Honoring the forgotten children of Rapid City’s Boarding School

RAPID CITY – Residents have been watching the unfolding of a very dark chapter in Rapid City history and now, after years of research and planning, the Remembering the Children project led by a team of dedicated volunteers, is ready to open the Memorial at the end of September.

Currently, construction is underway. Executive Director Amy Sazue said at a presentation at the library that construction has been under way for a couple of months. “So, the path up the hill is all roughed out. It’s all been compacted with small gravel, like M-Hill. You can see the shape of the plaza now, the parking lot, the road and the PV asphalt will start at the end of this month, and we should be ready by September 29 for the Remembering the Children Memorial Walk.”

The project’s origins trace back to a simple question about “graves” being mentioned during community conversations about the Sioux San Hospital, which once served as a tuberculosis sanatorium and Indian boarding school. What started as a search for these graves, remembered in the oral histories, has evolved into a comprehensive effort to uncover the full history of the Rapid City Indian boarding school and its devastating impact on generations of Native American families. “This is part of the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project, and I always start with what we call Pandora’s box,” explains Amy Sazue, executive director of Remembering the Children Memorial. “This story started because they were looking for graves about nine years ago.”

The Rapid City Indian Boarding School, which operated from 1898 to 1933, was part of a nationwide network of institutions designed to assimilate Native American children into mainstream American society. The goal, as infamously stated by the school’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Children were forcibly removed from their families, stripped of their cultural identities, and subjected to harsh living conditions and poor medical care.

“As with many boarding schools, there were high mortality rates,” Sazue explains. “These buildings, these campuses, and the staff, the people who staffed them, were not equipped to handle as many children as they had, putting them all together, especially children who were unvaccinated and not ever exposed to any of the viruses and illnesses.”

Much of the information discovered was found in physician reports and not from school documents. The project’s research has uncovered harrowing details about the children’s experiences. Physician reports from the time period reveal that over 50 children died at the school, though the exact causes of death are often not recorded.

The reports do, however, meticulously document the children’s tribal affiliations and blood quantum, suggesting a callous disregard for their individual well-being. “They always pay attention to what tribe they’re from. They also paid attention to blood quantum, like they would note really common descriptions like ‘male, full-blood Sioux’ but did not know how they died, or details about how they passed away, or how long they were sick, or things like that. So, for us, that really told us that they didn’t care. They weren’t worried about how the children were doing physically.”

The school was funded on a per pupil basis. “That’s why you’ll notice that this school didn’t just target the Lakota or the Oceti Sakowin. It was common to go pick up kids from the region – Northern Cheyenne, Chippewa, and all the tribes in North Dakota, South Dakota, some Nebraska and Montana. Getting them back home was another issue and they didn’t always work with families to try and get the children home.” Sazue said that a lot of these names are still present in the community.

The project’s search for the children’s final resting places has led them to a 24-acre parcel of land that was once part of the original 1,400-acre campus. This undeveloped plot has become the focus of the team’s efforts, as they work to honor the memory of the forgotten children.

“We were shocked to find out it goes all the way from Bakon Park back to Canyon Lake church, over by Canyon Lake by Blessed Sacrament, was built for this boundary, making it about 1400 acres that the school set on. So, as we were looking we were going parcel by parcel, looking at GIS on RapidMap looking at the history of each of the parcels, who bought it, when it was sold, how it was sold, the cost, the tax evaluations on all of them. And we were getting nowhere.”

They ended up contacting the nine Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPO) who came and walked the land. What they found was compelling evidence of the site’s significance. They found some cairns, which are human-made pile of stones usually stacked for some purpose, usually as a marker or burial mound, on the hillside.

Storytelling and song are vital components to the Lakota oral tradition but have long been invalidated. “That’s one way we are trying to decolonize the way that we look at research, the way we do research and the way we collect data. The people are oral historians. We tell stories. We might not write them down. We might not record them. But we tell stories and they are valid to us. So, we took these oral histories, we took what the THPO said and then we did one more thing and that was to invite local spiritual leaders to the site.” Spiritual leaders expressed profound unease and sensed the presence of children’s spirits at the location.

Sazue said there have been some changes to the overall plan. They had planned to have inipis but decided they were too close to the public so they have pushed those to phase two and are planning a more private and secure location. “We are continually trying to find ways to incorporate community input, elder input, and input from descendants into the design of the project.”

Sculptor Dale Lamphere, who is non-native, has consulted heavily with the elders. “We got some pushback because Dale is non-native.” Sazue said she too had apprehensions, but she watched him being lectured and advised. “I watched him make the changes on site. He has such a talent and again this is a way to tell the story, a way to show the impact on actual people and different family members. We’re really talking about ways that we help people step into the shoes and experiences of somebody else in hopes of building empathy and understanding, specifically regarding boarding schools and that the trauma.”

Another artist will be coming in August or September to carve stones. Each stone will have the name of a child and all the information that is known. Some don’t have anything but a date. Kathy Whitman will be carving the stones on site.

The story unearthed documents showing that Native Americans were asking for land by West Middle School for elderly housing. “Documents show they’re asking for land for apartments, for arts and crafts, for the museum, for an Indian Center. There was an contingent of advocates, mostly elderly Lakota women with boarding school educations who were writing to senators, to the president and to the Department of Interior saying that the divvying and use of the land was inequitable. She said the churches were buying up land for cheap and then selling portions of it.

Bringing this story to light is important. “It clearly defines the beginning of formal race relations in Rapid City. The fact is that we’re just never going away. At some point you have to figure out how to acknowledge this horrible history, this complex history that we all share here. Because this isn’t just a story about Native American people. This is a story about Rapid City and the people who live here, and we all have a part to play in that.”

(Contact Marnie Cook at cookm8715@gmail.com)

 

The post Honoring the forgotten children of Rapid City’s Boarding School first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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