Boarding Schools

This lowly place is what's left of the Pipestone Indian School, once a boarding school for lots of Yanktons and Ojibwa from the area. That man walking up to the front is Ted Charles, an old friend, a Navajo, who had a close, close friend who couldn't bear to say the word "pipestone" because, or so he told Ted, of what had happened to him there at boarding school.

Others had other reactions. I've got a book on the shelf behind me written by a man, a Native American, whose rendition of his school years at Pipestone Indian School takes great joy in childish pranks and all kinds of mischievousness, something akin to almost any middle-school kid today or yesterday.

These days, of course, boarding schools such as this one have impossibly horrible reputations, which they've earned because their most righteous acts were still impossibly foul. Boarding schools were aimed precisely at cultural genocide, at destroying Native cultures. They created devastating effects. 

Consider this man, Plenty Horses, a Lakota from Pine Ridge, who spent five years at Carlisle School, then returned home to South Dakota in late 1890 and was swept up in the Ghost Dance that preceded the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the skirmishes that flourished on the reservation in its wake. 

 On January 7, 1891, eight days after the slaughter, Plenty Horses took sure aim at Lt. Edward Casey as Casey walked back to his horse after an hour-long talk and shot him through the back of the head, the last white soldier to die in the Sioux Indian wars.

“I was an outcast,” Plenty Horses told people later. “I was no longer an Indian.” His seemingly cold-blooded murder of Lt. Casey, a story grippingly told by Roger L. Di Silvestro in In the Shadow of Wounded Knee, can and often is at least partially explained by the identity problems Plenty Horses faced back home in Pine Ridge. After all, shooting a man in the back of the head would not have given him standing, traditionally, as a warrior among his own his own people. “In the world of his own culture,” Di Silvestro says, “Plenty Horses had lost his way, and in his attempt to win a place for himself there, he had blundered."

Simply stated, the boarding school movement in American Indian education collapsed upon its own brash and racist foundation when, clearly, its mission was not met: the vast majority of students didn’t “assimilate” with either the dominant white culture, nor the Native world, the reservation system, into which they’d been born.

The entire boarding school movement was a means to an end—a way of dealing with the devastation which occurred when millions of white people determined the North American continent was empty land, there—and theirs—for the taking. The bloody and shocking depredations which occurred along famous overland routes during the 19th century occurred because white people wanted Native land, and took it.

As reprehensible as that idea might seem to white people today—it seemingly didn’t bother us much then—what is painfully clear a century later is that, in taking their land, white people also took away their culture, which is to say their way of life.