Exhibits > Trout Creek >
Girl at Government School
13. Girl at Government School, 1896 (Wind River
Historical Center/Dubois Museum)
 [We
made our] everday dresses...but our uniforms were the blue navy
middy type. Then they issued you shoes and if they were too small,
you wore them anyway, and if they were too big, you wore them anyway.
You wore black stockings. If they fit, all right, and if they didn’t,
then you wore them just the same, if they were too big or too small....They
were trying to change the Indian to the White way of living....
We used to go with my Grandma and we’d dig, we’d go gather
the sego bulbs and bitterroots and all those kinds of things for
our food. And you just lost track of all that and you even forgot
what the thing was, what you were looking for. You have to know
what you are doing and you forget. Oh, there’s just a lot of
things....Alice and I had these two great braids that hung down
our backs, plum to the floor and they cut it off and that just,
oh, that was something awful to us! It was just like cutting our
throats, because you didn’t believe in wearing and weren’t
brought up to have short hair. (Dorothy Peche)
|
