The Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School
by Megan Leverage
Street view of the site of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, located at the corner of Pickard and S. Crawford Rds, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, June 24, 2020. Please note the “No Trespassing” sign.
Jointly owned by the city and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, the site of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School is not open to the public, but you can still catch a glimpse of the deteriorating buildings as you drive past them on Pickard Road. As the city’s mayor William Joseph has said, when you drive by this place and know its history you "feel your heart sink and your stomach drop."
In 1890, Congressman Aaron T. Bliss secured a bill to build an "Indian industrial or training school” in Michigan “to be as near as practicable moulded on the plan of the Indian school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania." The Carlisle school was the first Indian boarding school, and had been established by Army officer Richard Pratt based on his social experiment with Apache prisoners of war. Pratt’s boarding school system was driven by the explicit mission to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Through strict enforcement of the English language and the Christian religion, Native American children were expected to conform to a European-American lifestyle. In 1882, Congress passed a bill to fund more boarding schools on the Pratt/Carlisle model.
A panoramic photograph of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, c. 1910. In public domain.
In 1891, Congress appropriated $25,000 for land and buildings in Mt. Pleasant and local residents contributed an additional $3,400. Local support reflected dissatisfaction with the day schools of the Methodist Episcopal Mission Society, which had struggled with attendance and language barriers perpetuated, according to some, by students’ proximity to their families. “[A]s soon as the school closed for the day the child returned to its home, there to talk Indian until the school hour the next day," Isaac Fancher complained. The Pratt/Carlisle model enforced multiyear terms with very few (if any) opportunities for students to return home.
The Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School was not simply a Christian institution. Its very foundation was Masonic. While Native Americans have found empowerment through both Christianity and Freemasonry, the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School exemplifies the dynamic nature of religion, particularly its relationship to power. The religion that undergirded the Mt. Pleasant boarding school sanctified colonization in the so-called progressive era of the United States.
On October 18, 1892, around 2,000 white residents of Michigan gathered in downtown Mt. Pleasant to march in a Grand Parade for the laying of the school’s cornerstone. The Grand Master of the Free and Accepted Masons laid the cornerstone with the square, level and plumb, certifying the building’s construction according to the Masonic values of virtue, equality and uprightness. The Grand Chaplain led a Christian prayer, explicitly stating the purpose of the school: “the advancement in civilization and education of our red brothers.” After the judge of the tenth circuit court made a speech commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s journey to the Americas, Masons mortared the cornerstone in place, making offerings of corn, wine and oil. Masonic cornerstone ceremonies are based on ancient rituals of human and animal sacrifice and symbolize a new era of prosperity and opportunity. In this case, the ceremony consecrated the violent process of assimilation and whitewashed the long history of broken treaties.
The Mt. Pleasant boarding school opened in June of 1893, quickly filling to its capacity of 325 students. Boys and girls were taken (often by force) from all over Michigan, surrounding states and Ontario. Upon arrival, they were stripped of all personal belongings, including the clothes on their backs; their hair was cut short; they were disinfected with alcohol, kerosene, or DDT; they were dressed in uniforms. They were given new English names to work, what was essentially, a child labor camp.
A photograph of enrolled boys and girls, in uniforms, lined up in front of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, c. 1910. In public domain.
Over the next forty-one years, girls learned and practiced “domestic science” in a modern cottage powered by steam and electricity, and boys labored the school’s 320 acre farm, specializing in “fruit culture.” Students were subjugated in many ways, but they were nonetheless strong and resilient children who actively resisted the boarding school system. To be sure, students ran away, stole food, held secret pow wows, and even set the school on fire.
In a 2012 archaeological survey, supported by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, anthropologist Sarah Surface-Evans excavated numerous buttons at the site of the school, explaining “the students would talk about using buttons as currency … they would discreetly remove buttons from their clothing, as many as they could, and use them to barter and trade for things.” This oral history is supported by letters from the superintendent to the federal government, requesting money for more clothing, “because the buttons were always gone and he didn’t know where they were going.” The buttons would have also served an invisible sociopolitical purpose of establishing kinship networks, modeled on the traditions of Anishinabe beadwork and wampum of Eastern Woodlands tribes.
Resistance continues into the present period. In 2019, the Mt. Pleasant community gathered at the site of the school to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the school’s closing and to recognize the suffering, strength and resilience of its students. The day was filled with religious ceremonies including a pipe ceremony, tribal flag song and jingle dress healing dance. As Ronald Ekdahl, chief of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, explained: “the purpose of this school ... was to kill the Indian and save the man; to teach us a ‘better’ way of life; to erase our culture; to erase our language; to take away all those values that we as Anishinabe people are able to celebrate today as in direct opposition to that.”
Looking to the future, the tribe hopes to restore three buildings for a revitalization project, including a memorial dedicated to the students and the 227 deaths that took place at the school, a museum, and a public language, arts and education center. Shannon Martin, co-director of the Ziibiwing Center in Mt. Pleasant, explains that the goal is “to flip the script of the site.”
As I return to school in the midst of COVID-19, one facet in the history of Indian boarding schools shifts into focus. During the influenza pandemic, public schools were closed, while Indian boarding schools were ordered by federal officials to remain open, primarily to maintain government funding. One letter dated March 3, 1920 reported that a pregnant mother traveled to the Mt. Pleasant to plead with school officials to see her sick son. Within thirty hours, she "developed the flu, aborted, and died." Native Americans were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, and many of those deaths occurred inside Indian boarding schools. A century later, racial discrimination continues to play a role in determining who lives and dies in this pandemic.
Mikaëla M. Adams, “Social Distancing in the Age of Assimilation: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920 in Indian Country,” The Center for the Study of the American South, April 16, 2020.
Isaac Fancher, “Indian Industrial School,” in Past and Present of Isabella County Michigan (Indianapolis: B.F. Bowen & Company, 1911), 76-82.
Gabrielle Haiderer, “Tribe works to build a picture of life at Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School,” Epicenter Mt. Pleasant, April 2, 2020.
“American Indian Boarding Schools: An Exploration of Global Ethnic & Cultural Cleansing,” Mt. Pleasant: Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways, 2010.
“Honoring, Healing and Remembering AM session,” June 6, 2019, Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, Mt. Pleasant, MI, Live Webcast, 2:13:31.
“The Stone is Laid: With Imposing Ceremonies,” The North Western Tribune, October 21, 1892, in “To Run and Play”: Resistance and Community at the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial School, 1892 - 1933, by Andrew Balabuch, BA Honors Thesis (University of Michigan 2010), 1-3.
U.S. Indian School, Mt. Pleasant, Mich., Kay County: Chilocco Indian School, c. 1913.
Megan Leverage is a Lecturer at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. She teaches Religion, Race and Discrimination in America, Religion and Social Issues, and Death & Dying. Her book project focuses on Transhumanism, a cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to transcend the limits of the human condition by means of new science and technology, and the relationship between religion and secularism more broadly.