RavenShadow

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Book: RavenShadow by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online
Authors: Win Blevins
can’t remember it aching like that, ever. Mr. King said it would teach me. It did. Taught me not to speak Lakota where adults could hear me, not even Indian adults, because they would sometimes turn you in.
    I had my hands whacked by yardsticks. Once Emile was whacked by a yardstick with brass studs. (He was lucky they never found out he liked other boys—they’d have thought up a really nasty punishment for that.) I was made to stand in the corner nose and knees touching the walls. They deloused me by force. They cut my hair by force, and it had never been touched.
    None of that was the worst. What I hated was losing my freedom. At home I would roam around every day. If I wanted, I would ride, or work with one of the horses, teaching it to stand ground-tied, or back up. Or I would straighten and fletch arrows—I loved to shoot. Or hunt. Or roam and gather sage, cedar, willow bark, or bearberry. Whatever I wanted.
    At school I had to do what Mr. Banks said. Sit in a hard chair at a desk for hours. Ask permission to go to the bathroom. Eat on schedule. Work on schedule (it was our job to keep the school clean). Go to bed at lights out, get up when ordered, do roll call, stand in line for oatmeal, and so on and so on.
    Among my people a hint from an elder was word enough. These white people just bossed you around directly and loudly, told you exactly what to do, and if you refused, dished out the punishment.
    I hated it. Who are these people , I said to myself, to tell me what to do with my life?
    So what did I do?
    I ran away. After I got the hang of it, I ran away every day. Figured out how to disappear between first roll call and last, didn’t go to class. At first they didn’t catch on—Indian children are always coming and going for various reasons. But the thirdor fourth time Mr. Banks saw me at meals, he got suspicious why he wasn’t seeing me in class. Must have gone upstairs, because Mr. King gave me a sharp talking to.
    I kept disappearing.
    Then they assigned an older boy to keep tabs on me. This was Emile, though we didn’t know each other yet. The first day he policed me real good, and I had to stay in class. That night we had supper together and then stayed up late in his room talking in the dark. He was from Big Hollow Creek, even deeper into the Badlands than me, and was related to me on Grandpa’s side. Not close related. What you whites call cousins, we Indians call brothers and sisters. Emile was a cousin in our way.
    The next day Emile ran away with me.
    Those were great times. For a week Emile and I went out to the lake every day. We swam, we fished, we walked, we roamed, we caught crawfish below the outlet, and we made friends. He told me he was called to be a winkte , and what that meant. I told him how I was picked out to carry the old ways, but now I was also picked out to learn the white world, and I hated it. I even told him I feared it. In short, we became friends enough that twenty years later, when Emile saved my life on the C&NW tracks, it wasn’t the first time either of us saved each other’s lives.
    The next summer at a powwow Emile and I did the ceremony that made us hunka , brothers by choice. That lasts for life. Emile Gray Feather was the best thing I got out of Kyle Boarding and Day School.
    They caught on, of course. Whacked us with yardsticks and assigned other older boys to keep tabs on each of us.
    That worked on Emile, who dreaded being beaten and wanted only to be left alone with his colored pencils and paper.
    But when they beat me, I turned defiant. I kept running away. I dared them. As long as my days were free, I didn’t give a damn about the beatings.
    It was fun. I only needed a couple of minutes’ head start. Icould get it when I went to the bathroom. Or when my guard went to the bathroom. Or I could come up with something so much fun that the guard would run off with me. Thomas Red Creek guarded me seriously for several days, but on Friday he hitchhiked all the

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