Back in September, we posted about the effort to bring two Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota children's bodies from the cemetery near the Carlisle Indian School in Video: Return of Our Sisseton-Wahpeton Children.
It's just one part of the legacy of the boarding schools.
Now we read about another chapter in the trauma in the upper Midwest in the Pipestone County Star story, Researching the Pipestone Indian School cemetery.
This episode strikes us as particularly heartbreaking because we have Dakota friends who extract pipestone from at the Pipestone National Monument for cultural use.
Kyle Kuphal reports for the Star:
Efforts are underway to learn more about a cemetery on what is now Pipestone National Monument land that was used for students of the Pipestone Indian School.
“Unfortunately, there’s not a lot that we do know,” said Pipestone National Monument Superintendent Lauren Blacik. “We believe that there’s a small cemetery located within the Monument that was in use from 1896 until about 1904. We don’t have its exact location. We have an idea of its location from a monument that was built by members of the CCC Indian Division later in the 1930s, and that marker was removed sometime between 1950 and 1963. We don’t know why.”
The marker, which was located in a part of Pipestone National Monument that is not open to the public, was inscribed with the words “Peace For Ever,” according to the book “The Blood of the People,” by Theodore Catton and Diane L. Krahe. Blacik said the marker was interpreted in various ways, so it’s not completely clear if it indicated the location of the cemetery.
“Whether it was constructed or intended specifically for the boarding school students or whether it was a more general marker, we don’t know a lot about it,” she said.
Blacik said the site was surveyed in 1998 using magnetic imaging and no signs of burials were found at that time. However, she said there is better technology available today and different methods could be used that could yield different results.
Wherever the cemetery is, Blacik said not much is known about the individuals who might be buried there.
According to “The Blood of the People,” the cemetery was used for children who died at the school and did not have family to claim their remains. Blacik said it is believed that the bodies of students who died at the school after 1904 were either sent to their homes or buried at Woodlawn Cemetery.
According to the book, as many as nine people might have been buried in the cemetery. Only three of them were identified in the book based on obituaries published in the Pipestone County Star.
The first was a 12-year-old girl named Annie Tappinnatis, who died in 1896 from tuberculosis. The second was an 11-year-old girl named Mabel Campbell, who died of tuberculosis in 1897. The third was a 7-year-old girl named Florence Resler, who died of pneumonia in 1903. Blacik said the tribal affiliation of the girls was not listed and is not known.
She said others who might have been buried at the cemetery could include additional children or adults who were associated with the school, which was in operation from 1893 to 1953.
Efforts to learn more
Pipestone National Monument has partnered with the Pipestone Human Rights Commission and the American Indian Movement (AIM) to start researching the cemetery and look into the records of the Pipestone Indian School to learn more about the children who were at the school and, specifically, those who died there and what happened to them.
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is also looking into Indian boarding school cemeteries nationwide. According to the DOI, the discovery of unmarked graves at Indian schools in Canada earlier this year prompted it to take on the initiative “with the goal of shedding light on these past traumas.”
In June, Secretary Deb Haaland announced the Federal Boarding School Initiative directing the Department, under the supervision of Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, to prepare a report detailing available historical records, with an emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites, relating to the federal boarding school program in preparation for future action. . . .
According to the DOI, beginning with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the United States enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the country to culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their cultural identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities.
Blacik said the Pipestone Indian School cemetery is a product of the policies that created the boarding schools. . . .
Read the rest at the Pipestone County Star.
Our romantic partner, a citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, heard stories about his father's experience at boarding schools while his dad was teaching him the Dakota language "educators" once tried to beat out of him. His aunt died at age nine at the school she attended; the family did get her body back, though there was no investigation of the circumstances of her death.
It's time to find and bring home all the relatives lost to this genocidal experiment.
Photo: Students at the Pipestone Indian School gather around a bus at the school. An effort is underway to learn more about the students who attended the school, particularly those who died while there and what happened to them. Source: Pipestone National Monument via the Pipestone Star.
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