Government Boarding School at Lac du Flambeau

The Ojibwe people have a long history at Lac du Flambeau. About 1745 under Giishkiman (Sharpened Stone) they settled where the Bear River flows out of Flambeau Lake.[3] In 1792 the North West Fur Company added a trading post there which operated until about 1835. A Presbyterian missionary visited starting in 1832. Major logging began in the winter of 1885. The first Indian agent arrived in 1888. The first church was built in 1894.[4]

Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. government tried various policies to assimilate Native Americans into European-American culture. Rationalizing boarding schools, one Indian agent wrote in 1886, "Only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated..."[5] By separating Indian children from their families, the boarding schools aimed to enable them to fit into mainstream American society as farmers or laborers, but they did this by stripping Ojibwe children of their culture.

Ojibwe children were forced from their families to government boarding schools as early as 1856.[6] In 1895 the Bureau of Indian Affairs opened the boarding school at Lac du Flambeau.[1][7] This was not the only such school; by 1899 there was also the Menominee Boarding School at Keshena and the Oneida Boarding School at Oneida.[8] There were also non-government Indian boarding schools like the Catholic-run Saint Mary's at Odanah on the Bad River reservation,[9] the Lutheran-run Wittenberg School, and the non-government non-church Tomah Industrial School.[8] Some Ojibwe children went to government day schools like at Lac Courte Oreilles. Others were sent to off-reservation boarding schools, like at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.[6][10]

Children from the tribes ages five to fifteen were required to attend the school at Lac du Flambeau.[11] Once there, they were forced to abandon all Native American language, ceremonies, foods and clothing. Breaking these rules resulted in physical punishment. The government made it a year-round boarding school, with no summer break, to more effectively break the passing of Native culture and replace it with Euro-American culture.[1]

The initial school was a complex of seven or eight buildings with 300 acres. The surviving building pictured above is just one of them - the boys' dormitory, built around 1895. Over the years more buildings were added to form a quad around a marching field. The buildings included "three dormitories, a classroom, ice houses, warehouses, root cellars, a hospital, a laundry, a steam plant/boiler room, a carpenter shop, a blacksmith shop, a carriage house, a clubhouse, ... barns, a silo, a hen house, a pig house, and a fish hatchery."[1]

The academic curriculum was pretty standard for the time: arithmetic, reading, spelling, ethics, civics, geography, drawing, history, written and oral language, physiology, current events, music and nature. As the children advanced, the curriculum became more practical, a sincere effort to give the children skills for modern western life. Boys learned farming and gardening, stock raising and dairying, carpentry and masonry, shoe and harness repair, engineering, blacksmithing, and painting. Girls learned child-rearing, home training, home nursing, poultry-raising, cooking, sewing, and laundering. The older students did some of the work that fed and maintained the school. Here is a schedule for a weekday:

 5:30 AM  Rising and drills
 6:30     Assembly
 6:45     Breakfast
 7:25     Warning signal - Industrial departments
 7:30     Industrial departments begin work
 8:30     First signal for academic work
 8:45     Second signal for academic work
11:30     Recall signal - all departments
11:50     Assembly signal
12:00     Dinner
12:55 PM  Warning signal - Industrial departments
 1:00     Industrial departments begin work
 1:00     First signal for academic work
 1:15     Second signal for academic work
 4:00     Recall signal - academic departments
 5:00     Recall signal - industrial departments
 5:20     Assembly
 5:30     Supper
 6:50     First signal for evening hour
 7:00     Evening hour
 7:30     Small pupils retire
 9:00     Large pupils retire

Weekends allowed some time for recreation, but also inspections. Sunday morning each child attended either Protestant or Catholic worship services.[1]

Most of the students at Lac du Flambeau were Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Odawa from northern Wisconsin, with a few from other communities. Some children were forcibly taken from their families by the school superintendent and disciplinarian, along with tribal policemen. In 1898 Charley Catfish of Lac du Flambeau sent this letter to the Indian agent at La Pointe:

Mr Agent esq will pleas tell me if Mr. Parash has the power to go and take our children away frome us without our consient that is I mean frome thay mother or father one of my nabors has a child taken away frome him and the child was nursing yet we think he is too young to go to school the Boy is foor years old that is too young to go to school and the Boy is sick over it and of corse the mother and father is feeling very Bad over it pleas let us indins know if he has the power to take our children with out our own consient of corse you know I am not doing this on my own hook I am writing for the Balance of my friends address
charley catfish
lac du flambeau res Wis

The agent answered that no child that young was in the school.[1]

To keep their children and preserve their culture, some native people chose to live off-reservation, beyond the reach of the school and Indian agent. For examples in central Wisconsin, see Powers Bluff[12] and Big Indian Farms.[13]

By the 1920s the federal government was questioning the effectiveness of the boarding schools. A 1928 report called The Problem of Indian Administration stated of the schools in general:

The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate. The diet is deficient in quantity, quality, and variety.... The boarding schools are crowded materially beyond their capacities.... In nearly every boarding school one will find children of 10, 11, and 12 spending four hours a day in more or less heavy industrial work—dairy, kitchen work, laundry, shop. The work is bad for children of this age, especially children not physically well-nourished; most of it is in no sense educational since the operations are large-scale and bear little relation to either home or industrial life outside.... Nearly every boarding school visited furnished disquieting illustrations of failure to understand the underlying principles of human behavior. Punishments of the most harmful sort are bestowed in sheer ignorance, often in a sincere attempt to be of help. Routinization is the one method used for everything; though all that we know indicates its weakness as a method in education. If there were any real knowledge of how human beings are developed through their behavior, we should not have in the Indian boarding schools the mass movements from dormitory to dining room, from dining room to classroom, from classroom back again, all completely controlled by external authority...[5]

In the 1920s Native crafts was added to the curriculum at Lac du Flambeau. By 1932 the school had shifted from a boarding school to a day school.[1]

Nevertheless, "The effects of the school were devastating to the tribal community. Traditional spiritual beliefs were replaced by Christianity, traditional dances by square dances and traditional languages by English. Within two generations, the boarding school had created a population of young adults who did not fit into either the traditional reservation culture or the surrounding white communities."[1]

In later years the school was owned by the Ojibwe people. Today the boys' dormitory houses offices of the LDF Tribal Historic Preservation Program, the Ojibwe Language Program, and the Cultural Activities Program.[1]

In 2000 the Department of Interior formally apologized for actions of the BIA "that in the past has committed acts so terrible that they infect, diminish and destroy the lives of Indian people decades later, generations later." In 2009 the U.S. President signed into law a similar apology. The sign-board outside the school observes, "...the Boy's Dormitory... towering over the state highway, is a constant reminder of the near destruction of Native language and culture. It is preserved as a memorial to all the children who passed through its doors."[1]

• Indian Students at Government School is an 1896 photo online at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Indian School is another from 1929.
• Barnouw, Victor (1966). Dream of the Blue Heron. Delacorte Press. is a novel aimed at teens about a Chippewa boy taken from his family to a boarding school, very much in a time and place like the boarding school at Lac du Flambeau.