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iViHe assured the man that was not the case. It’s the kind of long-lasting cultural ripple many tribal members have become accustomed to in the three decades since the school in Harbor Springs closed.A community voidJoAnne Cook, a Grand Traverse Band Tribal Council member, was the first, in her family not to go to boarding school. Her mother, grandmother and older siblings all attended the schools.Cook, who graduated from Suttons Bav Hi eh School inDudley’s father decided to send her to Holy Childhood for the sixth grade in the late 1940s. She spent the next three years there.region lor the most part were not allowed to wear their own clothes or speak their language, Anishinabemowen. Many Indian schools like Holy Childhood started as church-run mission schools designed to teach children in their own language, but their objectives changed in the late 1880s. The federal government took control of Indian education in the U.S. and the facilities shifted from mission schools to boarding schools, said Eric Hemenway, the director of archives and records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. He focused his studies on the school in Harbor Springs.“As long as the family nucleus was kept intact, they’d keep speaking their language and keeping their traditions,” Hemenway said. “The government wanted to break this, essentially.”The schools often used brutal tactics to impose mainstream culture on children and left a legacy of abuse from Pennsylvania to California. Nationwide the schools’ student population didn’t peak until the 1970s when more than 60,000 Native American children were enrolled, according to Amnesty International.John Petoskey, general counsel for the Grand Traverse Band, said the schools weren’t enough to whitewash the culture. The government then adopted the Dawes Actnf whirli riiviriprt rpc-her time at one as a needed escape from Suttons Bay when she was young. Other children and most of the teachers at the public school were prejudiced against natives, she said. She refused to go to class, and when the bus dropped her at school she wouldn’t follow her class-mates.“I’d get off and walk back home, about three milesRecortl-Eagle/Jan-Michael StumpJoAnne Cook’s mother and siblings who attended Indian boarding school.For video about the boarding schools go to www.record-eagle.comaway,” she said.s.*ReconJ-Eagie fils photoA historical marker stands in front of the former Holy Childhood of Jesus School building in Harbor Springs.
Newspaper Details
Traverse City Record Eagle
Traverse City, Michigan, US
Sun, Nov 15, 2015
Page 3
Full Page
Clipped by
Traverse A.
MI, USA 13 Oct 2018
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