“They’d would take our children away sometimes as early as 6 or 7 years old and they would take them sometimes thousands of miles away from their home and put them in these boarding schools that were funded by state and federal governments. And they were run by religious denominations—various religious denominations. And so, because of that it was a combination of religious training and also western education. When you went there you were told to cut your hair; take all your traditional clothing, they threw that away. And you couldn’t speak your language. And if you did you were punished. A number of our people refused to go along with that and they tried to run away. And they would be captured and brought back. A lot of our people died at these places. There's graveyards at a lot of these schools. And now they're finding unmarked graves at a number of these places, and so I'm sure there's even more unmarked graves and we'll be discovering that in the future. After you got out of schools, a lot of times the children were about 17, 18 years old, and by that time they had forgotten their language, they had forgotten their culture and their traditions. And they would go back home and they would feel lost, because they were no longer part of the world that they left—that Dakota world. But yet they didn't fit in to the Euro-American world because of the color of their skin and who they were. So they weren’t accepted really anywhere. And a lot of times it led to depression, maybe substance abuse problems, and even domestic problems. Before that, those things were really unheard of in our communities. All those different things I listed. And we live with a lot of those problems today because of the boarding schools. And because of the trauma they suffered in these schools a lot of these people when they went back home they refused to speak their language. And even though they probably still knew how to speak it, they wouldn’t teach it to their children when they had children. Thank goodness some of them refused to do that, and we can kind of think of those as our heroes today because they kept the language alive.”