DeSMET — Margie Johnson touched a display of a black and white photo of American Indian children dressed in traditional regalia.

Softly, she recited the names of those she knew.

“There’s my mom, and there’s my aunt,” she said, moving her finger to an adjacent image of students scribbling on a chalkboard in 1958.

"And there's me," she said. "I look at the faces and I can't remember all of the names, but it comes to me. It takes me a while."

The photos are displayed in panels on the grounds of the Sisters of Charity of Providence Boarding School, locally known as the Sisters Building, in DeSmet. The three-story building was originally constructed in 1908 and was used as a girls boarding school until 1974.

The building, next door to the Coeur d'Alene Mission of the Sacred Heart, was destroyed in a fire Feb. 3, 2011.

The structure is gone, but its history lives in the memories of the tribal elders who once lived and learned there.

"As I come by here and go to church here, I look over here and think, ‘Ohh, this place.’ I have a lot of good memories,” said Johnson, who attended the school from 1952 to 1960. "I had my wedding reception here. So many things, good memories here. Brings tears to your eyes."

Members of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe paid tribute to the school Thursday afternoon when the photo display memorial was unveiled and the grounds were blessed.

"People that went to the school up here in the past and come to the church are were always asking, 'What's going to happen up here?' That's kind of how this developed," said Ernie Stensgar, vice chair of the Coeur d'Alene Tribal Council and Sisters Building memorial project coordinator. "This place was here because of our chiefs that asked the missionaries if they would send someone down to educate the children. They knew that those times, as a vision, that we couldn't get any place unless we were educated."

Stensgar said many children came to the school with good hearts, others with bad hearts. They were forced to be confined in a classroom where their hair would be cut and their culture taken from them.

"There are a lot of bad feelings in people’s hearts about Catholicism, about Christianity, about what they did, but I like to be an optimist and look at the good things they did when they brought the school," he said. "One thing was help keep our families together. Those times were very, very traumatic to our Tribe. Transition was taking place across the land."

But many of the students who attended the Sisters School have good memories of their time there.

Johnson caused the crowd of about 30 people to laugh as she shared a memory of sitting next to Stensgar in class.

"I used to eat his paste a lot. Back then, paste was good," she said, chuckling. "We couldn’t keep enough paste, and I couldn’t go buy paste, so he’d have to go home and tell his mom he needed paste, and she’d say, ‘What are you doing with all that paste?’ and he says, ‘Margie’s eatin’ it.’”

Jeanie Louie, a third-generation Sisters student, first went to the school when she was 6 in 1952.

“When I was going to school here, it was a lot of fun," she said. "We met a lot of people. There were kids here from all the other reservations."

She said she remembers sledding down the hill of the mission on toboggans with other boarding school kids and day-students who lived in DeSmet.

"We had crabapple trees right over here in this area, we used to play games running back and forth through the trees," she said.

Louie's memories of the school are mostly positive, but she shared that it was difficult for her grandmother in her time because of the haircutting and the federal government's push for assimilation.

“It was their way of stomping out that way of life," she said. "They had to make that change, that assimilation. When they had their children, they spoke language but it was only to themselves. They didn’t allow my mother and them to listen to the language because they didn’t want them to go through the same battles that they had gone through when they went to school."

Louie said she doesn't regret her time at the school.

“In teaching us the English language and teaching us the ways that were taught in the world, we were able to become not Native warriors, but warriors for our people," she said. "(It helped us to) know the language and be able to not use bows and arrows, but be able to write letters and do all of that so we can accept the challenges that are out there today."

Stensgar said the site of the Sisters Building and the surrounding area were important to the Tribe long before the school existed.

"It's rich in history, it's rich in Coeur d'Alene," he said. "This is a sacred site. What makes it sacred? Not the nuns, not the church, not the people over there. It's sacred because our people were here. This is where they shed blood and this is where they had their dreams, their vision of what we were going to be. This is us, and that's why this site is sacred."