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When my mother was alive, I would often interrogate her about her life at the Sister School. Annoyed, she would demand, “Why do you always have to go poking?” And so I’ve spent much of my personal life and professional work as a journalist trying to uncover and investigate all that happened to her and thousands of others at Indian boarding schools.

For reasons I still don’t completely understand, I am consumed by the need to validate and prove, intellectually and emotionally, her experiences at the Sister School. I crave confirmation because I believe it will somehow reinforce my mother’s stories in the face of generations of federal and Church denials of their role in the boarding schools’ brutality. It will say to me: You’re not making this up. This really did happen.

As this country marks the bicentennial of the Civilization Fund Act, I think of the traumatic impact of my mother’s time at Saint Mary’s and, in turn, the effect that her dysfunctional survival strategies had on our family.

Although she died in 2011, I can still see her trying to outrun her invisible demons. She would walk across the floor of our house, sometimes for hours, desperately shaking her head from side to side to keep the persistent awful memories from entering. She would flap and wring her hands over and over again, as though to rid them of a clinging presence.

She was lost to our family during these times. We guarded her with our tensed stomach muscles, trying to help her battle the unknown demons. Eventually she would wind herself down. Sometimes, even laughing a bit in relief, she’d mutter, “Settle down, you crazy old chicken,” before collapsing on her bed.

Hypervigilance, defensiveness, resentment, and a hair-trigger temper had been her only allies against the Sister School messages of racial inferiority, daily reminders that Natives were primitive beings unlikely to rise above the role of servants in a white man’s world. She raged against the nuns’ label “dirty Indian,” haunted by the fear that the nuns were right, even as she scrubbed miles of floors and performed hours of heavy manual labor.

All of those awful Sister School doings cut her mind. I think she believed that she would break into 1 million pieces if she recalled the traumatic events that held her hostage, forever burned into her amygdala.

I remember a summer day, one of many, when I made my mother toast and brought her aspirin in her dark bedroom, where she was bedridden with a migraine. I placed my offerings on the little table next to her bed, and retreated back to my hiding place under the kitchen table.

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After a while, she called to me. I found her lying in the dark, with one arm thrown over her eyes; the other arm was open for me. Silently, I climbed onto the bed, fitting myself into her armpit and gazing at the tiny blue Virgin Mary medal pinned to her brassiere, a hidden remnant of her boarding-school days. I remember the bedspread, stiff from its time drying outside on the clothesline and fragrant with fresh air and my mother’s scent. She would spend hours washing the laundry “white, white” like the Sisters had taught her, rushing up and down the cellar steps with baskets of heavy, wet sheets. “We may be Indian, but by God we ain’t dirty,” she’d say while hanging laundry on the line.

I remember her deep voice that wrapped a cocoon around us in the bedroom as she, like she had done hundreds of times before, told me her Sister School stories. There was the “evil” nun Sister Catherine, Mother Superior Sister Catherine of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, who was the principal of the boarding school she had attended.