WALHALLA (ND)
Associated Press
December 19, 2019
By Wong Maye-E and Juliet Linderman
[This article with photographs is part of the series Sundays After.]
The nine Charbonneau sisters grew up straddling two worlds, outsiders in both.
In summer, they lived as white children, the light-skinned daughters of a father born of French lineage in Olga, North Dakota. During the school year, they were shipped off to the St. Paul’s Indian Mission School on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, where their Chippewa blood earned them free room and board.
“They called us half-breeds,” said Barbara Dahlen, 67. But they had each other and their bond carried them through those boarding school years filled with brutal beatings, even if the best they could do was lie on their bellies at night in the dark, reaching under locked doors to touch fingers.
They stayed connected as they scattered across the heartland and had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But after the death of their mother, new memories began to surface. One by one, the sexual abuse each suffered at the hands of priests and nuns came into focus.
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