Wednesday evening saw a different kind of walk through Marquette. It wasn’t Jim Koski sharing historical information about the businesses that have come and gone. It was about a page in our history we should never forget… and as you may suspect, it’s not one of the good pages.
The walk was a remembrance event commemorating Orange Shirt Day, also known as Truth and Reconciliation Day. It’s an annual event meant to memorialize the Native American children forcibly taken from their homes and sent to boarding schools, a nationwide program sponsored by the federal government in coordination with religious institutions. It was intended to Americanize the native population. They even had a slogan… “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man.”
Many of us, present company included, never heard much about this indoctrination effort, which took place for literally hundreds of years, and was still in effect as recently as the early 1980s.
A History Lesson
April Lindala, Department Head of Native American Studies at NMU, acknowledges the lack of widespread awareness of what can reasonably be called cultural genocide. “From my lens, and the lens of most Native adults, we are very aware of this history and we know that others do not know about it which makes it sometimes frustrating to be honest. It is a part of our day-to-day life.”
In their goal to assimilate the Indians, as Christopher Columbus mischaracterized them, into the white man’s culture, area Native American children were taken from their homes and placed in boarding schools throughout the upper Midwest, including Marquette’s former Holy Family Orphanage, now the Grandview Apartments, along with seven other facilities in the U.P. and northern Michigan.
Families did not voluntarily sign their kids up for the schools. They were forced to release their children to the authorities, or suffer any number of detrimental consequences. Children were enrolled in schools that were either day schools or boarding facilities, many to never see their parents and siblings again.
In The White Man’s Image
Though the idea of helping a class of people find their footing in a new landscape sounds well-intended, Lindala explains why the program was misguided at best. “The so-called melting pot is idealistic, but more so, I suggest it is a construction, a movement toward collective nationalism in order to control the masses. I am a proponent that Indian people should be able to live their lives how they choose.”
Rather than identifying our nation a melting pot, I prefer to call it what it truly is… a mosaic. A number of different pieces, which, when put together, retain their identity while forming an accurate portrait of what America really is. But somewhere along the line, someone called it a melting pot, so we turned up the heat on anyone who looked, talked, or worshipped differently than we thought they should.
Native Americans had already suffered from the invasion of the white men coming from Europe, as their land was taken and their peaceful existence was upended, for no good reason. Now the powerbrokers plan was to do the indigenous tribes a favor by taming their uncivilized tendencies and smooth their integration into this new society, whether they wanted it or not.
As it turned out, it merely stripped an entire culture of its traditions and character. The children in the schools were subjected to a number of disrespectful routines, not the least of which was the forfeiture of their heritage. In addition, traditional attire or physical attributes like long hair were typically not tolerated, further eroding any connection to their ancestry.
A Challenging Existence
Most of the boarding accommodations were bare-bones at best. One of the schools, located in Ontario, was given the nickname “the mush hole” for the terrible quality of the food. All were not as bad, but as you might imagine, creature comforts were seldom a priority.
When the last of the schools were finally closed, the impact of the incarceration lived on. “Intergenerational trauma impacts different people differently,” Lindala explains. “Ojibwe scholar, Kathleen Absolon, describes the effects as a dismemberment; being ripped away from family, community, culture, and language. I cannot think of a better term because there is something visceral about the word, dismemberment. There is an understanding that someone cannot be made whole as a result of the impacts of the boarding schools.”
The best way to truly appreciate the cultural trauma generated by the decades-long event is to imagine such a practice happening to you and your family. Though we can’t imagine anything like that happening today, it’s important to recognize… it wasn’t that long ago.
“I work with two people at the NMU Center for Native American Studies who are boarding school survivors and one of them is younger than me,” Lindala says. “So, these off-reservation boarding schools (US) and residential schools (Canada) are not from a history from another century; it is very close to some of us in the community.”
Local Importance
With a considerable Native American population here in the Upper Peninsula, Orange Shirt Day is an important reminder to them… and those of us who are non-natives, something like this can never happen again.
The Orange Shirt Day walk, organized by the Marquette Intertribal Community and attended by dozens of orange shirt wearing supporters, started at the Grandview Apartments and proceeded to the Seven Grandfather Teachings display in the lower harbor. Recollections were shared and traditional music was featured, all intended to ensure the story never becomes just a distant memory.
We’d like to think we’re better than that, right? And for sure, in many ways we are. But we still have a ways to go in order to accept all cultures and people for who they are, rather than try to remake them in our own image.
“I propose that Indian people want to live as self-determined beings and have agency over how they choose to live their life,” Lindala says. “However, even today there is still stereotyping and labeling that happens, so respect is not always granted to people who choose to live differently from what the mainstream presents as acceptable.”
For more information about the history of the Indian Boarding Schools, a fairly comprehensive documentation can be found here, on YouTube.