What she found was a trove of stories closely guarded for decades by those who lived them. “So, it was a long journey to understand why my father was the way he was." "It's a journey I had to go on to forgive my dad for the way we were raised, for his temper, his verbal abuse and for the beatings,” she said. Lajimodiere believed her parents’ boarding school abuse was a reason for the family dysfunction she grew up with, so she began a decade-long quest to understand it, interviewing people who went through the experience. “Papa said, 'I just couldn't learn that language,'“ she said, “so they put lye soap in his mouth and the kids would get blisters." She only was able to coax stories from her father in the last years of his life. Her parents rarely talked about their boarding school experience. He saw one of his fellow students die from a beating at the school,” she said. The experiences of those children, now with children and grandchildren of their own, have left a deep scar on many in the generations that came after them. The children were sent to the schools to be purged of their Native cultures, languages and spiritual practices - forced to learn English, and often abused. Denise Lajimodiere's grandfather Benjamin an his sister Martha, circa 1898.
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