An "Honoring, Healing and Remembering" memorial on Thursday honored victims of Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School and recognized Native American people’s resilience against that genocide.
The ceremony marked the 90th anniversary of the closing of the boarding school in 1934 after 41 years in operation. The school was established by the U.S. Congress and was among more than 350 Native American boarding schools that operated in the country over more than a century.
The names of nearly 250 children who died at the Mount Pleasant school were read at the memorial.
Daisy Kostus attended the memorial because she is a survivor of a similar boarding school in Canada and is now an elder in her community.
“It’s a learning time for everybody because a lot of people don’t know that there were boarding schools, either here or in Canada,” Kostus said. “The ceremony is to remember all the loved ones that passed at the school.”
Mary Shabanaa Bush, president of the Native American Student Organization at Western Michigan University, said all her older family members, except her father, went to boarding schools.
“I believe it’s really important that we come to remember them and give them the respect that they fought for,” Bush said. “They didn’t choose this life. They didn’t choose to come here, and their families didn’t choose to give them up, either.”
She said it’s also important to know that boarding schools used brainwashing tactics to try to erase Native Americans' identity.
Kostus said many students at these schools were sexually abused. Many also tried to escape, but were never able to make it home because they got lost. She said the schools didn't keep records of missing students and instead said that these students just “disappeared.”
“To experience that kind of life, especially the sexual part of it, that’s got to be devastating for a student,” Kostus said. “That was the worst part ... Then, too, we got punished for speaking our language.”
But Kostus said students were still speaking their native languages behind closed doors, and she still speaks it.
“We were able to survive through boarding schools although it was an active genocide against us,” Bush said. "We were able to survive through it, and you can see that here, especially, a lot of people fought against it. Even in the girls' dormitory, there was a person who tried to burn it twice to free us and to free the people that were there.”
Now, the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School Committee is working to make the boarding school a space for memorial and healing.
Christian Nakarado, who spoke at the memorial, said there are seven historical buildings on site, and the committee wants to preserve and transform three of them - the workshop, the gym and the classroom.
He said he wants to give a new presence and new functions to those buildings.
“This concept ... is basically changing the mission of the school, which was a place of removal of land from native people, of the removal of children from their families, of the removal of the language,” Nakarado said in his speech. “We want to turn that around ... and make this about return. We want to make this a place where all those things can come back and be present.”
To support that concept, Nakarado said he’s looking at how to make it a place for healing and treatment of historical trauma, a boarding school museum, and a memorial space. He also added that the best way to remember the victims of the boarding schools is by coming together at events like this one.
Skyler Wolverton is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and a graduate student at WMU who came along with Bush to support their professor, a speaker at the event.
Wolverton said events like this one help commemorate those who have been wronged, and remind the living to keep their traditions and carry on.
“Native Americans are here; we aren’t history,” he said. “We are here every single day, walking just the same as every other culture. Sometimes our culture gets blended, sometimes it gets forgotten. It doesn’t matter because the core is still here. We have our teachings, our medicine, and those are what really help us carry on.”
