Free RavenShadow by Win Blevins

back to the place on Medicine Root Creek.
    We walked outside, the four of us. Kyle didn’t look like much those days, no handsome Little Wound School, no college, not even a Wild Horse Cafe. Kyle was just a few houses, a place to get gas, and two general stores. Except for the school it wouldn’t have been a town at all. The school was a red brick affair, unimportant-looking.
    I don’t remember ever being so scared as when I watched Grandpa flick the lines at the horse, and the wagon pulled the two of them away, their backs toward me.
    “Everything is going to be fine,” said Mr. King beside me, patting my shoulder to reinforce the lie.

School Days
    I am going to take no truck from you about what Indian schools are like. BIA schools, church schools, it makes no difference. The lie is that they’re charitable institutions, established to help Lo, the poor Indian. The fact is that of all the white man’s gifts, they are the most insidious.
    First, let’s get clear about the purpose. Someone said, You can’t Christianize an Indian until you civilize him. (That’s absolutely true, and I am doing my best to avoid both.) So what they do at boarding schools is try to beat the red out of us, and the white in.
    For more than a century Indian children of every tribe have been shipped to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania and other boarding schools, on and off the reservations. When the children left home, they and their families wept openly at the train stations. Indian families aren’t used to being separated. We don’t send children to schoolrooms or daycare centers. They go everywhere with their parents and do everything. This is considered a vital part of their growing up.
    So when Indian kids were taken away to boarding schools in the old days, they were acutely lonely. Often they didn’t go home at all during the school year, not even at Christmas. Sometimesthey didn’t see their parents for years. This isolation was the worst thing boarding schools imposed on Indian children. Many of them committed suicide.
    At boarding school they learned English, they learned to be white. They got punished for speaking their own language. They got punished for singing the songs they grew up with, even the lullabies. They got punished for being Indian.
    On the Lakota Sioux reservations in my day you went to school or else. If you tried to stay away, a cop would come and take you—a truant officer or a BIA policeman, and either one might be Indian, for all that meant. We thought school was worse than any of the white man’s inventions, even jail, because it was inflicted on children, and pretended to be kindly.
    The Kyle School was run on military lines. Roll call at start and end of day. Stand at attention. March in step. If you disobeyed, corporal punishment. Simple as that, just like Catholic schools. One advantage I will admit to a BIA school. Since we didn’t have priests, we didn’t have pederasts.
    The first day of class was the most humiliating day of my life. I was fourteen years old, already over six feet tall, yet I was in first grade. A kid half my age showed me the way to the boys’ room. I was looking to go outside, because I didn’t know what the sign on that door meant in English. He showed me how to use the toilet, and the sink.
    The teacher, Mr. Banks, didn’t speak Lakota, so he taught us English by pointing at pictures and saying the words. Picture of bovine with bag. “Cow.” Picture of bovine with tool box. “Bull.” Picture of prairie. “Grass.” If I’d known more English, at least I could have added that up to “bullshit.”
    I was punished twice that first year for speaking Lakota. The first time I was forced to kneel on two-by-fours for hours, and that hurts. The second time I was hung up by my thumbs from water pipes. The only way I could relieve the pressure on my thumbs was to stand on my high tiptoes, and you can’t last longat that. My body ached terrible when they let me down—I