The worst part is deep down I knew even then I wasn’t any better than any other Indian with a job. Going to the Ursulines’ just reminded me of my own failures, because after only a few minutes in the Sisters’ company I found myself blaming Ernestine Chief Spear for her own death. I had listened to the nuns, and what they told me was Ernestine Chief Spear was bad, and because she was bad she had died. They didn’t say that to me with their words. They told me everything with their sternly crossed arms, the sagging twist of their mouths. It was Ernestine’s own fault she had been locked up, the brutal hint being she got what she deserved.

And I stood there, dumb to the nuns. I stood there with a pencil and a hardback report and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. It just seemed to me the more good the white man tried to do for us the more trouble we had. The government thought it was a good thing for the Indians to attend the white man’s school, to be instructed by a group of women who had never known love. Women who were more lost than we were as a troop of wild-eyed Indians, homesick, lousy, smelling like woodsmoke. Women who came from France, women who came from Germany. Women who were more like us Indians than they cared to admit. Women who had lost their identities, too, even their names, like our names, were lost to them. Nuns. Sisters who were not sisters. Their hands so white there was a gray look about them.

And I used to think they hated us. I’d been struck by these women, had my ears slapped for laughing, had been cuffed so hard I bit through my lower lip. But I felt sorry for these women and their lonesome lives. I used to walk up behind the school and look at the graveyards of all these women buried far from their families, knowing that long after we had left the Ursulines’ they would stay.