The Dakota expression for child, wakan injan, can be
translated as “they too are sacred,” according to Glenn Drapeau,
Ihanktonwan Dakota and a member of the Elk Soldier Society on the
Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. “To us, children are as pure
as the holy, moving energy of the universe,” he says, “and we treat them
that way.”
When Native children arrived at Holy Rosary Mission, founded in 1888 at Pine Ridge to help in the religious conversion of the Oglala Lakota, nuns staffing the school described them as having good “morals” and giving “a tenth of the trouble white children cause,” Raymond A. Bucko wrote in Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Nevertheless, corporal punishment was meted out regularly at Holy Rosary—“apparently without scruple,” according to Bucko—and a primary goal of the school was to cut the children off from their parents, their language and their culture.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/07/28/south-dakota-boarding-school-survivors-detail-sexual-abuse-42420
When Native children arrived at Holy Rosary Mission, founded in 1888 at Pine Ridge to help in the religious conversion of the Oglala Lakota, nuns staffing the school described them as having good “morals” and giving “a tenth of the trouble white children cause,” Raymond A. Bucko wrote in Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Nevertheless, corporal punishment was meted out regularly at Holy Rosary—“apparently without scruple,” according to Bucko—and a primary goal of the school was to cut the children off from their parents, their language and their culture.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/07/28/south-dakota-boarding-school-survivors-detail-sexual-abuse-42420