To some, though, curriculum at the school smacks of an assimilative type of education geared toward exporting Northern Cheyenne students toward mainstream America and away from their homes and families on the reservation.

Jace Killsback, a tribal council representative from the Busby district, says education at St. Labre doesn’t offer the types of classes in history and culture that might encourage students to return to the reservation after going off to college.

“It’s a closed choice,” he says. “There has been no education that gives them the choice to come back.”

Eugene Little Coyote calls it the hidden history of the Northern Cheyenne, the history of American Indians that is slowly being erased from most Americans’ memories because it’s excluded from the curriculum.

This history is that of the only ethnic group in America that required an act of Congress to practice their religion in a country based on freedom of religion, he says.

It’s the history of a people suffering cultural amnesia because of systematic cultural genocide against them as children in religious institutions and boarding schools throughout America in the 1940s and ’50s, he added.

St. Labre Indian School, some former students say, was one of these schools.

Joe Little Coyote gets quiet when he thinks back to that period of his life. Sitting on the perimeter fence of the Northern Cheyenne powwow grounds near the mission school, he looks at the ground and compulsively folds and unfolds the wrapper to a piece of bubble gum.

When he attended St. Labre Indian School in the 1950s, he says he and his friends were punished any time they spoke Cheyenne or practiced any of their traditional ceremonies. And he says there were other indignities as well:

They had their mouths washed out with lye soap and were made to kneel on broomsticks.

Nuns and priests whipped them with hoses with chains strung through them.

Alberta Fisher, a tribal council representative from the Birney district, remembers lying in bed with her older sister at night and listening to a nun pace the hallway outside their room, her rosary rattling noisily at her side.

“I would sometimes wonder, ‘Can she hear me breathing?’ and my heart would start racing,” Fisher says.

She has memories of nuns poking children in the ribs for slouching, telling them that only dogs act in certain ways, and of being told to recite countless Hail Marys kneeling on a cold, cement floor.

Years later, when she saw Catholic nuns blessing themselves in a Northern Cheyenne sun lodge, and heard a priest use the Northern Cheyenne word for the Creator, Maheo, Fisher felt the rage of years of mistreatment well inside of her, despite the outsiders’ attempts to embrace her tradition.

“The damage was already done to us,” she says. “The emotional abuse. I sometimes wonder, ‘When did God come down to say it’s OK for them to use our language? To participate in our ceremonies?’”

Now Fisher’s and Little Coyote’s generation, nearing their 60s and 70s, is the last that speaks Northern Cheyenne in daily life.

No agency involved in the boarding school years, or in any type of Indian assimilation movement, defends it today — including St. Labre Indian School. Yarlott says he’s never heard those specific accusations about St. Labre before, but as an Indian himself he knows bad things happened at some boarding schools and he condemns them.

In September 2000, Kevin Grover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a formal apology to Indian nations in America for the agency’s involvement in “destructive efforts to annihilate Indian cultures.”
“Never again will we attack your religions, your languages, your rituals, or any of your tribal ways,” he said. “Never again will we seize your children, nor teach them to be ashamed of who they are. Never again. … Together, we must wipe the tears of seven generations.”

Now, past the black-and-white pictures in the school’s hallways of formally dressed Indian children with chopped-off hair are color pictures of St. Labre students dressed in traditional attire, participating in powwows and other gatherings.

Further down the hallway is an entrance to one of St. Labre’s crowning achievements in embracing Northern Cheyenne and other Plains Indian culture: the St. Labre Chapel.

Constructed in 1971, the dolomite chapel is shaped like a tipi medicine lodge.

The tabernacle, placed at the sacred tent poles location at the back of the lodge, has an eagle on its face. Eagle feathers, symbols of prayer and spiritual power, are attached to the hanging tapestry behind the altar.

The Stations of the Cross, depicting the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, are etched into the walls of the chapel, like ancient Indian petroglyphs.

On the cross, below Christ, is the medicine wheel.

On the outside, a wooden cross sticks out of the “smoke hole” of the chapel, a place where Plains Indians of the past would often hang shields, medicine bags or different charms. The cross is located at the center of the lodge and yet, at the same time, appears to lean on it, as if the community is carrying it.

The integration of Cheyenne culture into Christian spirituality isn’t embraced by some.

In fact, Eugene Little Coyote calls that cross the symbol of the Northern Cheyenne’s oppression.

At his office in Lame Deer, between phone calls and meetings with BIA officials, Little Coyote speaks with Killsback about St. Labre Indian School and its attempts to appeal to Northern Cheyenne children by combining traditional spiritually with conventional Christianity.

“In education, we call that the hook,” Little Coyote says.
Little Coyote says the school doesn’t try hard enough to actually teach its students their native languages or about their heritage; he says classes on culture are token gestures, and are often electives relegated to the back of the classroom.

Little Coyote, who spent a couple of years teaching Northern Cheyenne history as part of a grant project through Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, says the only way that Northern Cheyenne youth can understand and appreciate who they are today is to learn about the events that have happened to their ancestors throughout history.

This, he says, is the only way the Northern Cheyenne people will be able to rebuild their self-esteem as a nation and break the epic of silent acquiescence instilled in them. This, Little Coyote says, is education that is not being offered at St. Labre.

Killsback, youthful and hip and a colleague of Little Coyote, recently returned to the Northern Cheyenne reservation after earning a degree in Native American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

He says the relationship between St. Labre and the Northern Cheyenne is a colonial one and that Northern Cheyenne students can’t benefit from the school’s fundraising without subjecting themselves to St. Labre’s attempts to convert them to Catholicism by requiring they study theology and attend Mass.

He says the Catholic school tries to force a foreign religious world view on a nation of people who traditionally practiced their own spirituality in their day-to-day lives.

“In proselytizing and recruiting, one of their main focuses was the ‘correct’ way to pray,” he says of past leaders of the mission school. “We had our own way of praying.”

Killsback says it’s always been the Northern Cheyenne who’ve been tolerant of other religions on the reservation.

“I’m not against the church,” he says. “I’m against the idea of conquest.”

Yarlott counters that St. Labre’s mission is to offer students choices.

“Our goal is not to convert students or faculty,” Yarlott says.

According to a recent survey at the school, approximately half of the high school students at St. Labre are non-Catholic, a percentage that is slightly less in the lower grade levels.

He says the schools work to accommodate different types of spirituality and teachers are constantly looking for new ways to incorporate Northern Cheyenne language and culture into the curriculum.

Adeline Fox, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, is one of six generations of women in her family to pass through St. Labre Indian School’s doorways.

For four years she has been teaching Northern Cheyenne, her first language, to students at the mission school.

She takes St. Labre students on field trips to sacred Northern Cheyenne sites after learning proper traditional protocol from adults in the community. She organizes events for the students during Native American Week and teaches students how to prepare traditional feasts. Many activities she coordinates foster interaction between St. Labre youth and Northern Cheyenne elders.

“We’re not just preserving (culture), we’re teaching it here,” she says. “We learned it, and we’re teaching it to our kids here at the school.”

The students take classes in English, literature, different types of theology, math, various foreign languages (Northern Cheyenne being one of them), and history, just like at any other public school.

In addition to career counselors at the school, St. Labre offers both its graduates and graduates of other schools in the area college scholarships — approximately $1.4 million worth to date.

Many students who graduate from St. Labre move forward with successful futures, like Michael Running Wolf, currently the vice president of Montana State University’s American Indian Club and a recipient of a Gates Millennium Scholarship for bright minority students.

Tomi Wooden Legs, a senior at St. Labre Indian School, will join the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Montana next year where she plans to study to become an operating room specialist.

When asked how students attending St. Labre have been handling the firestorm surrounding the lawsuit against their school, Yarlott grows quiet.

He removes his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. He wipes his eyes.

In a voice that’s barely audible, Yarlott says, “I have parents calling me because their children want to know if their school is going to close.”

Eugene Little Coyote, his friend Drew Elkshoulder and Frank Rowland of the Independence Task Force head up the back roads of the Highlands just outside Lame Deer, muddy ruts yanking at the tire sidewalls of their vehicle. The subject of conversation, of course, is the St. Labre lawsuit.

Once at the top, the three men get out of the car and walk past exposed patches of coal and past hoar-frosted pines on the sandstone cliffs overlooking their reservation. They fall silent.

Holding St. Labre financially responsible, they believe, is the first step in rebuilding the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. And Little Coyote’s election, they say, is the catalyst for an impending cultural and spiritual revolution among the Northern Cheyenne people.

Joe Little Coyote says his son has learned tradition and the old ways from him, and so has one foot in the past. But, Little Coyote says, his son also has one foot in the future.

That future, Little Coyote says, is one where the Northern Cheyenne no longer stand silently by as St. Labre reaps profits from the tribe’s misfortune.

“St. Labre has been marketing our tribe as the Race of Sorrows,” Joe Little Coyote says, gesturing toward the valley around him.

“Our elders left this land to the priests and nuns to teach our children, to educate them,” he adds. “They’ve debased our humanity as well as theirs with this parasitic relationship they’ve established with us, and then they have the audacity to act surprised about all this.”

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Kate Pine, Dianna Williams, and Kendra Woodenlegs drag Shalane Burns to class after lunch on a recent spring afternoon at St. Labre Indian School.

Curtis Yarlott, executive director of St. Labre Indian School, believes the best way to affect longstanding change is through education. "Painting all these houses won't fix the problem, it'll just put a new coat of paint on it," he says. "We show what's possible; we need to work toward what's possible - the potential."

During the campaign for tribal president, Eugene Little Coyote simply said that the St. Labre matter would be "resolved." With the Northern Cheyenne lawsuit against the school, many say he is making good on that promise.

Joe Little Coyote represents the last of the Northern Cheyenne tribal members who speak their language in everyday communication. He says the St. Labre Indian School is responsible for the "cultural genocide" of the Northern Cheyenne people.

St. Labre Chapel was constructed in 1971 to resemble an Indian lodge or tipi. Traditionally, the beam that stretches out in front of the tipi holds things of importance to the family that resides in that lodge, such as a shield or medicine bundle. Today, some Northern Cheyenne view the cross of the St. Labre Church as representing the burden they carry as a people, brought on by St. Labre during the boarding school era.

Cedar, an agent used to purify and protect Plains Indians, is available to Catholics attending the St. Labre Church.

Beaded crosses are just one of many things that St. Labre has done to try to incorporate Native American elements into the church.

Eugene Little Coyote, left, Drew Elkshoulder, and Frank Rowland make plans to rebuild the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe. Rowland is a member of the Independence Task Force, a group that looked into the operations of St. Labre.

Middle school students at St. Labre Indian School patiently stand in line waiting for lunch.

Joe Little Coyote looks out over his family's ceremonial grounds. Every year, he and his extended family camp out for a year in the hills of his ancestors and partake in rituals and ceremonies. I even take a portable basketball hoop and a volleyball net, he says, and we just let the kids run wild through the hills.