St. Joseph's Indian School opened on the bluffs above the Missouri at Chamberlain in 1927, a Catholic boarding school for Lakota children brought from the reservations to the west and north. Like the other mission and government boarding schools of its era, it took children away from their families to be raised in a different language and faith, and that history is part of what a visitor walks into. The school still runs today as a residential school for Native children, supported by donations.
In 1991 the school opened the Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center in its old school building, an eight-sided hall with some 14,000 square feet of display space. Akta Lakota means to honor the people. Much of the collection came as gifts from the school's alumni and friends over the decades since 1927: beadwork and quillwork, clothing, tools and ceremonial objects, along with paintings and drawings made by students at the school in the 1930s and the work of Lakota artists since.
The Collector's Gallery shows and sells the work of living Native artists from the region, and the museum's displays carry the story from the buffalo days through the reservations to the present. The campus is in town, across the interstate from the Dignity statue on the bluff, and the museum is free.
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