Fort Shaw was a military fort during the late 1800s. A year after the Fort was abandoned by the US military the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School was opened. Indigenous advocates remember sorted family histories and grapple with a new federal initiative to better understand the impact of boarding schools throughout Montana and the U.S.
A national initiative announced by the U.S. Interior Secretary this spring is looking at the history of Indian boarding schools to better understand the lasting impact on survivors and their descendants. The Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School was one of those schools in Montana.
You can hear school bells ringing near the Ft. Shaw historic site on a mid-summer day. A modern-day elementary school stands near the former boarding school site along the Sun River in central Montana where native children in the late 1800s were taught to assimilate into American culture.
Fort Shaw was a military fort from 1868 to 1891 and a year after the military base was abandoned, the school opened.
Susan Webber, a state senator from Browning, had two grandparents go to the Fort Shaw Boarding School. Webber herself went to another boarding school in Montana.
“And thank God our children who are in their forties, thirties, and forties, and our grandchildren never have to go through that, but they're still suffering from the effects of it,” Webber says.
Webber says these schools contribute to Indigenous people's historical trauma by removing children from their parents and culture. As the creator of the first Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania Captain Pratt famously said in 1892 “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”.
Stanford School of Medicine found that the effects of historical trauma have been linked to depression and high early mortality rates in Indigenous communities.
Iva Croff is a professor at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. She also had family members at Fort Shaw and now studies and teaches about the history of Indian boarding schools.
Croff walks around the old buildings at Fort Shaw that were used to house military officers and then were renovated to house the school's staff. She says that the kids were more employees than students.
“They weren't getting paid. And that's not uncommon. That stuff was the way that the system was designed. And it was to teach them a trade so that when they went away from the school, then hopefully they could get a job somewhere other than returning to their reservation,” Croff says.
Croff says that many records she studied about Ft. Shaw were incomplete, with some student tribal affiliation listed inaccurately on purpose.
“So they had to list them as Indian students in this area so that they would get funding for the school,” she says.
A national initiative looking into the history of Indian boarding schools was announced by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in late June. The announcement followed the recent finding of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school for Indigenous children in Canada.
Haaland made the announcement at the National Congress of American Indian mid-year conference and has set a deadline for a report for Spring of next year.
“For more than a century, the Interior Department was responsible for operating the Indian boarding schools across the United States and its territories. We are therefore uniquely positioned to assist in the effort to recover the dark history of these institutions that have haunted our families for too long. It is our responsibility,” Haaland said.
Haaland says she wants the inquiry to locate potential burial sites on or near these boarding schools.
No student graves are recorded at Fort Shaw, but some advocates say researchers need to take a closer look.
Northern Cheyenne researcher Marsha Small lives in Bozeman and has developed a technique using ground-penetrating radar to find human remains.
Small is optimistic about Secretary Haaland’s plans to learn more about the history of Indian boarding schools but she says moving forward is going to be a slow process.
“We’ve never had to be put in this position, reclaiming our children from these cemeteries,” Small says.
Small says a search for children’s remains at Fort Shaw or any former Indian Boarding School could be complicated by the fact that children at the school had different tribal affiliations. That means different unearthing protocols would be needed to respect unique tribal customs.
“There's a protocol associated with each community, with each nation that is specific and distinct to that tribe,” Small says. “There might be similarities in the region, but there is specifics and distinctness per tribe.”
In the month since Haaland's speech, it’s unclear what progress Interior has made on its investigation or how it could reveal more about the history of Fort Shaw. An Interior spokesperson told YPR in an emailed statement there was nothing new to report on the investigation outside of the agency’s original announcement.
As some await answers, Senator Webber says she’s grateful that another generation of children won’t have to go to boarding school.
“Uh, I am thank God. The last generation. There's a lot of us as the last generation to have to go to boarding school,” Webber says.
Taylar Stagner is Yellowstone Public Radio's Indigenous Affairs reporter.
