I visited a Catholic-run residential school in Montana as Joe Biden was giving his national apology. ‘Nice school,’ says one student
ASHLAND, Montana — It is Seniors Night in Big Sky Country. Onto the volleyball court trot the Lady Braves of the St. Labre Indian School, a Catholic residential academy for the daughters and sons of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne tribes of Montana, now in its 141st year. Opposing them today are the Lady Indians of a rival school called Lodge Grass High from a Crow town on the Little Bighorn River where the median income for an entire family is US$22,222 a year.
The players and coaches on the competing squads are named Bigback, Bullcoming, Killsnight, Bad Bear, Rides Horse, Lefthand, Falls Down, Pretty On Top.
Yes, it is the “St. Labre Indian School.”
Yes, it is a Roman Catholic residential educational institution for Native American pupils from kindergarten through Grade 12.
Yes, the homestanders are the “Lady Braves.”
Yes, the visitors are the “Lady Indians.”
The niceties of Canadian newspeak are six rough-road hours to the north, across the Missouri River and the Little Rocky Mountains and the arrow-straight Saskatchewan line. This is, and always has been, Indian Country, per se.
Outside, on this late October afternoon, the cottonwoods along the Tongue River have turned to gold. The sky is clear, the roads that twist through the coulees are not yet snowbound, and half of the 1,800 residents of the Northern Cheyenne capital of Lame Deer, half an hour away, have just endured three days without running water because the town’s aging plumbing cracked.
Across campus, near the handsome new dormitory and the well-stocked cafeteria (fresh salads, cantaloupe, honeydew) and the Cheyenne Indian Museum and the classroom buildings apportioned by grades (elementary, middle, high), a soaring dolomite tipi pierces the sky: the St. Labre Chapel, offering the Sacrament of Holy Communion daily at seven and four.
“For the Indian, the inverted tipi is a sign of the family,” a brochure in the vestibule reads. “The Church is the sacred meeting place for the family of God.”
One by one now, the Lady Braves of the Class of 2025, along with the soon-to-graduate members of the school’s other fall sports teams, are introduced, their scholastic and athletic achievements are enumerated, and their plans and dreams are proclaimed. Parents and grandparents, some of them St. Labre alumni, escort them onto the floor. Pennants in a campus hallway illustrate the paths that other Braves before them have taken: Dartmouth, Yale, MIT, Notre Dame.
An honour guard troops in the state and U.S. colours. Courtside, a well-rehearsed circle of boys pound a leather drum and hail the players in song. Leading the rhythmic beating and high, piercing chanting is a young man named Bucky Old Elk, St. Labre’s instructor in traditional drumming, part of the institution’s belated obeisance to the cultures and the languages that it once believed was heaven-sent to erase.
“There are two dogs within me and I’m fighting both and they’re tearing me apart,” Old Elk says. “Being a Native person is the hardest thing. You’re expected to live two lives: this modern life and the Native life.”
“Do you wish the white man had never come and you still lived with your traditions and the buffalo?” I ask.
“I have a weak mind,” Bucky confesses. “I want to do the Native stuff. But I’ve got my Apple watch, my nice wedding ring. I’d rather be in a car going 80 miles an hour than on a horse going 30.
“In modern times, if you’re not going to school, then you’re not getting a good job with the government, you’re not getting all of this stuff, all of these things.
“I don’t want to look like a big fat white guy,” he says with a sigh.
The corridors of St. Labre are lined with vivid paintings of muscular riflemen on lightning steeds, galloping to glory. Those days are long gone, replaced too often by indigence, diabetes, alcoholism, drug addiction, despair.
“I want to look like my six-greats-grandfather Curly, who guided Custer to his death,” says Bucky Old Elk.
***
Ashland, Montana is a rather discouraging lay-by on the road to just about nowhere.
Some gift.
“If anybody asks, ‘How much land did the government give to the Northern Cheyenne?’” admitted the Billings Gazette in 1933, “a truthful reply would be that nobody ever gave them any land. The barren and scrubby little remnant of it where they are now confined is not fairly to be considered as having been given by us to them. It is simply what we have not yet taken away from them.”
“Three marijuana dispensaries, two bars, and two grocery stores,” is how the executive director of the St. Labre Indian School encapsulates the Ashland economy. And of the reservations that the institution serves, he says: “Not good. Kind of a chronic recession.”
Ashland also offers a single deep-fried eatery and a motel that casts a traveller back in time to 1968, and that’s about it. The nearest sizable cities — Billings, Montana; Sheridan, Wyoming; Rapid City, South Dakota — are hours away from St. Labre and a galaxy removed from the grim realities of what the people here call “the Rez.”
Fittingly, the school is named for the patron saint of the homeless, a bedraggled French mendicant of the 18th century, Benoît-Joseph Labré, who, according to the 1913 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia, believed that “it was God’s will that he should abandon his country, his parents, and whatever is flattering in the world to lead a new sort of life.”
It was much the same with the Ursuline Sisters of Detroit, who were invited in 1884 by the enlightened Bishop Brondel and the Northern Cheyenne themselves to open a school out here on what most white Americans deemed to be a frontier as remote as Mars.
“I would use the Indian police if necessary,” outlined Commissioner Morgan, later that decade, when asked how his underlings had been able to enroll so many offspring of the nation’s brutalized, displaced and sickened Indigenenous. (Smallpox killed far more than cavalry cartridges.)
“I would withhold rations and supplies … I would send a troop of United States soldiers as an expression of the power of the government. Then I would say to these people, ‘Put your children in school.’ And they would do it.”
“Eight little Crows are mingled with little Cheyennes under Catholic teachers at St. Labre’s mission,” gushed a Helena paper in the 1890s. This might not have been a mingling of which the little ones’ elders would have approved — the two tribes had been horse-stealing, slave-raiding enemies for centuries. But by then their martial spirit had been broken.
Today, the 265 pupils at St. Labre appear amicably divided between Crow and Cheyenne, with a few children of Caucasian and Filipina staff members attending as well. Only about 65 of the kids bivouac from Monday through Friday in the commodious bunkhouse for students in Grade 7 and older. The others commute daily by bus. Everybody goes home for the weekend, even if home is a cramped trailer far across the so-called fruited plain.
Of the first nuns of the Order of Saint Ursula — there were only three of them — the Hardin Tribune-Herald reminisced in 1933 that “they took into their schools Indian and mixed-blood boys and girls and strove to teach them cleanliness as well as their conception of godliness. Being ladies of culture and refinement, they instructed these ‘wild ones’ in manners, and in many instances made the girls excellent housekeepers and homemakers.”
“Do you think those nuns came out here to kill children?” I ask the woman who is perhaps the Crow nation’s most prominent scholar, a few days later, a hundred miles off campus in bright and mostly white Billings, Montana’s largest metropolis.
“They are not instruments of genocide.”
***
Cecilia Thex got to St. Labre Indian School about 70 years after the Ursuline sisters. It’s an unusual surname; in fact, it is not a surname at all, but a moniker given to an ancestor who could not sign his own name and therefore made only a cross. Hence “the X.” And then it was handed down as Thex like Rides Horse and Bullcoming and Pretty On Top.
The principal of the St. Labre high school calls Cecilia Thex her “disciplinarian,” but she prefers “interventionist.” She has been working at the school for 46 years. What she remembers about being an elementary-school pupil here is not pleasant.
“It’s a sore subject,” she says. “I don’t like talking about it.” She talks about it anyway. Her eyes turn red.
“They told us, ‘If you lie, you’ll go straight to hell,’” she spits. “We had never heard of hell. We didn’t even know there was a devil until the priests told us. Now I imagine those nuns and priests being in hell themselves!
“They soaped peoples’ mouths if you spoke your language. They kept the boys and girls separated. They had a long stick of a kind of wood that wouldn’t break. They would make you put your hands on the desk with the palms down and they would hit you with that stick.
“When I think what was done in these mission schools … Look at what went on in Canada. They had the same churches here.
“They cut peoples’ hair and braids. I would run and hide. I fought like hell. I remember my parents told me, ‘Do not let them cut your hair!’”
It’s not like the grade-school girl was a powder puff. The descendant of the man who signed with an X grew up in a cabin on the Tongue River, 10 miles from St. Labre. There was no electricity. The family travelled by horse and cart. But this was not the 1880s. The Soviets already had put a satellite in space.
“You had to be tough,” Cecilia Thex says. “You had to be emotionally strong. My mother said, ‘Stand tall. Be proud of what you are.’
“We used to be called ‘dirty Indians.’ Do you know that the skin behind the elbows is the darkest skin on your body? I used to scrub my elbows until they were raw, trying to turn them white.
“Even the other Indians discriminated against me because I am only three-fourths Indian. They started calling me vé’ho’á’e — ‘white woman.’ They even called me ‘Custer,’ and I don’t want to hear no excuses for him.
“I ran away. It was third or fourth grade. It was winter, but there was a chinook, so the roads were dry. Another girl and I, we ran down the sledding hill and through the cemetery. It was 10 miles, but we made it home. My mother hollered, ‘What are you doing here?’
“No one came looking for us.”
***
“In some cases, the schools were the only thing that kept the people alive,” says Janine Pease. “Elders would tell me, ‘My mother sent us to school because there was no food at home.’ The rations were withheld if you didn’t send your kids to school. In a way, they offered life.”
Thomas Jefferson Morgan had it all figured out — no school, no eat.
“The word ‘assimilation’ is so euphemistic,” Pease states. “You can’t understand what is happening, you don’t know what they are telling you, you can’t speak their language, and you’re only six years old and now your mother is gone? That’s not assimilation — it’s like you’re deaf, dumb and blind. And this is only 60 years ago.
“The cruelty in the schools is something that was so common, but it was so different from anything in Native ways. They would never hit their children.
“Resistance never stopped, but it’s hard to be philosophical if there’s no food.”
***
Dear (name),
Joey is only fifteen years old. At home, he experiences a lot of uncertainty and there isn’t always enough to eat.
He sometimes carries the weight of looking after his three younger siblings by himself. It’s a lot of responsibility for a young man, especially when he’s worried there won’t be enough food for everyone.
That’s why he recently confided in our school counselor. With the weekend approaching, he was anxious about his little brother and sisters. Would there be food for them?
As he shared his concerns, he broke down in tears …
Gratefully,
Curtis Yarlott
Isalúutshíile – “Yellow Arrows”
Executive Director
Since 1952, the motherlode of St. Labre’s bottom line has been a relentless mailbox bombardment of sob stories to which the phrase “poverty porn” has been applied by outside critics. Here is another of the letters that plaintively leverage — or exploit, depending on your choice of words — the abysmal living conditions on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne rez:
Every gift makes a difference! That’s because you will not only help deliver kids to and from our school – you’ll also help deliver hopes and dreams to our children. You see, you are a part of their journey to their future that is Proud, Prosperous and Free.
Thanks to you (Name), St. Labre can offer an exceptional education and important opportunities that nurture young minds and empower kids to overcome generations of poverty. In fact, over 93% of our students graduate – a higher average than the state and national averages. We owe so much to faithful supporters like you because we are funded primarily by our donors …
“As a member of the Crow nation, aren’t you embarrassed to do this?” I ask the executive director when we meet for an interview at the St. Labre administration building. Like the Ursuline Sisters of the 1880s, Curtis Yarlott, who is the son of a Korean woman and a Crow member of the U. S. military, has donated his life to an institution that would not exist if not for the donations of others. He started here as a “houseparent” in 1986 and never left.
“Do I regret it? No,” the self-described “Crowrean” educator replies.
“Do I enjoy it? No.
“It’s necessary.”
The mass appeals are effective. From kindergarten to graduation, and beyond to Montana State University in Bozeman or to Pease’s Little Big Horn College or the Cheyennes’ Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, or to a vocational or technical trade school, so much money comes in that St. Labre is able to operate free of cost to the attendees and their families.
“The folks on the Cheyenne and Crow Reservations do not have the financial means to contribute,” Yarlott says, defending the “crying Joey” strategy. “We don’t get any government money, except for some funds to cover school lunches. We have to appeal to the general public to support what we do.
“Unless you are Harvard or Yale, you can’t simply say: ‘We’re the best in the country, send us money.’ We’ve had chronic poverty on the reservation for as long as I’ve been alive, and I am 61 years old. We need help from the outside. We have to show them what the need is.”
But what if the tearful 15-year-old boy with the famished siblings is a fictional composite?
“If I write, ‘One parent is dead and the other is in prison,’ these are real stories even if I change the names and the faces to protect the children,” Yellow Arrows insists. “Maybe one of these days we won’t have to do that.”
“When you tell that poverty exists, you’re telling the truth,” Pease concurs. (She is not affiliated with St. Labre.) “Forty-five to 50 per cent of the Crow and Cheyenne people are addicted.
“If you think of all the money that was spent on warring with the Indians, the loss of language, the loss of culture, someone has to pay for all that loss.
“There’s wealth out there. Why not ask for it?”
By chance, while touring the soaring stone tipi, one of St. Labre’s longtime contributors enters the church. He gives his name as Mike Becher, a recent widower out of Mesa, Arizona. He tells me that he and his wife had vowed to someday visit the school together, but now, alas, he travelled alone.
“These people do a good job with what God gives them,” the donor says.
“Do you give out of pity?” I ask.
“No,” Becher replies. “Out of respect”
***
“We have to acknowledge the past,” says St. Labre’s director of Mission and Ministry Integration, a white layman named Jack Joyce who left his hometown of Detroit 28 years ago to tie up his horse at a cluster of low brick buildings in woebegone Ashland, Montana. Joyce’s wife, who is part Crow, is the principal of the high school division here. “As an organization, we have to be the prime mover in healing. We have to be the agent of change.”
“After all the trauma, why should this place still exist?” I ask him.
“We get a lot of parents and grandparents who choose to send their children to St. Labre because conditions in the other public and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools are so bad,” Joyce replies with candour.
Chief Plenty Coups, the last traditional headman of the Crow nation, died in 1932 at the age of 84. In 1921, in an extraordinary act of humility and clemency, he offered his war bonnet as a gesture to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in the capital of the nation that had seized and oppressed his own.
“Education is your greatest weapon,” preached Chief Plenty Coups. “With education you are the white man’s equal, without education you are his victim and so shall remain all of your lives.”
***
Afternoon mass in the dolomite tipi.
A dozen St. Labre students and staff members sit in the soft grey chairs while others across campus are primping for Pink-Out and getting stoked for volleyball against the Lady Indians.
A Capuchin priest in a hooded cassock of earthen brown conducts the service — “Hosanna in the highest,” he intones. “In the company of angels and saints …”
Father Jim Antoine, a son of small-town Wisconsin, first came to St. Labre in the 1960s as a student — “initially curious, and then scared, because I was going among a people whose ways I didn’t know.” He returned after his ordination.
I quote to the priest those words from the 19th century: Beyond the range of civilization and into the haunts of savagery these dauntless men carried the banner of their religion into an almost unknown country. Father Jim doesn’t look particularly dauntless.
“I came with the outlook of someone who is curious,” he says. “I felt attracted to the people, but I didn’t have that grand missionary attitude of making converts.
“I was here basically to love them for who they are. I was trying to find out what they believed before Christianity; what God had given them that connected our oneness. God is one, and the ways in which he has been with Native people are valid.”
“Are they equally as valid as your Christian beliefs?” I wonder.
“No,” the Capuchin answers. “But what God gave Indigenous peoples was a relationship with Himself, and ways that He as the Creator could be with them.”
Only one priest from St. Labre was listed among the “credibly accused.” But he was here for 40 years of the 20th century.
“Are the criticisms of the Church and its schools valid?” I ask Father Jim, who is one of three Capuchins serving at St. Labre today.
“In some situations, yes, but we shouldn’t universalize that,” he replies. “We are in a different time now and the challenges are different. The diocese has made its apology. I don’t feel it is my place to do that. My place is to love and encourage those who are living in this time, because it is a different time, on and off the reservation.”
“Do you wish the white man had never come and these people still lived with their traditions and the buffalo?” I ask.
“Such an attitude is futile,” says Father Jim. “History happened, and justice is certainly present now. I definitely feel that the balance is for the good now, or this school wouldn’t be existing.”
***
The reckoning that has agonized Canada has come belatedly to the United States.
“Children would arrive at schools,” Biden declaimed. “Their clothes taken off. Their hair that they were told was sacred was chopped off. Their names literally erased and replaced by a number or an English name.
“Children abused — emotionally, physically, and sexually abused. Forced into hard labour. Some put up for adoption without the consent of their birth parents. Some left for dead in unmarked graves.”
There they were, finally out in the Yankee sun, straight from the commander-in-chief, those two chilling words so familiar to Canadians: “unmarked graves.” But St. Labre had beaten Biden to it.
The Americans appointed a committee of independent scholars, including Dr. Janine Pease and Dr. Richard Littlebear, president of Chief Dull Knife College, to lead the investigation.
“We started out knowing very little,” Pease tells me at a Billings coffee shop. “There was no reason to assume that what happened in Canada happened here. I feared that it happened but I tried to keep an open mind but I really did not know.”
The commission members searched St. Labre’s records as far back as the Ursuline Sisters.
Sister Saint Angela Louise Abair described the first death of a child at St. Labre. She said the child succumbed to unknown causes at the “Indian tents,” where children lived with their families a half mile from the school. The experience proved memorable for the Ursuline Sisters, who heard screams of grieving family but did not understand why until morning, when they learned a girl had died and was buried. Sister Abair did not record the child’s name or even if she attended the school but did note that it “was our first experience with the death toll of the Indian, and we did not forget it for some time …”
In 1924, Mother M. Xavier questioned Father Charles Renaudi’s “mentality” and presented the ultimatum “if he is to be in the Mission as superior we shall withdraw our nuns.” She also said that of the “three men employed there,” one was “a thoroughly immoral man, and whose presence around the girls terrify the nuns …”
In a letter dated April 9, 1938, Father Matthew responded to the BIA superintendent after parents raised allegations of physical abuse of a student named Jimmy Whitebird. The child had run away from school multiple times, and Father Matthew recounted what he told the boy’s mother: “Three years ago I had asked permission of old Jim Yellow Hair (the boy’s grandfather) to trash Jimmy just once, believing this to be a sure means of settling the boy once and for all. Do you see this hand? If I had used it to slap him down at that time Jimmy would be a better boy to-day.”
“Maybe there is some canon law that forbids commenting on the cruelty of fathers, priests, nuns, and Catholic Church personnel because there seemed to be no consequences for those Church personnel who inflicted harsh punishment,” noted Littlebear. “If harsh punishment no longer is the norm, what eventually brought that change about — a closer reading of the scriptures, a collective realization that those being so harshly punished are actually human?”
“The circumstances surrounding student deaths and burials at St. Labre, St. Xavier, and St. Charles are not always clear,” the commission concluded in its 151-page report. (The latter two institutions are day schools administered by St. Labre.) “We do know that at least 113 children died while enrolled in the schools, or shortly after attending them, between 1884 and 1960. This is a substantial loss of life, and there are likely many others whose deaths are not recorded in documents reviewed during this investigation.”
Painfully and meticulously, the commission’s report listed every child who is known to have perished while enrolled at St. Labre, St. Xavier, and St. Charles.
Peter Paul (1890)
Described as one of three children who died at the mission during its first 12 years. Baptized as Peter Paul. Went home sick with his grandmother but returned to the mission to die. He had a high fever. Buried in a coffin made by old school boys. Funeral and burial in the St. Labre Mission Cemetery.
Richard Basil Crawling (1910)
Had tuberculosis and was taken home, but “insisted that his tent should be moved near the Mission where the good missionaries could visit him daily.” Mother St. Thecla present at his death. Buried in the St. Labre Mission Cemetery with personal belongings, including his spring bed, cup, and tea plate.
Isabel Sanchez (1924)
Died of tuberculosis of the lungs. Sick for 31 months. Letter denying her admission into a tuberculosis sanatorium stated, “I am sorry, I assure you, that we cannot make room for the girl.”
The commission brought in a specialist who operated a Light Detection and Ranging drone that could pinpoint any disturbance or anomaly that could not be cross-referenced with known burials.
The LIDAR drone searched the existing St. Labre Cemetery, through which little Cecilia Thex had sprinted for home years before. It flew over the locations that elders had mentioned in the group or private interviews that the commission held across the Crow and Cheyenne lands: “In the grotto,” or “under a tree next to the river in Ashland.”
Nothing was found.
“We were looking for evidence,” Pease says. “We didn’t find it. We had funds for excavation if we found anything, but we did not find it.”
“Are you ready to say ‘case closed’ at St. Labre?” I ask the scholar.
“It makes a difference to know what we can know,” she answers. “I think we found the truth to the extent of our efforts, but there is a lot of truth out there. We came 40 years too late.”
***
“We kind of forget what they did,” a 17-year-old senior named Jerome Fox tells me in a quiet moment at St. Labre Indian School. “My grandpa was whipped — they had a leather belt, and they would hit him in the hands. He took punishment for speaking his language. I can’t speak our language because our grandparents were told not to speak it, not to do their ceremonies.
“We should not forget. It’s called ‘generational trauma.’ It still hits us today.”
Fox is part Cheyenne, part Sioux, part Arapaho. No one at St. Labre has whipped him, cut his hair, or made him eat soap. He has participated in the ancient Sun Dance ritual that assigns young Cheyenne men to a society of warriors. He says that he is “sort-of related” to Chief Crazy Horse, whose braves shot George Armstrong Custer dead, then pushed an arrow up his penis and sewing awls into his ears “so he would listen,” cut out his heart, and — according to a contemporary newspaper on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. — “put it on a pole and a grand war dance was held around it.”
“Do you wish the white man had never come and you still lived with your traditions and the buffalo?” I ask the 17-year-old.
“Sort of,” the student replies. “We were living a nomadic lifestyle. We didn’t have to worry about money, about paying bills.”
Now, the young man says, he is caught in the same buffalo jump as his peers — trying to balance Catholic and Indigenous teachings, two realities, two histories, two worlds.
Outside the room where we are talking is a gallery of class photos from the past half-century, and those pennants from Yale and Dartmouth and MIT, on a modern campus that seems so bright and promising compared to the nutritional Sahara and the meth addiction and the cracked waterlines outside. But I am only a tourist. Maybe I am as deaf as Colonel Custer.
“Will you send your own kids to St. Labre?” I ask Jerome Fox, who has been here since early childhood.
“Yeah,” the student answers. “Nice school.”
Main image: Photo of St. Labre Indian School senior Jerome Fox, taken in late October by Peter J. Thompson/National Post