Sustaining, Nurturing, Belonging

Tyler and Haelee by Sonia Many Cows of Diné College

Plenty Kill grew up in the traditional Lakota way. He was born in 1868 near Fort Robinson, right around the time the Treaty of Fort Laramie was brokered, which had set the boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation. His father, Standing Bear, fought against the Seventh Cavalry at Greasy Grass where Custer met his demise. Like all Lakota boys his age, Plenty Kill learned to hunt, scout, and dance, and he partook in traditional ceremonial rites. He had great respect for his elders and heeded their advice and wisdom. Plenty Kill’s life was not all that different from his ancestors’ and all the generations that came before—until a group of strangers arrived at the Rosebud Agency.

The visitors spoke about a place faraway to the East where they hoped to take the Lakota children and teach them the ways of the Long Knives. Standing Bear listened quietly, yet intently, and then turned to Plenty Kill and told his son that the decision was his. For the boy, honoring his father was of paramount importance and that meant being brave. Although he fully expected to die, Plenty Kill believed that going to this place in the East was the courageous thing to do and so he told his father he would leave with the strangers.

In the ensuing days, Plenty Kill and other Lakota children travelled to the Missouri River where they would board a boat to begin their journey to the East. Arriving at the port, they said their final goodbyes. “There we parted from our parents, and it was a heart-breaking scene, women and children weeping,” Plenty Kill later recalled, adding that for many “it was a final parting.”

When at last they reached the United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the assimilation process began with full force. Plenty Kill’s clothing and moccasins were replaced with wooly trousers, a stiff-colored shirt, flannel underwear, and hard leather boots. They shaved his head and placed him in an all-boys’ dormitory. Accustomed to lean meats, along with fresh and dried fruits and vegetables, the children were given a diet heavy in white bread, sugar, and processed foods, which Plenty Kill considered “most injurious.”

More insidious was the headmaster’s effort to “kill the Indian and save the man.” On this front, all Indigenous languages and ceremonial practices were expressly forbidden. Further, Plenty Kill and the other children had to change their names. Given a list of possible choices, he selected “Luther” and honored his father by taking “Standing Bear” as his surname.

During his time at Carlisle, Luther Standing Bear would heed his father’s parting advice to “learn all you can of the white man’s ways.” Yet at the same time, he maintained and nurtured his Lakota identity, despite the concerted efforts to eradicate it. “I kept the language, the tribal manners and usages, sang the songs, and danced the dances. I still listened to and respected the advice of the older people of the tribe,” he recalled.

Eventually, Luther Standing Bear returned to the Rosebud Indian Reservation, where he became an assistant at the government-run school there. Later he served as superintendent at a day school on the neighboring Pine Ridge reservation while also authoring four books on his experiences growing up on the Northern Plains and at the Carlisle school. Despite the concerted efforts to assimilate him, Luther Standing Bear never ceased being Lakota. Unfortunately, as he later observed, not all the children who attended Carlisle were able to return home, reintegrate, and embrace their tribal identities. Many seemed unable or unwilling to speak Lakota, revealing the far-reaching effects of the assimilation project.

In his writings, Standing Bear meditated on his boarding school experience and projected how things could have been different. “We went to school to copy, to imitate, not to exchange languages and ideas, and not to develop the best traits that had come out of uncountable experiences of hundreds and thousands of years living upon this continent,” he stated. “While white people had much to teach us, we had much to teach them, and what a school could have been established upon that idea!”

Today, such schools do exist throughout Indian Country. As envisioned by Standing Bear, tribal colleges and universities are melding Indigenous knowledge with Western ideas, reimagining higher education. And they’re doing so on their own terms. “Tribal college achievement encompasses something much larger than standard institutional measurements of grade point average,” says Nebraska Indian Community College educator Megan M. Miller. “To sign up for class is to know your own power. To successfully complete a semester is to invest in your community. To earn your degree is to rebuild nations.” Read Miller’s feature article “More Than a Statistic” and discover students’ own stories of what tribal higher education means to them.

For the United States Poet Laureate and Institute of American Indian Arts graduate, Joy Harjo (Mvoskoke), it’s all about self-determination and celebrating Indigenous ways of knowing and being. “For the first time in all my years of education . . . I felt like I belonged,” Harjo recalls in TCJ’s exclusive Profile. “Tribal colleges make obtaining a college degree more accessible for Native students,” she observes. “They are closer to home and the curriculum is more tailored to the particular tribal groups in the area. They’re especially helpful to those who have jobs and other family commitments.”

Harjo’s observations are backed up with concrete data mined by the American Indian College Fund. In this issue’s Research department, Dina Horwedel presents both quantitative and qualitative findings from a few of the College Fund’s recent surveys, illuminating how Native students who attend tribal colleges succeed at greater rates and are more than three times as likely to report having professors and mentors who cared about them and were genuinely invested in their success. As College of Menominee Nation student, Jasmine Neosh, observes, the TCU community is “literally and figuratively like our family.”

Although Luther Standing Bear passed into the Spirit World in 1939, just 30 years later Lakotas at Pine Ridge and Rosebud built tribal colleges that implemented his idea of schools that would embrace and pass on Lakota languages and ideas. Since then, TCUs have risen throughout Indian Country, from the sands of the Sonoran Desert to the tundra of the Arctic Rim. Indeed, TCJ is happy to celebrate the silver anniversary of Iḷisaġvik College in the feature article “Unapologetically Iñupiaq.” The student stories from Iḷisaġvik, like the student stories from all TCUs, shine forth like beacons, offering hope and a path to success for generations to come.

Bradley Shreve, PhD, is editor of Tribal College Journal.