Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School

A renowned activist recalls his childhood years in an Indian boarding school

Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a “contrary warrior” by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike.

Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions. But this book is hardly a dry history of the late boarding school era. Telling this story in the voice of his younger self, the author takes us on a delightful journey into his childhood and the inner world of the boarding school. Along the way, he shares anecdotes of dormitory culture, student pranks, and warrior games. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone’s shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than “a little bit of heaven.”

Were all Indian boarding schools the dispiriting places that history has suggested? This book allows readers to decide for themselves.

• American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)
• Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
• Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (North American Indian Prose Award)
• Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools
• This Tender Land: A Novel
• The Ecological Indian: Myth and History
• Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows (Volume 4) (Stories & Storytellers)
• Scalping Columbus and Other Damn Indian Stories: Truths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies (Volume 60) (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series)
• The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (The Penguin Library of American Indian History)
• A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman