The United States began paying missionaries to civilize, convert, and educate Indians in 1792 by recommendation of Secretary of War Henry Knox to President George Washington. Washington authorized an annual payment of $1,500 to Samuel Kirkland of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in order to establish the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, a boarding school for both Indian and white students in New York. Washington wrote that the school would be “teaching them the great duties of religion and morality, and… inculcate a friendship and attachment to the United States.”
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The Second Great Awakening at the dawn of the nineteenth century fueled evangelical missionary work among Native peoples. Eager missionaries, supported by government policies and funding, descended upon Indian country to evangelize and civilize primarily through education. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Christian missionary education for Indians became “a thing.” Although some denominations’ efforts were sparse and short-lived—in 1886, Unitarians successfully created one school on the Crow reservation in Montana—nearly every Christian denomination tried its hand at converting and educating Indians.
There was never any consideration that nineteenth-century white settlers would not take land and resources away from Indians; the only question was how it would be done.
One of the most enthusiastic early government officials appointed to expressly deal with tribes was Thomas Loraine McKenney, a Quaker who began his service in 1816 as superintendent of Indian trade. Later, as superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1824, McKenney’s Quaker faith played a major role in his dealings with Indians; he is considered one of the key figures in the development of federal Indian policy. He advocated for policies in Indian education and civilization run by Christian missionary societies. McKenney’s work laid the groundwork for the enactment of the Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819, which he proposed would “encourage activities of Christian benevolent societies among Indians.” Congress allocated $10,000 per year for the effort. The number of religious Indian boarding schools began to rise: 32 schools in 1824, 38 in 1825, 52 in 1830, and 48 boarding schools and 102 day schools by 1877.
One of McKenney’s lasting contributions to the philosophies of Indian education was inculcating instruction with “the habit of labor.” From earliest contact, missionaries were outraged by what they saw as periods of unproductive work, of time spent on socializing, ceremony, storytelling among Indians, whose determination to enjoy their lives seemed to utterly frost white people. “Labor is painful,” McKenney wrote. “Education and habit alone can reconcile him to it. It is upon this basis the present school system rests.” But McKenney later admitted that work, prayer, education, and strict discipline alone were ineffective in quashing Indian culture and language. He complained that once removed from the school environment, children quickly reverted to their former habits. Indian people were not necessarily averse to Western education for their children; more than one-third of the nearly four hundred treaties signed between tribes and the federal government included provisions for education.
Always innovative and responsive to their environment both physically and socially, Indians realized that white settlers were here to stay. Many willingly sent their children to missionary schools to learn English and settler ways as a means to survive and navigate the country’s new reality. They envisioned maintaining their culture, language, and families in the process and resisted missionaries’ insistence that children board at the schools and frequently removed them. Surely, Indians could have never imagined the wholesale onslaught against their hearts and souls that would soon become central to the country’s Indian policies.
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Fast on the heels of the Civilization Act, the wheels of federal assimilationist policies moved swiftly, reducing the amount of lands and resources for subsistence hunting and gathering, further impoverishing Indians. The white settler population exploded in the nineteenth century, creating greater demands for land. According to the U.S. census, the U.S. population of 5.3 million (excluding Native peoples, who had yet to achieve suffrage) in 1800 increased to 23 million by 1850, driven primarily by Irish, British, and German immigrants. By 1900, the number increased to 76 million. In a savage kind of math, while immigration exploded, Congress tried to reduce Indian lands to make room for the newcomers.
In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which provided for the removal of all Indians east of the Mississippi to what was then Indian Territory. The government failed in its mission, but thousands of Indians from various tribes were removed to lands west of the Mississippi River, sometimes forcibly, to what is now known as Oklahoma. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes or Allotment Act, which authorized the government to break up communally held tribal lands into plots, usually between 40 and 160 acres, for individuals and families. Land considered excess, beyond the number of allotments, was sold to settlers. Indian lands decreased from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by 1934, when allotment ended. From the American perspective, the future for the country’s Indigenous population was clear. As the superintendent of an Indian school in Kansas summarized, “The only alternative left is civilization or annihilation, absorption or extermination.”
There was never any consideration that nineteenth-century white settlers would not take land and resources away from Indians; the only question was how it would be done and how the actions would be framed. Rather than theft, settler acquisition and dominance came to be envisioned as divine providence or Manifest Destiny, a collective social decree coined by the journalist John Louis O’Sullivan in 1845 to consecrate western expansion. It was the destiny and duty of white people to settle and conquer the continent. Indian lands, resources, and even children were commodified in the process. Indians would benefit by being lifted out of paganism and barbarism, assimilated into a new white America. The era of extraction economics had begun. Ojibwe in the Great Lakes region soon felt the impact of these events.
In 1837, several bands of Ojibwe signed a treaty with the U.S. government ceding about thirteen million acres of land in the current states of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Nicknamed the Lumberman’s Treaty, the agreement gave the timber industry rights to harvest abundant white pine in the region. Although Ojibwe understood that they would still have access to the lands for hunting and gathering, in 1850 President Zachary Taylor revoked these rights and ordered tribes to “remove from their unceded lands” to an area west of the Mississippi. In 1850 and 1851, several bands of Ojibwe were lured to Sandy Lake in Minnesota, three to five hundred miles away from villages in Wisconsin, where the government said they would receive their annuities. Payment was scheduled for October 25. Thousands traveled to the site but found that no rations or annuities arrived.
The government subagent John Watrous didn’t arrive until late November, without the cash annuities and without any plans to feed and shelter the Ojibwe while they waited. It’s estimated that 170 Ojibwe died at Sandy Lake from starvation, illness, and exposure while waiting for annuities that never arrived; another 230 died on their way back home in December. The anthropologist James Clifton describes the Sandy Lake event as the “Wisconsin Death March.” Angry Wisconsin band leaders grew determined to stand their ground against the government’s removal orders. Some Ojibwe talked of war, but in 1852, Chief Buffalo, leader of the Red Cliff band, organized a remarkable journey along with other Ojibwe leaders to take their case to the president himself in Washington, D.C. Buffalo, in his early nineties, included the white interpreter Benjamin Armstrong on the long trip, stopping along the way to meet with local newspaper editors and prominent leaders in white communities, gathering their support and signatures on a petition.
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The delegation met with daunting setbacks along the way, sometimes forced to organize public exhibitions and sell trinkets for travel funds. Soon, however, newspapers were filled with reports about the unfair treatment of the Lake Superior Ojibwe who were being pushed off their traditional homelands. The delegation secured a meeting with President Millard Fillmore, who agreed with their demands, leading to the Treaty of 1854, which set aside four reservations in Wisconsin, Red Cliff, Bad River, Lac Courte Oreilles, and Lac du Flambeau, as well as a small portion of land on Madeline Island.
The Bad River reservation was established as part of that treaty, but Odanah, the Ojibwe word for town or village, had been a cultural center for the tribe for centuries. In the seventeenth century French explorers had great difficulty navigating the river flowing through the region, so they dubbed it Rivière Mauvaise, or Bad River. But Ojibwe have always called it Mashkiiziibii, Medicine River; it’s said that everything needed for mino-bimadizwin, a good life—food, medicines, and spirit—is available in its coffee-colored waters and along its banks. Mashkiiziibii and its tributaries simultaneously drain and feed seventy-five miles of lush land, in the Bad River watershed and the Kakagon Slough. The slough is home to wild rice, manoomin, the sacred seed that has sustained Ojibwe bellies and spirits for generations.
Finally, at the mouth of the Bad River, Mashkiiziibii adds its rich alluvial lode to the Lake swollen with fish. The river frequently floods, so the lands along its banks are especially fertile. The sisters say they taught the Indians at Odanah how to garden, but Ojibwe have planted gardens here for generations at Gitiganing, the gardens, an area not far from where St. Mary’s Church still stands today. One can still see remnants of the large, cultivated rows of that ancient gitigaan. The great wealth of natural resources at Bad River—timber, fish, minerals—soon caught the attention of the growing white settler population. Before long the wilderness first described by the sisters began to swarm with timbermen and entrepreneurs. Railroad construction in nearby Ashland began around 1872, bringing hundreds of workers to the region.
By 1877 the rail to Chicago was finished. Suddenly the little village of Odanah was no longer an isolated wilderness. Almost overnight it transformed into a boomtown with a bustling main street and housing for lumberjacks and workers. The Bad River reservation found itself at the center of one of the world’s largest timber booms. The traditional Ojibwe economy was disrupted; many turned to wage labor and were forced to sell their land allotments to survive, no longer able to rely on a subsistence lifestyle alone. Assimilation in all its forms, including boarding schools, had come to Mashkiiziibii.
The events leading up to and surrounding the nuns’ time in Bad River are a microcosm of what unfolded in much of Indian country during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the genesis of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration’s civilizing mission can be traced back to the earliest days of the republic, when political leaders turned to Christian missionaries, the de facto Indian experts of the day, as they sought to solve the country’s Indian problem. That problem was the barrier Indians presented to white settlement and westward expansion.
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The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration packed heavy on their first trip to the Bad River reservation in 1883. They reasoned, rightfully, that little from their world at the Franciscan order’s motherhouse in La Crosse, about two hundred miles to the south, would be available in the wilderness of northern Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior. The bulk of their supplies, however, supported their celestial mission rather than physical survival. That mission focused on civilizing the pagan Ojibwe through conversion and education; theirs was also a race to secure Bad River as a Catholic mission school. Under President Grant’s Peace Policy, authorization and funding to erect schools on reservations were being divided up among Christian denominations.
The cheapest solution to the Indian problem, they reasoned, was erasure of Indian identity, the breakup of Indian families, not outright war.
The government, despite promises to the contrary, reneged on some guarantees to designate certain reservations for Catholics. Indignant and determined to claim as many reservations as possible, Catholics launched a full-court press in Indian country. The dioceses of La Crosse and Milwaukee offered initial financial support to the sisters, confident they would best the small Protestant mission already established in Odanah. In addition to their meager belongings, the two nuns, Sister Cunigunda Urbany and Sister Emmanuela Klaus, brought two huge altar stones, a tabernacle, monstrance, chalices, and numbers of linens and vestments for the priest, Father John Gafron, who presided over a primitive church in the little village of Odanah.
The railroad was not yet finished, and there were few roads in the region then; like most travelers the sisters arrived in Ashland via ship on the great lake, about fifteen miles northwest of the reservation. It was late March, but the waters of Chequamegon Bay, which borders Ashland, were still frozen. After loading a bobsled with their heavy luggage and other items, they and their guides headed to Odanah over the bay and on to a dirt road. The nuns worried that the bobsled, so weighted down with Catholic sacred gear for the Mass, might break through the ice. But they arrived safely in the wilderness where the only buildings in sight were the little chapel and a rough house for the sisters’ lodging.
Fortunately for the nuns, Ojibwe social customs include feeding guests, regardless of their race or religious affiliation. Seeing that the nuns had little food, one of the pagan Ojibwe women began bawling out the Christian Indians for failing to feed their guests properly. Soon the nuns were supplied with maple sugar, fish, wild rice, venison, and dried turnips. They immediately began offering day school on the main floor of their little house, focusing on the gospel and training their students in the habits of “industry, cleanliness and virtue.” In addition to reading and writing, girls were taught needlework, cookery, and domestic work, and the boys were taught gardening, agriculture, and “other useful work.” Occasionally, the nuns visited huts and wigwams in the village to baptize the sick during outbreaks of measles and smallpox, sometimes facing off with medicine people conducting demonstrations of rites known as the medicine dance.
In one case, although frightened by the “hideous antics,” the nuns managed to sprinkle holy water on a sick girl. The chief of the proceedings angrily threatened the nuns. He seized a kettle of boiling wild rice soup to hurl at them, but one of the nuns lifted the crucifix of her rosary and shouted, “My God is stronger than your God!” Likely concerned with endangering those seeking healing at the ceremony, the chief backed down, but for the nuns the event represented a spiritual triumph. By 1888, more sisters traveled to the mission, where they succeeded in building a boarding school with the help of a government contract; the fifty students that first year grew to about two hundred by the 1930s.
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The sisters traveled to Bad River on the tide of the federal boarding school movement, which had its beginnings in the U.S. Peace Commission of 1867 and later in President Ulysses S. Grant’s Peace Policy of 1869. The post-Civil War years were devastating for Indians, with federal policies focused on assimilating and infantilizing them. Reformers fresh off a win with abolishing slavery eagerly embraced the Indian problem, advocating for assimilation and civilization rather than outright extermination. Christian reformers and humanitarians created various “friends of the Indian” organizations such as the Indian Rights Association and the Women’s National Indian Association (notable for their lack of Indian membership), which advocated for education as the road to civilization and removing Indian children from their homes as the best means to assimilate them into white society. The cheapest solution to the Indian problem, they reasoned, was erasure of Indian identity, the breakup of Indian families, not outright war.
Congress agreed, citing the expense of warfare with tribes as well as the public’s antipathy toward extermination of an entire race of people. Carl Schurz, secretary of the interior, estimated that the cost of killing a single Indian was nearly $1 million versus the cost of eight years of schooling in a boarding school at $1,200. “The greatest danger hanging over the Indian race arises from the fact that, with their large and valuable territorial possessions which are lying waste, they stand in the way of what is commonly called ‘the development of the country,’” Schurz wrote. Reformers also called for an investigation into the Indian Bureau, long a haven of corruption and patronage. Agents on reservations, they said, should be tasked with educating, Christianizing, and assimilating Indians.
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Excerpted from Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools by Mary Annette Pember. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Mary Annette Pember.
