The difficult story of Indian Boarding Schools

Administration Building of the now defunct Pipestone Indian School

A friend of mine, who is Navajo, told me about an old army buddy--make that Marines--who, as a boy, attended a long-gone Native American boarding school in nearby Pipestone, Minnesota. This Marine so resented his treatment there that he simply could not find it within himself to repeat the name of the town, even though the school itself was just a short walk from one of the most sacred of Native places on the continent. 

As a white man, I found it difficult to believe that traditional farm folks of the upper Midwest, good Minnesota Lutherans and Catholics, could be as evil as the extent of the man's horrors suggested--good, God-fearing people? Besides, often as not, those in charge of residential Indian schools were coming in the name of the Lord. 

For me, a white man, raised in a devout Christian culture, it was altogether too easy to be skeptical of this Marine's story, but then that story came to me before I knew much about the Dakota War of 1862, which turned new white settlers in the region--no matter what their countries of origin or religious affiliation--into true Indian haters, more than willing to run every last Indian off the land.

What's more, the literature is full of stories, horrible stories of abuse--physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, levels of abuse that require generations of time to supplant. Just down the road in Canton, South Dakota, an asylum for Native people ruled insane by white authorities often ignorant of neighborhood Native cultures left a track record that is an abomination. 

Just a few years ago, via ground-penetrating radar, Indiginous Canadians discovered a mass burial site of over 200 children, all of whom died at Kamloops, the biggest boarding school in British Columbia, a discovery that triggered an outpouring of stories, long suppressed, and a nation-wide attempt to unearth the truth about those schools via truth and reconciliation ceremonies and events.   

I don't know what went on at the boarding school at Pipestone, but today it's impossible to even believe that Marine's memories are fabrication. Too much abhorrence has long ago been documented.

Can anything be said for the hundreds of residential boarding schools that once operated across the land? Were they all and always dens of terror and revulsion? The answer to that question is, today, always yes and no--yes, because it's impossible to understand the legacy of 19th century colonialism in America as anything less than a dispicable movement. A mass of broken treaties testify to the sheer blasphemy of Manifest Destiny, the determination that somehow all of this land was not only new land, but it was also our land, our meaning white Europeans.

The madness of successive gold rushes out west pushed thousands into lands once the domain of Native people, pushed colonizers in and residents out. The dream of land ownership brought millions to this country, millions who, like Charles Ingalls, kept moving west, looking for cheaper land that would support a growing family. That truth makes all residential schools institutions of oppression, and we put students into them.

Was that all evil, or just wrong-headed? Really, were all the personnel of those schools oppressors? beasts? bigots? 

And what do we make of Jim Thorpe, a graduate of the model Indian school of the 19th century, Carlisle, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Thorpe won America's first Olympic golds back in 1914, played professional baseball, basketball, and football, and was an American hero. Had he stayed on the reservation in Oklahoma, had he determined not to go to school, he would not have attained what he did? Was his schooling at Carlisle a good thing? 

But even if it was, do his unusual successes somehow obviate the horrors inflicted on hundreds of thousands of others?

There are tough questions and answers are hard to come by, but I'd like to stay here for some time. I hope you'll stay with me.