Boarding School Resistance Narratives: Haskell Runaway and Ghost Stories
An after hours lover shimmies down a window ledge, avoids the dorm matron's write up, but hears footsteps behind him. A spectral figure waves from a dark window. Lights flicker on and off when no one is near the light switches. A figure stands under a tree smoking, but disappears in an instant. These are a few of the stories that I have heard in twenty years of teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University. In this intertribal community, oral literature keeps the school's history in the minds of this generation. Haskell began as an intertribal boarding school in 1884, and since that first terrible year, when many children died, a complicated history has haunted the landscape. At the edge of campus, rows of gravestones are mute testimony to failed assimilation. Along with the physical monuments, other less tangible reminders of the children remain. Their spirits are as much a part of Haskell as the football stadium arch and the gazebo. These ghost stories have a subversive purpose. They allow the painful experiences of turn of the century Native peoples to remain alive in memory, despite their omission or elision in official history books. In English or tribal languages, Native people were able to use ghost stories for cultural preservation. Ghost stories appeared to be harmless folk tales, and so they were invisible to Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school censorship. The physical reality of early boarding schools was harsh by any standards, and the students had few options besides the desperate choices of run away or give up life. The schools were modeled after military institutions, and the children were like military personnel who needed permission for any leave. Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, was located far away from most reservations in order to isolate children from their families and cultural continuity. The world champion decathlete Buster Charles' daughter Nola Lodge researched Haskell during the 1920's, the time her Oneida/Yakima father attended the school (Lodge 1999) She found letters from parents expressing concern that their children actually lost weight, because the food meant for children was sold in the surrounding community of Lawrence. The farming programs were, in practice, child labor. One of the most wrenching archival photographs from early Haskell years is a group of fourteen young children in drab uniforms and sheared hair. They sit