'They’re ready to go home': Few answers at school gravesite

WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you feel triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

ICT and the Rapid City Journal’s Amelia Schafer spent over five months researching life at the Immaculate Conception Mission School on the Crow Creek Reservation.

Amelia Schafer
ICT + Rapid City Journal

STEPHAN, S.D. – On the northern prairies of the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota sits a remnant of a dark period in American history, the federal boarding school era.

Abandoned buildings – dormitories and churches – that once housed hundreds of children each year now lie crumbling, awaiting demolition.

In mid-November 2023, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe Chairman Peter Lengkeek and several others stood at the site of the former Catholic boarding school, the Immaculate Conception Mission, digging in search of a main water line break, trying to find the shutoff point.

Lengkeek had the idea to try and find the original blueprint for the nearly 74-year-old waterline. Searching through the blueprints, a small piece of paper sticking out of a pile caught their attention. The paper, a hand-drawn schematic of the waterline and street, identified something strange – a gravesite.

The map was from the early 1900s, during the early years of the school, and on the left-hand corner, ever so lightly, someone had written the word “graveyard.” In 1900, the school received utilities identified as “water works” and a gasoline engine, which may be when the map was created.

“No one had noticed it before,” Lengkeek said. “At first we thought these must be the wrong plans because our cemetery is across campus … but it all lined up.”

Later, a member of the tribe’s historic preservation office visited the site and walked around in a clockwise circle. Odell “Muggs” St. John, Lengkeek’s first cousin, told Lengkeek to grab some utility flags lying around from the waterline break and whenever St. John would stop, Lengkeek was to place a flag where he stood.

“Muggs has a gift,” Lengkeek said. “He’s able to heal children and we rely on him to fix things for us. We rely on him to find sacred places like graves, alters, those kinds of things.”

When they finished the two men stepped back and looked at the site. The flags were lined up perfectly, six-foot rows, eight feet apart.

“We knew right then and there that these were graves,” Lengkeek said.

Later, a photo depicting 38 little white crosses matched what Lenkeek’s cousin had found, confirming suspicions of a hidden gravesite separate from the school cemetery.

Indigenous children from across the United States came to the school, like other boarding schools, seeking an education. But many faced abuse and neglect, and all were forced to give up their culture and heritage in favor of an education guided by the partnership between the Catholic Church and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The 38 graves are likely those of children who attended the school during its nearly 100-year run in the Stephan community on the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota.

From 1887 to 1975, more than 1,000 children were taken, many by force, to the Immaculate Conception Boarding School. While many students came from the Crow Creek and Lower Brule Sioux tribes, children were taken from tribes across South Dakota and even as far as Wisconsin, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, North Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa.

This was part of a larger initiative to assimilate Indigenous children into European-American culture. As part of this, the Bureau of Indian Affairs allowed Christian missionaries to open new boarding schools across the United States, and in 1874 a group of Catholics in DC established the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, a Roman Catholic charity institution.

A time of turmoil and expansion

Chief Drifting Goose, leader of a band of lower Yanktoni people, reached out to the missionaries, known to the tribe as “black robes,” to try and establish a school on the Crow Creek Reservation, much like Chief Red Cloud did in creating the Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Drifting Goose and famous missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet met along the banks of the Missouri River and formulated a plan to create a Catholic mission school on some of Drifting Goose’s land in the northern part of the reservation.

Thus, Immaculate Conception was born – the name was chosen by a wealthy donor named Katherine Drexel who supplied more than $660,000 in today’s money in memory of her mother. Initially, Immaculate Conception was to receive from the government the equivalent of about $850 in today’s money for each Lower Brule child boarding at the school and $1,600 for each Crow Creek child. With time, the school began accepting children from other tribes, despite not being given additional compensation for them. The amount grew over time, as did the school’s attendance, even beyond maximum capacity.

In 1929, financial records indicate the school was ordered to build an addition as constant overcrowding was causing health and safety concerns for children. In some school records, children are noted as having to share single beds due to overcrowding.

What originally began as an elementary school in 1887 soon grew into a full K-12 facility, with two students, Aurelia LaRoche and Martina LaFraomboise, graduating in 1938 after spending their entire educational careers at the school.

From its beginning to end, illness spread rapidly in the school’s overcrowded conditions – in 1957, nearly all of the student and staff populations were infected with the flu.

The school frequently ran out of food and needed to supplement with whatever supplies workers could find. The clothing sent by the government for students, brown heavy suits and brown brogan shoes, was usually too small.

Everything at the mission was “exceedingly primitive,” according to a book on the school’s history written by former nun Sister Marmion Maiers.

Aside from illness, the school was set on fire six different times (only burning down twice) and was destroyed by a tornado twice. The second tornado in 1938 is noted to have “torn up the cemetery,” but it isn’t clear which one, and injured 29 people. Extreme cold led to the deaths of some staff members, most notably one nun in the early years of the school who was unable to find her way back during a blizzard.

Marquette University in Milwaukee hosts a majority of records pertaining to the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Amy Cooper Cary, head of the Marquette Archival Collections and Institutional Repository, said that the university could not provide enrollment information that would contain private information such as student names and blood quantum but was able to provide microfilm from the school.

The Marquette website contains digitized correspondence letters between the mission and the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1926-1932 excluding 1929 which was recently removed. These documents provide a glimpse into life at the school including multiple strange incidents.

Records from 1928 exposed correspondence regarding a 4-year-old Hunkpati Dakota boy named Clarence Little Eagle who was seemingly taken from his mother to a Sioux Falls orphanage following a request for help his mother made with the mission. The child’s mother and a mission priest fought for his return, but subsequent financial records make no mention of Little Eagle’s whereabouts.

In later years, financial documents contained letters from multiple community members calling for a mission doctor to be removed from the reservation over concerns of racism and malpractice, specifically that the doctor “treated Indians like dogs.”

The mission also seemingly took in children under the age of 7, though the Bureau of Indian Affairs only allowed it to house children age 7 and older.

Life in Stephan

The 1950s were a turbulent time for the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation in North Dakota. The creation of the Garrison Dam led to a major flood in 1953, consuming a quarter of the reservation and ruining homes, the tribal office and the hospital.

Susan Paulson’s family, like many other Mandan Hidatsa Arikara families, made the tough decision to send their children off to boarding schools in South Dakota along the Missouri River.

“They made life so difficult that people thought, ‘Well, this way they’ll be going to a place where they’ll be fed,’” Paulson said.

In 1957, Paulson and her cousins traveled over 400 miles south to South Dakota. Her cousins were enrolled at St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, and Paulson was enrolled 35 miles north at Immaculate Conception.

For many students, school life was completely different than dorm life. While the school provided a good education, the dorms were a place of work, fear and sexual and physical abuse.

“I learned a lot, and I had good grades, we had good teachers, and nuns were over there, you know. But it was dorm life that was terrible,” said Roberta “Kay Bird” Crows Breast, a Mandan Hidatsa Arikara elder who attended the school starting in 1963. “When we went back to the dorm, all we did was work. All we did was work.”

Zachary King of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians said the manual labor and abuse at the schools led to his mother Alta Marie Bruce experiencing lifelong back problems.

Bruce, also a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, was sent 400 miles from her reservation in northern North Dakota to Stephan, S.D., where she attended high school until graduating in 1971.

“When I was a kid, I remember her talking about having to clean the bathrooms, scrubbing the floors down on her hands and knees, and one time she was kicked in the back (by a nun) really hard,” King said. “That lingered on and in her old age she really struggled with arthritis in her hands from being hit with rulers so much.”

Paulson, now 72, was around seven years old when she enrolled in 1958. At the school, she and around 100 girls her age lived in the dorms with one nun, called a matron, responsible for their care.

A free spirit, Paulson has always moved to the beat of her own drum, something she said may have bothered the nuns.

One of the nuns, Sister Damien, began locking Paulson in a storage room alone during mealtime, occasionally leaving her there until 2 or 3 in the morning.

“When they punished her, they really went overboard,” said Crows Breast, 71.

Crows Breast, an elder from the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation, came to Immaculate Conception in 1963 seeking reprieve from the rampant racism she’d experienced at the public schools in Parshall, N.D., a town on the Fort Berthold Reservation with a significant non-Native population.

“The racism was horrible, they made fun of Indians, and if they brushed past us they’d have to ‘wipe’ us off of them,” Crows Breast said.

At Immaculate Conception, Crows Breast witnessed abuse and neglect perpetrated on Indigenous children, like Paulson, by nuns at the mission.

Paulson and Crows Breast would go on to form a lifelong friendship.

“A lot of people have no memories (of the school), but Kay Bird, she helps me to remember the details,” Paulson said.

Scroll to Continue

Read More

Online sports betting companies align with California’s gaming tribes

The Wrap: Land back, Leonard Peltier, Native absenteeism

The next census will gather more racial, ethnic information

The two women recounted hearing stories of “the belt line,” where male students were forced to punish each other. Boys would be lined up in rows of two and the boy being punished would run through the line as both sides hit him with belts.

“I never witnessed it, but I heard of it,” Paulson said. “They would talk about it in whispers.”

Paulson remembers seeing a little boy from Mandaree, a community on her home on the Fort Berthold Reservation, who was bullied for having sores on his face.

Sister Damien’s treatment of Paulson eventually escalated into physical violence.

When she was nine, Paulson and a few other students tried to run away from the school. It was winter, bitterly cold on the Great Plains, but the girls were determined to escape the abuse they’d been enduring.

Dressed in brown, denim dresses with big clunky shoes and brown stockings, the girls made a break for it, but it wasn’t long before they realized they’d never make it home.

Paulson was over 400 miles away from home and one of her fellow runaways was 740 miles away from Chicago, from where she’d been sent. With no hats, gloves or winter clothes and no way out, the girls turned back.

“We were so far away from home it wasn’t even funny,” Paulson said. “If we didn’t turn back, we’d probably have been frozen kids lying on the prairie somewhere; they wouldn’t have found us until spring.”

When they came back, the girls were beaten and reprimanded for trying to escape.

For a while, life went back to the way it had been. Paulson was responsible for laundering student bedding and had several other chores around the school.

Once, when Paulson was 13, she was walking down the stairs when Damien jumped on top of her in front of Paulson’s friend, Crows Breast. Damien attacked Paulson, and Paulson fought back.

At 13 years old in 1964, Paulson was expelled from the school after standing up to Damien, who had been abusing her for seven years.

After Paulson left, Crows Breast remained at the school, coming back every year for the friends she’d made.

“My mom asked me why I didn’t say anything to her about how bad it was, but I went back for my friends,” she said. “We became like family.”

Many students never came home, and their stories and names are yet to be revealed to tribal leaders who’ve begun the search for students.

A broader struggle in identifying graves

From 1872 until the present day, over 32 Indian Boarding Schools have operated across South Dakota, bringing students from across the country.

So far, only roughly 50 graves have been identified in the state, though this number is expected to change as more former and still-operating schools begin their searches.

In 2008, Canada established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which operated until 2015, and was organized by parties of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

The search for truth and healing picked up steam in 2021 when more than 215 children’s graves were discovered in Canada at the Kamloops Indian School, sparking an international trend of grave searches and wider education on the existence of boarding schools in Canada and the United States.

Around this time, Zachary King said, his mother Alta Marie Bruce began speaking to him and his siblings about what she’d experienced at Immaculate Conception.

“People just didn’t talk about it,” King said. “There were people around here that had a good experience, and I think that’s why maybe my mom didn’t talk about it as much.”

King said he felt his mom, who died in 2020, was afraid to speak about what happened to her because of the positive experiences she heard from others.

“Some of the people that live around here they’ve got big families, around 13 kids, and sometimes they weren’t able to feed them, so going to a place (like a boarding school) with three meals a day was huge,” King said.

Now, the search for graves has spread into the United States and more specifically South Dakota. Schools such as Holy Rosary, now Maȟpíya Lúta, near Pine Ridge, S.D., and the former Rapid City Indian School have begun searching for and identifying graves. And while the Rapid City search has made great progress, work at the Immaculate Conception school is just beginning.