I believe we Americans and also our Allies are fighting for the purpose of freedom. Many of our early ancestors fought for the very same purpose, so their children and children’s children, etc., would be free. … I only truthfully know that I am one of God’s children regardless of race, color, or creed. You or I or anyone else is not to blame what we are. But we are all proud to be what God has made us. Why was it Thomas Jefferson and his men signed the Declaration of Independence? You or I know for certain that they did not fight and had thousands injured and killed for nothing. It has been known and said through centuries that all American citizens have the right to go, do, and say what they please. What has hurt us constantly is that we are not able to go to a public theater and sit where we wish, but yet we pay
Sad and bitter memories are there, along with lighter childhood stories, but from all I have read and been told, Jesse Lee was overall a benign institution, not in a category with the Bureau of Indian Affairs institutions recently and infamously in the news. Throughout the Home’s 75-year history at Unalaska and then at Seward, however, the announced aim was to de-Native the kids, albeit benignly. An early superintendent wrote, “One small part of one generation is scant time to work perfection. Scientific experts in eugenics [aside: the “science” of eugenics …] tell us that to get near perfection in a human we should begin with the great-grand parents, but at least a start is made in the right direction.” At Jesse Lee as elsewhere, the route to perfection wasn’t a bridge between cultures but the elimination of one culture (or many) and the triumph of the other. Or as a Jesse Lee boy who was at the Home in the 1960s said, “The trouble was, they wanted us all to be white. And we