History Instructor Anita Gaul and Janet Timmerman presented at the Academy of St. Rose of Avoca, Minnesota which operated a Catholic boarding school for Native American girls between 1884 and 1893.

Gaul began the presentation by giving context for how a Native American boarding school came to Avoca, Minnesota in Murray County.

It started with Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul. He had a vision of Catholic colonization of southern Minnesota. He believed the way to save the faith was to get Catholics out of the sinful cities and onto the farms.

Bishop Ireland created the Catholic Colonization Bureau in 1876 to sell land farmland to Irish Catholic families. Between 1876 and 1881 there were 10 Catholic colonies created across western and southwestern Minnesota. Ireland prioritizes Irish Catholics, but he did not bar other ethnicities or protestants.

History Instructor Anita Gaul explains the policy that led to the creation of Native American boarding schools.

Avoca was at the heart of the Catholic settlements. Ireland established a church in Avoca called St. Rosa of Lima Catholic Church. He was also a firm believer in Catholic education and realized a school would be needed. In 1883, Bishop Ireland sent a letter to the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, to establish a school in Avoca. He offered a hotel he had built a few years earlier as a location for the school.

This group of Sisters agreed to purchase the hotel for a school. They were able to open a school in Sept. 1883. The school was intended as a boarding school but also a day school. Before starting the school, the Sisters were told they could draw Catholic students from the surrounding communities, but few came.

Gaul said there were between 30 to 40 students attending split between the boarding and day school.

“It is not enough to keep the school going,” Gaul said. Without enough students and community support the sisters struggled to feed themselves.

According to journals written by the sisters, Bishop Ireland made a surprise visit in Nov. 1883 and there was no food to provide him a meal.

Janet Timmerman (left( and Anita Gaul (right) present on the history of St. Rose Academy and it's legacy as Catholic Boarding School for Native American girls.

“Imagine the Bishop coming to your house and you don’t have enough food even to give him a cup of coffee,” Gaul said. “That gives you a sense of how much the school is struggling.”

Things changed abruptly in July 1884. Bishop Ireland has secured a contract for the U.S. government for the Sister to educate 50 Native American girls. The Sisters received $85 per student every year. This is equivalent to $2,744 per student today. The Sisters are required to “feed, lodge, clothe and care for the girls generally besides bringing them up in the habits of civilized life, training them to the performance of household duties and giving them the elements of a good plain education.”

Why was the federal government giving a religious order of nuns a contract to educate Native American girls?

Gaul said it was part of President Ulysses S. Grant’s peace policy. Western expansion had led to near-constant conflict with the U.S. Army and the tribes of the American West. By the time Grant became President he was seeking peace with tribal nations. His administration creates a peace policy with Native Americans through “humanization, civilization and Christianization.”

Gaul said the plan was to Americanize the Native Americans. The goal was to eliminate everything indigenous about Native Americans by assimilation.

Anita Gaul and Janet Timmerman presented at Brown County Historical Society's Lunch and Bite of History program, Thursday. The presentation was on St. Rose Academy in Avoca, MN. In 1884, St. Rose became a boarding school for Native American girls as part of U.S. policy to assimilate indigenous people.

The government approaches this by putting Native Americans on reservations and teaching them to farm and taking kids to be educated in White schools.

Gaul said there was a phrase with the program: “Kill the Indian to save the man.”

“The goal of Indian education was cultural genocide, that was the point and it was explicitly stated,” Gaul said.

In Sept. 1884, the first Native American girls arrived at the school. The Sisters of St. Rose Academy created a spin-off school for Native American girls called St. Francis Xavier Industrial School. The St. Rose Academy continued operating for white students.

The first Native American girls were likely Lakota students from the Rosebud Reservation. The school took girls from other groups including Ojibwe, Metis and Dakota.

Timmerman said because of the mixture of different groups the school was fairly cosmopolitan. There were around four different tribes with different religions. The Sisters themselves were a combination of Irish and English and were not necessarily Americanized themselves.

The Sisters wrote in their journal that more students would arrive later, but the Bishop had difficulty getting students for the school.

Gaul said it is likely many of these students were taken against their will to these schools. The rules stipulated the students were being sent to these schools for three years before they could return home. This was to prevent the student from backsliding into their Native culture.

Timmerman said the girls were taught to cook, clean, garden, sew, and how to become good Catholics. In order to teach the girls English, they performed different plays and musicals. Timmerman said they know from journals the students performed “Beauty and the Beast” in 1885. The girls were also taught to sing and over time they excelled at it. According to journals and area newspapers, they became a popular act in the local Catholic Churches.

Timmerman said in their research there is evidence the girls were allowed to keep some of their native traditions. Performances for visiting Sisters and Priests were done in the Native language. There were some documents written in English and then translated into Native languages.

In order to be self-sufficient the school maintained a large garden, which produced apple food. One fall the Sisters and students dug up 700 bushels of potatoes.

The school struggled with the Minnesota climate. The summers were often humid and the winters were brutal. During one winter, the school’s chickens were housed inside the school to shield them from the harsh cold.

Timmerman said under this condition it was no surprise some students would succumb to disease.

The first girl died after the winter of 1888/1889. Tuberculosis was the main killer. It spread quickly through kids. There were at least six girls who died at the school and were buried at the St. Rose of Lima Cemetery.

By 1890, the Sisters realized they were not making progress growing the school and with the death of some students, the sisters turned it over to a different convent. A new convent ran the school for three more years. The school was closed in 1893 and turned into an orphanage for boys. The Native girls were either sent back to their tribal homes or to the Pipestone Indian School. This was a government school instead of a religious order.

Timmerman said after researching this school, she attempted to find the cemetery stones for the six girls buried at St. Rose of Lima Cemetery.

“All I could find were little round cement pads in the grass with numbers,” Timmerman said. However, after first giving this presentation in 2017, members of the Slayton Catholic Daughters decided to get a proper stone for the six girls. By 2018, they achieved this goal. A headstone was placed on the cemetery with the names of all six girls: Lucy Walters, Mary Josephine Bordeaux, Alma Pasukaduta Parient, Inez Brugler, Mary Xavier Tasunka and Bertha Tapantinwin.

Timmerman said after the new stone was placed a special ceremony was held to honor the girls. The ceremony was done with a combination of Catholic and Native American traditions.

Timmerman said the goal of this ceremony was to start healing wounds inflicted by these boarding schools.

“Whether they were intended or not, [the wounds] were deep and long-lasting,” Timmerman said. “We can’t change the past, but together we can change how we approach the future.”

Gaul said they are in contact with the Minnesota Historical Society to get the Sisters’ journals published as well as photographs taken of girls attending the school.