Skagway’s borough assembly has voted unanimously to work with the Skagway Traditional Council to authorize ground-penetrating radar — and some shovel work — at the former Pious X Mission School site, which operated 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.
The borough in recent years has considered redeveloping the property as a housing subdivision or making utility improvements and continuing RV services for independent travelers.
The Skagway Traditional Council has asked that they be allowed to study the area before any major renovations get started. They have also asked for a portion of the area to be gifted to the tribal government after the study is complete.
There isn’t a formal plan or a timeline for the archeological study, and decisions for paying the costs are unresolved. The assembly approved the study at its Oct. 7 meeting.
The backdrop of all this is the recent discoveries of more than 1,000 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 in 1932 to help the Rev. G. Edgar Gallant run the school in Skagway.
Other Sisters of St. Ann nuns were sent to Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C. It was reported this summer that 215 bodies of children were found buried at that school in Kamloops. To date, more than 1,300 bodies have been discovered across Canada.
Jaime Bricker, president of the Skagway Traditional Council, said her grandfather and uncles were brought from Kodiak Island to Skagway to attend the mission school. “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,” Bricker said.
“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,” she said.
Skagway elder Andy Beierly attended the St. Pious X Mission School 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 said there were about 60 kids at the school when he attended, and six or seven nuns. He 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,” Beierly said.
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, an associate professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation: “For Our Little Grandchildren: Language Revitalization Among The Tlingit.” In it, he discussed the role of residential schools in nearly eradicating the Tlingit language.
“Five 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.”
He quoted a missionary: “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 Pious X Mission School have apologized for their role in stamping out Native culture among young children in boarding schools, posting 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.”
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