Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors

By Denise Lajimodiere
North Dakota State University Press (2019)
320 pages

Review by Denise Low

Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is a poet, jingle dancer, fabric artist, professor, and practitioner of mazinibakanige (birch bark biting in patterns). Now she adds the role of historian to her activities in this essential book about boarding schools. It includes new research, photographs, interviews with survivors, and her own experience as a child of parents who attended boarding schools.

The boarding school system of the 19th and 20th centuries separated Native children from parents and tribal communities, often through force. They enacted assimilationist pedagogies on students as young as kindergarten age, and corporal punishment and other abuses were condoned. This amounted to a second war on Indigenous peoples, as boarding schools proliferated. “By 1887, about 14,300 American Indian children were enrolled in 227 schools,” Lajimodiere notes. The author provides a fold-out map of 366 known boarding schools and their locations. Some of these boarding schools—Carlisle Indian Boarding School, Intermountain Indian School, Genoa Indian School, and Chilocco Indian School—were closed in the 20th century. Others, like Haskell Institute, Morris Industrial School for Indians, and Bacone Indian University, evolved into tribal colleges or Native-serving institutions still open today. All share the same painful histories.

Lajimodiere focuses on the Northern Plains schools for her interview subjects. Her father and mother attended boarding school, so her personal investment in understanding and recuperating the history from a Native perspective is essential to this book.

Interviews with survivors are heartbreaking accounts of abuse and courage. Students lived with beatings, bullying, sexual abuse, child labor, and starvation. The author writes that many interviewees had never talked about their bitter experiences. Some, like her own father, did not recognize the impact on their adult lives until viewing films or hearing others speak about the schools. The first-person stories bring statistics to life.

Lajimodiere did the hard work of traveling to historic boarding schools to access archives and visit cemeteries. Stories of children put in solitary confinement, forced to participate in abuse, and those who died due to beatings, malnourishment, and disease are difficult to record. As a response, she creates a healing circle in her final chapter. The individuals interviewed describe reconciliation through government apology (Canada), personal therapy, and Native spirituality.

In an interview with Indian Country Today, Lajimodiere says she would like to see this book taught in high school and college classes. It is especially appropriate for Tribal College Journal readers, as the Native methodology includes community participation— beyond the reporting of quantitative statistics. This is a landmark book that belongs in every library.

Denise Low, PhD taught at Haskell Indian Nations University for 25 years and is the author of The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival.