Uncovering history

Editor’s Note

This story belongs to the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict and the people of White Earth Nation. We are incredibly proud of and grateful for the trust they have placed in us to tell it as respectfully as we are able. We’re also proud of the diligent, scholarly research and plain old meticulous hard work by our faculty and undergraduate researchers. Their study and analysis demonstrate the best of the liberal arts.

The Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict played an active role in an appalling part of American history. Learn what happened and what’s next.

BY | ELLEN HUNTER GANS ’05

Warning: This feature explores the story of federally driven boarding schools for Native American students. The article contains references that may trigger discomfort.

“We acknowledge the injustice done through our community’s participation in the federal government Assimilation Policy to educate Native American youth at Saint Benedict’s Mission boarding school on the White Earth Reservation (1878-1945), St. Mary’s Mission on the Red Lake Reservation (1888-1940s) and the Industrial Boarding School (1884-1896) on our monastery campus.

“Within the past two years the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict have been working in collaboration with the White Earth community and its Tribal Historic Preservation Office and the College of Saint Benedict to strengthen the bonds that continue to move toward reconciliation and peace with our Native American sisters and brothers.” – S. Susan Rudolph, OSB Prioress, Saint Benedict’s Monastery

In the 1880s and 1890s, children’s voices filled the air in St. Joseph as they learned their lessons at boarding schools run by the sisters of Saint Benedict’s Monastery.

If you just skimmed that and thought, “Yep, I’ve heard this one before. They were daughters of German Catholic immigrants,” you might want to keep reading. The majority of those voices were Native. And they didn’t ask to be there.

At that time, the monastery operated two schools in St. Joseph: Saint Benedict’s Academy (which later grew into the College of Saint Benedict) and Saint Benedict’s Industrial School for Chippewa* Girls. In 1888, 60% of the monastery’s students were in the industrial school, which as a primary purpose, aimed to force Native youth to assimilate to Christian norms.

If you are an Indigenous American, this isn’t breaking news. This story is raw and current. There are people alive who attended these schools.

This is well-worn family lore for countless Indigenous American families, not just here but across the nation. Starting after the Civil War and extending well into the 20th century, around 500 of these schools housed a total of more than 100,000 childreni – some as young as two or three – who were abducted from their homes and subject to inadequate conditions and abuse, all under the pretense of “civilization.”

Sixteen of these schools were in Minnesota.

The Order of Saint Benedict ran four of them.

Photo of Saint Benedict’s Mission School, White Earth Nation, 1890.

One on the White Earth reservation.

One on the Red Lake reservation.

One on the grounds of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville.

And one in St. Joseph, on the grounds of Saint Benedict’s Monastery.

What happened here was a systematic attempt to erase a culture. Beyond that, it meets the official criteria for genocide, as outlined by the United Nations in 1948 and ratified by the United States in 1988, because it involved “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

And yet, if you are not Native American, this might well be the first you’ve heard of it. Ted Gordon, visiting assistant professor of sociology here at CSB/SJU, first learned of the boarding schools operated by the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict when he arrived on campus in 2013 and was eager to dig in and confront the past.

Outside the Indigenous American community, this information is housed not in families but rather buried in dusty archives, quietly tucked away.

Until now. Thanks to an extraordinary collaboration between representatives of three groups: the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict, members of the Indigenous American community in Minnesota and the College of Saint Benedict, the story is being brought into the open.

This is a story of aggressive ethnocentrism and government-sanctioned racism. It’s also a story of communities confronting an ugly truth with a commitment to work toward a measure of healing that leads toward reconciliation.

Critically, for the Indigenous Americans and their families affected by these schools, this is not simply about trauma. This is a story about resilience. The resilience of individuals, families, communities – and an entire culture that withstood the unthinkable and looks forward.

A national issue

The practice of Native boarding schools in the U.S. dates to the early part of the 19th century. It gained traction (and the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict entered the picture) in the early 1870s when President Ulysses S. Grant kicked off his tenure with an eye toward “careful study” of Indigenous peoples and engagement via a so-called “Peace Policy” that ultimately proved to be anything but peaceful.

The policy led to massacre, war, widespread government theft of Native land and sweeping attempts to assimilate people within Indigenous American communities. The assumption from those who instigated this assimilation was that Euro-American, Christian culture was inherently superior. By their standards, decrying, criminalizing and erasing Indigenous cultures amounted to “civilization.”

Much of this was a collaboration between church and state. As Richard Pratt, founder of the influential Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, noted to a convention of Baptist ministers in 1883, “I believe in immersing the Indians (sic) in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”

Two pillars of that assimilation: government funding of boarding schools and forced attendance for Native students. Around the country, children as young as two or three were taken away from their parents and sent to schools where they were stripped of their culture. They were held to an imported and alien standard of achievement. And they were taught, in a language foreign to them, that what they knew and loved was wrong. They could be held until they were 21. Then they were told to return to their communities and spread the word.

Don’t be fooled: Native boarding schools weren’t filling an educational gap. Indigenous American communities were not wanting for an education system. There was already a wellestablished system.

Local complicity

The government often collaborated with the military to enforce attendance at Native boarding schools. Communities like White Earth commonly had warning systems. Melanie Benjamin, Chief Executive of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe,* describes how the first person to notice government or religious presence on a reservation would blow a whistle, and families would rush their children into the woods or to designated hiding spots like ditches.

Some families literally had their children torn from their arms. Others were threatened with loss of land or resources. Others were left so impoverished by loss of land and lack of opportunity that they felt they had no choice but to send away one or more of their children in hopes that a boarding school would mean enough food to survive. Some were convinced to let their children attend boarding schools nearby so their children could at least come home on the weekends, because the alternative was sending them to a school across the country and they might never see them again. The bottom line: it was all under duress.

With attendance physically enforced, that left operations to contend with. For this, one of the government’s most reliable resources was an institution that already had a system for schooling: the church. Other denominations were involved, none more so than the Catholic Church, which played a central role in accepting government funds, establishing these schools and recruiting teachers.

For the four schools mentioned earlier, the Order of Saint Benedict at Saint John’s Abbey was involved in governance, ownership and logistics, but the day-to-day operations – and the teachers – came from our founding sisters, the sisters of Saint Benedict’s Monastery.

Photo of Ojibwe and Benedictines at White Earth, circa 1880

We need to do this work.

In 2020, those words came from the archivists at Saint Benedict’s Monastery. They were referring to confronting the painful connections with Native American boarding schools, and working toward what’s next.

Belen Benway ’21, a member of the Prairie Island Indian Community and a research assistant with Ted Gordon (visiting assistant professor of sociology at CSB/SJU) under the Mellon Foundation Becoming Community grant, approached the archivists in 2019 and asked if she could dig around to learn more about the boarding school history. The sisters welcomed her – and the effort – with open arms. “Here’s everything we have,” Gordon recalls them saying. “They said, we want to share. We want to learn.”

This wasn’t an entirely forgotten subject among the sisters. S. Carol Berg ’66, Professor Emerita of History at CSB/SJU, wrote her doctoral thesis on White Earth four decades ago. She had learned years earlier about the national history of boarding schools and felt the importance of digging into our specific history and interviewing several sisters who had taken part in the schools.

The consensus among the teachers of those schools was a phrase you just read: We need to do this work. When confronting matters of violence and trauma, it’s important to not excuse or rationalize any of it – especially not from the perspective of the oppressors. S. Carol and several of her contemporaries who share her interest in social justice are quick to assert that there’s no excuse. And yet, what she learned in her interviews helps anchor what is, to many of us, incomprehensible complicity. “It was ignorance, more than malice,” says S. Carol. “These women only knew one culture – many of them were German immigrants and they all lived in a bubble – and they asserted that culture unquestioningly. They only knew one way of teaching, characterized by Eurocentric, Catholic standardized testing and curriculum, and they applied it without regard to context or harm.”

It’s one thing to run a school with structure, standards and discipline. The sisters certainly did that. It’s another thing when that structure is designed to vanquish a culture.

Belen Benway ’21 has spent hours carefully sifting through the archives at Saint Benedict’s Monastery. Learn more on page 18.

Large-scale failure

The school at White Earth was built to board 110 students at a time. It was in operation from 1878 until it was converted to a day school in 1945, and closed as an educational facility entirely in 1969. The school at Red Lake was built to board 77 students at a time and is still in operation as a Catholic day school affiliated with the Diocese of Crookston.

The schools operated on campus were deemed “industrial schools” and were aimed at training in “practical” (by Euro-American, Christian standards) skills. Saint Benedict’s Industrial School operated under government contract from 1884 through 1896, and eventually grew to accommodate as many as 150 students at a timeii .

When it comes to Native boarding schools in general, recordkeeping is minimal. The records that have emerged around the nation paint a shocking picture. The Meriam Report, commissioned by the Institute for Government Research, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and released in 1928, revealed “grossly inadequate” provisions. Crowded facilities with inadequate hygiene amenities. Diets “deficient in quantity, quality, and variety.” Children forced to spend hours each day in heavy industrial work despite malnourishment. Discipline that is “restrictive rather than developmental.” Concerted efforts to eliminate and vilify expressions of culture. And “disquieting illustrations of failure to understand the underlying principles of human behavior.”

Indelible impact

The Meriam Report received sufficient attention to put pressure on the schools, and after that, many schools began shifting to day programs and the boarding school structure waned. But the damage was done.

It’s important to note that the attitudes and approaches at the schools shifted over the years, especially after the conversion to day programs. Also, the attitudes and approaches varied by teacher, some of whom had a stronger grasp of and respect for Indigenous cultures than others. According to S. Carol’s research, the Benedictines intended to teach the Ojibwe, but found themselves learning much in the process. Still, that shared learning experience certainly didn’t mollify the overall impact of what happened.

The impact of the boarding schools was not limited to the children who attended, nor to the families left at home. It was devastating on multiple levels: emotional, physical, practical, cultural, economic, spiritual, political. This impact rippled through the country, and it has left an indelible mark.

“You cannot understand the challenges facing Native communities today without understanding this 100-year period of the boarding school era,” says Gordon. Inherited trauma is part of it, but it’s so much more than that. The systematic and persistent eradication of a culture –through the education of children – isn’t something that will ebb out like a tide. It’s more like a 100-year flood that left utter devastation even after the water leaves. It’s definitely not something that can be tidily cleaned up with an apology. But work is underway – from multiple groups and individuals – to unpack, to explore, to listen, to learn, to collaborate, to cooperate and to create a future that allows for healing.

Watch the PBS NewsHour story

On Wednesday, June 23, PBS NewsHour aired the story of this collaborative effort by White Earth Nation, the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict and the College of Saint Benedict. You can check it out using this QR code. Simply point your smartphone camera at the icon.

*Both Ojibwe and Chippewa are names given by Europeans to the Indigenous group that originally called itself Anishinaabe.

I Source: Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/an-american-apology-long-overdue II Source: College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University Archives. https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033& context=archives_history_lessons

Photo of Saint Benedict’s Mission School, White Earth Nation, 1890.