This is the first of our bonus episodes, things we couldn't fit into the larger narrative,

but they piqued our interest, and we thought you might want to know more about them too.

For this one, we're going deeper into the Sherman Indian High School.

We mentioned it as one of a hundred boarding schools the U.S. government used to re-educate

native populations, or in other words, to solve the Indian problem,

it's one of four still operating today. But what was once an Institute of Cultural Assimilation has

changed. Here's Lorene Sisquok. By about 1960s and 70s, just like everywhere else, the civil rights movement and red power

movement and all kinds of things were happening.

So things started to change.

And now there's only four of these schools left.

And they serve a purpose to kind of help with the healing and the correcting things. It takes a lot of

generations to heal from that kind of trauma. Healing has been slow, but following the civil

rights movement, major cultural changes have been made in the school's curriculum. I can see a lot of it

in the yearbooks and in the

newsletters, of course, you know, the changes or who's doing what. We had an Indian Day celebration,

just different things like that in the 70s, I think. And then in the 80s, Marianna Taylor,

she started the Indian Studies classes, firm Charlie Bogas, who is a graduate of Sherman and still teaches it today. She started the Indian Studies classes, firm Charlie Boggis, who is a graduate of Sherman

and still teaches her today. She started tribal government and also continued teaching Indian studies.

And she was actually punished as a young girl for speaking her language, you know, in the 60s before

she graduated. And now she teaches Navajo language and culture there.

Now, alongside the powwows and the boys' drumming classes,

the school also has a cultural ambassador that's selected each year of a girl called Miss Sherman.

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