A
young girl prays at her bedside at a boarding school. A new book by an
Ojibwe author tells the stories life for American Indian children in
boarding schools designed to purge their language and culture.
Denise Lajimodiere's interest in the Indian boarding school experience began with the stories of her parents.
"Mama
was made to kneel on a broomstick for not speaking English, locked in
closets for not speaking English,” she said. “They would pee their pants
and then the nuns would take them out [of the closet] and beat them for
peeing their pants.”
Lajimodiere is Ojibwe, and a member of the
Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. She was an educator
for 44 years, working as an elementary school teacher and principal
before ending her career recently as as an associate professor of
educational leadership at North Dakota State University in Fargo.
Her
parents were separated from their families and sent to federal
government-run boarding schools as children. Thousands of Native
children met the same fate during the boarding school era, which
scholars estimate lasted from the late 1800s to well into the middle of
the 20th century.
Denise Lajimodiere's grandfather Benjamin an his sister Martha, circa 1898.
Denise Lajimodiere for MPR NewsThe
children were sent to the schools to be purged of their Native
cultures, languages and spiritual practices — forced to learn
English, and often abused.
The experiences of those children, now
with children and grandchildren of their own, have left a deep scar on
many in the generations that came after them.
“Papa was beaten with a belt. He saw one of his fellow students die from a beating at the school,” she said.
Her
parents rarely talked about their boarding school experience. She only
was able to coax stories from her father in the last years of his life.
“Papa
said, 'I just couldn't learn that language,'“ she said, “so they put
lye soap in his mouth and the kids would get blisters."
Lajimodiere
believed her parents’ boarding school abuse was a reason for the family
dysfunction she grew up with, so she began a decade-long quest to
understand it, interviewing people who went through the experience.
"It's
a journey I had to go on to forgive my dad for the way we were
raised, for his temper, his verbal abuse and for the beatings,” she
said. “So, it was a long journey to understand why my father was the way
he was."
What she found was a trove of stories closely guarded
for decades by those who lived them. She tells those stories in their
own words in her new book, “Stringing Rosaries.” She collected the
stories using strict academic research protocols, but the listening was
intensely personal.
Many
of the former boarding school residents she interviewed prefaced their
stories by telling Lajimodiere, “'I've never told anybody my story. I've
never told my kids. I've never told my grandkids. I had to think about
these stories all my life about what happened to me. I don't want my
kids to have to think about it or know about it,’” she said.
Denise Lajimodiere, author of “Stringing Rosaries.”
Amber Mattson | Courtesy of Dreamcatcher Photography
For most people, Lajimodiere promised anonymity before they would share with her the stories.
She recalls one elderly woman who refused to even let family know she was being interviewed for the book.
"She
became very quiet, even though it was a huge house, and no one was in
the house,” recalled Lajimodiere. “She started whispering about being
sexually abused and she said, 'I don't know why I'm telling you. I have
not told anybody.' Almost every survivor in the book experienced sexual
abuse, or they witnessed it."
Lajimodiere found that, while the
stories people told her were often infused with painful and traumatic
memories, that pain was not universal. Some people recalled their time
at a boarding school fondly. But Lajimodiere says even those people
— who said they preferred the school experience to alcoholism, abuse or
hunger they experienced at home — shared stories of abuse in the
boarding schools.
As she traveled the country doing research on
boarding schools and collecting stories, Lajimodiere said she would
often find herself sitting in her car, sobbing, after an interview.
She
realizes now that she was experiencing the collective intergenerational
trauma of losing language, culture and identity. Her parents both spoke
their native languages, Ojibwe and Cree, before they went to boarding
school.
"My father never spoke Cree again; that was completely
beaten out of him,” said Lajimodiere. “So, now, at my age, I'm trying to
relearn Ojibwe. Ojibwe is the language of our ceremonies — and our
ceremonies have come back very strong."
Lajimodiere
thinks connecting with traditional ceremony and culture is helping
Native Americans across the country recover from the generational impact
of the boarding school era.
She asked people she interviewed what it would take to heal from the trauma they experienced.
“Some
of the people in the book say an apology would be a recognition of what
the government did to us. Others have said, 'Boarding schools destroyed
my childhood; I'll never get that back, so an apology would mean
nothing,’" she said.
“Many of them said [what would be healing
would be] a return to tribal spirituality and to the languages, our
traditions and our ceremonies," she said.
Lajimodiere felt
compelled to share the stories because many who attended boarding
schools in the first half of the 1900s are now elderly and dying.
She's clear that she doesn't want the stories to elicit pity. She wants understanding.
“I
want the world to know that part of why we are the way we are,” she
said, “with high alcoholism, high diabetes and a lot of other health
issues, one of the overarching reasons is the boarding school era.”
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