By Phyllis Pokela
Alger County Historical Society
Your hair as you’ve always known it to be is considered unacceptable. It therefore has to be clipped and shaved.
You are caught talking to a friend in your first language. You are refused your next meal as punishment. No worries. The food is strange-tasting, and you are forced to eat everything on your plate or there is more punishment.
You especially miss your mother at these times and wonder if she has forgotten you.
You get sleepy in the late afternoon catechism class and find five fingernails penetrating into your scalp to gain your attention.
You have an aversion to the porcelain plumbing in the washrooms and sometimes get away with relieving yourself behind a tree like you did at home — but, again, at the risk of receiving punishment.
Wool stockings cause your legs to itch constantly. Scratching makes them bleed. You are told you won’t be given any calming ointment as the only cure is to quit scratching.
Outdoor activities are limited to the area within the surveillance of patrols, mostly at the windows of nearby buildings. Unhappy and homesick, you don’t tolerate the obscenities hurled your way for having sat too long in someone else’s preferred swing on the playground. Hurling your body against his in retaliation gets you called to the office and introduced to the leather strap — or maybe even a few days in a damp concrete cell.
You are a resident of one of more than 400 boarding schools sanctioned by the U.S. government under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. You are being shaped to speak, dress and think in the way these officials think is preferable to your own. The year could be 1860 when the first school was established in Yakima, Washington, or it could be 1983 when the last of the boarding schools closed. Michigan had three such schools during this period.
Holy Childhood School of Jesus
The Harbor Springs school began as the first boarding school in Michigan in 1829 as a mission constructed in L’Abre Croche with help from the Odawa Tribes and had lessons in native Anishinaabemowin. But the L’Abre School soon closed for “lack of means.”
The Catholic Church built modern facilities in Harbor Springs and staffed the new school with Franciscan fathers and later with sisters of the Order of Notre Dame. Changes in federal government policies led a push for assimilation and government funding, and eventually the Harbor Springs school became just like the rest of the Native American boarding schools and pressed for Native children to be integrated into the “American way of life.”
Old St. Joseph Orphanage and Boarding School
Old St. Joseph Orphanage and Boarding School was established and built by Bishop Frederick Baraga in 1860 on land north of Baraga.
Although mostly an orphanage, Bishop Baraga spoke of its core mission to be “white assimilation and religious conversion.” The large facility had, at its peak, 950 Ojibwa and immigrant children in their care.
Bishop Baraga was invited to the area in 1843 by Chief Edward Assinins, who became the first Native to be baptized there. The buildings were established on 500 acres. After the Civil War, Baraga gave the complex to Chief Assinins and the Keweenaw Band of Ojibwa. In 1929, a larger orphanage building was constructed.
Assinins, as the community was called, bore historic significance as it was here that Bishop Baraga helped local tribes recognize their right to self-governance and to purchase land in their own names.
It was also at Assinins that Baraga wrote some of his best-known works, including the “Chippewa Dictionary” (1853) and “Chippewa Grammar” (1850). Years of Baraga’s dedicated work to put the Ojibwe language into print for the Indigenous people to be able to read religious teachings in their own tongue were nearly lost in a disastrous crossing on the ice of Green Bay in Wisconsin when the sled Baraga was riding in plunged through the ice. He continued his journey, having managed to save the manuscript from the icy brink, and had it published in Cincinnati after a printer in Detroit found it unsalvageable.
In 1957, the Assinins site overlooking the waters of Keweenaw Bay was rededicated as an ideal setting for the Sacred Heart Friary by the Capuchin Franciscan Fathers as a novitiate for their second year of formation; the primary task being the devotion of themselves to discernment and prayer through contemplation. The friary closed in the late 1960s, and the complex was again turned back to the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.
They used it as tribal headquarters until several of the buildings were torn down and new facilities erected in the village of Baraga on U.S. 41.
Indian Industrial Board School
Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School operated from 1891 to 1934. The campus consisted of 320 acres and about a dozen buildings. Their yearly enrollment was 300 students from Michigan and other states.
The school purported itself as a place where Native Americans could prepare themselves for the duties, priorities and responsibilities of American citizenship. The mission was to make Native students “useful citizens,” schooling them in the trades and white standards of housekeeping for the females as well as offering athletics, music and instruction in farming practices. Discipline at the school was harsh, and multiple deaths were reported to have occurred there.
Forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the dominant culture of white America has taken a tremendous emotional toll on Native Americans and their families as they strive to reclaim the validity and strength of their Native identity and heal from the psychological damages of abuse and separation.
A bill introduced by Congress and enacted on July 31 called for the establishment of the Truth & Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies of 2025. Among the duties of S.761 is to investigate the federal policies that impact the ongoing effects of the forced removal of children from their homes to be placed in boarding schools.
The legislation also recommends ways to protect unmarked graves and grave sites, support repatriation and identify the tribal nations from which children were taken and to discontinue the removal of Indian and Native children from their families and tribal communities by state social service departments, foster care and adoption agencies.