A 2022 federal report on federal involvement in Indian boarding schools sent shockwaves through Native communities across the country, including Milwaukee where the history was all but lost.
“There was a collective and audible reaction,” said Mark Denning, who is Oneida, Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee. “I had never ever heard of a boarding school … in this community.”
Just three miles northwest of downtown Milwaukee, a Catholic-run reformatory school called Good Shepherd Industrial School had served as a federally funded Indian boarding school.
Denning and other Indigenous leaders and allies began work with Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to find out about Good Shepherd. The federal government funded the school from 1884 to 1890 as part of its larger project to assimilate Indigenous children into non-Native culture…