Black Elk's role was a complicated and delicate one. ![]() Maka Black Elk, who attended Red Cloud, is leading the school’s process of “truth and healing.” Photograph: Tailyr Irvineīy spring 2021, the school was already more than a year into its process of “truth and healing,” led by Maka Black Elk, who had attended high school at Red Cloud and spent five years as a history teacher there. Red Cloud adopted Yellow Horse Brave Heart's model for addressing such trauma, a sequence with four stages: confrontation, understanding, healing, and transformation. ![]() Disease, war, forced assimilation: “The rapidity and severity of these traumatic losses, now extended by high death rates from psychosocial and health problems, has complicated Lakota grief,” she writes. She saw kinship between the Lakota experience and that of Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors, in the sense that the devastating losses of genocide had come to form a pivotal part of Lakota identity. Key concepts from the Lakota clinical social worker Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart have become central to how the school operates. In 2019 the school hired its first non-Jesuit leader, and many of Red Cloud's administrators are now tribal members who grew up on the reservation. In that time, Red Cloud had undergone major shifts. Countless Native children were taken from their homes, forced to give up their languages and cultures, and in many cases made to suffer and die from neglect, abuse, and disease.īack in Pine Ridge, Pourier thought of coming forward about those three mounds in Drexel Hall for the first time in 26 years. (Last summer, Haaland embarked on a yearlong “Road to Healing” tour.) Between the two countries, some 500 boarding schools for Indigenous children served as instruments of colonialism-not just in the distant past, but through the middle of the 20th century. In the US, though, it wasn't until 2021, when secretary of the interior Deb Haaland became the first Indigenous person to hold a cabinet level position, that the federal government first attempted to compile a list of the boarding schools it had operated or supported, as part of her Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The finding, which came years after the Canadian government began examining its role in the history of Native American boarding schools, made headlines amid a broader, rolling North American reckoning with white supremacy. Then in May 2021, evidence of unmarked graves of as many as 200 Native children was discovered at a former boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Pourier put aside the memory of what he'd found for two and a half decades. Two years later, work crews began renovations on Drexel Hall, and whatever Pourier had seen in the basement was covered with a thick concrete slab. I knew it was there, and I knew somehow, eventually, it was going to come to light.” He soon left his job at Red Cloud. “It bothered me, but at the time I just took care of myself with prayer and sweat lodge ceremonies. That afternoon, when Pourier told his supervisor, one of the handful of Jesuits who still ran the school, about what he'd seen, he recalls that the response was swift and sharp: “Quit bleeping nosing around! Stay out of there!” Later, Pourier told his girlfriend and a few close friends about what he saw, but he didn't bring it up again at work. “With all the cemeteries in these hills, why were they in the basement?” “I knew it was wrong for them to be in Holy Rosary,” he said. There, he says, aligned in a row, were three loaf-shaped dirt mounds, each about as long as one of Red Cloud's youngest students is tall and, as Pourier remembers it, topped with small white, wooden crosses.Īt the sight of them, Pourier turned around and climbed the stairs, certain about what he'd seen-and frightened by what it implied. Pourier doesn't recall whether he spotted the leak or not. At the bottom, he says, he opened the door to a low-ceilinged room with a dirt floor. Broad-shouldered and over 6 feet tall, Pourier had to stoop as he descended a narrow wooden staircase that led to an out-of-the-way corner of the basement. Now it was a drafty red-brick admin building where a steam boiler hissed and sputtered belowground. Built in 1887-back when Red Cloud was a Jesuit mission and boarding school called Holy Rosary-Drexel Hall originally housed classrooms and a dormitory. ![]() Tracing the old plumbing, Pourier made his way through the bowels of the oldest structure on campus, Drexel Hall. This article appears in the Jul/Aug 2023 issue.
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