On April 15, 2024, Dr. Veronica Pasfield spoke at an open event presented by the LSSU Native American Center about an Indigenized perspective of the federal Indian boarding school project as part of the U.S. empire, specifically in Anishinaabe territory.
Dr. Pasfield used historical events from Fort Brady, which is now the Lake Superior State University campus, Bawating, and the Eastern Upper Peninsula to frame a more accurate and Indigenized creation story for federal Indian boarding schools.
Indian boarding schools were created by the American government in the colonial era to assimilate indigenous children into the culture of the European colonizers. Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and tribes and sent to the boarding schools, where their braids were cut off and they were punished for speaking their indigenous languages. The children were forced to shed every facet of their indigenous cultures in favor of adopting the culture of settlers, including food, language, clothing, and even their names. Investigations of the boarding schools in recent years uncovered evidence of multiple types of abuse inflicted upon children in the boarding schools, many of whom did not survive due to untreated wounds, the unchecked spread of illness, insufficient food, or taking their own lives due to depression and PTSD. Some boarding schools remained open through the late 20th century.
Dr. Pasfield is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, boarding school scholar, and citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community. She is also an oral historian, tribal consultant, curator, repatriation officer, and museum decolonizer. She earned her PhD in American Studies with a Native Studies concentration from the University of Michigan, where she studied American and Hawaiian Indian boarding schools as expressions of the U.S. empire.