Tom Biron shared his experience as a survivor of the Holy Childhood Boarding School on Wednesday night, inviting audience questions and making for an emotional, powerful conversation. (Journal photo by Abby LaForest)

ISHPEMING — The Ishpeming Carnegie Public Library hosted Tom Biron for a presentation on residential schools and his experiences as a boarding school survivor on Wednesday evening.

Biron, who is Crane Clan (Ajijawk Dodam) and a member of the Anishinaabe Ojibwe First Nation known as Garden River (Kitigan Zibing.) Biron is from the Gathering place (Bawaating), also known as Sault Ste. Marie, where the Soo Locks now stand. As a survivor of the Holy Childhood Boarding School in Harbor Springs, Biron discussed the truth of his experiences during his time at the school from 1956-57 and the history of boarding schools in Michigan.

The presentation was given as part of the programming for the “Walking Together: Finding Common Ground Traveling Exhibit.” The exhibit was developed by the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan to uncover, acknowledge and document the truth of what happened to Indigenous peoples within Michigan’s Native American boarding schools.

Biron, who attended the school when he was five years old, doesn’t remember much of his time at the boarding school, but still feels the traumatic effects of it to this day and remembers the impacts on his surrounding community. Now in his seventies, Biron has had time to not only reflect on his experiences, but use his position as an educator at Northern Michigan University and community member to advocate for tangible solutions that work towards healing and changing conceptions of race and racism in the United States.

Part of Biron’s presentation included a handout explaining the ideas and history of where Indigenous peoples in the Americas being perceived as “less than human” by European colonizers originally came from, and the justification of Christian Europeans taking Indigenous land. Biron’s handout cites the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” from Pope Alexander VI and the Doctrine of Discovery, both from 1493, among other research pulled from historical documents and studies in anthropology. One thing Biron emphasized in his pre-presentation interview was the differences in language between Indigenous and European ideas of land ownership and the divide between what was called the “Old” and “New” worlds.

“We have these algorithms. We have these, what we’re calling machine languages, artificial. We have new ways to communicate, collect, and distribute these things immediately. It wasn’t so immediate back then (pre-contact), but they had a way that was the basis of what we have now,” said Biron. “To write code in a new language and spread that through their networks, getting the word out that ‘Here’s what we’re doing, here’s what’s over there in the new world, create the new world.’ That’s another part of it. We didn’t create the New World, but they – the history, movies, and books – make it feel like we, the Indigenous people, said, ‘Oh, you’re in the New World now.’ We didn’t study that, you know? This is the Old World. This is our home.”

He also pointed out how worldviews between Western and Indigenous peoples differ, which was also a point of contention when Europeans began coming over to the Americas.

“This is where we’re still at. This is what, I think, is (the) most difficult part of this. The cosmological expression from our language learning resource is challenging. The concept of cosmology doesn’t have a direct equivalent in Ojibwe, as it is a term rooted in Western scientific and philosophical traditions,” explained Biron. “However, Ojibwe culture has its own rich understanding of the universe and creation stories. In Ojibwe, you might refer to the broader concept of the universe or creation, with terms like a key earth world of Gichi-Manidoo, Great Spirit Creator, depending on the context. So 600 years later, we still don’t talk to each other in our languages. Why not? That’s a question. That’s where I’m at.”

Biron, who is a certified Education Specialist and holds Master’s degrees in Education, Public Administration, has also thought about how the indoctrination tactics used in boarding schools may be directly in conflict with what already exists within a child spiritually, and therefore is more traumatizing to the child than actually assimilating them into the boarding school’s desired Christian model.

“You look around the world, and you look in New Zealand, you look (in) Australia, you look (in) Britain, and anywhere there’s a boarding school, you have these ideas that somehow you can make your children into something. Aren’t they something already?” Biron prompted. “I mean, shouldn’t we try to figure (it) out? This is where I think the big difference is, and there should be a talk between spiritual people about what’s in that child that grows into an adult. Is it what we put in there after they’re born? These ideas (are communicated) through discipline or through, ‘You can’t eat that unless you get work done,’ stuff like that.”

Aside from acknowledging that multiple social and scientific studies are finding that race is an invented concept rather than an established biological “fact,” Biron believes that encouraging children to forge connections with the natural world is a step in the right direction for healing relationships between people, land, and cultural and spiritual divides.

“Land-based education is one of the things that a lot of people are coming up with in other tribes and bands, but also outside in the rest of the world. The idea that getting children out into the natural world is a good thing. Let them put their feet on the ground, taste the water, (what) they’re feeling when (they) run free a little bit, see a bird, hear a bird, instead of learning how to spell it, or listening to it in a movie or something,” said Biron. “There’s something missing in our natural education that we need to (address). I think at a moment in time where we really take those 225 years of America to the grave … in a manner of agriculture, imagine if we get it cleaned up and we slow it down a little bit and we take a better sense of what the needs of the human being (are) – not just the ones we like, or the ones that the Pope says are human beings – but all human beings. We’ve got all the knowledge now. We know that epigenetic problems come from being traumatized, the intergenerational trauma and all that. We have it in our community. I have it in me. I know that, all of that.”

Biron invited community members to ask questions during his presentation, which was modeled as more of a conversation than a traditional presentation. Nearing the end of the presentation, Biron mentioned that he hopes there will be more opportunities for communities to come together and let people speak the truths of their lives.

Further questions about the Walking Together: Finding Common Ground Traveling Exhibit can be directed to mqttravelingexhibit@gmail.com. The exhibit will be on display on the main floor of the Ishpeming Carnegie Public Library, located at 317 North Main Street, until May 31. More information about the exhibit and its subsequent programming can be found online at nmu.edu/walking-together/boarding-schools.

Abby LaForest can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 548. Her email address is alaforest@miningjournal.net.