Missions

She told me that they learned to march at the boarding school. She said they got really good at it, too. She claimed she learned to enjoy marching, in great part because the girl who taught them--an older Native girl--was sweet, was nice. "We liked her," she said. So there they went, around the boarding school ground, bunched in squares like Rice Krispie bars, marching along like soldiers, little Lakota girls like recruits for the cavalry. Smiling too, she said. 

There weren't many matrons or teachers she liked. Every day, it was a half day of school, and a half day of work--washing, ironing, scrubbing floors, sewing, most of the work kind of janitorial, keeping up the grounds, keeping up their dormitory. Once, she'd been told to run the mangle. I had no idea was a mangle was, so she told me it was a machine-like thing for ironing. "We mangled quite a bit," she told me. I giggled and told her that sentence sounded perfectly awful. She smiled. 

Once when she was mangling or ironing, she ran across a blouse with ruffles, she said. She didn't know whether she was supposed to iron the ruffles or not, so she didn't do it, and in just a few minutes that blouse was back in front of her--with a reprimand. They didn't tell us how to do what we had to do, she told me. And they never said thank you or anything like that.

There was another older girl there, a big girl, she said, so big and strong that she remembered when she and another little girl or two, right there in the dorm, hung from that big girl's extended arms, hung there while she twirled. A human merry-go-round, I thought. She told me it was lots of fun, and the big girl--she was older too--the big girl always looked out for the little ones. That was good too because nobody else did. There weren't many things really nice about the boarding school, she said. When they cut her hair, she told me she cried off and on for three or four days. Such was life at the boarding school.

They didn't go home for nine months back then, she said. When in May their parents came to pick them up, some of the littlest children didn't recognize their mothers.

Oh, yes, and the big girl, she told me--she left the year her two little brothers came to school. She left and enrolled at another boarding school, this one north of their place, not east. When she did, she registered as a boy so she lived in the boy's dormitory because she refused to allow her little brothers to be abused by anyone, red or white. She pretended--all year long, she pretended--that she was a boy, just to make sure her little brothers didn't get hurt. When her father came to pick up his children in the summer, he asked for his daughter. The school told him he didn't have a daughter. She'd done it: all year long. And the boys?--she'd kept them safe. That big girl, she was a lesbian, she said. She learned that later.

But you know, she explained, in my culture the people respect them. Did you know that? In my culture, she said, we think of them as being gifted. They've been blessed by being given two conscious-es, one of them male and the other one female. To have two persons in one person, she said, in my culture, that's considered very special. 

In 1888, the very first missionary my people sent to the Brule Sioux from the Rosebud reservation, came home after two years and reportedly claimed that bringing the gospel to such people little, if any promise. To his credit, he'd been there at the time of Wounded Knee, when the reservations were alive with a messianic vision that eliminated the white people then taking over all the Native homeland. Must have been scary.

But on them, Dominie Vanden Bosch said, on their pagan culture, preaching the gospel of Jesus would likely be a waste of time.