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105 6 / The Tulalip Indian Boarding School I n school we tried to follow what our grandparents said. When I arrived at the Indian boarding school in 1912, I was seven years old. It seemed so cold, and we were always running, running, hurry, hurry, hurry. Compared to my home, it was a traumatic shock. I don’t think anyone stopped to think how hard it was for us Indian children to be taken to an Indian school and suddenly have to get up at 5:30 in the morning. At home I woke up around seven or nine o’clock in the morning, and I could always eat. My mother would fix something. My mother did the laundry for the agent. When I was really small, I used to follow her around, tell her I was hungry, and she would finish her washing or whatever she was doing. Then she would take me to the kitchen and fix me homemade bread and butter. The Indian women made homemade yeast bread. Every week my mother made loaves and loaves of wonderful homemade bread. The boarding school was a dreadful monotony: getting up early, and our shoes and stockings were left downstairs in the basement playrooms. We took off our shoes and stockings in the basement playrooms at night, and we marched up two stairways to go to bed. In case we tried to run away, we were separated from our shoes. I consider that like a life in a penitentiary. If a bell rang, I ran. The discipline was to civilize us. It was a terrifying time to arrive at the boarding school. I never saw my mother, but I saw my father every other day or so. He worked there at the agency and he was there every day, but sometimes I didn’t see him. I was so very homesick. I used to cry. I wanted to go home. My sister was already in the school. She was almost two years older than me, but she used to talk to me and tell me not to cry. She said you will get used to it here and you will have some fun. I never could see why I would have fun, but I eventually did. They had a very short time for us to play in the evening. 106 / The Tulalip Indian Boarding School The little girls stayed in dormitories C and D. That is where I used to sleep. When I first got to the school, I was in dormitory D, where the little girls were, and then when I got bigger—a teenager who was fourteen or fifteen years old—I was naturally with the big girls. The big girls’ companies were A and B. I never got to be tall enough for Company A, even though that was my ambition. As soon as we got up in the morning, we made our beds. Believe me, the sheets had to be absolutely straight and stiff. You talk about how you can bounce a quarter off of the sheets in the Army. Well, ours were like that, and I mean they were absolutely straight and stiff. Each one of us had two Army blankets. They were wool, but thinner—not what you would consider wool today from a department store. They were Army blankets. The two blankets and top sheet were folded a certain way over the foot of the bed, so that the sheets were all showing. They had to be absolutely smooth and straight. Pillows were straight up and down. I wonder where they got the pillows? The pillows and the mattresses were filled with straw. They were actually pretty good, I guess. But all of us had single beds. They were narrow steel beds. Each one of us slept separately. When we got up in the morning, it was so bitterly cold. I remember my teeth chattering and everybody’s teeth chattering. We had a clothing room. On one side were the cupboards. Actually, they were just boxes. All of them were numbered, and every week that is where my clean socks and everything came back from the laundry. Everything was folded up and put in there by some of the girls. We wore uniforms. The girls’ uniforms were made of wool serge. Blue wool serge is the heaviest, scratchiest material that was ever invented on the earth. In the spring and summer, when we were marching into the church and then sitting in...

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