Justin pourier was working maintenance at the Red Cloud Indian School in 1995 when a supervisor asked him to check out a leak in the school’s heating system. It was early winter in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, when daytime temperatures often dip well below freezing. At the time, Red Cloud’s 500 students—ranging from kindergartners to high school seniors—relied on a network of steam pipes to keep warm. At 28, Pourier wasn’t much older than some of the kids, and like most, he was a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.
Tracing the old plumbing, Pourier made his way through the bowels of the oldest structure on campus, Drexel Hall. Built in 1887—back when Red Cloud was a Jesuit mission and boarding school called Holy Rosary—Drexel Hall originally housed classrooms and a dormitory. Now it was a drafty red-brick admin building where a steam boiler hissed and sputtered belowground. Broad-shouldered and over 6 feet tall, Pourier had to stoop as he descended a narrow wooden staircase that led to an out-of-the-way corner of the basement. At the bottom, he says, he opened the door to a low-ceilinged room with a dirt floor.
Pourier doesn’t recall whether he spotted the leak or not. But what he did find startled him. There, he says, aligned in a row, were three loaf-shaped dirt mounds, each about as long as one of Red Cloud’s youngest students is tall and, as Pourier remembers it, topped with small white, wooden crosses.
At the sight of them, Pourier turned around and climbed the stairs, certain about what he’d seen—and frightened by what it implied. “I knew it was wrong for them to be in Holy Rosary,” he said. “With all the cemeteries in these hills, why were they in the basement?”
That afternoon, when Pourier told his supervisor, one of the handful of Jesuits who still ran the school, about what he’d seen, he recalls that the response was swift and sharp: “Quit bleeping nosing around! Stay out of there!” Later, Pourier told his girlfriend and a few close friends about what he saw, but he didn’t bring it up again at work. “I just let it go,” he says. “It bothered me, but at the time I just took care of myself with prayer and sweat lodge ceremonies. I knew it was there, and I knew somehow, eventually, it was going to come to light.” He soon left his job at Red Cloud. Two years later, work crews began renovations on Drexel Hall, and whatever Pourier had seen in the basement was covered with a thick concrete slab.
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