I can't help myself here...Hayward is by no means the only school where those kids were mistreated, every single one of them has their horror stories & they didn't need to learn how to become slaves for white society we had our own teachings & ways to take care of ourselves, we knew how to do everything we needed for our own society. -----Original Message----- From: Pacqrat@aol.com [mailto:Pacqrat@aol.com] Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 2:34 PM To: NISHNAWBE-L@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [NISHNAWBE] Re: NISHNAWBE-D Digest V03 #232 Hi Mike and Larry, The forced "education" of our parents and grandparents is not in the least out of place on a list for people researching their family history. Its effects were catastrophic for the individuals and for our cultural heritage. My mother, now 82, went through the BIA boarding school system at Hayward (where the head of the school actually killed one of the students), Pipestone, Haskell, and Flandreau. the stories she tells are hair-raising. When she was first dragged off to school, she was completely bilingual in Ojibwe and English. By the time she graduated, she could hardly understand Ojibwe any more, and she could use only a few words. She calculates that from the age of 6 until graduation, she spent only a grand total of 3 whole years with her parents (including a full year "off" from school). Quite literally, her language and heritage was stolen from her, and she is still outraged. Just thinking about it makes me cry. It must be said, however, that students at the schools she attended other than Hayward were not mistreated. This was during the Depression, and while the goal was to turn the students into good servants for whites (the boys trained as mechanics and gardeners, the girls as maids, cooks, and nannies), at least their training enabled them to make a living of sorts , which is more than you can say for far too many schools nowadays. Betty Jack ============================== To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237