The Boarding School
Last Thursday, we visited the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe reservation in northern Wisconsin.
Our museum partner in the grant, Chippewa Valley Museum in Eau Claire, had copies of an industrial survey done there in the early 1920s that the Fellows had studied. While little of these buildings remain, the pictures of the buildings and the sometimes vividly biased brief descriptions of families and occupations that accompanied the photographs provided a cross section in time upon which we could build.
The people at the George W. Brown Historical Museum were remarkably helpful in working out the details of our visit. In particular the director suggested that we get the tribal preservation officer, Kelly Jackson-Golly, to guide us in a tour of the reservation.
A little over halfway through that tour we got to the boarding school.
It closed in 1932, so it’s hardly surprising that there is not much left. A storage building and, in this picture, the boy’s dormitory.
Elders still remember the sounds of crying homesick children through those windows. The kids were homesick because they were rarely locals. Most Lac du Flambeau children were shipped elsewhere. Other Indians heard them cry.
Boarding Schools were not utterly evil. When sympathetic people were in the schools—and that happened on rare occasion—the situation was much less harsh. Some of the skills taught were useful and did help the graduates. The company of many more people of the same age also made for some pleasant memories.
And usually there was enough food.
It was the goal of destroying a culture regardless of the heartbreak and the deceit in the way children often were recruited that make them a devastating part of tribal history. The boarding schools are the nasty flip side of a belief that education can instill virtue: that is the belief that unflinching indoctrination can reshape culture.
Of course I’ve known about this for years. Heck, I’ve taught it.
And yet, somehow it had never entered my emotions until last Thursday. It did not enter my gut until I looked at the building, heard that the cries of the children were still within living memory, and watched Ms. Jackson-Golly state, with only a light hint of anger, that this building and what it stood for was why she could not speak Anishinaabe. Only at that moment did I truly realize just how deeply these schools slashed through the guts of a people and their ways.
Some of the tribal members would like the building torn down, but the people I was dealing with have convinced them that it should remain and even be restored. If their plans come to fruition—they are still raising money—the old boarding school would be a reminder of that past and a monument to the tribe’s endurance.