Charles Trimble: Going back to boarding school for a reunion

Opinion

Monday, May 17, 2010

On June 4th and 5th, I will attend a reunion of all-classes at Red Cloud Indian School. It was Holy Rosary Mission when I graduated from there in 1952 – 58 years ago.

Like other alumni and former students are probably doing, I am freshening up my memory chips, trying to envision classmates and memorable basketball or football games and other incidents at the school sixty years ago. Getting in shape and getting a nice suntan to look younger are out of the picture. But I’m expecting that most of my old schoolmates are as overweight and wrinkled as I am. And I’ll have to just hope that they will be kind enough to not recall nicknames and embarrassing situations of the past.

The last reunion I attended there was 22 years ago, at the school’s Centennial celebration in 1988. That was a splendid gathering, with many generations of alumni, and many who have had successful careers in government service, in tribal leadership positions, or in the private sector. So many of those alums have since passed on, and there are only a few left in my class and classes earlier. So I’ll just saunter around trying to look like an elder in more ways than just being wrinkled and grey.

If it is like the 1988 reunion, there will be surprisingly little remembrances – or none – of any cruelty at the hands of teachers. I use the term “surprisingly” because any sign of intergenerational trauma was not evident in the gaiety of that reunion. The term intergenerational trauma wasn’t even invented yet at that time.

I do have memories of being spanked often in my younger years, and being punched out in high school when I called one scholastic a bastard. Physical punishment is outlawed at most schools nowadays, although there is growing number of people who think it should still be practiced. I do remember the names of school bullies, but they’re all dead now. I have long since forgiven high school bullies, and even if I didn’t I’m too damned old to do anything about it anyway. I do hope there aren’t any in attendance that might remember any bullying on my part.

I have heard accounts of cruelty and cultural/lingual oppression by boarding school attendees much younger than I am – some of them from the same school I attended a quarter of a century earlier. It’s hard for me to imagine that, since I was in the Stone Age of boarding school history – something akin to the Oliver Twist era in 19th Century England as described by Charles Dickens. But with the awful gruel they served us at the mission school, I don’t remember anyone asking, “Please sir, may I have more?” Nor do I recall anything like some of the horrors being described now. I have experienced life at one federal boarding school, and witnessed nothing like those horrors there either.

When I graduated from Holy Rosary Mission in 1952, I went to Cameron College in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a junior college at the time, and is now Cameron University. I was very young at the time, and trying to make it for four years on a $3,000 tribal loan. (No, the $3,000 was not for just one semester as it would be today, it was for all four years.) To help stretch my budget, I stayed on the campus of the Fort Sill Indian School, a BIA boarding school, where my sister worked as a clerk. I rode by city bus every day to the college. My memories of that school and the students are warm and wonderful. The guys were fun, most of them from Navajo and Western Oklahoma tribes. The girls, I thought, were beautiful. I drew cartoons for their yearbook in the spring of 1953, and was presented a copy autographed by students. I still look at it from time to time, and it brings back fond memories.

I remember life at Fort Sill Indian School as good, especially compared to Holy Rosary Mission, even though the mission had become far less strict by the time I graduated. Although I didn’t attend any classes at Fort Sill Indian School, I had not witnessed any harsh punishment. I attended most home basketball and football games there, and spent much time talking with students. They were very spirited and seemingly happy. As I look at the yearbook, I wonder if children or grandchildren of any of those students are among the victims experiencing intergenerational trauma. From my memories of them, I can’t imagine any that would tell of harsh mistreatment or cultural oppression.

Even though Holy Rosary was far more restrictive, especially with relations between the sexes, I do have some fond memories of my boarding school days. I remember friends – boys and girls – who had made life happy for me, and of teachers to whom I owe much for any accomplishments I have experienced in life. And to my mother, a Lakota widow who placed me in the school when I was only four years old to protect me from forced adoption, and kept me there until I graduated, I owe everything. It was for her love and care for my future that she kept me there. Knowing this, I was able to endure the harsh life that was typical of boarding school life all across America.

I think it would be good for someone with first hand experience in the worst eras of Indian boarding schools to write a factual book on the subject. Not one that starts with the idea that nothing good came out of them. If it is truthful, it will not gloss over the harsh life, and the loneliness of children who were away from their parents for the first time, nor the military regimen that most boarding schools of that era – white and Native – employed. And it will tell of the many graduates of those boarding schools, from the time of Carlisle and Hampton down to those that existed up to the 1970s, who have contributed greatly to their tribal nation, their communities, and to the entire country.

If it is truthful and objective, such a book will go a long way to dispel much of the historical horrors to which many people attribute today’s reservation problems – horrors transmitted down through the years as intergenerational trauma.

Charles “Chuck” Trimble, Oglala Lakota, was principal founder of the American Indian Press Association in 1970, and served as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1972-78. He may be reached at cchuktrim@aol.com. His website is iktomisweb.com.