Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School

The grounds of what is now the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Nation's property in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, held a school for forty years that the children who attended it did not choose to enter. The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School opened on January third, eighteen ninety-three, authorized by an act of Congress two years before. It was one of dozens of off-reservation boarding schools the federal government operated nationwide, all built around a single declared purpose: to absorb Native children into mainstream American culture by separating them from their families, their languages, and their traditions.

The philosophy behind these schools was encapsulated in a phrase used by one of the movement's founders: kill the Indian, save the man. Children from Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, and Alaska were sent here, many against their families' will. Enrollment ranged between three hundred and three hundred seventy-five students in a typical year. The school maintained a strict daily schedule. Children were forbidden to speak their Native languages. They were given English names, dressed in uniforms, and trained in vocational skills: farming and trades for boys, domestic work for girls. Academic instruction existed but was secondary to the goal of assimilation.

Records confirm the deaths of two hundred twenty-seven children during the school's four decades of operation. They died from disease, accidents, and the physical and emotional toll of the institution. Some were buried in unmarked graves on the property. Many families were never notified.

The school closed on June sixth, nineteen thirty-four. The campus became a state facility for youth with disabilities and juvenile offenders, operating under that purpose until two thousand eight. The Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Nation then acquired the property, and the tribe has announced plans to convert the site into a museum, a decision freighted with the weight of what happened on these grounds: a place of deliberate cultural erasure becoming, at last, a place of cultural memory.