Transcripts For CSPAN2 Tim 20240703

Built on the pine ridge reservation. The Catholic Boarding School in 1888. And it was built on land that was deeded to the Catholic Church by red club. Red cloud is buried the cemetery there right now at red cloud in school, Holy Rosary Mission and the he had a strong feeling that we had to become educated in order to survive in the world that was coming and so that was his primary motif of donating land and allowing the Catholic Church to come on to the reservation. I dont think he ever saw the long term concern coincidence of what it was going to do somebody and and children. I started school, the holy sary Mission Boarding School when i was five years old was left there at the mission and back then it was run by the jesuit priest and the franciscan nuns. Those are all it was a whole new world to us coming from the small communities out on the reservation and uh, frightening experience to begin with. So, but i think probably one of the best thing they did is the catholic priests and nuns have a good way of. So i think the educational part of it was the most beneficial, beneficial thing got out of it. Otherwise i stayed until i was in the 11th grade and i could just couldnt take it anymore. I preach grade and i ran away once one sunday morning while the church going on, i told the priest i had to go outside and get a breath air because it wouldnt feel good. And i just kept on running around all the way to pine ridge, which was four miles away. So why did you run away . I just couldnt stand the discipline. And i think the outrageous way they to destroy everything that we knew culturally took away our language, took away our traditions, our culture, our spirituality. So the in the guise of educating us and the acclimate in us to a whole new of living. I wrote that book. The children left behind. When i was 17 years old, believe it. Or i was on a troop ship and i was headed for korea and i had a special and guess i was still feeling, which i didnt know then the trauma of having just come out of that school because i ran away. 16 i went to service when i was 17. So my memories were still very vivid of the years i spent there. So i start a book and time is poetry and. One of the fellow sailors aboard the ship, i had a College Degree looked at and he said, these are really, really good poems. You should writing. So i wrote them all as many as i bring back from and. I sent the transcript to a gentleman. Helper. Hell come to me pretty soon. Anyway, he had a he had a. A foundation in san and it was called in Historical Society and he printed books. He was one of the few publishers native american. He was a queer indian. Rupert was his name and he read the book of poetry, the poems i sent him, and he called and said, i got to put these into a book, said, a lot of us went through this experience and youre bringing back a lot of terrible memories for me included you know theres some good things in there i wrote about about going to the movies on sunday nights that was our chief recreation the one time we could escape the reality the world and go into it. A world of hollywood movies and i wrote about how we had even a for that in that if had more than ten demerits they let us up on sunday night before the movie started and we had more than ten demerits the priest would be standing with a book. Hed read your name hed say it to the wall. So that meant that the one thing we really enjoyed the movies we were forbidden to see if we had more ten demerits so i worked at the movie selling popcorn and pop with the gentleman, mr. Bride and i wrote about one time mr. Brad said, its too quiet in here before the movie starts. We need to, uh, we to get something to entertain the people that had come in earlier. So he hooked up a phonograph player up into the where the projection room was and just half an hour of movie start before it started, he on strauss waltzes he loves strauss waltzes. So one day i was up there just put the music on. I have noticed that the screen was went right up with the show movie on the stage. So i ran to the stage and adjusted. The lights were still on and the blue danube waltz was playing. And so i had looked back at the audience with the lights on and i saw these people, young and elders, sitting there with their eyes closed, listening to the blue danube waltz. And at the scene that has never left my mind. Why was that important . It was just due to the peacefulness music could bring to people that were troubled. And we have this was back just after the depression and things were really hard on the reservations and yet they found their way to 0. 50. We would go out again to see a movie every sunday night after i started a newspaper and a lot of the kids had gone to school with the holy rosary during the years i was there. One time i got a call from, a young lady whos whos dead, and she said, wed like to have you come and talk to us. So they were all sitting in a bar and i came in and they were all drinking was about eight or nine ladies. Then. And each of them told me of the experience of how they been physically abused, not only nuns and sexually abused by priests and i some of that in the book, but the reason i did bau my little sister shirley was one of the girls that was raped. She was there and she was only about nine years old. So. It was really hard for me to write that, but i felt that it had be written that someone had to know what had happened. And i think that probably upset some of the the prefects and the priests, the Holy Rosary Mission that i brought some of that stuff up that they had kept buried and hidden all of these years. But the children about it, we all knew those things happened. I have never stopped writing columns about the boarding schools. I just wrote one sunday today and i wrote about. Down at the immigration down on the border, doctors doing treatment of some of the children that were taken from their and they noticed that they compared to ptsd post traumatic syndrome and the kids are going through the same ptsd that veterans from war had and it struck a chord with me i thought you know what i remember those days the symptoms of escape kids crying constantly the extreme loneliness. I thought i saw that when i was a boy at the boarding schools and i wondered then how many those kids came out of those boarding schools and actually were suffering from what they didnt know was a disease. Ptsd and so theres a correlation there in my mind. So i just wrote about that today and it takes me back to the boarding school days, the that wrote this book is still there today. And if he is, how has he changed. You know, when i was 17 years old, i never really had a chance to ever be a teenager. I went straight. From age 17 right through to korea, and i saw horrific things while i was just a little boy. And so that was probably a part of the my childhood, i think, made me pretty fearless about life itself. And and but having to see opportunities coming to me that i never thought i could ever have, i had something i probably never would have had if i stayed on the reservation. I had the gi bill and with the gi bill, i was able to go to college by writing has taken me to the point where i was the first south dakota. South dakota, not just native, to get an even fellowship to harvard. So those those i think happened simply because i grew. I changed my writing changed. I think my writing matured all of the years. And i was able to sit in my classmates at harvard and educate them they wanted to know a lot of the that were happening in indian country. They had no idea. But we had students from ghana, from ecuador were from nairobi. They were all so interested in native americans. It just amazed me that they had no idea, you know, or what an indian was, whether any of us still spoke our own tribal languages. So those experiences, i think me to reach this point in my life and know im still here, im still healthy, im still writing and im 85 years old. So i good about i contribute to native american journal this evening. Were happy to welcome dit