Nine Little Indians: When One Family’s Story Becomes All of Ours
Nine sisters from one family. One school. Decades of silence.
On May 27, a documentary called Nine Little Indians premieres at Lincoln Center in New
York City. It tells the story of the Charbonneau sisters, members of the Turtle Mountain
Band of Chippewa, who attended St. Paul’s Indian Mission School — also known as
Marty Indian School — in Marty, South Dakota.
All nine of them say the same thing.
They were abused there. By the priests. By the nuns. By the very people who were
supposed to be teaching them.
I want to sit with that for a moment before I say anything else. Because it’s one thing to
talk about Indian boarding schools as history. It’s another thing entirely to look at nine
sisters from one family — nine — and understand what was done to children inside those
walls.
Why this story is breaking through
The trailer for Nine Little Indians has been viewed more than 7.5 million times in two
weeks. The director, Shannon Kring, said in a recent interview that for a documentary,
“viral” is usually 500,000 views. They have no marketing budget. No big studio push.
This is happening because people are finally ready to hear it.
The executive producers include Leonardo DiCaprio and Tony Robbins. Names that get
people’s attention. And maybe — finally — get them to listen to a story Native families
have been telling for generations.
Marsha Small, a Northern Cheyenne geophysical surveyor, walks through the film with
ground-penetrating radar, searching for unmarked graves at Marty. She has done this
work at boarding schools across the country. Because that is what this story requires
now. Looking for the children who never came home.
The Washington Post reported last year that at least 3,000 Native children died in U.S.
boarding schools between 1828 and 1970. That number is almost certainly low. We are
still counting.
What most people still don’t know
Here is something Shannon Kring said that stopped me cold. She said when she pitches
this film, she has to keep explaining the basics. That there were more than 500 boarding
schools. That they existed in 40 states. That at their peak in 1926, 83% of Native
children were enrolled in one.
Eighty-three percent.
An entire generation. Then another. Then another.
These schools were funded by the federal government and run by churches — Catholic,
Protestant, sometimes both. Children were taken, sometimes by force. Their hair was
cut. Their language was punished. Their names were replaced. Their families were told
they were being given an education. What they were being given was something else
entirely.
I did not always know this story
I want to be honest about something, because too many people assume that if you are
Native, you grew up knowing everything about what was done to your family.
I didn’t.
I learned about the boarding schools when I was on active duty in the U.S. Navy, in my
early thirties. A grown woman. A veteran. An adult with a whole life behind me, and I
didn’t know that my own grandfather had been taken from his family and sent to one of
those schools. I didn’t know he had run away. Twice. The first time at nine years old.
That is how successfully this history was buried. Not just from the country. From us.
From the descendants. The people it was done to didn’t talk about it, and so we didn’t
know to ask.
When I finally did learn — when I started putting pieces together, asking my
grandmother questions, calling family — a whole picture started to form. And not just my
picture. The picture of every family I know.
Why the silence lasted so long
People will tell you survivors were silent because no one believed them. I don’t think
that’s quite right.
I think they were afraid.
Afraid of the people who hurt them. Afraid of the institutions those people belonged to.
Afraid that speaking it out loud would bring it back. Afraid their children would be taken
next. Afraid the priest at the front of the church on Sunday looked too much like the one
who walked the dormitories at night. Afraid that if they said the words, the words would
not stop coming.
So they carried it alone. They drank to bury it. They got quiet at certain words. They
flinched when a priest walked into a room. They could not say “I love you” to their own
children because nobody had ever said it to them. Some of them sent their own kids to
schools — sometimes the same schools — because they thought that was what good
parents did. They were told that was what good Indians did.
That is the trauma we carry now. Not just what was done to them. But what they could
not pass on because it had been taken out of them.
When the Charbonneau sisters tell their story on screen, they are speaking for
thousands of families who never got to tell theirs.
What’s happening right now in Washington
In February of this year, Congresswoman Sharice Davids and Congressman Tom Cole
reintroduced the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act.
If it passes, it would create a federal commission to formally investigate the boarding
school system and document survivor testimony.
It would be the first time the United States government has done this kind of formal
truth-telling about what it did to our children.
In 2024, President Biden issued a formal apology for the boarding school system. He
called it “a sin on our soul.” Those words mattered. But words are not the same as repair.
And repair has barely begun.
A film like Nine Little Indians matters because it does what statistics cannot. It puts a
face on the policy. It makes the abstract real. It says: this happened to these nine
women. Look at them. Listen to them.
What I want you to take from this
If you have never heard of the Indian boarding school system before this post, you are
not alone. Most Americans haven’t. I didn’t, for most of my life. That is by design. The
story was buried because telling it would have required reckoning with what this country
did.
If you are reading this and you are a descendant of someone who went to one of those
schools, you may not yet know the full story of your own family. That is part of how this
works. The silence travels down the generations like the trauma does. Ask your elders
while they are still here. Ask carefully. Ask with patience. You may only get pieces. The
pieces are enough to start with.
Watch the film when you can. Sit with it. Write down what you learn. Even the half-
answers. Even the things people tell you sideways.
Our stories were nearly lost.
That is why I write.
About my upcoming book, Boarding School Indians
I’m working on a book called Boarding School Indians — and it is bigger than my own
family story.
Yes, my grandfather’s experience is part of it. So is my grandmother’s, and the things I
learned later in life that reshaped how I understood where I came from. But the book is
not just about my family. It is about what the boarding school system did to Native
America as a whole, and what it is still doing.
People talk about the loss of language. The loss of culture. Those losses are real and
they are profound. But there are pieces of this story that get less air time, and I want to
put them on the page where they belong.
The physical and sexual abuse of children, by adults who were supposed to be teachers
and clergy. The alcoholism that came as a consequence — not as a stereotype, but as
the predictable, documented result of unhealed trauma being passed down. The
depression. The suicide rates. The broken parenting that came from people who had
been broken as children themselves. The way an entire generation was taught to be
ashamed of being Native, and how that shame still moves through families today.
These are hard things to write about. They are harder things to live with. But if we are
going to tell the truth about the boarding schools, we have to tell all of it. The losses we
are willing to name and the losses we usually aren’t.
If you want to be notified when Boarding School Indians is released — and if you want to
receive Warrior Wisdom reflections from me and from my dad, Gene — you can join my
newsletter below. You will be the first to know when the book is available for pre-order.
Join the newsletter → https://diannagoodsky.kit.com/6e6b5fd243
You can also read my first book, Warrior Spirit Rising, here.
Related reading on this blog:
He Ran Away From Boarding School. He Was Nine.
She Never Said No
Intergenerational Trauma in Native American Communities
The Role of Storytelling in Indigenous Healing
Dianna Good Sky is a Native American author, U.S. Navy veteran, and Ojibwe writer
whose work centers on Indigenous storytelling, healing, and the recovery of stories
nearly lost. Her first book, Warrior Spirit Rising, is available now. Her next book,
Boarding School Indians, is forthcoming