Ground-penetrating radar to be used at former residential boarding school in Skagway

Skagway’s assembly voted unanimously last week to work with the Skagway Traditional Council to authorize ground-penetrating radar with some shovel work at the Pius X Mission School site. It was open from 1932 to 1959 and served about 60 indigenous children.

The property is now owned by the municipality which uses it as a seasonal RV park.

Plans have swirled in recent years for redevelopment as a housing subdivision or making utility improvements and continuing RV services for independent travelers.

But, the Skagway Traditional Council has asked that before any major renovations get started, they be allowed to study the area. They have also asked for a portion of the area to be gifted to the tribal government, the size and scope of which will be discussed after the study is complete.

The backdrop of all this is the recent discoveries of more than a thousand bodies of indigenous children found at residential boarding school sites throughout Canada in the past year. 

The Sisters of St. Ann sent nuns from British Columbia Canada in 1932 to help Reverend G. Edgar Gallant run the school. Other Sisters of St. Ann nuns were sent to Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C. 

Earlier this summer it was reported that 215 bodies of indigenous children were found buried at that school in Kamloops. To date over 1,300 bodies have been discovered across Canada. According to a 1907 report by a Canadian doctor the schools were poorly ventilated and overcrowded which led to large outbreaks of tuberculosis to wipe out roughly 1 in 25 indigenous children.

Most of the boarding schools were operated by religious organizations that were also active in Alaska.

Jaime Bricker, president of the Skagway Traditional Council told KHNS that her grandfather and uncles were brought from Kodiak Island to Skagway to attend the mission school here.

“I think with all of the unfortunate news, throughout our nation, and in Canada, we are doing our due diligence and asking that an archeological study be done,” said Bricker.

“​​I’m looking into some personal history there to find out more about how old they were when they came and under what circumstances. I was told, when I was younger, that they were brought here during World War II as part of the Aleut relocation,” said Bricker.

Skagway elder Andy Beierly attended the St. Pius X Mission School in Skagway in the 1950s. The buildings are long gone; today it’s a flat open space covered by gravel and patchy grass where RVs park during the summer. He showed me the site during a recent rainstorm. 

“Where we’re standing right now is I think is the south side of the Pius X mission main building,” said Beierly.

He said there were about 60 kids at the school when he attended, and six or seven nuns. He also said a lot of the kids were from families that had a hard time finding jobs and ended up on the welfare system. Most of them would go back home during the summer, but some stayed year-round. The kids came from all over the state.  

“There was one person that I remember that was from Nome. And the other ones from up north were from Palmer, Anchorage, Fairbanks. And the rest of the students were from Southeast Alaska, Yakutat, Juneau, Angoon Wrangell, Petersburg,” said Beierly.

He said there were four barracks when he was at the school. One each for a boys dorm and a girls’ dorm, one for storage, and one was an art building of sorts where they taught pottery and some kids were allowed to do Tlingit carving.

Only English was spoken. 

Lance Twitchell is an associate professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. In his Ph.D. dissertation titled For our Little Grandchildren: Language Revitalization Among The Tlingit, he discussed the role of residential schools in nearly eradicating the Tlingit language.

“5 Elders tell stories of childhood abuses by teachers and missionaries: picked up and shaken by their hair, placed into icy cold showers, placed in tubs of ice and beaten with garden hoses, forced to put their tongues onto metal flagpoles in the cold winter, and being hit on the hands with rulers and on the ears with a cupped hand. This was also documented by some missionaries, as in the following passage: …We required them to speak nothing but English except by permission; but they often would get into the washroom or in the woodshed, and having set a watch, they would indulge in a good Indian talk. A few cases of this kind, and we applied a heroic remedy to stop it. We obtained a bottle of myrrh and capsicum: myrrh is bitter as gall and capsicum hot like fire. We prepared a little sponge; saturated it with this solution, and everyone that talked Indian had his mouth washed to take away the taint of the Indian language!”

Beierly remembered the nuns doling out a wrap on the knuckles if a kid was out of line, and their basketball team wasn’t allowed to play against the Skagway high school team. But he said he didn’t recall any actual abuse. 

“I think that even though I didn’t like it, I think they taught me to respect people and respect whatever they are.”

The Sisters of Saint Ann who sent the nuns for the Pius X Mission School have apologized for their role in stamping out Native culture by assimilating around 150,000 young children in boarding schools, posting this on their website:

“The Sisters of St. Ann recognize with deep humility the intergenerational survivors, family members and community members of all those impacted by the dark legacy of Indian Residential Schools.”

What comes next isn’t clear. There isn’t a formal plan or a timeline for the archeological study yet, and though the tribal government has offered to contribute funds to the project, those details have yet to be hammered out.

 

**This story has been modified to correct the spelling of Pius.**