An elopement, quarry carving and letters home: records shed light on Pipestone’s Indian boarding school

July 26, 2024

Raymond Derby never knew much about his great-grandparents’ lives a century ago at an Indian boarding school in southwestern Minnesota — only that they were among the thousands of students who attended the school over a 60-year period, from 1893 to 1953. Today, however, he knows his great-grandmother was a “strong-willed” woman who ran away from the Pipestone Indian Training School to elope with his great-grandfather, thanks to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis-based organization that has been reviewing school records housed at a national archive in Missouri…