An elopement, quarry carving and letters home: records shed light on Pipestone’s Indian boarding school
Raymond Derby never knew much about his great-grandparents’ lives a century ago at an Indian boarding school in southwestern Minnesota — only that they were among the thousands of students who attended the school over a 60-year period, from 1893 to 1953.
Today, however, he knows his great-grandmother was a “strong-willed” woman who ran away from the Pipestone Indian Training School to elope with his great-grandfather, thanks to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis-based organization that has been reviewing school records housed at a national archive in Missouri.
It’s part of an effort by the coalition to uncover the history of boarding schools across the country and to help the communities where they were located to be more transparent about a part of American life that has mostly been ignored for decades.
The discoveries in those records have revealed a range of experiences for the students and parents who were involved in Native American boarding schools — some positive, to be sure, but others darkly reflective of the tenor and racism of the time.
The Pipestone school records are the first the coalition has examined, though it hopes to review records for all 24 boarding schools that operated in Minnesota — as well as hundreds of others across the nation.
More records could be unearthed with passage of the bipartisan Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, which is still working its way through House committees but as of late July was headed for a Senate floor vote.
Built near unique quarries
The Pipestone Indian Training School, on the windswept prairies of Pipestone County, was built on Yankton Sioux Tribe land near the storied red pipestone quarries that have been used by Native Americans for thousands of years.
Students attended classes and lived in a three-story school building. They were sometimes signed up by parents, sometimes by other guardians and, in some cases, according to Fallon Carey, the Interim Digital Archives Manager of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, forcibly sent to the school.
The school, which educated an estimated 4,000 students, was one of 523 Indian boarding schools across the nation.
Records, which can be found on a database managed by the University of Minnesota, show that students came from various tribes, including Dakota, Ojibwe, Sac and Fox, Oneida, Omaha, Pottawatomie, Winnebago, Gros Ventre, Arickaree, and Mandan, in Midwestern states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota and Nebraska.
Application records of the students indicate that some people wanted their children to attend the boarding school because it was an accessible way to receive an education and because the nearby public school was too costly.
Michelle Night Pipe, who has been examining the University of Minnesota database as a Mellon Foundation fellow, said many of the students were enrolled by their parents, many of whom had previously attended the school.
That’s a contrast to other boarding schools where, according to reports and recollections, children were placed after being taken from their homes. Carey said her great-grandmother, for example, was enrolled in the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma by someone that nobody in her family knew.
“A lot of times, you see that children were taken and trafficked and put into boarding schools without the parents’ consent,” she said of the records. “(My great-grandmother) was listed as an orphan. They would take orphans and put them in schools, but my great-grandmother had a whole family.”
Carey learned about how her great-grandmother ran away, with a subsequent legal battle waged between the school and the student’s parents to get her back. “All of that is documented in her file,” she said.
A start to more conversations
Pipestone’s school offered a mix of standard courses and training in the trades, according to Night Pipe, who read through about 150 student case files. She said that in addition to learning blacksmithing, leatherworking, masonry, carpentry and plumbing, students also worked with animals on agricultural lands.
Typically, the students were not paid for their labor, she said, though those ages 17 and 18 would sometimes work for families and farmers in the Pipestone area and receive payments for that work.
Night Pipe has also read through letters between superintendents and parents and letters between students and parents — all of which came from the National Archives Records Administration in Kansas City. The federal agency has scanned and digitized hundreds of thousands of documents.
“This is the best way to get more information on boarding schools,” Carey said. “If we can get these for all 523 schools, that’s kind of a way to help people kind of figure out their own history.”
Countless stories remain untold.
“It starts conversations,” she said. “A big thing with boarding school survivors and my experience working with (healing coalition) is people always say, like, ‘My grandmother never talked about this. I had no idea that she was carrying this around.’ For me, it’s opened up a lot of conversations with my family.”
She thinks it’s important to tell this history because until it’s addressed Native communities won’t be able to heal from the lingering effects of the forced assimilation and family separation some people experienced.
“This isn’t just native history. This is everyone’s history. It’s the history of this country. I think the biggest barrier to addressing the hurt and the pain in native communities is raising awareness that it actually happened,” she said.
A monument to history
In 1937, the land surrounding the school was dedicated as the Pipestone National Monument — a 301-acre federal park that includes dozens of quarry pits and surrounding prairie. That allowed tribal members to quarry again after having lost access to the land when the U.S. government violated the terms of an 1858 treaty that had reserved the quarry for the Yankton Dakota.
Park ranger Gabrielle Drapeau, the cultural resources specialist at the park, said various tribes have quarried and carved the stone into pipes and other objects for 3,000 years. “That’s how we pray and so it’s a really important and super significant piece within the culture,” she said.
Sharing that history, however, hasn’t always been first and foremost at the monument. The National Parks Service wants to change the way it presents the school’s history, and with the help of the healing coalition is working to change the visitor center so that it is more representative of the actual history.
“The goal is to not only bring the records and the childrens’ experience to life but also address the fact that the space as it currently is out there in Pipestone needs to reflect the native history in a better way,” Carey said of the collaboration.
Right now, Native Americans come from across the U.S. to quarry at the site and make pipes that are used for prayer and believed to carry messages to the heavens through the smoke. The park has 56 active quarries, with long waitlists. They’ve also got their regulars and families who have been coming to the site for several years.
The main campus of the Pipestone Indian Training School was adjacent to land that now makes up the monument.
“We hadn’t really interpreted the history of the boarding school in the past,” said Lauren Blacik, the monument superintendent.
Twenty-three tribes have cultural affiliations with the Pipestone quarries.
“Most of those tribes, but not all, had children who were at the Pipestone Indian School and then so many more tribes than that,” Blacik said. “One goal is public understanding and awareness of the truth about what happened, bringing this story to light, being honest about what the system was and what happened here at Pipestone and across the country.”
And in the long run, they want to share that history with the public. In 2020, the National Parks Service remodeled the visitor center, which now mentions the boarding school. But the agency is working with the healing coalition to identify what parts of the history need to be focused on and what that could look like at the visitor center.
“We’re starting to see a lot more questions and a lot more interest in the visitor center,” Drapeau said. “I also hear that from people locally that they were aware that there was a school here, but didn’t know a lot about it and are really interested in knowing the truth.”
Drapeau is originally from just across the border in South Dakota. She’s a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe and grew up quarrying at Pipestone with her family.
She recalled how what she had heard about the boarding schools from her family members who had attended them hadn’t been reflected or talked about in any other spaces. The stories were only told around family.
“That’s the only place I ever learned about it, was from my own family,” she said. “It was never talked about in history class or anything like that. So a lot of people didn’t know that they were even a thing.”
She hopes that researching the records and telling the history at the national monument will help create awareness of what people went through.
“It was always something that was just super traumatic,” she said. “What I heard from my dad, that’s with me all the time. And it didn’t happen to me. But it’s like that trauma. That’s real. It was a total black-and-white idea of what boarding schools were from my family and from the school system, and the general public seems to have a lack of awareness around that.”
Little space for authentic culture
Indian boarding schools became institutionalized in the mid-1800s, with support from the federal government and sometimes churches. They sought to assimilate Native American children through various ways, one of them, records show, being physical distance from family and culture.
Carey said it wasn’t unusual for children from Midwestern states besides Minnesota to end up at Pipestone, or for Minnesota children to be at a boarding school in other states. That was intentional, in her view.
“They realized that having the children boarded where their parents were was not effective because the parents would wait outside the school,” she said. “They would come and try and pick them up and they were unable to assimilate the students in a fast way because the parents were still there, bringing them gifts and trying to see their kids and speaking their native language.”
She added: “That’s why they started off-reservation boarding schools, so they could completely remove the kids, punish them for speaking their native language and practicing their culture and completely wipe out culture from these students.”
It’s unclear from the records, some of which were reviewed by MinnPost, whether the boarding school students were allowed to quarry Pipestone, but Night Pipe said some students would often hang out around the quarry and watch the carvers.
Blacik said some records show that kids made Pipestone objects, but she hasn’t seen an indication that they were encouraged to use the quarry culturally.
From what Night Pipe can tell, there wasn’t a lot of space for the students to represent their culture or to practice any of it.
“There are pictures of some sort of play or something that the kids did where they were actually dressed up in costumes of Native Americans, but not realistic looking ones,” Night Pipe said. “I think that might have been the kids doing Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The culture that they did get was appropriated culture that was then kind of fed back to them … instead of just being able to engage in real culture.”
The healing coalition, which is constantly updating its site and will scan more records in the coming months, has 1,516 student case files from Pipestone.
Night Pipe has found evidence of tense relations between parents and school leaders. Sometimes the school would make decisions for a student without consulting the student’s family, like cutting hair, for example, over concerns that a student had lice. She said families would often get upset because surgeries were performed on their children without consent, most commonly tonsillectomies.
“The biggest thing I’ve found is how much the parents, the families were trying so hard to stay connected to their kids to understand what was happening to them. They complain a lot about the heavy workloads, the lack of food, young children working on industrial machinery, and being injured,” Night Pipe said. “And the response from the superintendents, regardless of who they are, because they changed across the years, it’s always super dismissive, really patronizing, often rude.”
Night Pipe said that in pictures, the older children typically look happy and are smiling while the younger children are not. Some younger children did not adjust well and were extremely homesick, the records show.
Night Pipe also observed that the students didn’t have much time for schoolwork because a lot of their time was spent working. Several students would run away each year, for various reasons. “That was because they were miserable, overworked, hungry,” she said.
Family stories in the archives
The records helped to uncover a story of a family that still has a big presence in Pipestone. Over a hundred years ago, in 1916, a young girl named Estelle Pearsall attended the school and met another student, Moses Crow. They ran away together and eloped.
Night Pipe was able to find the couple’s descendants in Pipestone — including Raymond Derby, their great-grandson. When Night Pipe gave a presentation in Pipestone about the boarding school records, Derby was instantly interested in learning more.
“A lot of the family wasn’t at that meeting, so I wanted to invite Michelle down here and do kind of an encore presentation of what she presented to us at the meeting. And so far, it’s blossomed into this whole, like, wow-factor story,” he said.
According to the story, Estelle needed to buy new shoes and wanted to go into town, which would have been about a mile from the boarding school. That same day, Moses was going to visit relatives in Flandreau, South Dakota, and he picked her up.
Records show that the superintendent was very distressed by their elopement. By learning about these records, Derby has gained insight into his great-grandmother, saying that she was very “strong willed.”
The experiences at the school heavily depended on who was running it, Night Pipe thinks. Sometimes, students would have better experiences than others and would stay involved with the school as they grew older. “I think it is important to highlight that some people did have good experiences, but, statistically, it’s not the case across the board,” she said.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to note that Pipestone is in Pipestone County and to include Drapeau’s full title as park ranger and cultural resource specialist.