Linda Grover

submitted

TOWER- Linda LeGarde Grover, professor emeritus of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, will be the featured speaker at the Tower-Soudan Historical Society annual dinner on Tuesday, Sept. 10. Her presentation, part of the History Talk series, will begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Herbert Lamppa Civic Center in Tower.  Admission for the History Talk is $5.
The TSHS invites everyone to attend this informative History Talk. Membership in TSHS is not required to attend, but there will be an opportunity to join for $15. Advance dinner reservations are required for those planning to attend the annual dinner, which follows the History Talk. The History Talk admission is included in the $25.00 dinner fee. 
For more information or to make reservations, please contact TSHS volunteers:
Call Linda Folstad (218-750-0193), or Cookie Bonicatto (715-558-5391) to reserve. Call Linda Folstad at 218-750-0193 to reserve and instant pay with your Venmo account.
Linda LeGarde Grover
Linda LeGarde Grover is an enrolled member of the Bois Forte band from the Vermilion district of Nett Lake Reservation. She has done qualitative research on the effects of federal and state Indian education policy on Ojibwe children, families, and communities.  Early in her career as a historian, Grover researched and wrote about the Vermilion Lake Indian School, a federal boarding school on the Bois Forte Reservation where her grandparents met. Others attended boarding schools in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Canada. She found that recruiters used coercion to convince parents to send their kids to the school. They would argue “the futility of efforts to continue living the Indian way.” The boys were forced to cut their hair, and all students had to wear military-style uniforms. Punishments included spanking and whipping. 
Vermilion Lake Indian School differed from many other Indian Schools. Grover writes, “Although many accounts exist of children being forcibly torn from their families and sent to boarding schools, there is no evidence of that practice at Vermilion.”
Educating children has always been of prime importance to the Ojibwe people. At the time of western impact—as it is now—education was a holistic and lifelong experience. Children learned from their parents, other relatives, and members of the community, particularly the elders, whose wisdom and experience ensured the survival of the culture. But the Ojibwe tradition of training by observation, modeling, experience, and oral tradition was not acknowledged or validated— perhaps not even seen—by missionaries, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who arrived in the Upper Midwest in the nineteenth century. The United States’ Indian-education system that followed was built on the premise that Indian children were not being educated and needed exposure to the superior western culture.  
Historically, Indian education was linked with federal policies designed to force assimilation. In 1819 Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act, which authorized federal funding for Christian missionary societies to establish Indian schools. In 1870 mission schools began contracting for government subsidies to operate as “federal contract” schools. A new system was born in 1879 with the opening of the federal Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pa. Its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, had previously worked with Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche prisoners in Florida. To instill discipline and order, he dressed them in old army uniforms and drilled them as a platoon. As a further experiment, he had some of them taught to read. Pratt claimed he had discovered a new way to deal with the “Indian problem”—by education and assimilation. “I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.” His method became the policy of federal Indian boarding schools for the next half-century. Generations of Indian people were supposed to gain economic independence by emulating white society and abandoning tribal cultures. 
By the 1890s this policy of assimilation was firmly in place. In Minnesota, boarding and reservation day schools for Indian children had increased in number and scope from the small mission schools of the 1830s to campuses that could house more than 400 boarders and serve more than 1,700 children. Vermilion Lake pupils had attended a mission school on Pike Bay between 1878 and 1890. In 1885–86 officials counted 163 children in the district; 50 of them were enrolled in day school, although average attendance was 25. A dozen years later, a new government Indian boarding school was being planned for Vermilion Lake. In 1906/1907 there were 40 pupils at Vermilion Lake Indian School and in 1909/1910 the number peaked at 100 to 115 students with very few runaways. 
Grover’s extensive research on American Indian boarding schools is extended family tribal community focused and centers upon the schools that her family members attended. Her award-winning works, all of which are threaded with the boarding school experiences, include the novel “The Road Back to Sweetgrass,” “The Dance Boots,” “The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives,” and “Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year.”
Grover’s most recent publications are the novel “A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids,” a mixed-genre memoir “Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong,” and a revised re-issue of her research paper “From Assimilation to Termination: The Vermilion Lake Indian School.”