Annie Todd|Sioux Falls Argus Leader
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Phyllis White Shield was cold. The itchy Army-issued blanket wrapped around her was too thin and the frigid air creepinginto the boarding school dormitory wasn’t the same cold like the mornings back home, when the wood-fire stove would go out and her grandmother hadn’t thrown a fresh log in yet.
As she lay wrapped up in the blanket and listening to the nighttime lullaby of girls crying, all she wanted was her comfortat home.
“I have so many blankets, because I want people to be warm,” a now adult White Shield told the crowd of people gathered at the Sinte Gleska University Multicultural Center in Mission, South Dakota, last week to remember their experiences at Native American boarding schools.
Althoughdecades have passed since White Shield attendedboarding school, she and othersat the ceremony could relate to what generations before them had gone through at these assimilationcenters.
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“All of us know what their pain was,” she said. “It’s all the historical trauma we have carried on for generation and generation and generation. It’s a historical trauma we pass on to the young t'akojá [grandchildren] and they carry that trauma. Our young people need to know what that is.”
After the return of the remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children in mid-July from the former Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School, the sordid history of Native American boarding schools is being confronted, by those who experienced boarding school and their children.
That includes South Dakota.
A federal investigation has been created to look into the abuse and human rights violations indigenous children endured at these schools. At least 20boarding schools in South Dakota were established between the 19th and 20th century, meaning the investigation will take place in the state's backyard.
It's unclear what may be found on the grounds of the former schools, but indigenous people hope what is known as "America's best kept secret," will come to light and their history will finally be taken seriously.
What were the Indian Boarding Schools?
The first Indian Boarding Schools were set up in the mid-1800s as part of Christian mission schools. The schools were in operation for over 100 years until the last one closed in 1978.
By 1926, 83% of indigenous school-age children were in boarding school, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The first government-run Indian School, the Carlisle Industrial Indian School, was set up in 1889 and ran until 1918. It set the standard for the future government-run schools.
The school’s founder Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt's belief was to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Young children were forced to assimilate to white culture, meaning their hair was cut, they stopped speaking their languages andpracticingtheir religionand they had to adopt English and Christianity.
Studentscaught breaking the rules was severely punished, from beatings and solitary confinement to sexual assault.
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More than 180 students died at Carlisle during its operation. Many are buried there today, even after their families requested their remains. The Sioux children brought back from Carlisle were the fourth repatriation of remains since 2017.
It’s unknown how many boarding schools there were in the United States in the 110-year periodbecause the government didn’t keep strict records. But historians have found at least 360 schools in 30 states.
Denise Lajimodiere, a retired education professor at North Dakota State University, has spent the last 12 years compiling a list of boarding schools, including the ones run by the government and those run by churches.
“It's very tedious,” she said, about the process of going through digitized government records that mention the schools. “You have to be extremely patient.”
Part of the difficulty is how often boarding schools would change their name. Some of the schools, Lajimodiere said, would say they were industrial schools, farming schools, mission schools and agency schools, when in fact they were just boarding schools.
Even today, certain boarding schools still exist although they are run through either the Bureau of Indian Affairs or private institutions.
Lajimodiere was also inspired in part because of her parents’ experience at boarding school. Her father had been sent to an Oregon boarding schooland her mother attended the Catholic Boarding School on the Crow Creek Reservation in Stephan, South Dakota.
Lajimodiere said her father was raised by an older couple who hid him out of sightuntil he was 9-years-old.
“They didn’t want to send him off to school,” she said.
Why now?
In late May and early June, nearly 1,000 unmarked graves of First Nation children were found in Canada. The bodies, found on the grounds of former boarding schools, set off an international reckoning.
“It's not a surprise or a shock. We always knew these kids were there by these boarding schools,” Lajimodiere said. “It took our Canadian relatives, our First Nation relatives, to start making people nationally aware of what's happening here in the United States.”
As a result, Secretary of the Interior Department, Deb Haaland, announced in June a year-and-a-half long investigation into the history of U.S. Indian boarding schools. The goal of the investigation is to locate boarding schools sites, potential unmarked graves and identify the children in those graves.
Older people attending the ceremonies for the nine Rosebud children returned to the Rosebud Sioux reservation in mid-July spoke about their own experiences at boarding schools, and the lengths that their parents went to keep their children out of the schools.
Samantha Dion’s grandmother would tell her stories of when the white men came to take the children away to boarding school, the women would hide the children in the folds of their skirts.
“For my family, personally, not one of us were ever put to boarding school or not even allowed to ask about it,” said Dion, 45, a member of the Yankton Sioux people. “I, myself, am still like that with my kids.”
Instead, Dion sent her children to the public school on the reservation and her grandson will go to public school as well.
Where do we go from here?
There’s hope that with the return of the Rosebud children and the Interior Department investigation, more Americans will now know what happened to indigenous children at boarding schools.
Rose Lamoureaux, 21, a member of the Rosebud Sioux,is a mix of emotions when it comes to thinking about the future. She says it’s hard not to be angry about the children who were taken from their families and died in boarding schools. But she’s also excited people are actually listening.
Lamoureaux's ancestor Maud Little Girl Swift Bear was one of the nine children returned to the Rosebud reservation and buried last week.
“They’re starting to believe the things we’ve been saying for generations that happened to our relatives are actual things that happened,” she said. “The people who led the schools and the government did everything they could to twist the story and make it sound like they were the good guys in the situation.”
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Christopher Eagle Bear, 23 and a member of the Sicangu Youth Group responsible for bringing back the children from Carlisle, says he hopes what his group did will inspire other youth groups across Indian Country to get their relatives back.
“We want to empower the next generations to come to do the battles the generations before us chose not to do,” Eagle Bear said.
He also doesn’t doubt that many of the sites of former boarding schools have mass unknown graves on them and the pain that that will bring. But, it’s also time for history to be reconciled, he said.
“I kind of feel that as a Lakota people our history is just as important asAmerican history,” Eagle Bear said.
