Indian boarding schools described as ‘genocide’

The old Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg thrived during an era when the goal was to eradicate tribal traditions and assimilate Native Americans into white society.

On the footprint of what once was the mission’s property, about 100 people gathered at Wittenberg-Birnamwood High School on Sept. 12 to learn about and try to come to grips with that dark time in U.S. history.

The program, sponsored by the Wittenberg Area Historical Society, included a panel of people whose parents and grandparents had direct ties to Bethany and similar boarding schools.

Betty Berglund, a University of Wisconsin-River Falls professor who has studied the boarding school movement and the Wittenberg experience specifically, said the period of “allotment and assimilation” began around 1887 and followed about 50 years during which Native Americans had been forcibly removed from their homelands and relocated.

Bethany Indian Mission primarily served displaced Ho-Chunk and Oneida, and a number of other tribes to a lesser degree. Founded by Even Johnson Homme and eventually part of the Norwegian Lutheran Church Synod, the boarding school aimed to “Christianize” Native children as well as tend to their physical needs.

A 1928 report submitted to the U.S. Department of the Interior that concluded that the allotment and assimilation policy was “a disaster” led to the closing of the boarding schools, Berglund said.

“It was dispossessing the Native people from the land — destroying traditions, their heritage, their language, and so it was awful for the Indigenous populations and had to be abandoned,” she said.

One of the panelists, Heather Bruegl, director of cultural affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee community, framed the mission more bluntly.

“The goal of the boarding schools was genocide,” Bruegl said. “The motto of Richard Henry Pratt, who started (Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania), was to ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ That’s genocide. Even though the person is still walking around, that loss of tradition, culture, language — that’s genocide. It’s tough to hear. It’s tough to talk about; it’s also tough to live.”

An Oneida tribal member, Bruegl said her mother didn’t talk about being Indian when she was growing up, because her grandparents had been taught not to talk about being Indian.

“It was something you were taught almost to be ashamed of, right?” she said.

Bruegl said she doesn’t talk in blunt terms to make people feel bad about themselves – “I want you to learn. It’s important to tell the truth when we are talking about history.”

Richard Gonzales, whose mother attended the Red Springs Indian Mission just outside Gresham, described a similar reticence on her part.

“She could not ever share with me the beauty of her self through the definition of a culture that she was supposed to embrace, but that embrace was broken by the boarding schools,” said Gonzales, a consultant on cultural trauma who has worked with Green Bay schools.

Paul Rykken, grandson of the Rev. T.M. Rykken who served as superintendent of the mission for many years, said he would have a lot of questions for his grandfather and grandmother.

“As one who’s spent my adult life teaching history, it’s abundantly clear to me that the era of boarding schools brought tremendous damage, family disruption and cultural destruction to the world of Native America,” Rykken said. “It’s painful to me as a historian to realize that my grandparents were part of the settler-colonial enterprise, and they were working within the assimilations paradigm of that era. I have grappled with that knowledge for my entire adult life.”

Susan Sihler, daughter of the Rev. E.W. Sihler, mission superintendent for 20 years in the middle of the Great Depression, said her father was tasked with following 800 Indian alumni after the school closed and seeing to their physical and spiritual needs as much as possible. Bethany maintained social service and summer school programs through 1955.

“Coming to grips with this, for myself, in terms of what we did in the name of doing good, has been very difficult for me,” she said. “It’s been an evolution for me to change in my attitudes. I went through a period where I was very angry with my parents and wondered if they had done more harm than good.”

Sihler went so far as to write a letter of apology to a number of the Ho-Chunk people she knew.

Gonzales said the Oneida have a value to “have a good mind” and speak well of one another, but he acknowledged, “I’m having a hard time doing that with this topic.”

His grandmother had gone to the Carlisle school, where Pratt’s charge to “kill the Indian, save the man” was written on the wall.

“They were killing my grandmother, they were killing my grandfather, and they attempted to kill my mother,” he said. “Where can I have a good mind with that? … You in this audience did not do that. I am not blaming you, nor am I angry at you, but you have to understand the continued emotional upheaval.”

Gonzales has worked with Green Bay schools and said that district, which has a diverse, population, has developed a good relationship with surrounding tribes.

He said education is the key to long-term healing and reconciliation, “through educators who are dedicated now to the real mission that these children do not have to read a motto on the wall that says we’re here to kill you. No – we’re here to embrace you, we’re here to love you, we’re here to laugh and smile and send you home with good success.”