The Indian boarding school at the edge of Mount Pleasant

Just north of downtown Mount Pleasant stands a row of brick buildings most drivers pass without a second look. They are what’s left of the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. It opened on June 30, 1893, and ran until 1934 — one of the off-reservation schools the federal government built to strip Native children of their language and culture.

Congress funded it in 1891. At its peak the campus held about 37 buildings on roughly 320 acres, with an average of 300 students a year in grades K through 8. Children came not just from Michigan bands but from Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and as far as Alaska. Many were taken from their families. They were forbidden to speak their own languages or practice their own beliefs. The days ran on a strict schedule of English lessons and “vocational training”: farming, woodworking, sewing, laundry, housekeeping. The model came straight from the Carlisle school in Pennsylvania, whose founder summed up the whole grim idea as wanting to erase the culture but keep the person.

When the school closed in 1934, the property passed to the State of Michigan. The state reopened it as the Michigan Home and Training School for people with developmental disabilities. That institution, later the Mount Pleasant Center, ran until 2009. Then the buildings sat empty again.

The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan has reclaimed part of the grounds, including the Mission Creek Cemetery where some of the children are buried. The federal government added the site to the National Register of Historic Places in 2018, on the strength of what it stands for rather than its architecture. The Tribe’s plan is unhurried: shore up the buildings, clear the hazards, and let the quiet rooms speak for the kids who never made it home.