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Welcome to Common Ground. I'm
Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this episode native artist
Duane Goodwin creates a
sculpture for the

University of Minnesota Morris
that examines some of the
injustices of the

boarding school era.

Duane: My Indian name is
Niibogabo. I'm a White Earth
enrollee. My English name is

Duane Goodwin. Summer of 2018 I
sculpted a monumental scale
three figure

sculpture representing the
boarding school era. Speaker:
It's been an amazing project

for me personally to work on.
And I'm thankful to everyone
involved and I see

some of the faces of people
who've been involved in this
project from the

beginning. And I thank you very
much for being here today and
for all the work that you've
done. Duane: I guess

you know this sculpture was kind
of like a really lifetime
achievement. It's

something that I've been working
for all my life to do another
piece of work and

that connection to the boarding
school is something I'm very
familiar with. My

grandmother went to school there
so I was very connected to the
theme of the

boarding school. Speaker: Before
the University of Minnesota
Morris was

established here the campus
housed an American Indian
boarding school. Duane: Wards

For Wolves was a boarding school
when it started out. It was
started out in the

latter 1800s and ended in the
early 1900s. A fairly
short-lived boarding school but

their concentration was on
agriculture growing their own
food which they did.

Speaker: The sculpture is a
visible reminder of the role
that Native peoples have

played in this place. Their
histories have not always been
happy ones. But

those histories are inextricably
linked to that of our campus.
Duane: So I was gone you

know almost the course of
three months last summer.

Bambi supported me from the
start you know with supporting
the home. Because

we have a lot of responsibility
at the home front here
especially you know we

have animals and so forth.
Bambi: My name is Bambi Goodwin
and I'm married

to Duane Goodwin. It will be 48
years next month. [laughing]
That's a long time.

Duane had a deadline and it was
a lot of work. He didn't come
home I don't

think maybe once during that
period. Duane: Well time to get
geared up because by 3

o'clock we may be done
if it gets too hot.

Bambi: He had two helpers and
they were young men that you
know could lift those heavy

saws and he still did a lot of
lifting and cutting. Duane: Oh
you wanna grab that

step stool there? Bambi: But I
was so glad he had help because
this rock carving is tough

on him. Duane: Joe is from Red
Lake and he was an intern that
the tribal college paid for

and then Inkpa was an apprentice
that I trained in a number of
years ago. So he

was a big help he could dig
right into it he could see what
I seen. We had a

great model to follow that was
three dimensional scale and we
had a great

sight to do the work on. [hammer
drill]. The rock started out at
nine tons, eight feet by five
and

a half feet by 30 inches. It was
installed June 29 of 2018. We
had a

hundred thousand pound crane
lifting the rock off the flatbed
over the trees and

placed it on the foundation. And
the rock came from Winona,
Minnesota. That's

another great aspect about the
project the rock is from
Minnesota. Well this

specific type of rock has a lot
of geological history to it.
First of all I

found out from a geologist that
studied this rock that this rock
originally part

of aquifer. Because of that I
titled this sculpture, Nokoomis
Nibii which means

'grandmother water'.

It's very brittle it is very
hard. So much of the rock was
sawed and then broke

away with a hammer drill and
chisels. You score the rock and
then you take the

hammer drill and you break it at
the base of the score till all
the rough

rock is removed. Then from there
you reduce your tools to a
smaller cutters. [hammer drill]

Inkpa: Let's take a... I sawed
this down at the base so it's
even. [inaudible]

Yeah it usually helps out quite
a bit. Duane: Inkpa he was the
apprentice and

then he had Joe Strong who was
an intern from Red Lake. And
both these young guys

were young and strong and they
both had an influential part of
the process. You

know the experience was working
creatively, being on task,
taught them to

be responsible because both of
them were responsible throughout
the course of

this project. [hammer
drill] [inaudible]

I think we all had a vision you
know we all seen the vision. And
we all worked

cohesively together to make it
happen. I didn't have to
instruct them exactly

what to do anymore. They just
knew exactly what to do. This

is how much rock you got take
off today. The only thing I had
to watch because we had

some big tools we were working
with and you couldn't go beyond
some of the depth

we had to cut into that rock so
you had to really watch
yourself. They had a good

sense of what we're doing.
Duane: [inaudible] ..have
another lunch break? [laughing]
Should we have an early lunch?

Cause they could feel the
significance of the project and
they could see the model

and they could see how that was
being transformed into this big
big piece. This

little bitty scale model we were
following very closely. So you
know every

time you were working on a
general area you had to follow
that area because it

was certainly a lot to do
removing that negative rock
without making too many

critical mistakes. How deep on
that one, a plunge? Inkpa: This
is the deepest and this

one will be the shallowest.
Duane: So we were fairly
successful in removing that rock

and getting it to look as much
as possible like the model.
Inkpa: And this may be

only about [inch and a half?]
1/2 inch. Duane: Okay, I can do
it.

People didn't have no idea what
the boarding school was. A lot
of people have

no idea that this ever took
place and what effects they had
on the Native

American people. Elaine Fleming
is the former mayor of Cass Lake
and a Leech Lake

Tribal College teacher. Elaine
is a very knowledgeable
historian on the Leech

Lake Band of Ojibwe and the
Native American Boarding School.
Elaine: Bezhigo

bineshii'ikwe indigomaang
indoodam Gaa-
o'ziskwaajimekaagan idoonjibaa

Gaa'miskwaawaakokaagninda,
Elaine Fleming indizhinikaaz. So
the name that the

universe knows me by is One
Thunderbird Woman. I'm with the
Loon clan. I'm a

member of the Leech Lake Band of
Ojibwe of the Minnesota Chippewa
tribe. And I

live in Gaa-miskwaawaakokaag,
the place

where there used to
be red cedar trees.

It's called Cass Lake. I work
for Leech Lake Tribal College
and I've been

working here for a quarter of a
century. Yeah the boarding
school era, that

occurred during the assimilation
era. And that was about 1870 to
1934 the

assimilation era and that's when
they were trying to take away
our tribal

identities they were trying to
assimilate us into being U.S.
citizens.

And they were also trying to
take our land away from us and
so there were

crazy things that happened
during the assimilation era. And
one of them was the

1887 allotment act and that was
one of the ways that they took
the remaining

land that we had during that era
in order to turn us into
citizens, U.S.

citizens they developed
the boarding schools.

And it became mandatory to send
our children to the boarding
schools. And so

it was just a horrific time for
us because we loved our children
that's the

way things are we love our
children. And some of those
children were as young as

four years old when they would
be taken away into the boarding
schools and they

would be separated. Carl Gawbay
is a former instructor from

the University of St.
Scholastica. And he's a
historian on the boarding school

era. Carl: My name is Carl
Gawbay, I'm a Boise Forte
enrollee. My father and his
family were

originally from Rainy Lake we
are one of the people that
immigrated to the

reservation in about 1918 or so.
I went to public school I was an
artist and an

art major and I began to get
interested in boarding schools.
And I did research at

the Walker Art Center when I was
a museum intern there. And Duane
when he

was a teenager attended the
Institute of Indian arts in

Santa Fe. One of his teachers
was Allan Houser the great
Apache sculptor that

has a gallery dedicated to him
at the Smithsonian today. At
that time he was

teaching at the Institute and
was so impressed with Duane,
asked him to be

his assistant and Duane said no
I'm gonna go back to Minnesota.
I could have

kicked him at that moment but
he's a good artist primarily
self-taught. Allan

Houser was a great influence on
him but he has a great loyalty
to northern

Minnesota too. And I guess if I
could say probably the most
important thing about

him was his loyalty to home.
There are many Indian artists
that moved to Santa

Fe took one look around and said
I am never going back home again
because in

Santa Fe there's a lot of
institutional support there's a
lot of Indian artists

there's a big community full of
Indian artists there and so why
should they

come back to White Earth when
there was not a single artist
working in that area

at that time when Duane came
back. Duane virtually created
the arts community

himself. Elaine: I really admire
Duane. We've been here at

the college a long time he's
always has had so much energy
and

even with his physical
impairment he just does
miraculous things. [He's a
dynamo!]

Oh my gosh! I just yeah, I
admire him I mean you know he's
just always always on

the ball. Always creating.
Duane: I've overcome some severe
setbacks like losing my eye

to a carpentry accident. Busted
up my right arm you know
wild-rice finishing

process but I managed to prevail
and achieve what I have
achieved. Carl: Like I said

I never thought of my father
going to boarding school but
then looking back on

it on his behavior how we were
raised there's boarding school
written all over

it. For one thing he refused to
teach us the Ojibwe language
because he was

taught that he shouldn't do that
he remained fluent all of his
life and it

was a thrill to me to listen to
him speaking Ojibwe to other old
older

Indians. But he never taught us
he insisted that we only speak
English even

though in our house we heard the
Ojibwe language spoken. We heard
the Finnish

language spoken in the town that
I grew up in I could hear
Slovenian and

Swedish and Italian on the
street. It would have been a
perfect place for me to be

multilingual thinking back on it
now I would've loved that. It's
hard to look back

on it look at those decisions
that were made in the 1920s and
try to gainsay

them I mean you can't. Elaine:
The government had a trust
responsibility to take care of

us because they thought we were
not quite human so we had gone
into a period

of deeper and deeper poverty.
And so they were always trying
to think of ways how

can they take care of the
American Indian? And so when
they went into the

assimilation era it was that
idea well we'll make them into
US citizens and

we'll do that through the
boarding schools and then we'll
also teach them

how to be farmers and we'll give
them their own land so that

they can learn to farm it and
they'll feed themselves. So the
thing about the

children is that when they went
to the boarding schools they
were modeled after

the US schools. They start in
kindergarten and they go up
through 12th

grade and so the different
boarding schools they serve
different ages. And

the boarding school at Morris it
served kindergarten through
eighth grade. And

then other schools like
Flandreau or Haskell they would
serve other ages and

so those children they would go
to one boarding school and then
once they would

graduate from like Morris and
they would go on to another
school like Flandreau or

Pipestone. And so they would get
moved around like that. What
they wanted to do

is because we were were not
ethnic minorities we're peoples
of nations and

so a nation has its own language
and culture. So it's very
important for them

to take away our language and
our culture and the way they'll
do that is

through the boarding schools.
Captain Pratt he said the way to
change

a nation is through the children
so that's why they would have
young

children. And you know during
those times too like on Leech
Lake people were hungry

and we had been concentrated on
these real small reservations
and so we

weren't able to feed our
children the way we had.
Sometimes during these years

the rice crops would be bad and
that was a food we could depend
on and we weren't

able to feed our children so
sometimes we would send the kids
to the schools

just so they could eat. Carl:
What I found is that they were
especially set up for

cultural genocide I mean that
was their whole design. You know
there are still

people who defend boarding
schools. Some of them are
Indians. Elaine: Some of the

horrors of the boarding school
era one is just you come you
come from a

place we come from the land we
come from this earth and we're
people of the water

and our families love this. And
so then they take you away from
your

family and they tell you that
you can't speak your language
and so how can you

ask for information how can you
ask for food how can you defend
yourself when

you can't speak your language?
And so the horrors being that
they took your voice

away your ability to speak was
taken away and then you had to
learn this

other language and sometimes
they would the horror stories
are where they would

punish you and they would do
many different things like make
you kneel on

rice for hours. They would hit
them they would put them in the
cold rooms where

they would put the food in to
keep it frozen and keep it from
decaying or

thawing and they would put the
children in rooms like that and
keep them in there.

They would take their clothes
away from them and they would
delouse them they

would cut their hair and the
hair was so important to them.
And the children

aren't understanding any of this
that's going on because they're
speaking to

them in English. They would use
turpentine on their hair to kill
what

bugs they thought might be there
and then they would have them
dress in

clothes that were not of their
culture. Carl: And boarding
schools were like a big

prison so you look at the way
the social life in prisons
operate. You have

gangs and you have bullies and
you have victims and you have
people who just go

along to get along in a prison
situation. And the boarding
schools were the same.

Dressing in uniforms living in
great big dormitories marching
in the afternoon

horrific discipline. Elaine:
They were very regimental in the
way that they would

treat them, they would get them
up early in the morning and they
would march to

their school rooms they were not
hugged and when they were hugged
or when they

were touched then many times it
was in a horrible way in a
sexual way so the

children have no one to turn to
you know no one to go to for
help.

The way they might get touched
is like the being hit being
punished like that. Carl: I

was reading Jim Northrup's
commentary on Pipestone and he
said that the very

first day that he sat down to
eat with 75 other boys in this
big hallway the

very first meal that they had
the big boys came and took all
his food and he

said that he learned to have to
protect his food when he was
six. Now the guy who

took his food was the bully that
thought the boarding school was
a real great

place because he got to eat all
he wanted he took it away from
the little

kids. So these were the people
who thought boarding schools
were a real

great thing. Elaine: When people
are disrespected they will start
turning in on themselves

and so those children would
start to hurt themselves or each
other and so

bullying would happen in the
schools. And the school that my
father went to the

older boys would take all the
food from the little boys and
the little boys were

literally starving and so what
they did was they had the little
boys sit with

the older female students so
that they would get to eat so
there was that

bullying that was happening in
the schools too. Carl: So as I
started researching

about boarding schools I
realized that there was actually
very little material

out there and most of it was
very pro- boarding schools. A
lot of the material

thought boarding schools were a
real good idea. And as I started
researching

it now I have to tell you this
was 1972 and this was before
generational trauma

theory was out there and that
wasn't until I believe it was
Marilyn

Braveheart that first introduced
it to us based on research from
Holocaust

victims and the survivors of
Japanese-American

internment camps and that trauma
is passed on through the
generations. If it

stops in one generation that
doesn't mean that the trauma
ends that it's

passed on and it's passed on
through behavior through subtle
cues through

values and no one actually
realized that Indian kids
traumatized in boarding

school would pass on that trauma
to their own children even if
they didn't

send their children
to boarding school.

Elaine: So then when the artist
Dewey, makes that sculpture and
that woman see she's

made of stone and it doesn't
wear away. Her love is like that
for all her

children and just like stone
she'll always be there for her
children. So

that's just really powerful that
'Mindamooya' down at U of M
Morris is made

out of that stone and then that
whole image of those two
children holding on

to her like that and her
holding on to them is just

awesome. Duane: Well I
envisioned first and foremost
the

strength of a lot of native
families which is the
grandmother the mother the

great-grandmother they've always
stood strong when the men

were at a low of time the women
still stood strong and kept a
family unit

together. So I chose the
grandmother because my mother
was there for a lot of

grandkids and other children
taking them in feeding them. So
I chose the grandmother.

Elaine: The grandparents they
were always there and they were
the ones who were still

fluent in the language and they
were still practicing cultural
ways so there

were a lot of deaths of our
people during the assimilation
era. It was like

something like 60% of our Ojibwe
people died during that
particular era and it

had to do with disease mainly.
And so a lot of times the
children wouldn't have

a parent and so the grandparents
would take care of them and a
lot of times it would

be the grandmother. And so that
just reminds me of Dewey
Goodwin's statue how

it's the grandmother who was
taking care of the two children
and in the statue

how it has that little boy he's
got the uniform on. They would
send leftover

military uniforms for the
children to wear and so the
little boy's got on his

uniform holding on to the
grandmother and the other little
girl

she's got on her traditional
dress holding on to her
grandmother. But

they're holding on to the old
ways in that way they're holding
on to those

ones who gave us life and held
us together during all those
hard times. Duane: The

dedication was going to be to
them something very important.
Man: You'll be

seated in the front row and I
asked Bambi to sit there and so
can any

family that can. [okay] We need
two chairs for the Hefner's a
chair for the

Chancellor. Duane: He wanted to
show people how proud they were
of this project. They

came to me earlier to ask how it
should be done what kind of food
we should

serve to a large audience. So
they asked me to give him some
ideas on what to make

for this menu for this
dedication. I thought that was
important to ask

what kind of food you'd like to
see at your dedication I said
yeah I'd like to

see buffalo you know. Oh yeah
they can get that I said they
might be a little

expensive but they'll get it.
And sure enough they got it they
had a nice meal

of Indian food and they have a
very large audience of the
community of

alumni. This project at the
University of Morris Minnesota
was made possible by

Mary and Punky Hapner, alumnis
and felt they needed to address
the original

history of where University of
Morris came from. I believe it's
a respect for our

history you know they want to
have something representational
that's a good

strong example that this is
still a strong memory and part
of the university

the Native American aspect of
the land and the people that
once lived there

before they were there.

Scott: Thanks for watching. Join
us again on Common Ground. If
you have an idea for

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