Reporter's Notebook: Telling the tale of one boarding school
Amelia Schafer
ICT + Rapid City Journal
On Monday, my five-month-long investigation into the Catholic boarding school Immaculate Conception was published on ICT. It’s been a long, emotional ride, and one that I’m especially proud of as it’s also made me think about my own family’s history.
Children stand outside in the 1930s at the Immaculate Conception Mission School. (Photo from Marquette University)
Five months ago I was asked to help out with ICT’s larger story on the Department of the Interior’s final boarding school report. The first tribal leader I reached out to for comment was Peter Lengkeek, chairman of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe.
I asked Lengkeek for his thoughts on the report, which he told me, but then he told me something I wasn’t expecting. Not long before, he said, the tribe had found more than 30 unmarked graves at Immaculate Conception Mission in Stephan.
Lengkeek told me the tribe had been taking some measures of their own to identify graves at the former Catholic boarding school and they’d been struggling to get records. Between the Catholic church and the National Archives, they didn’t have much. I told him I’d look into things and see what I could find.
After our conversation, I sent a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to Marquette University and other entities. From those FOIAs and conversations, I was able to obtain a series of microfilm records and a dissertation written by a former nun in 1965 about the school’s history. I wouldn’t have been able to access those records without the help of the Rapid City Public Library, to whom I owe a ton of thanks for helping me with interlibrary loans and teaching me how to use a microfilm reel.
I spent countless hours looking at microfilm, reading the nun’s history book and searching and searching for who these 38 graves could possibly belong to.
As a 24-year-old gen-Zer, I had to ask my dad, Scott Schafer, to help me read the old cursive on the microfilm documents more times than I’d like to admit.
What I found was a detailed description of life at the school and its growth, but also not a single one of these documents contained any mention of children dying at the school. The history book did detail numerous natural disasters and fires but never made any mention of a student's death.
Students at the Immaculate Conception Mission school in the 1930s. (Photo from mission correspondence letters, Marquette University)
The Catholic Church and other religious institutions are not legally obligated to release their boarding school records as the documents are considered private. Therefore, the church has significant control over who can access these documents, and I was unable to acquire them.
An archivist at Marquette University, where most of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Mission records are held, told me the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe would be able to access detailed student records but that I could not because they contain blood quantum information (the amount of Indian blood someone has) and because of this the records are private.
Marquette did, however, tell me that I may have luck obtaining death records from the Immaculate Conception Parish – except it doesn’t exist anymore. In this situation, I was told the Sioux Falls Diocese would have them, but the diocese ignored my emails and phone calls.
It was also a challenge finding survivors. Many have died now (Immaculate Conception closed in 1975), and some people aren’t comfortable speaking to someone hundreds of miles away on the phone who they don’t know and may never meet.
So I decided to look for people who’d already somewhat spoken about their experiences publicly in one way or another. This is where Facebook became an incredible tool for me.
Through Facebook, I was able to find Susan Paulson, a matriarch from the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation who graciously shared her story with me and connected me to Roberta Crows Breast, who had also attended the school.
On Sept. 30, Orange Shirt Day, hundreds of Indigenous people shared stories online of surviving boarding schools and through this, I was able to meet Zachary King, who’d posted about his mother, Alta Bruce, and how she attended Immaculate Conception.
King, who lives on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, shared his late mother’s story with me and information about other survivors in the area. After the turn of the century, the school began bringing hundreds of students in from North Dakota.
Not long after, Lengkeek shared with me that everything had finally fallen into place and the tribe would be hosting a ceremony for the graves on Nov. 9. I asked him if I could invite some of the individuals who’d shared their stories with me, which he agreed to, so I texted Paulson and King and asked if they’d come.
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Paulson agreed but King was unable to make it due to schedule conflicts.
On Nov. 9, the day of the ceremony, I met with Paulson and Crows Breast in person for the first time. I can’t begin to describe how thankful I am that these women came to the school for the ceremony and spoke with me.
Photo from the 'History of Immaculate Conception Mission' the caption reads: "Reverend Justin Snyder O.S.B. 1931-1943 entertained by Alex Thunder Horse."
We met at the Lode Star Casino in Fort Thompson for breakfast alongside Paulson’s daughter Jennifer YoungBear. I could tell we were all a bit anxious – none of us ate much. We chatted for almost too long and before we knew it was time to go to Stephan for the ceremony.
Eventually, we all made it to Stephan and waited for the ceremony to begin. The three Mandan Hidatsa Arikara women met with Chairman Lengkeek, who was driving around in his truck checking on everyone, and I laughed as YoungBear described her mom as still being a cowgirl. With a smile, Paulson told Lengkeek about the time she fought back against the nun who had terrorized her for years.
After the ceremony, I said goodbye to the women and broke off to take photos of the old campus.
Finally standing at the school was an eerie, almost nauseating feeling. I’d been investigating it for so long that seeing the locations discussed and standing in front of these massive Catholic statues made me feel something I can’t quite describe – a mix of anger and sadness.
Standing outside the abandoned church near the school building, I thought about Paulson and Crows Breast and what the two women had shared with me, not just that morning but a month prior in our initial phone interviews. I thought about the children whose hidden graves I’d just seen. I thought about how their families must have felt, and I wondered where they may have been from – there’s a chance some of them are from Fort Berthold, just like the women I’d met.
I laid tobacco down on the grounds and proceeded to take pictures of the old campus – the abandoned remaining buildings and the crumbling eerie statues of the Virgin Mary and Infant of Prague. Lengkeek told me sometimes community members think they see these statues move at night, I could see how that would happen.
I didn’t take pictures of the ceremony or of the site following the ceremony. And while I did get a photo of the plot of land the graves are hidden under, later on I did not feel it was appropriate to share. The tribe, along many other tribes, has been hit by grave robbers over the years, most notably the Crow Creek Massacre site where hundreds of Arikara were murdered alongside the Missouri River. It was hit by grave robbers not long after its discovery.
I thought about that history and decided some things are better left unseen. While I described the location in the article, I decided that showing the actual location was unnecessary.
When I left, I broke down and cried in the Journal’s work truck for a good five minutes, but I felt a sense of relief. I’m a descendant of the Brothertown Indian Nation and a long time ago my ancestors attended boarding school on the East Coast where we’re originally from.
My ancestors on my Montauk side attended one of the first Indian schools in the US, the Moor’s Indian Charity School at what is now the famous Ivy League Dartmouth University.
This story reminded me of the ongoing journey to reconnection my family has been on for the past few years and my own struggle to identify what schools my ancestors attended. I can’t ask them about their experiences but I can speak with other elders. In some way, that makes me feel better about the situation.
I’m incredibly grateful and honored to have been able to tell this story. I’m especially thankful to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and Chairman Lengkeek for trusting me to tell the story. Thank you for inviting me to the ceremony and letting me join the conversation afterward.
I’m proud of all the work I’ve done over the past year-and-a-half during the partnership between Lee Enterprises and ICT and am thankful to my editors for trusting me with the hundreds of stories I’ve pitched – especially this one.
Thank you Kevin Abourezk, Mike Brownlee and Darsha Dodge for editing the story.
This story is co-published by the Rapid City Journal and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the South Dakota area.
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