My Childhood Was Stolen, Says Linda Raye Cobe, Indian Boarding School Survivor

Linda Raye Cobe discusses the growing movement of survivors seeking to heal from the “Indian boarding school” system.

By

Frances Madeson , Truthout | October 10, 2022

Linda Raye Cobe at the edge of the woods at her childhood home in Watersmeet, Michigan, where she used to run "free as a bird" before being taken to Indian boarding school in Harbor Springs, more than five hours away from her parents, when she was only 5 years old.

 

Linda Raye Cobe, 64, is a member of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe, whose healing journey led her to publish in 2015 a short courageous and straightforward memoir called Red, White & Blues. In it, she tells what happened to her just before her 6th birthday, when she, her siblings and cousins were taken from their family homes in Watersmeet, Michigan, to the Holy Childhood School in Harbor Springs, an Indian boarding school five hours away. Cobe writes of arbitrary beatings raining down from the nuns as they screamed that the holy children under their care, whose childhoods they were ending with their fists, were “good for nothing, stinking little, dirty Indians.” 

READ:  https://truthout.org/articles/my-childhood-was-stolen-says-linda-raye-cobe-indian-boarding-school-survivor/