‘ I was no longer allowed to use my name ’ Boarding school survivors share their stories

ANADARKO – Brought Plenty was sitting in her South Dakota day school one morning when two white men entered the building, grabbed her arms and hauled her out to a car.

Plenty, who was about 6 at the time, said she does not remember the ride to Pierre Indian School in Pierre, South Dakota. But she has vivid memories of what happened when she arrived.

The men took Plenty into a small room which looked like a laundry room, where they stripped her down and cut off her hair.

“They poured liquid in my hair and gave me some liquid stuff in my hand and told me to go to the showers,” Plenty said, her voice breaking. “When I got out, they issued me towels, sheets, and told me I was no longer allowed to use my name.”

School officials then gave Plenty a number, 199, which she used while she was a student at Pierre.

A Standing Rock Sioux, Plenty talked about the abuse she endured in the federal Indian boarding school system, which forced Native American students to assimilate into white culture. She was among several survivors who told their stories during a July 11 listening session at Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, the first stop on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s yearlong “Road to Healing” tour.

The tour is designed to give former boarding school students and their descendants a chance to tell their stories and seek healing. The Interior Department will collect information from the tour for a permanent oral history of the boarding school system.

Survivors and their families are still dealing with the trauma that boarding school policies inflicted on them, said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to hold a Cabinet post.

“My ancestors endured the horror of the Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead,” she said. “This is the first time in history that a Cabinet secretary comes to the table with this shared trauma, and it’s not lost on me.”

Survivors’ stories

Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, a member of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe) in northern Michigan, listened quietly as survivors shared harrowing stories about their boarding school experiences.

Kiowa Tribe member Donald Neconie said when he arrived at St. Patrick’s Catholic Indian Mission in Anadarko, school officials took him downstairs, stripped off his clothes and threw green stuff on him. He said the green stuff stung his body, and the pain was even worse when officials poured water on him.

“They did not care,” said Neconie. “They didn’t bat an eyelid. And they said, ‘If you cry, we will whip you.’ And I said, ‘That’s OK.’

“I started crying, and they whipped me. And they whipped me, and they whipped me.”

Boarding schools

Under Haaland’s direction, the Interior Department launched an investigation of government-supported Indian boarding schools in 2021. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which examined how school policies affected generations of Native Americans, was designed to shine a light on the traumas of the past.

The agency released the first volume of its findings, which included an extensive inventory of federally supported schools, earlier this year.

Indian boarding schools forced Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children to assimilate by removing them from their families and enrolling them in far-off boarding schools, the Interior Department said when it announced the investigation in 2021. The schools were designed to suppress students’ cultural identities, languages and beliefs.

The investigation found that the federal government operated or supported 408 Indian boarding schools across 37 states or territories between 1819 and 1969. That number included 21 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaii.

Investigators found marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 schools across the system. Agency officials expect to find more identified burial sites as the investigation continues.

Oklahoma had 76 boarding schools, the most of any state on the list. One of those was Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, which opened in 1871 and remains active today.

Riverside is the nation’s oldest and largest boarding school for Native Americans. The 135-acre campus is located on Wichita, Caddo and Delaware land north of Anadarko and is surrounded by woodland next to the Washita River.

The Bureau of Indian Education currently operates the school, which serves nearly 800 students in fourth through 12th grades. The students represent more than 75 tribes across the United States, and the faculty and staff are mostly Native American.

Today, Riverside’s curriculum combines academic programs with courses in cultural topics and an introduction to tribal art, foods and games, according to The Associated Press. The school is one of 183 BIE-funded schools across the country, which aims to give students the tools they need to flourish.

But for Donald Neconie, Riverside is a symbol of the way Indian boarding schools mistreated students.

Neconie said he thought the abuse he endured at St. Patrick’s Mission would stop once he left the school. But when he arrived at Riverside, the abuse continued.
Neconie, who attended Riverside from 1946 to 1958, said school officials poured lye in his mouth to stop him from speaking his tribe’s language. He said students were sexually assaulted, but authorities did nothing to stop the attacks.

“They didn’t put the people that did that to us – they didn’t put them in jail,” he said. “They didn’t do anything to those people. And we went through hell again, because we were told that if you told anybody, you would get the hell beat out of you.”

Neconie said the sexual assaults continued until he was in high school, when they stopped for some reason. But he said he still feels that pain.

“I’m not ready to forgive this school for what it did – for anything,” said Neconie, an 84-year-old veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. “I don’t care how much money it takes. I will never, ever forgive this school for what it did to me.”

‘I don’t know how we survived’

Brought Plenty, who attended Pierre and Eagle Butte boarding schools in South Dakota, described how Pierre officials punished her when she tried to speak her native language.

“I was often brought out into the hallways,” she said. “They put a brick in each one of my hands and made me kneel there until they were satisfied. When I started to slouch down, they would come by and smack me with a ruler and tell me to straighten up. And so, I would be kneeling out there for hours.”

Plenty said Pierre officials took her to church one morning and asked her whether she was Catholic or Episcopalian.

When she said she thought the two denominations were the same, officials put a metal cross in her hand. Then they told her she would be an Episcopalian, and she should seek forgiveness for who she was.

When Plenty finished fifth grade at Pierre, officials transferred her to a school at Eagle Butte. There, she endured beatings and other abuses including a towel line, where students were forced to whip other students with wet hand towels.

Plenty said students who did not obey orders were sent down the towel line. She said a friend of hers who had been absent without leave went through the towel line one day, but Plenty could not bring herself to hit her friend.

“So, they ripped my clothes off me at the end and sent me down right after the girls,” she said. “It was things like this we all went through.”

Plenty, an artist who now lives in Dallas, started counseling when she was 22 but didn’t start talking about her boarding school experience until a couple of years ago. She still goes to counseling twice a week.

“You never get past this,” she said. “You never forget it. What they did to us was terrible. I don’t know how we survived.”