Pipestone

My Life in an Indian Boarding School

By: Adam Fortunate Eagle, Laurence M. Hauptman - afterword

Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab

Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a "contrary warrior" by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike.

Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier's pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions. But this book is hardly a dry history of the late boarding school era. Telling this story in the voice of his younger self, the author takes us on a delightful journey into his childhood and the inner world of the boarding school. Along the way, he shares anecdotes of dormitory culture, student pranks, and warrior games. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone's shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than "a little bit of heaven."

Were all Indian boarding schools the dispiriting places that history has suggested? This book allows listeners to decide for themselves.

©2010 the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University (P)2022 Tantor

Excellent

A well-written book by a man who lived it. I recommend the book for the positive side of boarding schools.

a little weird to hear about being beaten...

...with a leather strap in a jovial tone of voice. Everything was read that way (because clearly that's what the words indicated). Fortunate Eagle enjoyed his Indian boarding school days (contrary to most narratives) but he mentions lots of horrible stuff that happens to him and completely brushes it off as funny.

He's writing in the voice of a child and there is absolutely no reflection from his present-day self.

The ONLY time I got the feeling that he was trying to communicate "this was not good" was a section that he mentions over and over the word "asbestos." They were playing on asbestos covered pipes. I felt like he was hitting me over the head with, "You know what we discovered about asbestos in later years, right?" But even in that passage, it was not about the school, the rules, the environment, the adults who were sometimes abusive. (He nearly dies from a burst appendix in another scene, but they wouldn't call the doctor even though they knew the ramifications.)