Tim Giago: Innocence lost at boarding school on reservation

Opinion

Monday, May 17, 2010

I wrote, several years ago, that I was a recovering Catholic. Well, my recovery is complete and I have recovered, but the transition was a painful and emotional one.

For years, I had a lot of anger in my heart for the Roman Catholic Church’s boarding school, Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In the past few years my anger against the school has subsided because it took me a lot of years to realize that it was not the school. Holy Rosary Mission is now Red Cloud Indian School. The school made many changes in the way the Jesuit priests and Franciscan nuns dealt with the Lakota students. They did so in such a way as to make Red Cloud one of the finest schools on any Indian reservation in America.

Red Cloud High School has turned out students of the highest caliber, students that have been granted many of the Bill Gates Scholarships, students that have excelled in academics and sports. Many of the Red Cloud graduates have gone on to earn undergraduate college degrees and beyond. It seems that my anger was misplaced because I did get a good education at Holy Rosary Mission, an education that gave me the opportunity to build the largest Native American newspaper in the history of Indian country and to go to Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship and two honorary doctorate degrees.

It wasn’t the schooling that caused such anger in me; it was the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual abuse that was a part of that education. What was accepted as normal by the priests and nuns, yes and even by some of the students, was actually the worst form of abuse.

One day, when Pete Cummings and I were nine years old, we planned for several days to make a getaway from the Mission. We stored food north of the school in a wooded area, and on a relatively warm October day, we climbed under the fence at the end of the little boy’s playground and made our escape. We were about 10 miles from the mission when a man named Brave Heart chased us down on horseback. He placed both of us on the back of his horse and took us back to the mission.

The school principal, Father Edwards, was waiting with a big grin on his face and he was rubbing his hands together as he ordered Pete Cummings and me into his office. He actually toyed with us knowing full well what our punishment was going to be.

“Now you boys have been very naughty, so what do you think your punishment should be?” he said.

Of course, we actually begged for anything except for what we knew was coming.

Father Edwards reached into his desk and took out a leather strap. First, he beat my friend so badly that Pete’s screams could be heard all over the little boy’s gym, which was directly below his office. Watching Pete get beat so badly made waiting for my turn even more terrifying. Next it was my turn. I did not want to scream like Pete did, so I bit down on my lip until it bled, but this seemed to infuriate Father Edwards, and he beat me so badly that I had welts from my calves, across my buttocks and all the way up to my lower back. If this violence had happened today, Father Edwards could have been charged with child abuse.

I lived with the horror of that beating for a long time. But, like I said, I should have pointed my anger at the human factor, rather than at the Red Cloud Indian School nee Holy Rosary Mission. I have heard former students describe a severe whipping they received by saying, “I probably deserved it” That infuriates me because no innocent child deserves to be beaten so badly that they carry the bruises and lumps for days. No child deserves such abuse.

Red Cloud is going to have an all-school reunion next month and I understand that the present administration is not in any way, shape or form connected to the oftentimes inhumane administrations of the past. I understand that Red Cloud is one of the best Indian schools in the United States. I am an alumnus because the man who beat me so badly, Father Edwards, approved the GED certificate I earned while stationed with the military in Sasebo, Japan. He wrote me a letter which I still have congratulating me. How ironic.

I don’t know if I will go to the reunion because I am not sure I would be welcome, but I just want the students, present and past, to know that as of this day the hatchet is buried. I am proud to be an alumnus of Red Cloud Indian School. However, my Catholicism and my innocence were lost along the way.

Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the publisher of Native Sun News. He was the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association, the 1985 recipient of the H. L. Mencken Award, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1991. Giago was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2008. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com.