“I CAN’T THINK OF A NATIVE

person I know who doesn’t have this history in their family,” says Samantha Majhor, the Marquette assistant professor who heads the Indigeneity Lab’s boarding school research program. That includes herself – Majhor, of Yankton Dakota and Assiniboine descent, says that her grandfather was sent from his home on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana to a boarding school in Salem, Oregon, called Chemawa Indian School.

That kind of physical separation was common and by design, Majhor says. “They were strategically sent away from their homes because the idea was to assimilate them. There is a sense of trauma being taken from your home, told that the way your family does things is not only wrong, but words like ‘dirty,’ and ‘savage’ are used – words we find readily and regularly in documents we look at,” Majhor says. “There is a mindset behind it that is incredibly destructive to the human spirit.” Majhor’s research delves into Marquette’s record holdings from the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. “It’s an extensive resource,” Majhor says. The archive includes statistical summaries and pupil attendance records from over 100 schools across 19 states.

The records are from the Catholic perspective, and part of the goal of the project is to see this history from the lens of the Native students. “Where are their voices in the record?” she asks. The next step for the project, Majhor says, is a website that can be used by students – hers or any others – or by the general public. “We always want to keep an eye on how it serves the Native community as well,” she adds.

There were several boarding schools and day schools (located on or near reservations) located in Wisconsin – ones in Lac de Flambeau, Hayward, Tomah, Bayfield, two in Keshena. As part of her research, Majhor visited the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation to look into the Lutheran Mission School in Gresham, located in Shawano County. Most of the boarding and day schools were not in urban centers like Milwaukee; the closest experience in this area would be Native students who were sent to reform schools like the Wisconsin Industrial School for Boys in Waukesha and the House of the Good Shepherd school in Wauwatosa. Students at the Waukesha institute were sometimes whipped or given solitary confinement, according to a report from 1898.

But conditions were worse at the Native schools, where punishment was doled out not just for bad behavior but for expressing their culture. In addition to taking the culture away from Indigenous children, far from their families, Majhor says boarding school conditions were also “ripe for abuse.”

“We see a lot of reports of students being reprimanded violently and harshly for speaking their Native languages, getting out of line or various other transgressions. You also hear about quite extensive sexual abuse,” Majhor explains.

While the discovery last summer of mass unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School and other Canadian boarding schools grabbed headlines, the country had opened its Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008, Mahjor notes. Such systemic effort is only just beginning in the United States, she says, and unmarked graves connected to boarding schools are generally known by Native communities here even if they’re not documented.

“I would not be surprised if we found the same thing in the United States. I’d be surprised if we didn’t,” Majhor says. “I think it likely that if people were to do the type of looking they are doing now, beyond cemeteries, I think it’s likely you would also find unmarked graves.” Those discoveries might be forthcoming. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland launched a federal investigation in June 2021 to start the “long and difficult” process looking into the “troubled legacy” of the schools. That report is due April 1.

“I was heartened to see that on Indigenous Peoples’ Day this last year, Gov. [Tony] Evers issued an apology,” Majhor says. “Apologies can be great, but they sometimes don’t have teeth behind it. I appreciated that his call was for cooperation with the Native nations in Wisconsin working towards Deb Haaland’s investigations.”