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 Elena.

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/.

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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 grand-mother 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 contempo-rary ideas about race and progressive education. While scholarly studies have espoused resistance and resilience in the historical record of students who

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survived an assimilationist education, boarding school is increasingly con-ceptualized 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 sex-ual violence, and other social dysfunction.

It is not necessarily the job of the historian to explain how Indian peo-ple 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 geno-cidal. 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 every-day 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, osten-sibly rendering them powerless. The introduction of boarding schools coin-cided 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 experi-ence. 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 fami-lies 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 alien-ation from the people and schools that educated their children.

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 perse-verance, 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 girl-hood in the 1920s, and returned home afterward to re-embrace her culture, language, and community. She and other students, most of whom I encoun-tered 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 board-ing 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 back-grounds. 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 some-times 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 resi-dential 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

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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 sev-eral 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 his-tory. 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 gov-ernment, 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 inves-tigation 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 hold-ings 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

educators found little resistance to their idea for Indian integration into pub-lic 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 impover-ished 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 con-tinued 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 twenti-eth 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 con-ditions 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 par-ent children.”9 Psychologist Joseph Gone has observed the trend of “increas-ingly 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 psy-chosocial disability resulting from massive group-based oppression, such as forced relocation, political subjugation, cultural domination, and genocide,”

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yet he questions the lack of nuance within the historical trauma construct, while acknowledging the very real problem of “enduring mental health dis-parities” 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 contempo-rary 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 chil-dren 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 cen-tury. 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, alco-holism, 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 twen-tieth 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 weath-ering these years with great difficulty. There is not a strong historical memory of the notion that Indian people themselves repeatedly sought out govern-ment 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 board-ing 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 pub-lic schools. Morrison entered Hayward at the age of nine, and later wrote of his experience.

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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 govern-ment 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 remem-bered, “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 contin-ued 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

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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 com-mentary on the violence of his institution, where he remembered all non-white 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 mis-erable 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 com-pelling explanation for contemporary social ills so at odds with Indian val-ues. 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 fami-lies, 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 assimila-tion 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 histo-ries indicate there were countless students who not only survived, but flour-ished 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 experi-ences. 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 incorpo-rated 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 mem-ories of Father Stan. How do we remember the legacy of all of these board-ing 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, com-munities, 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

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intruded on tribal sovereignty, and in federally issued orders, Indians con-tended with religious discrimination and the suppression of their spiritual practices and other traditions. Even with the decline of assimilation, prob-lems 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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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 remem-bered 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 leav-ing.” 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 deci-sion. Everwind never complained once about learning English or his time at school, but the vivid, some might say traumatic, memories of his board-ing 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 inter-nal 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 relent-less 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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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 circum-stances 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 gather-ing 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 fol-lowing 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 assimi-lation 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—reso-nate as boarding school? Is this why tribal elders can simultaneously have fond memories of Father Stan and support their local mission school’s activi-ties, 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 nega-tive 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 duplici-tously 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 colo-nialism and violence seems focused on residential school history in recent years.20 Similarly, not all Indian people in the United States attended govern-ment 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 chil-dren 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 edu-cation, on reservations and off, was as much an agent of language transforma-tion 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 narra-tive, 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 west-ward from the main land and nearly divides upper and lower Red Lake. This pen-insula, 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, mis-sionary 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 posi-tion 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 eventu-ally built.

I continue to be inspired by all forms of rebellion—the students in board-ing 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 remem-ber the resistance of our ancestors that came in the form of tribal communi-ties 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 schol-ars 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 disproportion-ately 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 histo-rians 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 dis-possession, 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 histori-cal 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.