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Millie Guina and friend at Gov't School
26. Millie Guina and friend at Government School,
ca. 1930s (Millie Guina, Wind River Archives at CWC)
 The
Government School had Sioux, Cheyenne, Cree and students from other
tribes as well as Wind River. Although many felt its atmosphere
definitely improved during the 30s and 40s, the Government School
still could not compete with the better facilities and larger teaching
staff offered by the larger off-reservation schools which many wanted
to attend. Eva Enos, who went both to St. Michael’s and the
Government School, also spend several years at the Rapic City Indian
School in South Dakota:
There were both Indians and Whites, whatever, that was a pretty
good school, way it was run. There was a lot of different tribes
there.... You learn their ways, and they learn your ways, every
tribe is different you know.... It was more modern.... When I
got married I started raising a family. I had a big family; course
I know, I’d know how to cook for ‘em, like that, take
care of ‘em. And a lot of girls too, they’d pick up
nursing in that school. I was there three years before they closed
it, turned it into a TB sanitarium.... There was just nothing
here [at Wind River], I mean, you know, it was just a school.
Didn’t have much activities. Well, it was so different. So
different in the classroom too. We only had one teacher, he was
a kinda grumpy guy down here;...seemed to me he didn’t take
much interest in what he was teaching.
Mrs. Enos recalled that in addition to offering better classes
and opportunities to go into professions such as nursing, Rapid
City also offered more movies, basketball, footraces, and not only
square dances and waltzes but the Charleston!
It was a boarding school and there were kids from different
states that would just go there, like Wisconsin and Minnesota
and Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming....
It was interesting because there were a lot of students that came
from the other reservations.... They had home economics and they
knew how to sew and cook. We didn’t have that experience.
I learned how to sew from my mother, cause we used to watch her
sew. But to actually sit down and cut a pattern, I didn’t
know how to do that. (Bea Snyder, who attended Government School
and Flandrau )
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