Turtle Mountain Chippewa
- Oct 10, 2016
- 2 min read
Hi my name is Raine Dawn Valentine. I am a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa from Belcourt, North Dakota.
Growing up Chippewa didn’t mean growing up on the reservation, for me or my mother. My mother was the 3rd youngest of 14 children; all of whom attended St. Joseph's’ boarding school in South Dakota.
My mother was sent to St. Joseph's when she was 6 and returned to our reservation a few years later only to find out my grandmother had died months earlier.
Being forced to send her children to boarding school, my grandmother was a hardworking woman who did all she could to make sure her children had the opportunity for a future. My mother would always tell me the stories of how she would pick choke cherries for jelly, or harvest herbs and spices. She even produced her own moonshine in a small shack away from the house. My mother recalls seeing the shack and never knowing what it was until asking her older siblings as adults.
Growing up at a boarding school her whole life did not allow my mother or her siblings much of an opportunity to learn the ways of our people. When asked about our traditional native ways, my mother has very little knowledge. She was able to tell me my grandfather practiced traditional native medicine, and my grandmother was a natural healer with medicinal plants but that’s as far as her awareness of our traditions goes.
I wish to know more, and to be able to pass on this knowledge to my daughter and son so that they know who they are and where they came from.
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