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Session Guide

Deep Dive Session

SAT-DD-02: Remembering the Children: Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project and Memorial

Saturday, October 28, 2023
2:00pm – 4:30pm CT

SOLD OUT
2.50 PDH, LA CES/HSW, AICP, FL, NY/HSW
Ticket Price: $25 per person
This powerful session will lead attendees on a journey through history, injustice, remembrance, and reconciliation around the Rapid City Indian Board School. Panelists will discuss the Indigenous-led community-driven collaborative projects that are addressing this difficult history while reworking the physical landscape and collective memory of this northern Great Plains city.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Understand the injustices to Native people at the Rapid City Indian Boarding School and in Rapid City through the findings of the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project.
  • Understand the cultural importance and social justice implications of the challenge by Uncis (grandmothers) to find the graves of children who died at the Rapid City Boarding School.
  • Examine the relationship between public history, art, commemoration, landscape architecture, and architecture and how, together, they create opportunities for constructively addressing challenging community histories.
  • Show how history and historical memory/commemoration/memorial projects can serve as leverage in parallel efforts to affect positive policy changes at the local level.
  • Explore how consensus-based decision-making structures can support community history, advocacy, and memorial projects.
  • Understand the design language developed for the He Sapa Otipi Community Center as a culturally meaningful place for Indigenous people to practice and sustain their culture in an urban location.