Presenter: Gavin Zempel
Project Adviser: Kevin Whalen (Native American and Indigenous Studies)
Title: Dakod Etkiya: Dakota Perspectives of Boarding School Through a Familial and Tribal Lens
Feature Presentation: Edson Auditorium, 7:15p.m.
Abstract:
Pipestone Indian Training School was established in 1891 through illegal land theft from the Ihaŋktuŋwaŋ Dakota, and until its closure in 1953, the institution had the expressed mission of assimilating Dakota children from nearby Dakota communities, as well as children from many other tribes in the local interstate area, into Christian, Anglo-American society. The federal boarding school system, which Pipestone was part of, was a genocidal system of assimilation and land theft that began after outright massacre of Indigenous tribes became unacceptable to the American public following the events of Wounded Knee. Though Pipestone Indian School's purpose was to destroy Native identities and communities, the school instead became a hub of the local Dakota community in Pipestone, MN, as well as a space where students formed and strengthened tribal and intertribal identities and kinship networks despite the active and simultaneous persecution of these identities. Students endured harsh conditions, cultural assimilation, religious indoctrination, corporal punishment, and abuse of every form, while holding onto their own identities and forming new kinship ties with students from other nations. I will use an Indigenous research paradigm, articulated by Shawn Wilson, with reciprocity, relationality, Dakota ways of knowing, the Dakota language and values, and respect at the center of my research to ensure that it is done ethically and with the intent to benefit the families and community being studied. To use a familial lens, communal and familial knowledge and histories will be utilized to show how these institutions affected individuals, families, and Indigenous communities at a more intimate, familial scale. These institutions continue to affect the communities and families of survivors to this day through historically on-going trauma within the bodies of its’ survivors. By looking through a Dakota lens, or through the approach of using traditional Dakota ways of knowing and understanding, the Dakota language oral histories, and Dakota philosophy, I will illustrate how my tribe and families’ experiences surviving Pipestone Training Indian School continues to affect my family and community to this day as it has been ingrained into our DNA as intergenerational trauma, and compounded with already existing, historically on-going trauma. The effects of this trauma have been extreme, resulting poverty, loss of identity, loss of culture, loss of language, mental illness, low educational attainment, short life spans, spiking diabetes rates, as has the resilience Dakota students displayed in surviving their schools’ experiences, maintaining a tribal identity, and creating new kinship bonds with other students from different tribal communities.
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