Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

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When I was fifteen I was shipped out to the Wrangell Institute. That was a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Wrangell, Alaska, in the southeast section of the state. They prepared us to go to either Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka or the Chemewa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. That was one of the hardest things we had to go through, being separated from our families if we wanted a high school education.

Everything about going to Wrangell was different from being in Akiak. It was a boarding school in another part of Alaska hundreds of miles away. We didn’t hunt and fish. We lived with other Alaska Natives. Akiak was a cold, dry climate and Wrangell was a wet, milder climate. When I got there it felt like a prison. I had to go there. My parents had no other options for me other than to send me out. It was a trust obligation of the federal government to educate us and the goal was to assimilate Alaska Natives into the mainstream of United States life. It was about being acculturated. They wanted to do away with our culture and replace it with the everyday culture of the rest of the country. It was a necessary thing to do if you wanted an education. You were taken from your family and sent to this new place. That is why it was so important later to have schools built locally in rural Alaska. You could stay home and still get an education. You could still be with your family.