On March 26, Wayne State College hosted former faculty member Nancy Gillis for a presentation titled “Straddling Worlds: Negotiating Indian Education”. The presentation was about Native American children who were sent to boarding schools, both private and parochial. Gillis, who comes from Cherokee and Choctaw heritage, says this presentation is very important to her because of the things Native American children endured in these schools. She has been giving the presentation for many years. 

“In 1998, while working at the John Neihardt State Historic Site, I was asked to give a presentation on John Neihardt at Black Elk,” Gillis said. “I did it and enjoyed it and other topics started coming up and things I was using in the classroom, they blossomed into programs as well.” 

Gillis said growing up in a Native American home led her to wanting to know more about Native American studies. 

“Growing up in a traditional Cherokee household, I knew my own tribe’s history very well,” Gillis said. “As I went through school and was told ‘there are no Indians left’ by a third grade teacher, when I went home to a whole household of them, I early understood ignorance of our history… so I always had the interest.” 

Gillis said that 85% of Native Americans live in urban areas, which most people don’t know. She said the reason it becomes unknown is the fact that they become part of a general city population. 

“We are familiar with ‘ghettoizing,’” Gillis said. “In the 1940s and 50s, the government decided that Indians on the reservations needed to be urbanized and so they would forcibly send whole families to Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, so forth, trying to separate them off of reservations out of the communal living and because they had come off of reservations…they were lost and became ghettoized.” 

Gillis also said that different Native American tribes were not in much contact with each other. 

“In Minneapolis and places like that, there’s still sections of those cities that are predominantly Native, but they will be a variety of tribes. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that we began to have any kind of inter-tribal organizations.” 

Gillis said that if anyone can take away something from her presentation, she wants them to understand the difference between facts and truth. 

“You can know the facts from a book,” Gillis said. “But you can get the truth of the emotion behind those facts from hearing the stories that people tell of their experiences. If anyone is interested in learning more, there are Native authors who have written about their experiences and filmmakers making films. Every tribe has a website, and they tell their own stories. There’s over 1,000 tribes who are all unique. I want people to understand that we don’t lump them together, and the abuses of that timeline are still with us.”