Complicating Boarding School History

This week University of Minnesota professor Brenda Child shares more of those boarding schools' history and explains what it would take for a full reckoning with their legacy. Feven Gerezgiher reports-[LOON SOUNDER]This is Minnesota Native News. I'm Marie Rock.The U.S. Department of Interior recently released a report surveying the impact of the federalindian boarding school system over 150 years.This week...University of Minnesota professor Brenda Child shares more of those boardingschools' history…and explains what it would take for a full reckoning with their legacy.Feven Gerezgiher reports.[MUSIC]In May of 2022, Assistant Secretary of the Interior (for Indian Affairs) Bryan Newland reportedfindings that confirmed the U.S. targeted American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiianchildren with the federal boarding school system.To learn more, we turn to a noted historian for their perspective.My name is Brenda Child. I am Red Lake Ojibwe, and I'm a professor of American Studies andAmerican Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.The report looked at federally supported boarding schools over a wide time frame, from 1819 to1969. Child said within that time frame were several different eras of boarding school policy withdifferent motivations.I always looked at that 50 year period, up into from Carlisle to FDR, as being the half centurywhen the boarding school policy dominated in the United States. But it was also the same erathat the allotment policy dominated policymaking in the US. So you have to look at these twosystems as going hand in hand with one another.Child said the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania - which was the first government-run boardingschool and a template for others to come - was formed during the Indian Wars, and prisoners ofwar were among its first students.The idea had kind of taken hold among policy makers - I mean, this is the underlying objectiveof boarding schools - is that Native people aren't going to really need a homeland anymore,right? They're going to enter the mainstream. They're going to become citizens of the UnitedStates. They're going to speak English. My grandmother was trained as a domestic servant andso they're going to have great jobs like that. And they're not going to need to live as tribal peoplein their tribal communities. And so the idea was to kind of separate Native children from theirfamilies.Child said that changed in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. For her book BoardingSchool Season, she examined first-hand narratives from children, parents, and school officials.While many American Indian students began attending public schools under the Rooseveltadministration, Child remarked that families insisted some boarding school remain… as a formof poverty relief.I would say the number one reason Indian children ended up in boarding school was death of amother. And so you see that sometimes the networks on reservations or in our communitieswere kind of collapsing in this era of high rates of tuberculosis and other disease, poverty,dispossession, that a child might go to an auntie or go to several homes within the family beforethey were sent to a government boarding school. And in the 1930s, people were making somepretty desperate decisions for the survival of their children.At the same time, (Child said) many children died from diseases at the boarding schools. Thereport gave initial counts of 53 different schools with marked and unmarked burial sites.Thinking towards accountability and what people can do to address this history, Child saidreconciliation must come in real estate.….It's a very concrete way of recognizing the real damage that was done to Indian people at thetime. You know, there's nothing we can do to kind of go back in time. There’s nothing we can doabout, you know, I'm not looking myself for apologies, that doesn't go far enough. For me, I thinkwe need to talk to tribes about what they have lost in the boarding school era that could still bereturned to them.For more information on boarding school history, Child recommends the “Away from Home”exhibit at the Heard Museum in Arizona, as well as reading American Indian memoirs, likeCharles Eastman’s biography From The Deep Woods to Civilization.For Minnesota Native News, I'm Feven Gerezgiher.(Marie recorded funder credits)[LOON SOUNDER]