American Indian Boarding School Stories at Aurora University Museum

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Sioux children are shown in a photo from Aurora University’s Schingoethe Center Museum exhibit “Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories.” Submitted photo

Aurora University’s Schingoethe Center museum will exhibit “Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories” Jan. 28-March 14.

The event at the museum in the Hill Welcome Center, 1315 Prairie St. in Aurora, will display photos from a permanent exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Ariz. “Away” explores off-reservation boarding schools in a kaleidoscope of voices.

An opening reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 28, will feature refreshments and micro talks by guest speaker and AU alumnus, Dr. Em Loerzel ’17 MSW. Dr. Loerzel is White Earth Ojibwe and comes from a family with three generations of boarding school students.

In the 1870s, the U.S. government attempted to educate and assimilate American Indians into “civilized” society by placing children—of all ages, from thousands of homes and hundreds of diverse tribes—in distant, residential boarding schools. Many were forcibly taken from their families and communities and stripped of all signs of “Indianness,” even forbidden to speak their own language amongst themselves.

Until the 1930s, students were trained for domestic work and trade in a highly regimented environment. Many children went years without familial contact, and these events had a lasting, generational impact.

This exhibition is sponsored by Mid-America Arts Alliance, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Chickasaw Nation. For more information visit aurora.edu/museum.

—Al Benson

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