An Invaluable Exploration of a Dark Moment in Native American History
Sharon Marie Brunner’s Michigan Indian Boarding School Survivors Speak Out offers an intimate look into what it was like to be a child placed in an Indian boarding school in the twentieth century. Michigan had three Indian boarding schools in Baraga, Mount Pleasant, and Harbor Springs. Brunner originally wrote the book as her thesis for her master’s in social work in 2001, and she interviewed nine survivors of the boarding schools. Because the Baraga school closed in the nineteenth century, no one was alive to be interviewed, but she interviewed three people from the Mount Pleasant school, which operated from 1893 to 1933 and six from the Harbor Springs School which was open until 1983. Brunner is herself a member of the Sault Ste. Tribe of Chippewa Indians and her mother attended a boarding school.
While the interviews are the center of the book, Brunner does an excellent job of first providing us with context for the Indian boarding school experience by providing a history of Native Americans’ plight at the hands of Americans of European descent throughout Michigan and US history. While I have read several books about the Native American experience and specifically the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes region, Brunner makes several important points I had never considered, such as how the wars between the US military and Native Americans resulted in a decrease in males in Native American tribes that caused women to seek husbands outside of their tribes. This led to diversification of Native American cultures. In the boarding schools, Native Americans of different tribes were also brought together and treated as if they were all the same, which further diluted the individual tribes’ cultures.
Brunner discusses the boarding school experience prior to the interviews, giving us some information later repeated, but also looking at the psychological and traumatic effects the experiences had upon the children as well as their family members. Some of the people interviewed were even generational attendees of boarding schools, their parents or grandparents having gone there before them. She also discusses how recent studies have shown that people who experience trauma pass on trauma cells to their children, plus there is the environmental effects on families of trauma. For example, Native Americans have a higher risk for diabetes and also of obesity. Brunner discusses how food scarcity may have caused earlier generations or their descendants to develop overeating patterns that made them more susceptible to these ailments.
The experiences of the children in the boarding schools is, of course, the most intensely described, and I was both enlightened and shocked by much of what I read. A lack of funding for the boarding schools meant the children had both low-quality food and often insufficient nourishment. The children who attended Harbor Springs seemed to have the worst experiences. They were treated like they were evil, and told the only way they could be saved was through conversion to Christianity. They were also forbidden to speak their Native language. Children were given English names, which added to their identity confusion. They were raised to be farmers, barbers, tailors, and carpenters, and were taught to assimilate because, as Brunner puts it, “the only viable future was a white future.” Most horrible of all, some nuns at Harbor Springs played favorites with the children, even bringing young boys into their beds, then later casting them off when they grew tired of them, which messed with the children’s self-esteem besides the sexual confusion that must have resulted. Others were physically abused, including one who had her hair pulled and her head banged against a blackboard when she had difficulty with math. This trauma caused her to turn down jobs as an adult where she would have to work with numbers and especially budgets.
Not everything was always bad, however. Some of the students recalled positive experiences. They bonded with other students and created lifelong friendships. They joked at the nuns’ expense behind their backs. One interviewee recalled being treated with ice cream after painting the rectory and visiting the local Ramada Inn to go swimming. Of the nine interviewed, this one interviewee was the only one who felt her experience was overall positive.
Ultimately, the boarding schools’ purpose was assimilation of Native Americans into white culture. This caused the children when they returned home to feel alienated from their own families. Many of them had been taken from their families because of alcoholism or abuse in their families, yet some felt they would have rather stayed in that environment than go to the boarding school.
After presenting the interviews, Brunner provides tables showing similarities and differences between the interviewees’ experiences at the schools and themes that marked their lives afterwards, such as maintaining friendships with other attendees, coping with substance abuse issues, or trying to regain their ethnicity by learning their Native language and participating in traditional cultural practices.
The appendices include a discussion of the history of the federal government’s Indian education policy, the research questions used in the interviews, and a discussion of the Doctrine of Discovery, which exposes how the Catholic Church basically handed over Native American land to European powers, which it has never apologized for. Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ apology is given for how it hurt Native Americans in the past, but the US Federal Government at large has not apologized. That the Bureau of Indian Affairs has apologized is largely due to 90 percent of its employees now being Native American.
I will add that the Catholic Church needs to share its records from the boarding schools. Currently, the archives of the Diocese of Marquette are closed, and the diocese covers the entire Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In my own efforts to find information about Native Americans and the boarding schools in writing my own book about nineteenth-century Ojibwa chief, Charles Kawbawgam, I found the Catholic Church largely unwilling to be helpful. Boarding schools and other Native-related documents are part of our shared cultural heritage, and the Catholic Church and the US Government should be forthcoming in digitizing and making these documents available to the public rather than try to hide abuses committed in the past. We can all heal together if the truth is brought out into the open.
Thank you, Sharon Brunner, for giving these Indian boarding school attendees a voice through your book. I hope Michigan Indian Boarding School Survivors Speak Out will be widely read and open up further study into this key aspect of Native American life that had a significant impact not only on those who attended the schools but on their descendants who are still dealing with the repercussions.
