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Four Wrongs Do Not Make a Right: 

The Rapid City Indian School

 

By Fiona Poth '24 

​

A single-story,

Unassuming building

Locked now, luckily

“Closed until further notice”

Perched on a hill 

Of haunted brown dirt,

Marred with green weeds

(Who like the Explorers take

 our strength from the land),

Which hides the bones

Of too many Sioux 

Built of jaundice bricks 

More than 100 years ago

By the United States

Government

not to heal or teach 

But to convert—

a schoolhouse—

to stop an urgent plague,

The Sioux Culture.

 

Only another disease—

Tuberculosis—

Could stop the undeserved beatings, 

The cruel chains,

The confining cells, and

The meager meals

Disguised by the name “School.”

Again, the innocent were unprepared

And the school’s desks

Were replaced with death beds.

And again, the United States

Government

Buried Sioux around this building, 

But now it was called

A Sanitarium.

More than three decades later,

This tired sickly schoolhouse

Was called a Hospital

When the United States

Government

changed the sign

Above the front door—

And little else.

But the cruelty continued

With punishments meted out

By incompetent doctors

And inadequate supplies.

And more Sioux died.

 

Now, locked and sealed

Quiet souls float through

the rotten walls

Only Spirits in need of care. 

This building can no longer

kill the Sioux,

But its absence 

is strangling them.

Voices continue 

To be silenced,

Buried now in 

Marked graves.

Mourners crying

Softly for help, but

No one is listening.