LaRose(61)

You’re the only one who ever asked, he said.

You told me she was stolen, said LaRose.

Did I?

Wolfred had never remarried, though women threw themselves his way. For many years, he had talked of their mother incessantly, which had kept her alive to the children. He hadn’t spoken of her now for perhaps a year. This daughter, this LaRose, had been recruited by a man named Richard H. Pratt, who had passed through the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara reservation and traveled through North Dakota as well as through South Dakota. He’d started a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She wanted to go because she knew that her mother had gone to a boarding school. It was a way of being like her mother, who had vividly and with desperate insistence taught her daughter everything she knew.


What She Learned

BEFORE THE FIRST LaRose died, she had taught her daughter how to find guardian spirits in each place they walked, how to heal people with songs, with plants, what lichens to eat in an extremity of hunger, how to set snares, jig fish, tie nets, net fish, create fire out of sticks and curls of birchbark. How to sew, how to boil food with hot stones, how to weave reed mats and make birchbark pots. She taught her how to poison fish with plants, how to make arrows, a bow, shoot a rifle, how to use the wind when hunting, make a digging stick, dig certain roots, carve a flute, play it, bead a bandolier bag. She taught her how to tell from the calls of birds what animal had entered the woods, how to tell from the calls of birds which direction and what type of weather was approaching, how to tell from the calls of birds if you were going to die or if an enemy was on your trail. She learned how to keep a newborn from crying, how to amuse an older child, what to feed a child of each age, how to catch an eagle to take a feather, knock a partridge from a tree. How to carve a pipe bowl, burn the center of a sumac branch for the stem, how to make tobacco, make pemmican, how to harvest wild rice, dance, winnow, parch, and store it, and make tobacco for your pipe. How to carve tree taps, tap maples, collect sap, how to make syrup, sugar, how to soak a hide, scrape down a hide, how to grease it and cure it with the animal’s brains, how to make it soft and silky, how to smoke it, what to use it for. She taught her to make mittens, leggings, makazinan, a dress, a drum, a coat, a carry sack from the stomach of an elk, a caribou, a woods buffalo. She taught her how to leave behind her body when half awake or in sleep and fly around to investigate what was happening on the earth. She taught her how to dream, how to return from a dream, change the dream, or stay in the dream in order to save her life.



CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was overseen by a tall hatchet-beaked former captain of the Tenth Cavalry. Having succeeded in educating prisoners at Marion, Illinois, and having worked with young Sioux men and women at Hampton Institute, having in effect foiled those whose ideas were identical to Frank Baum’s, Richard Pratt promoted his students to sympathetic reformers, writing that the hope and salvation of the race was immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.

The second LaRose was saturated. She was smart. After the agony of getting used to her corsets she pulled them tight and wore gloves—because her mother had on special occasions worn gloves. She learned to clean white people’s houses during Carlisle’s outing program, gouging congealed dust from corners with a knife. Polishing the gray veins of marble floors. She made the woodwork glow. Sparkled up the copper boilers. Also, she wrote in lovely script and factored into the thousands. She knew the rivers of the world and the wars the Greeks fought, the Romans fought, the Americans fought, beating the British and then the savages. A list of races she had to memorize placed white the highest, then yellow, black, and finally savage. According to the curriculum, her people were on the bottom.

So what. She wore hats and buttoned up her shoes. She knew the Declaration of Independence by heart and Captain Pratt himself had spoken to her of the Civil War and why it was fought. She gave recitations including a poem about the angel in the kitchen. She learned mathematics and memorized the shape of the countries on the globe. She learned American history and the levels of civilization ancient to modern, which culminated in men like Captain Richard Pratt. She learned how to survive on bread and water, then coffee, gravy, and bread. Mostly she learned how to do menial labor—how to use a mangle, starch, an iron. She worked ten-hour days in 120 degree heat. She learned how to sew with a machine. How to imagine her own mouth sewed shut. For speaking Anishinaabe. She learned how to endure being beaten with a board. How to eat with a fork, a spoon, how to lard bread correctly with a knife, how to grow vegetables, how to steal them, how to make soap, scrub floors, scrub walls, scrub pots, scrub the body, scrub the head, scrape a floor clean, a commode, a pantry shelf by shelf, what rats were and how to kill them, how to supplement her diet by stealing from the surrounding farms or gathering nuts and acorns, hiding them in her bosom. During those early years, Carlisle sold its farm produce and fed the students oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal.

She learned how to stand correctly, shake hands firmly, pull on gloves and take them off finger by finger. How to walk like a white woman on hard shoes. How to use and wash out stinking menstrual rags when Ojibwe women never stunk of old blood as they used and discarded moss and cattail down, bathed twice a day. She learned to stink, learned to itch, learned to boil her underwear for lice and wash only once a week, once every two weeks, three. She learned to sleep on cold floors, endure the smell of white people, and set a proper table. She learned how to watch her friends die quickly from measles or chokingly from pneumonia or shrieking from the agony of encephalitic meningitis. She learned how to sing funeral hymns, and she sang them for a Sioux boy named Amos LaFromboise, for a Cheyenne boy named Abe Lincoln, for Herbert Littlehawk, Ernest White Thunder, Kate Smiley, and for a suicide whose name she carefully brushed from her mind. She learned how to go hungry and how to stay full even if she had to eat bark—the innermost layers of birch. She learned, like her mother, how to hide that she had tuberculosis.