Are children buried at Johnson County Shawnee Indian Mission? Chief calls for search
Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes is calling on federal and local leaders to investigate the history of Shawnee Indian Mission in Johnson County, and uncover any children who might have been buried there.
On Thursday, Barnes stood on the grounds of the former boarding school in Fairway, established by the Rev. Thomas Johnson — for whom Johnson County is named. The mission, now a state historic site, housed students from several tribes, forcing them to perform manual labor, with the intent of assimilating them into white American culture and Christianity, or as Barnes said, “to quote-unquote civilize Indigenous children.”
The practice has long been condemned as “cultural genocide.” Across North America, many students never returned from the boarding schools, and their families have since suffered generational trauma.
“For far too long, the truth about Indian boarding schools has been absent from national conversations,” Barnes said. “Others may have forgotten, but America’s tribal nations have not. Survivors’ stories have been handed down from generation to generation, and the stories of those who did not survive are coming to light.”
Gaylene Crouser, executive director of the Kansas City Indian Center and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said she came out Thursday morning to support the Shawnee tribe and “all the children that came here and were buried here.” The site is at 3403 W. 53rd St., off Mission Road.
“It is painful to think about it. But it is also so painful that our society has absolutely no idea that this happened,” she said. “And they can drive right by this school every single day and not know what happened to the children here. That to me is just as painful as remembering the children and what they went through.”
Following the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the U.S. enacted laws establishing and supporting the boarding schools across the nation. Thousands of American Indian children were forcibly taken from their homes and placed in such schools.
In Canada earlier this year, the remains of more than 1,300 First Nation students were discovered at residential school sites, igniting a broader effort to lift the veil off of the abuse and dangers at the schools, and provide answers to Indigenous families.
This past spring, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, “a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies.” The goal is to identify school sites where there may have been student burials, as well as the identities and tribal affiliations of the children.
Officials have said they do not believe Shawnee Indian Mission would be included in the initiative. But at the press conference Thursday, Barnes, the Shawnee chief, called on the federal government to comprehensively examine every residential school, including those run by the federal government and those brokered by federal agents, like Shawnee Indian Mission.
Barnes said families discovered that at the mission, which operated from 1839 to 1862, children were unkempt, poorly clothed and malnourished, and “when some parents came to the mission to see their children, they learned that their children were dead.”
Some descendants of former students there joined the crowd at the site, which originally was Shawnee reservation land. The school’s manual labor training ceased in 1854.
“Visitors today can see the dormitories and learn that the children slept in a windowless attic after laboring in the mission fields,” Barnes said.
“The truth is there is a lot that we still need to understand about the Shawnee Mission’s operational history,” he said. “Who were the children that resided here? What were their names, and what were their stories? What were the conditions here? How many of these children never returned to their families? And when they died, where were they buried?”
Barnes and the city of Fairway have begun talks to examine how to recover the lost history of children at Shawnee Indian Mission. Fairway Mayor Melanie Hepperly told The Star they have verbally agreed to establish a partnership and begin conversations with local officials, residents and others who wish to preserve the site.
The Shawnee Tribe also has worked with officials to bring in an architectural firm to perform “a deep assessment of the property and begin mapping out a plan for further restoration of the mission,” Barnes said.
And he said the tribe is looking into surveying the mission’s land, with ground-penetrating radar and other technology to uncover any lost history, and lost lives.
“For me and all Shawnee people, this is deeply personal,” he said. “Familial descendants of the children who came here are our fellow citizens, our friends. Our family. It is my moral obligation to search for these children and, if we find them here, to honor them properly.”
Barnes and several residents gathered Thursday in honor of Orange Shirt Day, which began in Canada in 2013 to remember the thousands of Indigenous Native children who died at church-run residential schools.
Tribal nations and advocates across America have adopted the movement.
“Regardless of tribal affiliation, that’s all of our kids,” Crouser told The Star. “I didn’t go to boarding school. But I know people who did. And it affects all of us. There is not a single tribal member that doesn’t know someone that is still living that went to these boarding schools.”
Crouser said all such boarding schools need to be investigated.
“It happened for much longer than most people are aware of,” she said. “We would like to see all of the residential boarding schools’ histories come to light, because when all of that sees the light of day, then we can all begin to heal from that. Until then, it’s still going to be this generational trauma, this wound among the people.”
Barnes said he is encouraged by the support he has received from city and local officials, but the issue “far exceeds our collaborative work at this single site in Kansas. The federal government needs to step up and work alongside tribal nations to examine every location across this country.”
He called on the Biden administration to consult with every affected tribe, allocate substantial resources and provide access to historians, federal archives and researchers to ensure investigations are completed.
“Whatever the conditions at these schools, the children who attended any of these places deserve to be remembered, found, named, returned and honored.”
Also on Thursday, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas and Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma reintroduced a bill to investigate past injustices at such boarding schools — including schools like Shawnee Indian Mission, even though it was not federally run. The bill would create a commission that would also develop recommendations to aid in healing for Native families and communities, according to a press release.
Crouser hopes that the investigations will bring more awareness and education to the history, treatment and erasure of Indigenous people.
“In addition to finding all of these kids, honoring them, and bringing them home, we also need to make sure people are educated and know the history of this country,” she said. “It’s our shared history. It’s not Indian history. It’s all of our history.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 3:18 PM.
