Nine Little Girls 

Some years ago, deep into a confounding research assignment for which I had been combing through the website of the South Dakota legislature, I stumbled upon the recorded testimony of a woman describing in detail her own rape and torture, and the tortures of her sisters by the same hands. In her account the acts, which allegedly took place in the 1960s and 1970s, continued for several years and had begun when they were all children some fifty years earlier. The discovery of that testimony was a thing that happened to me, an event in my life, in the way realizing for the first time that my parents will grow old and die was an event in my life. The sound of her voice, the stories she told, gripped me, and attached me to a group of people I had never met, to a story that, before that evening, had nothing at all to do with me and my world.  We are surrounded, of course, by reports of atrocities of various kinds, and the mass of them often has the unfortunate effect of inuring us to many hells. But on that day I encountered a human voice and, despite our cultural preoccupation with trauma, which should have readied me to understand what I heard, I did not know how to think about what the woman’s voice was saying. In a confrontation not with data points, but with a personal account of extreme cruelty, I was without adequate resources. I recognized the problem of my human unpreparedness.  The horrors needed to be studied and reflected upon over time. There were implications that I needed to work out, and understandings that I needed to develop. Framings that had seemed sturdy and fundamental now felt flimsy. I experienced the testimony of those abused women as new knowledge, which ruptured trusted conceptions of justice and duty. It was not obvious to me that justice was possible here, or that this evil could be punished. My strongest sensation was of having been inducted into a darker acquaintance with the world. The story stayed with me. What follows is not an attempt at investigative journalism or historical scholarship. I wish only to share what I discovered, in order to give an account of how I tried to find a mental and social context for certain acts, and to offer some reflections about how to think about them. Much of the grisly information relayed here is in the public domain. It turns out that there is a lot that we do not know, and do not comprehend, about the public domain.  Geraldine Charbonneau believes that the scars from her abortion must have been there since just before her seventeenth birthday, though for most of the intervening decades she couldn’t remember the procedure that left them, or the rape that she says necessitated it. Like all eight of her sisters (Louise, Francine, Mary, Barbara, Joann, and three others who wish to remain anonymous), and like most victims of childhood sexual assault, she claims that she repressed memories of the abuse that she sustained while a child and a teenager. Louise, Geraldine’s older sister, alleges that she was in third grade when she became the first of her family to be abused by the priests and nuns at St. Paul’s Mission School (now called Marty Indian School), a Catholic school in Marty, South Dakota. The nine sisters were born and raised in Olga, North Dakota into a tribe of the Anishinaabe people known by the federal government as the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, to a strong-willed matriarch, the mother of seventeen children. They were among those Native toddlers whose parents had willingly sent them to Native boarding school in order to secure an education that could supply the skills necessary to thrive in this country. Others across the country were ordered from their homes by government officials, still others were allegedly forcibly taken from their families.  Both Charbonneau parents died without ever hearing their daughters’ stories. Like other children at similar boarding schools across the country, the nine sisters say they were warned not to tell anyone about the abuse they alleged took place there. When

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