http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m29c1rtceAk This video is a visual tour of the present Blackfeet Boarding Dorm in its beautiful valley a few miles away from Browning.
Native American boarding schools seem so simple at first glance and turn out to be so complex on reflection. Of course, if I didn’t insist on reaching back so far, it would be simpler -- but only in the beginning. Maybe the first European boarding schools were monasteries and convents, places set apart where children could be sent for protection and character forming that might include education. The first universities were theological, so their set-apartness was also basically the study of religion, then medicine, and finally law -- the professions. By the time the idea of boarding schools for North American Indian kids came along, they were very much entangled with missions, legitimated by the belief that conversion to the Euro-world was for their own good. Attendance was not voluntary. Results were mixed.
Another factor in boarding schools was as barracks, preparation for military service, as in the elite college prep schools for the wealthy ruling classes of Britain to prepare them for running an empire. The idea was that boys should be “hardened” away from possibly indulgent parents -- or at least servants, since few of the upper classes raised their own children.
It's not just snow -- it's snow blown at a high velocity.
The Blackfeet Boarding Dorm, originally a boarding school with classes, was not specifically religious or military but rather governmental. It’s immediate predecessor was Willow Creek School which was a scandal, closed down to the relief of everyone. Like reservations themselves, the fact of setting a population apart implies that they are either better or worse than others, but even after the Blackfeet Boarding School had been closed for four years, it was re-opened as a dorm because of the simple fact of geography: the reservation is so big and so close to the mountains that in winter families are unable to get kids to school. Then the “school” part was supplied by Browning Public Schools via buses and the kids lived en masse at the dormitories.
Another aspect of geography has not been discussed anywhere that I’m aware of: the fact that the campus is all built on a flood plain. I don’t know what happened in 1965 when Holy Family Mission school was devastated because they were on the Two Medicine River flood plain below a dam that broke.
Now another complication has been thrown into the mix. Those who have taken my advice to visit the University of Athabasca Press website and for the online account (in print and on video) of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta will be able to visualize what a good place for a piskun the boarding school is, and -- indeed -- Tom and Alice Kehoe spent a lot of time excavating and documenting the actual fall site. At that point less was understood about how extensive a piskun must be: a long grazing area where bison are likely to linger above the actual cliff; a built V of stone cairns that would anchor branches to wave in the wind or be semi-shelter for people who could leap up and wave something to haze the buffs; a cliff of the right height to cripple the animals rather than smash them to mush; then surrounding the base of the cliff a broad pleasant area to spend weeks processing. One would need water, wood for fires to boil the marrow fat out of the bones, and ground soft enough to dig the fire holes.
In the Sixties Bob and I, showing the grandkids the area, discovered a dinosaur skeleton at the top of the cliff. Smallish, seemingly complete, it excited us. Not realizing how many similar skeletons erode out of the ground around here and on up into Alberta, we tried to think whom we should call. The Tyrrell didn't exist then. (The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller is a UNESCO designated world-class location, like Head-Smashed-In. http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com Some say it is a temple to evolution. I would not argue.) No one was very interested. For a while there was a fossil business located in Browning, but it closed down as far as I know. This high prairie is continuous with the terrain in Alberta. It also echoes similar lands in Mongolia where dino digs yield amazing info. (Photos of the original people around Lake Baikal, an extremely deep lake that formed in a cleft where plate tectonics pushed the land together, look startingly like Blackfeet.) These connections have not been explored, as far as I know.
Today’s Great Falls Tribune (September 1, 2013, as I write) features a story about the surprise unearthing of more of the bison jump complex at the Blackfeet Boarding Dorm. No proper study of the whole site had been done before excavation began for a new dorm. The BIA bureaucracy, like most of the federal and many of the commercial institutions that deal with the reservation -- including the newspaper-- is staffed by people from back east urban environments, as well as being young. They have very little consciousness of the area history, geology, or paleontology. Even if they know about it, the information is mere shadow across the windshield of plunging-ahead progress.
Not only does the physical evidence get lost, but also the human stories. Matrons at the boarding school formed warm attachments to their charges, and for many children that was life-saving. On the other hand the genetic families were weakened and some of the culture was lost. When I started teaching in 1961, many of my students were boarding dorm kids and they told a lot of tales, some of them fairly sensational. They told me about seeing ghosts rise from the old cemetery (at one time a hospital was on the grounds) and somehow seeing a still-born baby. “It was blue,” they reported.
They snuck off to do something mysterious that I was afraid was sexual, but it turned out they were choking each other into unconsciousness. And it turns out that IS both sexual and drug-related, but we didn’t have many drugs in those days, except for alcohol. When they do studies of drugs, the one that is the most damaging is the one still most easily available: alcohol. It teaches secrecy. But they hadn't quite learned the lesson yet. They would in adolescence.
The dynamics among those kids were like those in any giant family: quarrels, tight partnerships, favorites and trouble-makers. Some have turned out fine: teachers, parents, hard workers. Others did jail time. Too many died of violence and car wrecks. Some have left the rez and are doing okay in a city. I ask about them all the time, but usually only get rumors back. It would be a great project to find and interview the kids who are now grandparents. At one time the Browning school system had a publishing project going that made small booklets. With the cyber-tools available now, that could be developed into something far more lasting and valuable than a new dormitory or even possibly further excavation of the nearby buffalo jump. When it comes to education, if there is a choice between knowledge and buildings, my bias is to choose knowledge.
The "look inside" feature is on Amazon.com where you can buy this book.
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