Molly, Elweza, Edith, Rosa, and Katherine: Acknowledging Tragedy at the Greenville Indian School

Industrial Building, Greenville Indian School, April 1920. Gustavus Elmer Emanuel Lindquist Papers, Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University.

Last year news magazine The Walrus published a piece about “residential school denialism” in Canada. Residential schools in Canada were similar to the Native American boarding schools in the U.S.: First Nations children were taken from their families and forced to attend schools with harsh, assimilationist programs. The Canadian government has confronted this history more directly than its U.S. counterpart, through the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2015 that collected information and released a report about abuses that occurred at residential schools over the decades they were open. Researchers have continued investigating residential school history and in recent years have uncovered graves containing hundreds of First Nations children. (Similar work is being done in the U.S., as cemeteries were common features of boarding schools.) Efforts to commemorate the lives of these children have also appeared, including the placement of 215 pairs of moccasins in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery in June 2021. For some, however, such public acts of recognition are apparently too much and even unnecessary.

As The Walrus points out, a backlash against further acknowledging this history has emerged in Canada, and it is going to sound familiar to anyone following discussions about the teaching of history in the U.S. According to the political figures cited in the article, acknowledging residential school history is an attempt to make white people feel guilty. They also claim that life at residential schools wasn’t actually that bad for First Nations children. Their evidence: statements from residential school alumni who recall some positive experiences at these schools, combined with the ability to completely ignore and dismiss the harrowing accounts of former students who were traumatized by their forced separation from their families and the many documented accounts of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of First Nations children.

This strikes a chord with me for a couple of reasons. One, the point of knowing the truth about history, and acknowledging that our governments and citizenry have participated in violent and repressive systems, is not to make white people feel guilty. I will never understand this line of thinking. Uncovering the ugly parts of our histories is not unpatriotic. It is not a tool of leftist brainwashing. It is an attempt to understand and accept that the experiences of our fellow citizens and their ancestors may have differed dramatically from our own. And to understand how this history continues to impact them in the present. It is about listening, trying to understand, and, hopefully, preventing similar abuses from happening again. All good things.

Second, sometimes when I talk to people about my work on boarding schools I have been asked if there were any positives about these schools. This question makes me uncomfortable, because, as a non-Native person, I don’t want the positive experiences some alumni had at boarding school to be the main takeaway from my work. And I certainly don’t want my words to be used to back up anything like the denialism in Canada. But the truth is this history is complicated. Some people did have positive experiences. This does not repudiate the negative experiences of others, though. And former students who did have good boarding school experiences, generally those who attended these schools in the 1970s and later, are themselves quick to acknowledge that others, especially those who attended in earlier eras, were not so lucky. This nuance is important and should be recognized.

Sadly, I have no doubt that this same denial will come for boarding schools histories in the U.S., especially as the topic gets more attention in the news. And I want to share a story I recently read about the Greenville Indian School that occurred in December 1916 that shows why sugarcoating the history of these schools, especially as they were run during the early decades of the twentieth century, is dishonest and disgusting.

The Greenville Indian Industrial School was established in Plumas County, California, in 1898, and enrolled students from the Mountain Maidu, Valley Maidu, Nisenan, Concow (also spelled Konkow) Northwestern Maidu, Yana, Miwok, Washoe, and Paiute nations. Most of these students came from the surrounding Butte, Sierra, and Yuba counties in northeastern California. The school was not open very long – it officially closed in 1922 after a fire destroyed a dorm and study room the previous December. (1) The school was located in Indian Valley, four miles from the actual town of Greenville, and was initially managed by the Women’s National Indian Association in the 1890s before being purchased by the federal government. (2) Children ages five to sixteen were enrolled at the Greenville School, and, as with other boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students spent half the day in academic classes and half the day in vocational training.

Image One: Map of California with Plumas County highlighted (2007). Image Two: Detailed Plumas County map from 1882. Wikimedia Commons Images.

Indian Valley is located in a relatively remote part of California. And yet, in the less than twenty-five years the Greenville Indian School was open, there are multiple reports of students running away. This was not necessarily uncommon in boarding schools; hundreds of students ran away from off-reservation schools during the first three decades of the twentieth century. (3) Interestingly, though, in the accounts published in regional newspapers about runaways from the Greenville School, all of the students who attempted to escape were teen girls. And the terrain they attempted to cover was treacherous, with the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east and the Cascade mountains to the north of the school.

The first report about students running away from Greenville was published in 1902, not long after the school opened. In May of that year three unnamed female students, aged fifteen to eighteen, escaped from the school. The superintendent offered a reward to anyone who found them and the three students were quickly captured and returned to the school by two local men. There is no additional information about why the girls ran away as they allegedly “could not be induced to talk.” (4) In April 1909 three different female students, ages fourteen to seventeen, ran away from Greenville. Within days the students were found approximately fifty miles from the school in Berry Creek, California, near a stop on the Western Pacific Railroad, a journey that took them through the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains. Several “railroad men” were deputized “by telephone” to arrest the girls, but refused. (5) It is unclear whether the girls actually returned to the school. And, finally, in 1913 two female Native students and the white daughter of a Greenville teacher ran away together in October. While the two Native students were quickly found and returned to the school, the daughter hid for a month before being found at a hotel in Plumas County. In each of these instances, it is unclear why the Native students ran away, though the Greenville teacher’s daughter apparently left the school because she was fighting with her mother. It is also unclear whether any of these students sustained injuries during their escapes or what types of punishments they faced upon their return.

Undated photograph of the Greenville Indian School Office. Dorothy M. Hill Collection, Meriam Library Special Collections, California State University, Chico.

The outcome was much grimmer for the five female students who ran away in December 1916. Molly (also called Margaret) Lawrence, 11, Elweza Stonecoal, 13, Edith Buckskin, 14, Rosa James, 15, and Katherine Dick,15, ran away from the Greenville Indian School on Tuesday, December 5. The students were apparently trying to get to Susanville, a town 40 miles north of Greenville. Three days later the two younger girls were found; Lawrence had died from exposure and Stonecoal’s feet had frostbite. Within a week of her return to the school both of her feet had to be amputated. According to the three other girls, Lawrence and Stonecoal were too tired to continue their escape with the older students, so they broke several branches off a tree and laid down on them to rest while the others kept going. (6) The three older girls were found in Mountain Meadows, north of Greenville. James and Dick had made it to a ranger’s station, but Buckskin had developed frostbite on her feet and took refuge in a local cabin. Buckskin also required amputation as a result of her injuries: she lost part of one foot and her other leg below the knee. All of the students returned to the Greenville School and received medical care at the school hospital. Unfortunately, Buckskin later died from her injuries on January 2, 1917.

It is hard to imagine why these students would run away in December. The weather in Plumas County is cold in the winter, and in 1916 the average daily temperature in December was 30 degrees. The temperatures in the mountains surrounding the school were even colder, and there was a substantial amount of snow on the ground. So again, why would these students have run away from the Greenville School in the middle of winter? The surviving students publicly asserted that they ran away after being beaten with a strap by the school matron, Miss Hancock, for not getting up at the proper time in the morning. Greenville’s superintendent, E.K. Miller, claimed this was false, noting that because corporal punishment was banned in boarding schools, Hancock had merely hit them “over the shoulders with a cord.” (7) How this is not also corporal punishment is unclear to me. The newspapers that chronicled the students’ escape and recapture were quick to condemn the girls for running away from the school, and sprinkled in a hearty dose of racism in trying to explain their actions. Articles referred to the students as “truants” who participated in a “foolish escapade,” and one article suggested that they simply could not help their actions, noting that “the probable cause of the restlessness in all cases is the natural discontent of the Indian under restraint.” (8) The beating, apparently, had nothing to do with it.

Because of the severity of this incident and the press coverage it garnered, Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) Commissioner Cato Sells ordered an investigation. (9) OIA Special Agent Lafayette Dorrington travelled to the Greenville School on January 7, 1917 and spent the next five days interviewing students and school employees about the five girls’ escape attempt. In a report submitted on January 22, 1917, Greenville officials refuted claims that the children were abused by Miss Hancock, again emphasizing that corporal punishment was not permitted on the campus. Miss Hancock, however, admitted to hitting the girls with a paddle when they refused to get out of bed, but later changed her story, claiming she only hit them lightly with a cord (as Superintendent Miller had publicly claimed). The school officials interviewed during the investigation claimed that deceased student Edith Buckskin was a trouble maker and the ringleader of the escape, and maintained that she had persuaded the other four students to run away from the school. Dorrington agreed with this assessment, and in his investigation findings he asserted that the Greenville School bore no culpability for the deaths of Lowery and Buckskin and that school officials were not at fault for the incident or the way it was handled. Dorrington further recommended that Rosa James and Katherine Dick, who did not suffer any long term injuries, be punished for their roles in the incident. (10)

And that was that. No one from the Greenville School was held responsible for the deaths of two students and the critical injury of another. No one questioned the school’s account of events or wondered whether the long history of female students running away from Greenville might suggest there was something more sinister going on. And none of the adults working at the school, who were charged with protecting these children, listened to or accepted the students’ reason for running away: they were beaten with a paddle or strap or cord by the school matron, probably repeatedly. This abuse was apparently so bad that this group of five girls, according to their own testimony, gathered warm clothes and bread and ran away from the Greenville School at night in the winter to travel 40 miles on foot to a nearby town to escape.

When I read about people who deny this history, or suggest that ugly stuff like this is dredged up only to make certain groups of people feel bad, I think about stories like this. I think about the lives of the children who were lost in the often abusive early years of the Native American boarding school system. And I think about children who lived in situations so awful that trudging 40 miles through snow and mountains seemed like a better alternative to staying at school. If these kids were brave enough to run away, we can be brave enough to read their stories and acknowledge the reality of the horrible situations they and many other Native children were forced to navigate and try to survive. It’s honestly the least we can do.

[1] “Urges that Indian School be Rebuilt by Govenm’t.” Plumas Independent. (February 9, 1922).

[2] For more on the history of the Indigenous nations currently living in Greenville, and the efforts of tribal nations to get their land back after suffering from the termination policies of the 1950s and 1960s, see the Greenville Rancheria website https://www.grth.org/history .

[3] David Wallace Adams. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 253.

[4] “Runaway Girls.” Feather River Bulletin. (May 8, 1902).

[5] Collaboration between local law enforcement and boarding school authorities was not unusual during this time. The former routinely rounded up Native children who attempted to run away and returned them to school.

[6] “Indian Girls Are Frozen Near Westwood.” Oroville Daily Register. (December 11, 1916).

[7] While technically correct, this was not a reality. See literally any history of boarding schools in the early 1900s (and in some cases the late 1900s – the hotline at the Stewart Indian School!) for examples.

[8] “A Tragedy in the Snow: One Indian Girl Perishes, Others Suffering from Hardships and Exposure. The Lassen Advocate. (December 15, 1916).

[9] An in-depth account of this investigation can be found in the following: Kate Mook. “The Greenville Investigation: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Boarding School Runaways.” (2020) Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations. 990. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/990 .

[10] Ibid, 77-82.