What happens next?

BY | GREG SKOOG (SJU ’89) AND ELLEN HUNTER GANS ’05

If the first step forward is learning about and acknowledging this history, then what’s the next step? An apology is a start. Last month, Prioress Susan Rudolph and the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict delivered a formal apology to the White Earth Nation. And the trilateral work being done between the monastery, the people of White Earth and the studentresearchers of the college is continuing.

As stated earlier, this chapter in history belongs to the monastery and the tribes. But there are still steps that the college community can take. In their book chapter titled “Pathways for Native Student Inclusion” (included in the book Inclusion in Higher Education: Research Initiatives on Campus, edited by Amanda Macht Jantzer, CSB/SJU assistant professor of psychology, and Kyhl Lyndgaard, director of the CSB/SJU Writing Center), Visiting Assistant Professor Ted Gordon, Belen Benway ’21 and Claire Winter ’20 identify “three pathways” that an institution like CSB can take toward addressing past injustices:

1 Collaborating with affected Native communities

2 Empowering Native and Indigenous students

3 Forging partnerships that serve Native communities on their own terms

Photo of Chief Manitowabi of the Minnesota Chippewa, circa 1875 Collaborating with affected Native communities

With the enthusiastic blessing and support of both the prioress at Saint Benedict’s Monastery and the abbot at Saint John’s Abbey, the undergraduate research inquiry started by Belen has morphed into a full-blown collaborative campaign with additional research assistants and grant funding and advisory boards and partnerships. Jaime Arsenault, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Repatriation Representative and Archives Manager for the White Earth Band, is lending her time and energy to collaborating efforts with the White Earth community. Gordon is leading the college-based research efforts and working on securing additional grants to create more space for healing. S. Pat Kennedy, monastery heritage coordinator, is serving as the point person for the monastery. S. Carol Berg ’66 is leveraging her decades of research and a commitment to social justice. And this is just a partial list.

Already underway: the monumental task of digitizing and analyzing records from Saint Benedict’s Monastery, of which there are a lot – much more so than for many other Native schools. The research team set out in hopes of finding a few photographs and came up with more than 130, spanning the entire history of the schools. Some included names of people, so the team was able to digitize those photographs and give them to Arsenault in hopes of making them available for family members.

A grant from the Council of Independent Colleges – as part of their Humanities Research for the Public Good program – will fund two student researchers over the next academic year to do this work, prepare presentations, and then deliver those presentations both at White Earth and at the Stearns Historical Museum.

The unpacking is delicate, not only because of the artifacts and historical documents involved, but also because of the raw trauma, nuanced feelings and ethical concerns around it. Case in point: medical and school records might be viewed as useful information for family records or the sake of documentation, but unearthing them could also be a serious violation of privacy.

And digitized documents are only part of the equation. As Arsenault explains, “For some people in the community, progress means being able to see a picture of their grandmother. Or maybe it means having a dialogue with individuals from the school or hearing an apology. For others it’s about having the opportunity to say what’s on their minds.”

That’s why this collaborative campaign puts such an emphasis on creating space – for talking, for listening, for finally being able to ask questions, for answers, for peace, for closure, for healing or for whatever is needed. An advisory board is being formed within the White Earth community to help guide the process, provide feedback and facilitate connections.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It’s family by family. Individual by individual. “This is very careful work so no one feels like anything is being pushed on them,” says Arsenault. “By design, it’s not a straightforward project. It has to be fluid, intentionally. We’re holding space. If and when they’re ready, they’re always welcome.”

To make sure that space is truly welcoming, there’s a lot of work going on within the monastery and at the college – and it’s not just standing around a scanner in the archives. Arsenault says “Ted [Gordon] and the sisters have been doing the internal work, not only looking at what records they have there but making sense of it and sitting with it.”

Describing the working relationship as “slow, deliberate and really positive,” Arsenault says “we’re getting to a point where we can have these hard conversations, where we can build these relationships and have ongoing collaborations and take both communities to really great places.”

A significant grant from the McKnight Foundation will help strengthen those connections by funding a collaborative oral history project over the next academic year. Student researchers from CSB/SJU will be hired to conduct and record interviews with five sisters from Saint Benedict’s Monastery who worked at the OSB mission at White Earth. At the same time, tribal researchers at White Earth will record interviews with former students and descendants of former students of the school at White Earth. The two groups of researchers will meet regularly in the process of this digital storytelling project. “This is a really groundbreaking project,” says Gordon. “I don’t know of any other collaborations between a monastic institution, a college and a tribal community – on anything, let alone something as sensitive as this history.”

Photo of students in front of St. Benedict’s Industrial School for Chippewa Girls, St. Joseph, Minnesota, 1886. Empowering Native and Indigenous students

For Native students at CSB and SJU, “empowerment” meant starting with the basics. Until recently, most Native Bennies and Johnnies assumed they were the only Native Bennie or Johnnie. So the first step was making connections. Then came collaboration and organization in the form of the new Indigenous Students Association (see sidebar article on page 19). Right now those students are finding and raising their collective voice. T

his spring the ISA lobbied the CSB/SJU Faculty Senate for approval of a land acknowledgment that will be introduced starting this fall in classes that meet the curriculum’s “cultural and social difference” requirement. A student or faculty member will read the statement – which includes reference to our boarding school history – and then allow time for discussion.

The final, ongoing step will be creating community. When Native students feel welcome and valued in our community and have a space to embrace this part of their identities – then they’ll be empowered to bring those diverse perspectives to our greater community … and make our community greater.

Forging partnerships that serve Native communities on their own terms

“I don’t like to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to a community and that’s where the story ends,” says Arsenault. “What if people have the opportunity to write another chapter, where there’s self-determination? This is that opportunity.”

So Gordon and Indigenous advocates at CSB and SJU are working to listen and find mutually beneficial ways to act. One of those areas right now involves wild rice.

“Wild rice is incredibly sacred to the Ojibwe,” Gordon says. “It’s also a critical part of both their diet and their economy. The problem is that it’s threatened by all kinds of development.”

The tribe’s goal is to get wild rice sites listed and protected on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a slow, detail-oriented, time-consuming process. “Jaime (Arsenault) would love to do this,” says Gordon, “and she could use some help. This is a fantastic project for undergrad student research.”

Adrianna Warden ’22

This summer, Adrianna Warden ’22, a nutrition major from Nowthen, Minnesota, will take this on. Part of her work will be historical research, reviewing written histories of different sites, and part will involve interviews with people that practice wild rice harvesting today. It’s work that holds special significance for Adrianna, as a first-generation White Earth descendant. “I’m looking forward to a summer of growth both through research and relationship building within a community to which I hope to gain closer connections,” she says.

At the same time, there’s a connection growing to help students from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. (Children from Mille Lacs attended the boarding schools in our community as well.) In summer 2018, Gordon and education officials at Mille Lacs talked about the intergenerational impact this history continues to have on how that community perceives education. “Their point was that if we can get a bus load of middle and high school students here on campus, we can help get those students to see themselves as having the potential to go to college and succeed in college.”

A consistent area of interest for Mille Lacs students is environmental education. “And so it was a natural fit to connect them with Sarah Gainey (assistant director and education coordinator for pre-K/12 education) at Saint John’s Outdoor University and Abbey Arboretum. We have that whole infrastructure in place. They come here, they do outdoor activities, we connect them to talk with some of our Indigenous students and they experience a college campus.”

The ongoing partnership was forced to go remote and virtual this past year, but all involved are looking forward to getting back face-to-face.

Leading toward the light

“This is a really groundbreaking project,” says Ted Gordon, CSB/SJU visiting assistant professor of sociology. “I don’t know of any other collaborations between a monastic institution, a college and a tribal community – on anything, let alone something as sensitive as this history.”

The McKnight Foundation, as part of their Vibrant & Equitable Communities program, has awarded a $50,000 grant to a collaborative oral history program between White Earth Nation, the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict and the College of Saint Benedict.

Currently, there are no other institutions confronting this chapter of history in quite this way. Through the work of Gordon and his students over the last two years, CSB is helping to establish the standard for ethical guidelines on how to use, share, preserve and repatriate the documents and artifacts that document this past.

WHAT CAN YOU DO NEXT?

Learn about the land you’re on. A great place to start is at native-land.ca to learn about treaties, languages and tribal areas.

Browse background and resources from the CSB/SJU libraries

Watch a virtual discussion of decolonization here at CSB/SJU

Read

• The Thunder Before the Storm:

The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt (Clyde Bellecourt, Minnesota Historical Society Press)

• Full of Fair Hope: A History of St. Mary’s Mission (S. Owen Lindblad, OSB, Park Press Quality Printing)

• Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Brenda J. Child, University of Nebraska Press)

Consider a donation to the Ratelle endowed scholarship fund for Native students at Saint Ben’s or to the Saint Ben’s Initiative for Native Nation Revitalization (to support work like what Ted Gordon and team are doing). You can give at givecsb.com – remember to type “Ratelle” or “Native Nation Revitalization” in the Comments box.