“Over the four decades that the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School operated in Michigan, thousands of Native American children from across the country were taken from their parents and sent there to be stripped of their languages and traditions.
The U.S. documented five deaths of Indigenous children at the school from its opening in 1893 to its closure in 1934. But when the land where the school once sat was returned to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan in 2010 by the state, the tribe’s researchers uncovered a more extensive history of the federal government’s violence: records confirming the deaths of 227 children while at Mount Pleasant. The search for their remains is still underway.
The effort to figure out what happened to those children illustrates the challenge the Department of the Interior faces in its recently announced investigation of the more than 350 Native American boarding schools that operated in the United States for more than a century.”
-NBC News
I came across your website in my research on Governor Aaron T. Bliss who was one of the founders of the Industrial Indian School. I was alarmed to find articles indicating possible abuse of native children because it did not line up with the character of the man throughout his life. Bliss was born ti a poor garm family in Peterboro NY, the cradle of the abolishonist movement. He fought in the Civil War and volunteered to stay and fight so his company retreated to safety. He was captured and held prisoner in Andersonville but miraculously survived and escaped after 6 months penned outside like an animal. At the end of his life, he served as Michigan’s Governor. He and his wife had no children but founded a school for the blind, a home for the homeless (“friendless”), a hospital and orphanage in Saginaw. His intention was to help native people learn skills to support themselves so they were not at the mercy of unscrupulous operators. The school campus was as beautiful as any college at that time. I know others may have taken over after his death, or founded other schools to intentionally demoralize native people, but I do not believe that was Bliss’s intent. Nearly every decision he made was to help the underdog get out from the bottom of the pile. I hope this brings some healing to those who were affected. God have mercy on us all and may brotherly love yet overcome! Thank you for the opportunity to tell a little from the other side.
born to a “poor farm” family