Early Bird Tickets are now on sale for Promument, Monument Lab’s Annual Fundraising Event, Awards Ceremony, and Party. Join us for an evening of music, art, food, and celebration on May 23, 2024 at the Independence Visitor Center.
“To protect, honor, and remember the children who lived and died at the Rapid City Indian Boarding School.”
–Amy Sazue, Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project
On the site of the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, a federal assimilation school that operated from 1898 to 1933, the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project is developing a memorial and interpretive to protect and remember the children who died, honor them in culturally appropriate ways, and reclaim both land and legacies that the boarding school sought to suppress. During the Re:Generation project, Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project team members focused on formalizing their organizational structure to allow them to launch the development stage of their interpretive site.
With a new organizational structure, the team convened community events, including documentary film screenings and oral history collection as well as design reviews which built consensus and strengthened the emerging organization. Additional funding from the Mellon Foundation is supporting the construction of the larger project, which incorporates memorial sculptures, commissioned artworks, and a mixture of traditional and emergent ceremonial spaces into the project site.
Despite legal agreements which provided a claim to the land on which their relatives were buried, the distribution of the school’s land in the 1940s away from Native peoples contributed to ongoing tensions within the communities in the Black Hills. Some of the ongoing work of the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project will be contesting these illegal land transfers as yet another legacy of the boarding school period.
Team members include: Amy Sazue, Bobbie Koch, Eric Zimmer, Valeriah Big Eagle, Kibbe Brown, Sandra Fire Lightning, Eirik Asa Heikes, LaFawn Janis, Tatewin Means, Lorraine Nez, Jennifer Read, Beverly Stabber-Warne, Heather Dawn Thompson, and Robin Zephier.
Local Organizational Partner: Black Hills Area Community Foundation
Keep exploring and support! Visit the website for the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project: here