There were certain things you could do to leave school.
Finish. Once you finished you could leave. Most didn’t
finish but some did. Some went on to another boarding
school for high school or to learn a trade. Some stayed
home, or because they didn’t know what else to do.
Run away. Runaways and Indian schools always went
together; you hear them mentioned together. A lot of
kids tried it; a lot were caught. Runaways were easy to
find because they all ran to the same place, home. Some
the schools just let run without pursuit for a few days or
a week, knowing where to find them. Sometimes when
those kids arrived home they were met at the door by
somebody from the school, the disciplinarian or even
a teacher or the superintendent, who had been waiting
for them. This saved everybody a lot of work. Some kids,
though only a few, ran home and never went back to
school, either because home was too far away to be worth
the chase or because they ran so many times that the
school got tired of the trouble.
Get sick. There was sickness at Indian school, that’s for
sure, and at every school. Measles, whooping cough,
scarlet fever, impetigo all went through the schools and
spread. Diphtheria. Influenza. Children sickened, recovered,
sickened. The Spanish Flu closed whole schools down in
1919, and everybody was sent home. Trachoma wouldn’t
get you home, though you might be transferred to another
trachoma school. You’d walk around with sore eyes all
red and runny; you couldn’t see straight. It could blind you
eventually. T.B., tuberculosis, would get you out of school,
but instead of going home you could get sent to a sanitarium
for your lungs to dry out and scar over.
And that’s if you were lucky.
If you weren’t you might go home
to give it to your family,
to cough and hemorrhage yourselves to death.
Die. You could die from getting sick, or you could die from
getting hurt. Accidents, sometimes; the teacher did not mean
for you to die when she pushed you down the stairs. There
were runaways who died from exposure or injuries. So
many ways to die. A boy kicked in the side by an angry
disciplinarian, another boy from pneumonia when he
wasn’t allowed to sleep inside the dormitory. A little
girl with tuberculosis, sent home, her death thus not
counted in school reports to the government. A teenage
girl giving birth in the infirmary. A boy drowned swimming
in the lake. Children who died from broken hearts; they
were just too sad and homesick to eat, and couldn’t live
without their mothers.
No promises were made that death would get you home;
instead, you might be buried at school,
your body cradled in the earth, and your spirit,
where is your spirit?
Amanj i dash.