Nine in the letters, fourteen in the ground

One · What happened

Three miles from downtown Milwaukee

In January 1884, twenty-seven girls from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians arrived at a boarding school the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid for by the student. Good Shepherd Industrial School stood three miles northwest of downtown Milwaukee. Angeline Lafornoise died there on 24 July of that year, the first death on the record. The school ran as a federal Indian boarding school until 1890 and kept going as a reform school for decades after that.

Researchers from Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee worked with Indigenous leaders on the school’s records. They found fourteen students who died there between 1884 and 1891, reporter Amelia Schafer writes. Every one was a girl. At least eleven came from Turtle Mountain, and the youngest was seven. All fourteen lie in Milwaukee’s Calvary Cemetery, in a plot set aside for the school’s Indian girls. Many of the graves carry no marker or no name. Rosalie Gladu, who died on 3 May 1885, was nine.

Letters between school officials and the Bureau of Indian Affairs mention the deaths of nine girls and leave three of them unnamed. Dozens of parents wrote to the Bureau during the school’s six years to ask that their daughters be sent home, according to the report. Who owes what for these deaths today is argued in legislatures and in church offices. The story can be told with no side taken in that fight.

Two · What it is doing

A sister’s sentence, and yours

“[P]erhaps the change from the free life of the forest to civilization was too much for them,” one of the sisters at Good Shepherd wrote, in a letter the report quotes. Another sister described a physician who was “almost in constant attendance” and used all his skill to save the girls. The cause in the first sentence is a change. No person in the building is shown doing anything. Anyone who finishes that sentence has been handed a place to put the deaths that reaches nobody who is alive.

“That was how things were done then” is the sentence most readers had ready within a second of finishing the story. The sentence is accurate about the year. Whoever says it to himself has put the deaths where the sister put them, in a cause with nobody in it. With his morning going on unchanged, the sentence passes for understanding.

The other common sentence runs to a name. “Somebody should have to answer for this,” a reader thinks, picturing the government in one telling and the order of sisters in another, whichever he already distrusted. The sentence may be true, and anger at what was done is in order. The risk is a conscience that feels busy at a desk more than a hundred and forty years from the first grave. A third reader files the girls under history and scrolls on.

Three · Where the ground is

What God asked Cain about his brother

“The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” the people of Israel said in Ezekiel 18. They meant that their trouble was their parents’ doing. The Lord answered that “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). A reader who was nowhere near Milwaukee in 1884 is not guilty of what was done to those girls in the school’s first years. The same chapter has the Lord saying that he will judge each of them “according to his ways” (Ezekiel 18:30). What a reader does with the story today is his to answer for.

Asked where Abel was, Cain said he did not know (Genesis 4:9) and added, “[A]m I my brother’s keeper?” Then the LORD said (Genesis 4:10), “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” Cain had killed his brother. Nothing in the report says that anyone at the school killed anyone, so the verse brings no charge against the sisters or against the Bureau, which paid the school for each girl. The verse does show that God hears from a grave, including one in Calvary Cemetery.

The father who kept writing

The Bureau of Indian Affairs received letters from dozens of parents. One father wrote more than once to ask for his daughter back. The report does not say what the Bureau did with his letters, so a reader who claims to know is guessing. A psalmist tells the LORD that “you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed” (Psalm 10:17–18). The psalm gives no date for that justice, a gap no reader is entitled to fill.

Hebrews tells Christians that Jesus’ blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24). Abel’s blood called for an accounting from the man who had shed it. Christ died for sinners, among them the reader who has been collecting the accounting from other people and the reader who has been dodging it. A brother in the congregation can hear which sentence a man reached for first and can read him that verse.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Nothing done this week reaches Rosalie Gladu, who died on 3 May 1885. Five smaller jobs fit into the next few days, two of them with another person.

1. 01

   Look up the fourteen and read their ages.

   The reporting names each girl with her age and the date she died. Go through the list once and count how many were younger than your oldest child. Psalm 147:4 says of the LORD that “he gives to all of them their names,” in a verse about the stars. The school’s letters counted nine of the girls.

2. 02

   Ask your pastor which sentence he reached for.

   Send him the story and ask what his first thought was. Tell him which of the two sentences came first for you, “That was how things were done then” or “Somebody should have to answer for this.” Hebrews 12:24 says the blood of Christ “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel,” and a pastor’s study is a good room for hearing it read. If he has no answer for you, ask who in the congregation would.

3. 03

   Walk the old part of a cemetery.

   Pick the oldest section of one near you and look for the stones of children. Stay until you have found three and read the years on each. Ecclesiastes 7:2 says it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, because “the living will lay it to heart.”

4. 04

   Lay the Turtle Mountain families before God.

   Descendants of these girls may be reading about them for the first time this week. Ask the LORD to hear the desire of the afflicted, as Psalm 10:17 says he does. Pray for the researchers who matched the records and for the marker Mark Denning hopes to see, that somebody with the means to build it will.

5. 05

   Ask the oldest person in your family where your people were.

   Find out where your family was in 1884. Some of them may have been farming and others may not have arrived yet. The people of Israel were told to “ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you” (Deuteronomy 32:7). Make the call this week, while the people who can answer are still here.