Dora Brought Plenty, 72
Standing Rock Sioux, South Dakota
The two men in black suits and ties arrived with no warning.
Dora Brought Plenty, orphaned at 4 when her mother was murdered, had been living with her grandparents on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in South Dakota and attending a nearby day school. Then one day in 1956, the two White men showed up in her classroom and spoke to her teacher.
“She pointed at me,” remembered Brought Plenty, whose mother was from the Standing Rock Sioux Turtle Clan and also Canadian Assiniboine and whose father was Black and of the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe. “They came toward me, grabbed me by my little arms, jerked me up out from the desk, out the door, to a black car.”
She was 6½ years old and too terrified to ask who they were or where they were taking her. She had no chance to say goodbye to her grandparents, she said, and never saw her grandfather again. The men drove her to the Pierre Indian School, nearly 200 miles from her home.
Once there, she was told to climb up on a stool. A matron “jerked my head back and cut off my braids,” Brought Plenty said. “I remember seeing them hit the floor.”
When she asked for her clothes, a matron told her, “We’re going to teach you.” She took her to a dark basement in just her undershirt and panties and left. Hours passed before another matron came, took her to her dorm, threw a nightgown at her and ordered her to bed.
The next day, she got the school’s uniform — a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar, pedal pusher pants and saddle shoes. She was taken to church and asked if she was Catholic or Episcopal. When she said she thought they were the same, they put a metal cross in her hand, told her she’d be Episcopal and said she should “go pray for forgiveness for who you are.”
Brought Plenty became known by her assigned number — 199. When she whispered in Lakota to another classmate, a teacher told her to put out her hands and smacked her knuckles with a ruler. Another frequent punishment: She was taken to a hallway, where she was told to kneel and stretch out her arms with her palms up. Bricks were put in each hand and she was left in that position for hours.
“They beat me so bad at times, threatening that when they finished with me,” she said, “I’d never remember a word of my Indian language.”