For about its first 100 years, Red Cloud was a residential boarding school. Red Cloud School was started by Jesuit priests in 1888, who at the time called it the Holy Rosary Mission. Or if they’re… Hopefully their spirit was able to travel on to whatever is beyond this world for them. Which is why nearly three decades later on a cold spring day in May, he and a group of 10 people are making their way back down to the basement of the Red Cloud Indian School. So Justin reached out to some folks at the school. Who or what is buried in those mounds? Could it be students?īy 2022, he just couldn’t hold it any longer. He didn’t know who else to tell or where to start. I knew what I seen and I just kept it, I guess, all these years.įor nearly 30 years Justin would be haunted by what he saw down there, but he didn’t tell anyone except his wife. So just from his reaction, I didn’t really carry it any further. I said, “Well you told me to trace that line.” You shouldn’t have been bleeping nosing around down there and don’t be going where you’re not supposed to go.” So of course I argued back. He heads straight back upstairs to tell his supervisor.Īnd he got real mad and start… He cussed at me and said, “I don’t know. Justin says he sees three small graves, mounds of dirt evenly spaced, marked with little crosses. I seen three… Not one, but three small graves in that dirt floor in that room. The school is over a hundred years old and the basement is dimly lit.Īnd I went in his door and when I opened that door, there was a dirt floor there, very poorly lit. He’s following a steam line through a labyrinth of dark tunnels.
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One afternoon, Justin is down in the school basement working on the heating system. So I was a maintenance man and I started working on the boilers because I had some experience with diesel mechanics and stuff. In the early 1990s, a guy named Justin Pourier was working at a school in South Dakota. Al Letson:įrom the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio. Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Inasmuch Foundation. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. Special thanks to Meg Lindholm, Jason Tichi, ICT Editor Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, ICT Editor-at-Large Mark Trahant and ICT Managing Editor Dalton Walker. Reporter: Mary Annette Pember | Lead producer: Michael I Schiller | Editor: Taki Telonidis, with Dianna Hunt | Additional reporting: Kathryn Styer Martínez and Stan Alcorn | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Production manager: Amy Mostafa | Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Kathryn Styer Martínez and Claire Mullen | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson They want the entire campus scanned for potential graves. The school has brought in ground-penetrating radar to examine selected parts of the campus, but for some residents, that effort is falling short. We close with what is perhaps the most sensitive part of the Red Cloud School’s search for the truth about its past: the hunt for students who may have died at the school and were buried in unmarked graves. Donald Warne from Johns Hopkins University, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota tribe who studies how the trauma of boarding schools is passed down through the generations. He vividly remembers being traumatized by the experience and says many of his schoolmates suffered for the rest of their lives. Next, Pember visits 89-year-old boarding school survivor Basil Brave Heart, who was sent to the Red Cloud School in the 1930s. Under pressure from the community, the school has launched a truth and healing program and is helping to reintroduce traditional culture to its students. policy toward Native people and takes us to the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
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These schools were part of a federal program designed to destroy Native culture and spirituality, with the stated goal to “kill the Indian and save the man.” ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, explores the role the Catholic Church played in creating U.S. In a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children. Please reload the page and try again.Īpple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | S titcher | Pandora | Amazon Music Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription.