RA>  SB> I think, for many Indians, the poor parenting skills come from
RA>  SB> forced disruption of family life by the colonizing powers.  We
RA>  SB> something like 90 or 95 percent of our people in a couple of hu
RA>  SB> years.  That resulted in massive disjointing of family systems.
RA>  SB> the kidnapping of our kids at a very young age, and sending the
RA>  SB> to boarding schools, further disrupted the sytem.  I think many
RA>  SB> re in a position of having to re-create the family unit.
RA> No question about it, the family history of virtually every Indian f
RA> is a tragedy, a small reflection of the greater tragedy wrought by t
RA> past 505 years.  Dorothy, an Anishinabe lady who was my downstairs
RA> neighbor until I moved here four years ago, was very adamant about t
RA> adverse affects of the boarding schools on Indian families.  She was
RA> certain that's where her grandmother learned to beat her children an
RA> grandchildren as a means of discipline because part of growing up
RA> Anishinabe (or as a member of any other Indian nation) is learning t
RA> that's not the way things were done before the dominant culture
RA> interfered with the traditional social structures of the first natio
There's a Dene grandmother I've met around here. She spends part of her 
year here with her grandkids, and part of her year in the southwest on 
the rez.  She says she beat her kids when they were growing up, 
something she now regrets very much, since she thinks it was the wrong 
way to raise the young ones.  "But you know," she adds, "I really didn't 
know what else to do.  They would do something wrong; and the only thing 
I could remember about handling bad behavior from the boarding schools 
was being beaten.  I really did think it was the thing to do.  If I had 
my life to live over again, I would explain things a lot more, and hit a 
lot less."  
                    Sondra
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