Hello my friends, welcome, welcome, so thrilled you're joining me today. I have a story for you.

I have a story that probably only the most buffiest of history buffs.

Only the buffiest of history buffs will have heard of this and I would imagine that is probably not many if you.

So let's dive in to this incredible story from the state of Montana,

the Fort Shaw Champions.

I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

So I would imagine that many of you have heard the current event stories talking about the residential

schools for Native Americans and indigenous people throughout the United States and Canada. You've probably seen

those stories where they've used technology to determine that a number of

children in some cases, hundreds of children, were buried at residential schools. But let's just

set the stage here for a minute before we dive into this story about residential

schools in the United States. I am not an expert on Canadian history, but I

would imagine that there are many parallels of this story in Canadian history as

well. When the colonists from Europe begin to settle North America,

eventually the net effect is that indigenous groups were pushed farther and farther out of the eastern portion of the United States,

farther west of the Mississippi, and their groups were in many cases killed off due to disease or war and many of them

were consolidated onto reservations and their children were sent to boarding schools or residential schools.

The purpose of these schools was to help the native children assimilate into European culture.

It was essentially to remove their native language,

their native customs, and to help them dress like Europeans, wear their hair

like Europeans speak English. And that of course has had long lasting and

significant effects on the indigenous people of both the

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