Sorrow and strength
Jim Northrup remembers seeing a little boy trip in front of him, walking down the path for the first time to their dormitory at Pipestone (Minn.) Indian School.
“I said ‘hey-,’ an Ojibwe expression to show sympathy,” he said. “The housemother grabbed my ear and twisted it. She said, ‘We don’t use that language here.’ I was 6 years old. I didn’t know what language was.”
Northrup, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, was sent to an American Indian boarding school in 1947. He spent four years there - time he said he wouldn’t take back because it made him stronger, but time where he learned a dark side of humanity.
Northrup, 63, will appear in the independent film “Older than America” being shot in the Cloquet area this month. Directed by Georgina Lightning, the film aims to tell the stories of American Indians forced into boarding school in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a federally mandated melting pot with white, European-American culture.
Original Article with photo
“I said ‘hey-,’ an Ojibwe expression to show sympathy,” he said. “The housemother grabbed my ear and twisted it. She said, ‘We don’t use that language here.’ I was 6 years old. I didn’t know what language was.”
Northrup, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, was sent to an American Indian boarding school in 1947. He spent four years there - time he said he wouldn’t take back because it made him stronger, but time where he learned a dark side of humanity.
Northrup, 63, will appear in the independent film “Older than America” being shot in the Cloquet area this month. Directed by Georgina Lightning, the film aims to tell the stories of American Indians forced into boarding school in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a federally mandated melting pot with white, European-American culture.
Original Article with photo