They were stripped of their clothes and scrubbed with lye soap. Matrons cut their long hair. Speaking their tribal language could lead to a beating.
and a member of the Tulalip Tribes. “We made it to a place right now where we can finally talk about this pain and find enough strength to just stand up and say that our lives mattered and the lives of our children mattered.” Living in a small house with no electricity and no running water on the reservation, her parents grew flax and had a small herd of cattle, but nearly lost what little they had as they tried to care for one of her brothers who’d undergone a botched surgery for a broken arm. When she was 10, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her mother with eight children younger than 16.
Her daily routine started at 6 a.m. with making her bunk bed. The covers had to be tight enough so a coin bounced off them. If not, she’d have to redo it. She then had to do “details,” or chores such as cleaning floors and bathrooms. “We’d make sounds and be laughing, and the matron would get up and come,” Klein said. She’d bring out a broom and what was called the “board of education,” a paddle with holes at one end. Klein said she’d be told to kneel on the broom handle and then she’d be whacked several times with the paddle.
son of one of the school’s matrons — the term used to describe boarding school employees, regardless of whether they were women or men. She still has flashbacks from the sound of keys on a chain, because he would take his mother’s keys and let himself into the girls’ dorm and inappropriately touch her at night while she was supposed to be sleeping.
“Nobody ever talked to us. They never gave us any counseling,” he said. “We held it inside of us, all welled up. Nothing can make it go away.” When he and his wife were raising their three kids, Neconie said, he was strict with them: “If they got out of line, they’d get a whooping.” He said he inflicted on them “the pain I’d brought from that boarding school. ... I wasn’t always the kindest to my kids. I regret doing that to them.”
He believes that Indian boarding school survivors should get not just an apology but reparations, like those given to Japanese Americans for their incarceration during World War II.
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