Sasha Maria Suarez:
There were at least 11 boarding schools in the state of Wisconsin — some of them have a much longer history. So schooling, in terms of religious schooling, existed in Wisconsin well before the 19th century, well before the founding of the United States. Often, Jesuit missionaries would go to tribal communities, tribal nations — both here in Wisconsin, across the Great Lakes, and also across what is today the United States — and they would set up schools that often functioned as boarding schools where they would take children in and educate them and convert them to Christianity. In Wisconsin, the federal Indian boarding schools that existed started largely in the late 19th century — so 1880s, 1890s — and those are specifically different because of how they operated and the funding that they largely received from the federal government. So 11 schools, at least 11 across the state that operated for decades, probably until about the 1940s as boarding schools. Many of the schools also did transition to become day schools after the 1930s and '40s, and some federal Indian boarding schools throughout the country remained open well into the 1970s, and arguably some people say into the '80s as well, in the United States. However, they shifted in terms of what kinds of education children were receiving and how they operated over that almost a hundred years that they were being funded by the federal government.