Janine Pease outlines the mission of the St. Labre Boarding School Investigation Commission in Billings on June 28, 2023.
An independent commission of educators and researchers has outlined a plan to search for any children whose deaths at Indian boarding schools in Montana may have been forgotten.
The St. Labre Boarding School Investigation Commission, chaired by the former president of Little Big Horn College on the Crow Reservation Janine Pease, has been tasked with documenting any unmarked or undocumented graves at three boarding schools that housed Crow and Northern Cheyenne children for decades: St. Charles Mission School, St. Xavier Mission School and St. Labre Indian School.
“It’s important for us to respect the lives of our children and the experiences they had in boarding schools," Pease said during a presentation from the commission in Billings.
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St. Labre Board Member Matthew Redinger during a press conference at the Double Tree on Wednesday to announce an investigative effort to study St. Labre's past as an Indian Boarding school.
“So much of the history that’s been written about American Indians rests on the shoulders of male historians who tend to study the experiences of men, warriors and leaders, and so to look at the lives of children is a very important endeavor and privilege,” she said.
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Starting as early as 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act, the U.S. government campaigned to assimilate Indigenous peoples. Indian boarding schools administered by federal and religious authorities were a tool in that campaign. At their peak, according to recent academic research, hundreds of such schools dotted the country. It was the policy of many of these schools to impose European names on incoming children, cut their hair and forbid them from speaking their tribal languages. Coupled with strict assimilation policies, according to research from the U.S. Department of the Interior, were chronic cases of corporal punishment and sexual abuse afflicting children at the boarding schools.
A national reckoning with Indian boarding schools followed the revelation of unmarked graves of Native American children at former institutions in Canada and the United States. In 2021, the remains of 215 children were found on the campus of what was the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. Some were as young as 3 years old. The U.S. DOI identified 53 burial sites at schools in the United States, and reported that more than 500 children died while in the custody of the schools.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a former Indian boarding school at what is now U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, alone saw more than 10,000 Indigenous children assigned there from 1879 to 1918. At least 186 children died at Carlisle during that time, the Gazette previously reported. Pease, an enrolled member of the Crow Tribe with a doctorate in education, identified three of those children as fellow tribal members.
In Montana, the DOI named more than a dozen Indian boarding schools. Those included the still operating schools of St. Labre in Ashland, St. Charles in Pryor and St. Xavier, now known as Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy, in St. Xavier. Of the three, only St. Labre still functions as a boarding school, with students able to stay on campus in dormitories through the school week.
In light of the news out of Kamloops, the St. Labre Indian School Educational Association chartered an independent commission to review and report the history of all three campuses overseen by the association and find any and all children whose lives may have ended there. The commission was formed in May 2022.
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St. Labre Board Member and former President of Chief Dull Knife College Richard Littlebear speaks during a press conference at the Double Tree on Wednesday to announce an investigative effort to study St. Labre's past as an Indian Boarding school.
Richard Littlebear, a commission member who also holds a doctorate in education and recently retired as the president of Chief Dull Knife College on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, attended a boarding school while growing up in Busby. The Northern Cheyenne man said he joined the commission wanting to learn how his own experiences fit into the larger story of Indian boarding schools. For many families, he said, their education was a traumatic experience and he hopes the commission’s findings might be able to bring closure to some of the families sharing that trauma.
Other commission members include Anda Pretty On Top, a Crow woman with more than 30 years of experience as an educator, and Matthew Redinger, a former professor at Montana State University Billings with a PhD in history. Pretty On Top and Redinger are members of the St. Labre Board of Directors. Also joining the commission is Walter Fleming, the current head of the Department of Native American Studies at Montana State University.
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St. Labre Board Member Anda Pretty On Top speaks during a press conference at the Double Tree on Wednesday to announce an investigative effort to study St. Labre's past as an Indian Boarding school.
To answer the question of if there are any children whose deaths at the three campuses went unreported, Pease said the commission will take three steps. The first is wading into the flood of documents available. Those include records containing attendance and health information, Redinger said, along with any documents maintained by the religious organizations that oversaw the schools. All three schools date back to the late 1800s.
“The Catholic priests and nuns who ran these schools were famous for their record keeping in terms of making note of every occurrence that happened at schools,” he said.
To assist in piecing together documents from archives maintained in Montana and as far away as Washington D.C., Redinger said the commission has retained Historical Research Associates, a private firm based out of Missoula to conduct nationwide research.
The second step for the commission, Pease said, will be to hold listening sessions for tribal members on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations to share their memories of Indian boarding schools. Those oral histories, she said, offer a glimpse into the past that may be lost in official documentation. Pease’s great-uncle died while attending a boarding school in Crow Agency in 1903. During her own research, Pease couldn’t find any mention of Benny for that entire year.
“We know that there could be times when these stories have never been shared outside the confines of their own family dining room, or maybe it’s never been shared at all, so we’re planning to give that the utmost respect,” Pease said.
The commission’s final step will be combining the oral histories with the archival research in a report to the St. Labre Board of Directors. Although there is nothing to indicate at this point that there are any unmarked graves at the St. Labre campuses, Pease said the commission is prepared to invest in tools such as ground penetrating radar should its research prove otherwise.
The listening sessions will begin July 10 on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The commission is asking that only tribal members with information to share attend. The place and time of each listening session is as follows:
- Blessed Sacrament Church, Lame Deer: July 10 9:00 a.m.
- Christ the King Catholic Church, Busby: July 10 1:00 p.m.
- St. Labre Auditorium, Ashland: July 10 5:30 p.m.
- St. Dennis Meeting Hall, Crow Agency: July 11 9:00 a.m.
- Our Lady of Loretto Catholic Church, Lodge Grass: July 11 1:00 p.m.
- Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy Cafeteria, St. Xavier: July 11 5:00 p.m.
- St. Charles Mission School Cafeteria, Pryor: July 12 10:00 a.m.