What they needed to learn

She'd been telling me about the terrors of the boarding school, how much she cried when they cut her hair, how they screamed at kids for incidental things, for not speaking the Lakota language, how they would tell kids to do things the kids didn't know how to do, then scream if they got whatever it was they were supposed to do wrong.

She told me there were some few older girls there that the little girls liked because some of the older girls in the dorm were kind or funny. She said she'd never forget the older girl who taught them how to march. They marched all over the boarding school grounds back then because the teachers said they had to, but their instructor was a Lakota too and she was kind. She was nice. She was funny. She made marching a good time, she told me, smiling.

And there was another older girl, a big girl, a really big girl--not just older but bigger. She was kind too, and at nights, when the teachers and the housemother was long gone, sometimes a couple of the little girls--she was a little girl herself back then--would jump up on her. That big girl would just lift up her arms and turn around, circle around and around with the little girls on her arms. She said she would never forget that because it was so much fun.

The big girl didn't return to the agency boarding school the next year. When the term started, she went to another school, an agency boarding school farther north, along with two of her brothers, both of them little boys.

And then a story began, a story she intended to be something of a sermon. It seems that when the big girl and her little brothers got to that new boarding school, the big girl determined that she would do everything she could to protect her little brothers because that big girl knew little brothers could so easily be hurt in boarding schools. The best way to protect them, their big sister determined, was for her to be around them as much as she could.

So the big girl disguised herself as a boy, my Lakota friend told me. The big girl lived in the boys dormitory, ate in the dining hall with the boys, dressed like a boy, acted like a boy. She as much as became a boy that year because she wanted to make sure that no harm came to her little brothers.

Here's exactly what she told me.

We discovered, sometime later, that she was winkda. She was a bi-sexual, a revered person among our people because the winkda are thought to be twin-spirited: in one person, two people, so their qualities are greatly expanded. They were thought to have two different ways of looking at things and doing things, and that extra perception was a blessing.

I remembered what she told me when recently South Dakota, where she was born and has lived for 98 of her first 100 years, has tangled with proposed laws about trans kids--how they should and shouldn't be treated. Such laws--and such discussions--generate instant emotional responses in great part because they rush into matters that are always difficult because terribly complex.

I remembered what she told me because the contrast was such plain and convincing proof that so much of what those Native kids needed decades ago was the moral wisdom of good Christian white people. 

Sure.