(From Todd Epp, Northern Plains News)
A new memorial in Rapid City honors the Native American children who died at the Rapid City Indian Boarding School between 1898 and 1933. While the memorial marks a step toward healing, the land’s fate after the school’s closure reveals a deeper story of broken promises, systemic exclusion, and legal neglect for Rapid City’s Native community.
The nonreservation boarding school opened at Rapid City in 1898, according to the National Archives. For the school year 1929–30, it was converted into a sanatorium school for children with tuberculosis. It was reconverted to a regular boarding school in 1930 but closed in 1933, federal records show.
The memorial, led by the Remembering the Children project, stands on a 25-acre hillside above West Middle School, on land where unmarked graves of at least 50 children have been identified through tribal oral histories, ground-penetrating radar, and research by Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, according to project documents.
The memorial’s central statue, “Tiwahe,” was dedicated on May 31, 2025. The site includes a walking path, prayer spaces, engraved stones, and planned cultural features such as a child’s burial scaffold and a traditional Lakota inipi for ceremony.
“This memorial will always proceed with the Lakota values,” said EvAnn White Feather, Secretary of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, in a 2020 tribal resolution.
“And provide a permanent place of prayer, remembrance, and healing.”
Richard Moves Camp, a cultural and spiritual advisor to the memorial committee, has helped guide the memorial’s design and ceremony plans since the project’s inception, according to the Remembering the Children project.
Life at the Rapid City Indian School
Firsthand accounts and oral histories preserved by families and researchers reveal the harsh reality of life at the Rapid City Indian School. According to the Remembering the Children project:
“Children faced harsh discipline at the Rapid City Indian School. For most of the school’s history, Chauncey Yellow Robe, a Lakota graduate of the Carlisle Indian School, served as the school’s disciplinarian and was responsible for maintaining order among the boys, while a staff of matrons supervised the girls. The disciplinarian and matrons could beat children, and before the BIA banned the practice, students could be confined to cells or cages. Children sometimes ran away from the school, but were seldom able to avoid being captured and returned. Most runaways tried to return home, and were quickly caught by reservation police. Some children suffered horrific injuries in their attempts to escape the school. In 1909, Paul Loves War and Henry Bull lost their lower legs to frostbite after trying to escape the school in the dead of winter. In 1910, James Means and Mark Sherman died when they were struck by a train as they slept on the tracks.”
Students’ daily routines were dominated by regimentation and labor, according to project records.
“The Rapid City Indian Boarding School operated in half days. The children attended school in the mornings and then worked around the school in the afternoons. The purpose of this schedule was to educate children and provide them with work skills. The afternoon jobs included working in the kitchen, laundry room, boiler room, dormitories, and on the farm. Some of these skills were useful to the children, but the school exploited the children for free labor to maintain school operations.”
Some of the work, such as tending the school’s boiler or working in the steam laundry, was dangerous and sometimes led to injury or death, according to the Remembering the Children project.
Disease was a constant threat, and records indicate that at least 50 children and infants died at the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, though the actual number is believed to be higher. Nationally, a 2022 U.S. Department of the Interior report documented at least 973 deaths of Native American children across federal Indian boarding schools.
“As with most Indian boarding schools, the mortality rate was very high, and the government did not keep records of the deaths of the children or where they were buried. However, we know from oral histories and from years of independent research, including in the federal archived school records, that at least 50 children and infants passed away (the number is surely significantly higher). Some children died at the Boarding School, some traveling to or from the Boarding School, and others died trying to escape from the Boarding School,” the project reported.
What Happened to the Land
By 1907, the school encompassed nearly 1,400 acres—spanning from modern-day Baken Park to Canyon Lake. The land supported classrooms, dormitories, farms, and infrastructure, all maintained by the forced labor of Native children, according to project research.
When the school closed in 1933, the campus became the Sioux Sanitarium, a tuberculosis hospital for Native patients. After World War II, federal authorities deemed much of the land “surplus.” In 1948, Congress passed a law allowing the Department of the Interior to transfer such land to local governments, schools, the National Guard, and religious organizations—while also noting its availability to “needy Indians,” according to project documents.
In practice, nearly all the land went to local public and religious institutions, including what became West Middle School, Stevens High School, city parks, and Camp Rapid. The Catholic Church was the first religious group to acquire land under the act, later building Blessed Sacrament Church on a 35-acre parcel. Some church-held land was eventually sold for residential development, according to local records cited in the project.
An early agreement to provide land for Native housing near West Middle School was dropped after white residents petitioned city officials and threatened legal action. Despite the 1948 law’s language allowing land transfers to ‘needy Indians,’ none of the more than 1,200 acres was allocated to Native families. Many were relocated to the city’s north side, an area long associated with economic hardship and housing discrimination, according to the Remembering the Children project.
Ongoing Demands for Justice
In recent years, Native leaders have called for redress, citing historical injustices and overlooked legal provisions. Legal research by tribal advocates found that some parcels may contain “reversion clauses,” which allow the land to return to federal ownership if not used for its designated public purpose. In 2017, the Bureau of Indian Affairs acknowledged that at least three parcels in Rapid City may qualify for such review, according to project documents.
The parcel containing the unmarked graves is now held in federal trust for the Oglala, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes, a result of years of organizing and negotiations. That land forms the core of the new memorial site, which was transferred into trust on behalf of the Oceti Sakowin in 2017, according to the Remembering the Children project.
In a 2020 resolution, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reaffirmed its support for the project. The resolution describes the memorial as “a permanent place of prayer, remembrance, and healing” and emphasizes that it must “honor the lives, memories and spirits of the children.”
A Memorial and a Reminder
The new memorial is more than a tribute. It is a recognition of loss, survival, and resilience. For many families, it is the first official acknowledgement that their children died far from home and were buried without ceremony or records.
Yet the larger story of the land remains unresolved. As city and tribal leaders continue to negotiate the future of these parcels, the memorial stands not just as a sacred place of remembrance but also as a marker of unfinished business.
Tribal leaders continue to press for formal recognition of other burial sites and legal review of additional parcels under potential reversion clauses.
For more information about the statue and to view photos of the memorial, visit ICT’s coverage by CLICKING HERE.
