"Most mornings, they were served burnt toast. Lunch and dinner were often barley soup or mush, a mix of cornmeal and milk. Klein was always hungry, she said. Sometimes, she would smuggle a milk carton and a packet of sugar from the cafeteria, hide it on the windowsill of her room and wait until lights were turned off. She’d pull it out when it was nearly frozen, shake it up and add the sugar.
'That was my first homemade ice cream,' she said.
Only the bigger girls in the upstairs dorm were allowed to watch television, so the younger girls were often bored. 'We had no playground with swings, or a slide, a teeter-totter or merry-go-round,' she said. 'There were no puzzles, toys or books.'
Klein invented her own games. At night, she’d take a mattress and a blanket, wake up her classmates and pull them around on it in the hallways as if it were a sled. Sometimes they’d ride the mattress down the stairs.
'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.
'She would hit me so bad, I’d have bruises on me. … All on my back and buttocks,' Klein said. 'I remember thinking, ‘You’re not going to get the best of me,’ and I refused to cry.'
In class, she said, teachers repeatedly told her 'Indians can’t learn' or 'Indians aren’t smart.' Often, she was ordered to sit in the corner of the classroom and wear a dunce hat, she said."
~ Dana Hedgpeth
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/08/07/indian-boarding-school-survivors-abuse-trauma/
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