00:00She was chained to a heater and beaten daily.
00:03We knew that children didn't get to go home.
00:15They were missing.
00:17We heard stories of such immense abuse that some of our elders can't hear from one of
00:26their sides of their head because they were hit.
00:30We know that one of our young girls was sent to the basement and she was chained to a heater
00:40and beaten daily.
00:43We know others hid so that they wouldn't receive the abuse.
01:02The feeling of knowing that I'm sitting here and I was a young girl who wanted to know
01:09the truth about the Tulalip boarding school.
01:13My house is almost on the boarding school.
01:16I can walk down the road and it's right there, yet no one wanted to speak of the pain and
01:24the torture.
01:25We knew there was a little jail cell.
01:27We knew that the basement was for where the kids were crying and wanting to go home.
01:33When we began to open these doors for our boarding school survivors to come forward
01:38and share their stories, I'm deeply concerned.
01:40I don't want to lose another elder.
01:43None of us do.
01:44These are our knowledge keepers.
01:47We've lost enough.
01:48One more loss of our loved one, of our elders, is sometimes too much and a lot of the times
01:56too unbearable.
01:59So that's where many of us are at across the nation, whether we live in remote villages
02:04in Alaska or in Native Hawaiian communities or Tulalip, anywhere in the United States
02:13if you're an indigenous person, you have felt the impacts.
02:17I wish I could speak my language and it breaks my heart that I can't communicate with some
02:23of our elders who do speak.
02:25This is the time right now where we can speak the truth, where we can honor our loved ones,
02:38where we can stand up and stand together.
02:41This is the time to honor our boarding school survivors, our relatives, and the children
02:46who are still asking those questions and wondering, where is my grandmother?
02:52Where is my auntie?
02:53What happened to our family?
02:55We deserve that answer.
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