and superintendents, or to spill over with
pride when a child graduated from Haskell or Flandreau, while a fair number
of other parents challenged boarding school policies or felt a desperate alienation from the people and schools that educated their children.
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During the course of my research in the Bureau of Indian Affairs records
in the National Archives for a book titled Boarding School Seasons: American
Indian Families, 1900–1940, I became a witness to my own people’s perseverance, particularly the young, impressionable, and vulnerable students,
as they were besieged by assimilation on all fronts. My book was inspired
by the life of my grandmother, an Ojibwe woman from the Red Lake
Reservation in Minnesota who attended boarding school during her girlhood in the 1920s, and returned home afterward to re-embrace her culture,
language, and community. She and other students, most of whom I encountered in documents and letters, made it impossible to view this history as
one of simple victimization. In the end, what impressed me most about the
boarding school story was the strength of Ojibwe family and community life,
a deep and abiding commitment to children, demonstrated time and time
again by parents and others at home, that outlasted and outmaneuvered a
failed educational idea.1
It is worth examining how Indian people remember the history of boarding school, perceptions of which have no doubt changed over time. I have
been influenced by my grandmother’s observations about school as well as
other elders from my community, who shared with me memories of youthful
friendships and the drama of a time passed within a fusion of tribal backgrounds. For my generation, we heard stories from our grandparents and
other relatives who lived the experience of assimilation—how they worked
as maids and farm laborers, ran away from boarding school, and were sometimes rebellious. These stories were popular among Indians, and are the
most prevalent memory of boarding school passed down by families. The
expanding body of literature on the history of Indian education in the United
States, beginning with Tsianina Lomawaima’s They Called It Prairie Light: The
Story of Chilocco Indian School, David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction:
American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, my own Boarding School
Seasons, and other scholarly works and memoirs, has depicted the history of
Indian education as far more multifaceted and untidy than a simple story of
federal policy and assimilationist practice. The focal point of these studies
is foremost the resistant and resilient Indian students who attended federal
boarding schools run by the US government during the assimilation years,
not the separately organized mission schools.2
Great differences as well as profound parallels exist between the residential school histories of Canada and the boarding schools of the United
States, both created out of a colonial desire for indigenous assimilation and
lands. Complementing work by American scholars, Canadian Ojibwe writer
Basil Johnston has left a significant mark on the literature about the history
of Indian education for his insistence on representing the survival humor
The Boarding School as Metaphor
269
of students at his Ontario residential school run by Jesuits in the 1930s,
while narrating a broader strategy of resistance on the part of students and
their families.3 Canadian residential schools outlasted their US counterparts,
declining but not disappearing in the late 1950s, and were at their core a
component of Canadian religious organizations, to the detriment of several generations of First Nations children and youth who were silenced and
abused within their walls.4 As a consequence, Canadian residential school
history is remembered more intensely today by First Nations peoples, where
the concept of “residential school syndrome” is a recognized malady of some
former students, and the Assembly of First Nations has referred to residential
schools as “total institutions.”5
In Canada, a national dialogue on residential school history emerged,
led by charges of abuse from former students, while in the United States
it remains a distant and relatively unknown chapter for non-Indians. The
Canadian government approved the Indian Residential Schools Settlement
Agreement in 2006, the largest class action arrangement in that nation’s history. The settlement initiated a process for former students to apply for a
modest financial compensation for each year of school attendance, with extra
provisions for those victimized by physical or sexual abuse. Additionally,
the agreement set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the
legacy of the residential school system in Canada. In 2008, the Canadian
Prime Minister issued an unprecedented formal apology on behalf of the government, which included a statement publicly saying the “legacy of Indian
Residential Schools has contributed to social problems that continue to exist
in many communities today.”6 Yet, some First Nations people believe the
measures do not go far enough, and one outspoken former (non-Native)
United church minister has maintained that thousands of Native children
died or disappeared at residential schools across Canada, and that an investigation of crimes against humanity is necessary to comprehend and address
what must be labeled an aboriginal holocaust.7
Boarding schools in the United States and Canada originated in the same
colonial project, one that espoused extending Christianity, private property,
and incorporation into the nation, at a time when indigenous land holdings and resources were still viewed as ripe for plunder. Canadian residential
schools farmed out education to Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian,
and United church organizations, a practice that ended in the United States
with the establishment of the first government-run boarding school in 1879,
the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Fifty years later, the
impoverishment and dispossession of American Indians was complete, and
it was no longer necessary to maintain Indians in separate and segregated
government boarding schools. As a consequence, American progressive
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educators found little resistance to their idea for Indian integration into public schools. This emphasis on public school education for Indians during the
1930s is why historians (though not necessarily American Indians) see an
end to the boarding school era, though demand for the schools by impoverished American Indians was high throughout the Great Depression.
In the United States, some American Indians remember the government
boarding school era as lasting decades longer than it actually did, perhaps
failing to differentiate between US and Canadian indigenous history, or
including assorted mission schools privately operated by churches, who continued to spread their faith among Indian students. Or are they making a very
reasonable suggestion: that assimilation lasted longer as a practice than as
policy? Even American Indian educators and professionals in fields including
social work seem to have made the assumption that later Indian schools had
the same policies as their nineteenth-century predecessors, which they did
not. The proportionally small number of children who continued in Indian
boarding schools or mission schools throughout the second half of the twentieth century was born after an era when assimilation dominated federal policy
making toward Indians. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a professor of social
work in the United States, has worked to address issues of historical trauma
and unresolved grief for American Indians today, viewing their experiences
as much like those of survivors of the Jewish Holocaust. Unlike historians,
she extends the boarding school era from “1879 through the 1970s,” when
“federal policy included the forced removal of Lakota children from home
and their abusive institutional treatment.”8 For those who work in the field
of social work and not history, it may be constructive when helping clients
who suffer unresolved grief to have a more straightforward explanation for
the complexities of the colonial past, and so the boarding school is a usable
metaphor that crosses eras and tribal differences.
Social work and education were the first fields to indentify boarding
school as the primary explanation for social dysfunction and adverse conditions on reservations and communities, and educators and specialists in
human service fields now repeat the idea that boarding schools disrupted
indigenous child rearing so permanently that “institutionalized behavior
resulted” and “young people grew into adults who did not know how to parent children.”9 Psychologist Joseph Gone has observed the trend of “increasingly attributing the mental health problems of American Indians to historical
trauma” as “an alternative to established psychiatric disorders” by health care
providers and clinicians. Gone notes that American Indian historical trauma
“has been described as the collective, cumulative, and intergenerational psychosocial disability resulting from massive group-based oppression, such as
forced relocation, political subjugation, cultural domination, and genocide,”
The Boarding School as Metaphor
271
yet he questions the lack of nuance within the historical trauma construct,
while acknowledging the very real problem of “enduring mental health disparities” in the American Indian population.10
The historical trauma construct has gained a wide following. Writer
Diane Wilson, in finely written and tender biographical essays of contemporary Dakota people, also singles out boarding school as a defining experience
to explain the presence of “historical trauma that is a consequence of our
unacknowledged history.” Like Yellow Horse Brave Heart, she oversimplifies
by melding mission and government boarding schools histories, along with
fosterage and adoption, to position a long chronology of child removal based
on the beginning of compulsory attendance laws established for Native children in 1891, stating, “This policy remained in place until 1978.”11 Also like
Yellow Horse Brave Heart, she disregards critical evidence that the majority of
American Indians integrated public schools fairly early in the twentieth century. For Wilson, boarding school is a usable past that still speaks to Indian
people today, who must learn and remember the experiences of their parents
and grandparents, so that the consequences of this history are not passed
down as a terrible legacy to future generations in the form of “suicide, alcoholism, depression, and poverty.”12
The generation who experienced schooling during the peak years of
assimilation policies in the United States, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now passed away. Public school education surpassed
boarding schools as the foundation of US Indian education in the 1930s,
and the smaller number of boarding schools that remained primarily existed
to offset the poverty of Indian families during the Great Depression, when
Indian demand for the schools was so widespread that the 1930s became
the decade of highest enrollment. American Indians suffered greatly through
hard times and extraordinary deprivation during the Depression, only weathering these years with great difficulty. There is not a strong historical memory
of the notion that Indian people themselves repeatedly sought out government boarding schools as a strategy of family preservation, except among the
generation who lived through the Great Depression.
The memoir of Ojibwe artist George Morrison, born in Chippewa City
along the north shore of Lake Superior, represents the changing role of boarding school for American Indian families during the Great Depression. For
Morrison and two brothers, the Hayward Indian School in Wisconsin was
a place of refuge against extreme poverty during the early Depression years,
and when Hayward closed in 1933, most students transferred into local public schools. Morrison entered Hayward at the age of nine, and later wrote of
his experience.
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Brenda J. Child
The Hayward, Wisconsin, Indian school helped people with big families. It was
available to a lot of poorer families during the Depression. Things got hard for us,
especially during the Depression. I remember eating plain rice, or rice and potatoes
together. Sometimes those old staples were the only things around. Now, my brother
Mike and I kid about pork grease and potatoes.…
There were maybe fifty to seventy-five boys and the same number of girls, on
opposite sides of the campus. There was a central dining room; the meals were
adequate. It gave us a good place to eat.
When September came, the school provided transportation, either with a government car or by paying the bus fare for a group of young children. We stayed at the
school during the whole nine-month period, and we never did see our parents.
That’s an awfully long time. I guess my parents were too poor to come—they
didn’t have a car and they couldn’t pay to travel by bus. They never came to see us.
As I recall, we accepted it, we kept busy with the activities, school, and playing. We
were in it, so we weren’t lonesome.
The Morrisons’ family story is not unlike the experience of many Indian
families during the Great Depression, forced to make practical decisions for
the well-being of their children, which may have included boarding school.
Reflecting on the place of boarding schools in American Indian life, Morrison
was well aware of their reputation, saying, “I’ve heard stories of the teachers
in certain schools being very cruel to Indians,” though his own experience
during the Depression reflected Washington’s changing policies away from
assimilation in the 1930s. Indigenous languages were no longer stifled, and
teachers were not callous to students, Morrison remembered: “Many of the
kids probably spoke Indian. The school didn’t repress it or stop it the way I’ve
heard was done in some schools,” and “as I recall, the teachers at Hayward
were fairly decent. They all got along with the students and were liked by the
students, too. It was all right.”13
Teachers at the school supported Morrison’s emerging talent, as he remembered, “I was always chosen to do posters and things like that.” Fewer numbers
of American Indians attended boarding school after the Great Depression,
and the institutions evolved from their nineteenth-century origins. In this
later era of Indian education during the 1930s and 1940s, the superintendent
of the Flandreau Indian Boarding School was so highly regarded by students
and the local Dakota community that they adopted him into their tribe.14
Forced attendance was a thing of the past, but students in the schools continued to miss their families at home, undergo conflicts with teachers, and run
away. Their memories of school are not so unlike those of children who lived
in institutions like orphanages. The Minnesota Ojibwe writer Jim Northrup
attended Pipestone in the postwar years, and remembered beatings by both
teachers and other Indian students. Is what he suffered, and other Indian
The Boarding School as Metaphor
273
students institutionalized in those years suffered, simply racism, bullying,
and lonesomeness, rather than the forced acculturation experienced by the
early generations of Carlisle or Haskell students?
Another Ojibwe memoir, Peter Razor’s remarkable While the Locust Slept,
about life in a Minnesota state orphanage in the 1930s, is an indicting commentary on the violence of his institution, where he remembered all nonwhite students were mistreated. Razor spent his childhood in the orphanage
from the age of seventeen months, finally leaving in 1944, the year before
it closed. The state orphanage was a sterile and cruel environment for child
rearing, and Razor was more than once beaten to unconsciousness by an
employee.15 For both Razor and Northrup, dormitory life at the orphanage
and the boarding school was often unbearable and lacked the warmth and
security of a home, and students suffered. Night times were particularly miserable for young children, and Northrup spoke of waves of weeping that
would begin “at one end of the dormitory and come traveling down until
the boy in the next bed was crying and I was sobbing too.” He eventually
ran away from school simply because he missed his mother, though he was
found and returned to Pipestone, where he “toughed it out” and “survived.”
It is little wonder that Indian people explain and rationalize the existence
of social problems in their communities as a legacy of boarding schools. The
suggestion that students in schools were left without Indian parental role
models while being exposed to violence and cultural repression is a compelling explanation for contemporary social ills so at odds with Indian values. Yet, parents and families refused to allow government boarding schools
to supplant their essential roles in child rearing, which, along with student
resistance, put limits on the assimilative intentions of the institution. I worry
that to suggest otherwise considerably underestimates American Indian families, and the historical record is unambiguous in the way it demonstrates how
they also shaped and defined the boarding school era.
What do we make today of boarding school narratives that might be
described as happy? Letters written by Indian people decidedly show there
were those who supported education, with many on the reservations eager
to attend an Indian boarding school. Even during the height of the assimilation campaign in 1913, George White Bull, a fifth grader from Porcupine,
South Dakota, had heard so many positive things about Flandreau from other
Lakota children, he impatiently waited for word that he could also enroll,
making plans to join the school band. Boarding school letters and oral histories indicate there were countless students who not only survived, but flourished and emerged satisfied.
Or what of parents who willingly sent their children away? Were those
who spoke out in favor of education or heartily approved of boarding school
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education for their children naïve and uninformed, or persuaded by the
promises of assimilation? In today’s jargon, were they colonized minds? What
was the Oneida mother thinking as she wrote to the school’s administrators
with heartfelt gratitude in 1924, terribly disappointed she would miss her
daughter’s graduation from Flandreau?
I am very thankful to you people for all good you have taught my daughter while
she was in school and that she is a graduate girl now. I am proud of her. I am sorry
I can’t be there on the Graduating exercise oh I would like to have been there. When
will you send the Oneidas home?16
Narratives of boarding school life include students who found happiness or
refuge in the schools, while clearly others were abused and suffered—and
so we have learned that there is a wide-ranging continuum of Indian experiences. As Philip Deloria has suggested, Indian people do unexpected things
in unexpected places. Indian people in American history continually made
the best out of socially ambiguous situations, and it does not mean Indians
in the boarding school era sacrificed their identity and ideals as they incorporated Western education into their own or their children’s lives.17
Scholars, especially American Indian scholars, must try to make sense of
that surprising continuum, and search for historical context for the decisions
that students and parents made, to show how Indian people actively shaped
the boarding school era. Learning of happy students and satisfied parents—
Indians who liked boarding school—can be mystifying, even troubling to
Indian people today. Teaching a course on the history of Indian education
at the University of Minnesota a few years back, two terrific Indian students
in the class set out to interview Dakota elders and their eighty-nine-year-old
former teacher, Father Stan of the Grey Cloud Mission, a Benedictine school
near Sisseton, South Dakota. One student was the granddaughter of a Grey
Cloud Mission female alumna who had played on the basketball team at
school, and she was initially puzzled by the reflections of her grandmother
and the elders they interviewed at Sisseton. They were not expecting to find
elders so strongly identified with the mission school or with such fond memories of Father Stan. How do we remember the legacy of all of these boarding and even mission schools, if this legacy also included well-adjusted and
thankful alumni and families?
For Indians, our historical memory of the boarding school era is
clouded—confused and impaired by terrible losses for our families, communities, and cultures—the disruptive processes of settler colonialism. The
years after 1879 were a time when Indian people moved to reservations
and witnessed the environmental destruction of land and resources in the
post-allotment mayhem. Treaty rights were abused at the local level as states
The Boarding School as Metaphor
275
intruded on tribal sovereignty, and in federally issued orders, Indians contended with religious discrimination and the suppression of their spiritual
practices and other traditions. Even with the decline of assimilation, problems continued unabated, especially economic hardship on reservations. The
Great Depression was a catastrophe for Indian people already coping with
poverty, insidious diseases like tuberculosis, and new social ills. Cultural
practices collapsed under the weight of Christianity, and migrations to towns
and cities had a significant impact on Native language retention and other
social formations. Perhaps most disturbing, these problems appeared to be
permanent. Is the boarding school era so clouded by overlapping categories
of colonialism, hardship, trauma, and drastic change that it is unfeasible for
Indian people to begin to sort it all out? History is so deliberately confusing
we may lean on the ready explanation, especially when one defining memory
is endorsed by so many Indian people.
Is there still opportunity to narrate another sort of boarding school story,
an alternative to what has become a vastly oversimplified history? A man
from my reservation, Alex Everwind, went away to government boarding
school in the early years of the twentieth century. He was the child of a stable
and solid Ojibwe family, and remembered being indulged as a child growing
up in Ponemah as the only boy with two sisters. Sadly, Everwind’s older sister
became sick and died before he went to boarding school. There were several
students from Ponemah at Carlisle, and Everwind first thought of attending
school in the east. Instead, he was sent to the Tomah Boarding School in
Wisconsin as a teenager. In the fall of 1914, he left for Tomah with a friend,
Russell Wind, who very soon became sick and died. Everwind stayed on,
and worked hard in the school’s boiler house half the day, shoveling coal and
cleaning out ashes, but years later he shared no memories of mistreatment,
simply recalling the vocational prospects at school. In four years, Everwind
only came home from school twice, once in the early spring of 1918, when
his younger sister, Eliza, died. Everwind never forgot the day a telegraph
arrived at Tomah with this unbearably sad news. Decades later, he would
recall in detail his subsequent journey home by train and somber arrival on
the reservation, and finding the familiar landscape of Red Lake still frozen.
I walked. I walked this lake on foot, on snow. That evening when I got off at Redby, I
didn’t have no supper and I walked right straight across [the lake to Ponemah] and I
landed down here about a mile on the east here. Then my aunt was living here. I got
off there and then she grabbed me and says, “I hear you come home.” I says, “Yes.”
And I asked her, “How’s my folks?” She says, “They’re all right. I don’t think they
knew you were coming,” she says. “You will kinda surprise them when you come in.”
So, she gave me a little bread and what she had, and a little meat that she had and
fed me. I had to walk about half a mile, I guess. Folks jumped up when I got there,
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Brenda J. Child
so I kinda surprised them. Well, you know what they told me? They says, “Well, we
lost your sister.” I says, “That’s what they told me.”18
Everwind’s devastated parents spoke about his sister’s courageous demeanor
on her deathbed, the story of which they related in detail when he returned
to Ponemah from boarding school. Even as an older man, Everwind remembered and still cherished Eliza’s last words, “Ma, don’t cry for me, when I
gone, don’t cry. I’ll be all right. I’m going to have a good time when I leave
here.” Eliza said the same thing to her father, “Don’t cry. Just go ahead and
bury me and I’ll go and have a good time. Don’t be sad because I am leaving.” Everwind said, “And then she turned and died, that was the last breath
she took.”
The year of his sister Eliza’s death, Everwind completed the program at
Tomah and decided to go on for further vocational training at the Wahpeton
School in North Dakota. He arrived at Wahpeton in the fall, just as the flu
epidemic of 1918 grew deadly and was breaking out in the government
school, and hundreds of students were violently ill. Everwind made the best
of his situation and ran the boiler house and power at Wahpeton while the
student body recovered, a time when every available hand was needed. His
attitude about the flu was, “If I’m going to get it, I’m going to get it anyway,”
though fortunately, said Everwind, “I never got it.” In his short life, Everwind
had experienced firsthand too much death, even before witnessing young
people dying in the flu epidemic of 1918. When he related this story as an
older man, he spoke firmly of going away to boarding school as his own decision. Everwind never complained once about learning English or his time
at school, but the vivid, some might say traumatic, memories of his boarding school years were permanently imprinted on his life. Alex Everwind was
highly respected in our community, and even as a young man was asked to
travel as part of the Red Lake 1919 delegation to Washington, DC, and in
later years he worked as a tribal judge. His boarding school narrative is at first
glance an ordinary story about one young Ojibwe man and his family’s internal struggles, but its greater significance may possibly be what it expresses
about the human suffering that complicated and further destabilized Ojibwe
and other Indian communities in these same years, when grief was a relentless presence.
Is the boarding school experience overly remembered? Is it remembered
at the expense of other significant events, tragedies, and practices of settler
colonialism that also dramatically shaped American Indian peoples’ lives?
Sadly, my tribe’s history has many examples of colonial intrusion, violence,
and death before and after the establishment of government boarding schools.
During the first years of the organization of new political entities in Ojibwe
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277
Country—Wisconsin and Minnesota—12 percent of Lake Superior Ojibwe
people died in an event sometimes called the “Sandy Lake Tragedy,” though
today it should be appropriately identified as ethnic cleansing. Minnesota
Territorial authorities trapped Ojibwe people hundreds of miles from home
in winter with the promise of annuity payments, leading to six weeks of
starvation when food and annuities failed to arrive. This was an immediately
devastating population loss, but also an episode with profound psychological
and economic consequences for the next generation of Ojibwe people. These
same events coincided with an era of treaty agreements that resulted in large
portions of our homeland being opened to new settlers.
When the United States passed the General Allotment Act of 1887 calling
for individual property ownership on reservations, a collection of circumstances opened the floodgates to land loss for Ojibwe and other American
Indians. Reservations including White Earth were plundered for land and
resources by timber companies and their allies in business and politics during
the boarding school and allotment era. Along with these challenges, Ojibwe
living in states including the newly established Wisconsin and Minnesota
were systematically harassed for over a century by citizens and local law
authorities when they exercised treaty rights by hunting, fishing, and gathering in their homelands. One Lake Superior leader, Joe White or Gishkitawag,
was clubbed and murdered by a game warden and deputy in Washburn
County, Wisconsin, in December 1894, after shooting a deer out of season,
and a local all-white jury found the two men innocent of all charges the following year. Ojibwes were frequently the victims of local law authorities bent
on Indian harassment and expulsion during this era, and in one notorious
1902 case the Mille Lacs County Sheriff forced Ojibwes off their lands near
Isle, Minnesota, marched the band members to a public highway, and set
their houses on fire. Many devastating episodes in Ojibwe history paralleled
the boarding school era.
Our problems and tribulations as Indian people did not end with the
decline of government boarding schools. My public talks about the history
of education present many opportunities for people to remember and to tell
their own stories. I have conducted workshops with Ojibwe elders from the
US and Canada, in addition to my regular work with college students. After I
concluded a presentation on a college campus about boarding school history,
an Ojibwe woman in the audience commented that her mother had been
forcibly sterilized in a reservation border town in Minnesota. At first glance,
boarding school history and the more recent history of forced sterilization
of Indian women, which has been documented as a practice of the Indian
Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s, are not necessarily intertwined,
unless viewed as part of a broader pattern of colonial violence.19 Clearly, this
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Ojibwe woman found a strong association between boarding school and
forced sterilization, since both were practices implicated in this kind of state
interference into Indian family life, especially in relation to the bearing or
rearing of children.
After many years of listening to Indian people respond in discussions
about boarding school and interpret that legacy for their own families and
communities, I am beginning to understand how insightfully Indian people
use boarding school as a metaphor. When Indian people talk about boarding
school, they are not always exclusively referring to the education for assimilation designed for them by colonizing nations. They tell other stories. At
times, they express discontent, frustration, or horror with a broader colonial
experience. This broader experience may comprise personal exploitation or
the state interference into family life, as in forced sterilization of women, or
a more widespread exploitation of tribal land or resources, in addition to
misguided educational efforts. Does all state interference into family life—
forced sterilization or placing Indian children in white foster homes—resonate as boarding school? Is this why tribal elders can simultaneously have
fond memories of Father Stan and support their local mission school’s activities, yet view boarding schools as the reason for epidemic social problems in
their communities today?
Has boarding school become an adaptable metaphor Indian people in
the United States use to describe and encapsulate many different forms of
colonialism and historical oppression? To recap and remember all the negative experiences is simply unfeasible in day to day life, and boarding school
may be the one encounter that is most allegorical of the deeper inequality of
power that characterized the relationship between Indians and the United
States government. Surely, boarding school is easier to name than the duplicitously layered assimilation campaign that unfolded in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century US, which manipulated federal and state policy to get
at Indian lands and resources, while stomping on tribal political and cultural
sovereignty. Indian history is never uncomplicated or simple, and boarding
school might be the best metaphor for the vast chain reaction of events that
worked against the well-being of American Indian families, communities,
and nations.
A Canadian scholar has observed that perhaps one-third of Native
Canadians attended residential schools, and yet the discourse about colonialism and violence seems focused on residential school history in recent
years.20 Similarly, not all Indian people in the United States attended government boarding school during the assimilation years, just as in Canada the
majority of students attended day schools on reservations. In my community
at Red Lake, also about one-third of the reservation population had spent
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time at one of the schools when a survey was conducted in the 1930s. Many
of the non–federally recognized Indian tribes in the US were never compelled
to send their children to boarding schools. Yet today, boarding school is the
institution singled out and remembered for the decline of Native languages
and other traditions.
My mother, Florence Auginash Child, attended a public school on the
Red Lake Reservation during the 1940s and 1950s that was located only
five miles from her home. Just as today, her generation of rural children was
bused to school. On school days she was immersed in English. For her, the
bus represented a transitional passage between home and school, where children still spoke Ojibwe. Once at school, she spoke English until the bus ride
home at the end of the day, when students resumed speaking the Ojibwe
language. Eugene Stillday, a Navy veteran of the Korean War, also from Red
Lake, described punishment for children like him and my mother, who were
caught speaking Ojibwe at the reservation public school. Public school education, on reservations and off, was as much an agent of language transformation as boarding school.
Every family affected by boarding school has their own story. I am the
granddaughter of Ojibwe people who were sent to Carlisle and Flandreau
during the prime years of cultural assimilation. Fortunately for us, Carlisle
and Flandreau have never been defining chapters in our larger family narrative, which is far more deeply intertwined with the cultural life and Ojibwe
landscape of northern Minnesota. We do still remember our great-grandfather
as a Carlisle athlete, one who played professional football in later years with
Jim Thorpe. He returned to his small village on the reservation to marry and
raise a family. He sent his own daughter, my grandmother Jeanette Auginash,
to the Flandreau boarding school. In our family she was a beloved figure,
and we all knew how critically important the Ojibwe language was to her.
Even though the Ojibwe man she married did not speak English, for her, a
bilingual boarding school graduate, speaking Ojibwe with her children was
a conscious decision. She raised her own children, including my mother, to
always speak the Ojibwe language at home, even though she was well aware
it would not be part of their school days. My own research into the history of
boarding school education, which began with her, taught me about my own
family and community’s history, but also about the larger narrative of the
persistence of Indian people and their ways of life.
When I was researching in the archives one day, I came across a powerful
story of Ojibwe people from the small village at Ponemah on Red Lake who
forcefully resisted the introduction of a new school in their midst in 1900.
We have many relatives from Ponemah, and I like to think that some of them
participated in these events. This community’s determined and swift reaction
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to the establishment of a reservation boarding school in their midst, known
as the Crosslake Boarding School, was shocking to government authorities
at the time. On July 11, 1900, the government overseer stationed on the
Red Lake Reservation telegraphed an alarming message to his supervisor,
William Mercer, Acting Indian Agent and Captain in the 7th Cavalry, who
was stationed about seventy miles away at the Leech Lake Agency. The sparse
telegram read, “Come at once, serious outlook ahead.”
The school site is located on the south shore of the peninsula which extends westward from the main land and nearly divides upper and lower Red Lake. This peninsula, as may be seen from a glance at the map of Red Lake Reservation, is quite
an extensive bit of territory, and is isolated from the rest of the reservation, and
is occupied by a band of unprogressive, pagan Indians, who desire nothing more
than to be separated, both from the other Indians and from the white people. They
have never had any discipline and never recognized any authority, refuse to sign all
treaties and to take payments, have declared they would never permit schools, missionary buildings, or the advent of improvements of any kind on what they consider
their territory, which is the peninsula described above.21
Workmen had recently arrived in the Ojibwe village “on what they consider
their territory” to begin the construction of a new on-reservation government
boarding school. The agent in charge warily described the independent spirit
of Ponemah residents, “their refusal to recognize any authority,” and the position of sovereignty from which they countered this colonial intrusion. When
Ponemah residents took a stand, an armed stand, against the establishment
of a new school, they defended their right to control the education of their
own children on their own homeland—a determination they had never once
considered was not theirs to make. US government officials interpreted their
intervention as a rebellion. After a great deal of dialogue with the people of
Ponemah and concessions from US representatives, the school was eventually built.
I continue to be inspired by all forms of rebellion—the students in boarding school who would not bend to the will of administrators and the scores
of resilient parents who insisted on remaining parents, staying in touch with
their children who lived hundreds of miles from home. We as Indian people,
who share a common experience with colonial education, must also remember the resistance of our ancestors that came in the form of tribal communities actively refusing to go along with Western education, including the Hopi
men imprisoned at Alcatraz or the Iowa tribe of northeastern Kansas who
harbored boarding school runaways from Haskell. Most Indian people, like
the villagers at Ponemah, eventually sent their children to boarding schools
or public schools, or allowed for schools in their communities, and often did
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so on their own terms. Differences will continue to exist between how scholars write about boarding school history and how American Indian people
remember that experience, which is a tension between history and memory.
It makes sense to implicate boarding schools. Boarding school has become
the most tangible symbol of the widespread turmoil that sprang from the
allotment and assimilation era; for some indigenous people boarding school
may be the “mnemonic benchmark,” or even an “aboriginal Auschwitz.”
Native people today are overwhelmed by the array of social problems in their
urban and reservation communities—alcoholism, unemployment, low test
scores, high drop-out rates, and family violence. In their own family lineages,
they recognize how these problems are attended by cultural losses such as
the decline of speaking Native languages and indigenous spiritual practices.
Indian people understand that the reasons social problems disproportionately appear in our communities reside somewhere in our troubled historical
experiences with American settler colonialism, which devoured our land and
resources with the greed of a Windigo.22 Until a better day, boarding school
is with us.
Boarding school history, like all of American Indian history, is also about
agency, resistance, survival, and the sometimes heroic actions of people both
young and adult who had lost significant freedoms. Without that, as Basil
Johnston suggests, there is no story. As a historian and an Ojibwe person, I
am dedicated to learning more about the multiple experiences and diverse
perspectives of indigenous people throughout the history of Indian education
in the United States. I also know that boarding school is not the only window
from which to view our colonial past or present. Scholars tell us that history
and memory are both part of a changing landscape—that historians and all
the rest of us can be selective about how we remember, even though historians have the privilege of publishing books. For many important reasons,
some that historians might find to agree or disagree, the boarding school era
continues to hold great meaning for Indian people today. Boarding school
history offers a plausible explanation for how and why colonialism has been
destructive to American Indian community life, with the resulting losses to
tradition and especially to the Native languages of North America.
On a visit to central Michigan recently, I drove past the campus of the
former Mount Pleasant Indian School, which had educated the children of
dispossessed and impoverished Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi people
for fifty years before closing in 1933. Today the school is a state historic
landmark and, as luck would have it, the style of architecture is described
as “Colonial Revival.” The campus was built on land confiscated from the
Ojibwe and unsympathetically sited directly over their traditional burial
grounds. The shade trees that one superintendent, in 1902, remarked on the
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planting of now tower along the perimeter of boarded brick buildings. Just
across town, the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe operates a beautiful new cultural
center and museum that interprets the history of the boarding school, in
addition to their very successful casino and hotel. Asked to tell something
of his experience at the Mount Pleasant School, a former student recollected
in one exhibit, “If it wasn’t for this school, I would’ve starved to death,” and
so the contradictions that make up the history of Indian boarding schools
persist. If boarding school is the best way Indian people have to sum up
the complexities of colonial encounters, surely the architecture of boarding
school is also our best monument to the history of colonial cruelty and dispossession, but one with the power to educate us about Indian survival, both
past and present.
Notes
Epigraphs: Ingrid Washinawatok-El Issa, Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony
of Native American Women, 48; Diane Wilson, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life, 133; Michael G.
Kenny, “A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History,” 436.
1. Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940.
2. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School
Experience, 1875–1928; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco
Indian School.
3. Basil Johnston, Indian School Days.
4. Exposing residential school violence and pedophile rings has been a significant part of the
testimony of former students. See Celia Haig-Brown, Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian
Residential School; Milloy, “A National Crime”: The Canadian Government and the Residential School
System, 1879 to 1986.
5. See “Breaking the Silence: An Interpretive Study of Residential School Impact and Healing
as Illustrated by the Stories of First Nation Individuals.”
6. See Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and
Reconciliation in Canada.
7. Kevin Annett has authored two books, produced a documentary film, Unrepentant: Kevin
Annett and Canada’s Genocide, and hosts a radio show to publicize his claims of mass child murders
in postwar Canadian residential schools.
8. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart-Jordan has numerous articles dealing with historical trauma, including M. Y. H. Brave Heart-Jordan and Lemyra DeBruyn, “So She May Walk in
Balance: Integrating the Impact of Historical Trauma in the Treatment of Native American Indian
Women,” 345–368; M. Y. H. Brave Heart-Jordan and Lemyra DeBruyn, “The American Indian
Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief”; Brave Heart-Jordan, “Gender Differences in the
Historical Trauma Response among the Lakota,” 1–21; Brave Heart-Jordan, “The Historical Trauma
Response among Natives and Its Relationship with Substance Abuse: A Lakota Illustration,” 7–13.
9. Thomas Peacock and Marlene Wisuri, Ojibwe Waasa Inaabidaa: We Look in All Directions,
81.
10. Joseph P. Gone, “Reconsidering American Indian Historical Trauma: Lessons from an
Early Gros Ventre War Narrative.”
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11. Wilson, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life, 35.
12. Wilson, 6.
13. George Morrison as told to Margot Fortunato Galt, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in
Art, 37–38.
14. The superintendent was Bryon Brophy; see Child, Boarding School Seasons: American
Indian Families, 1900–1940.
15. Peter Razor, While the Locust Slept: A Memoir.
16. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, Records of the Flandreau Indian School,
Parent Letter, 1924.
17. Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.
18. Everwind was interviewed at Red Lake and his record is part of the Doris Duke Oral
History Collection. A copy of his transcript is in the Red Lake Tribal Archives.
19. A classic review essay is Rayna Green, “Native American Women”; see also Jane
Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women.”
20. Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and
Reconciliation in Canada.
21. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, Records of the Leech Lake Agency, The
Crosslake Boarding School, July 1900.
22. In Ojibwe traditions of storytelling the Windigo is a cannibal, and used to symbolize
insatiability and greed.
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