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I Am Not A Number by Jenny Kay Dupuis and Kathy Kacer<\/a> is focused on the true story of co-author Jenny Kay Dupuis’ grandmother Irene Couchie. The book begins as she and her brothers are forcefully removed from their home by an agent and taken to a residential school far away from where they live. For a year, she was referred to as Number 749 instead of her name, had her hair cut short, and was tortured for speaking her native language. The book describes how she was forced to hold a metal bedpan full of hot coals for saying “thank you,” to another student in their native language.<\/p>\n In the end, when the agent returns the following year to collect the children for another term, she and her brothers hid in a shed and avoided capture.<\/p>\n In an effort to eliminate all aspects of Native culture, the residential schools stripped the children of their hair, clothing, and names, and replaced them with standardized (short) hairstyles, basic clothing, and new names. Sometimes those names were just replaced with a number. Irene Couchie, the primary person in the book, refused to be reduced to being called Number 749, and insisted to herself “I am not a number.”<\/p>\n Read more: 10 Native American Children’s Books for Elementary Age<\/a><\/p>\n Residential schools were Native American boarding schools in the United States and Canada with the stated goal of providing colonized education to Native American children. However, the actual reason for the Residential Schools was much darker: Civil War Captain and founder of the Carlisle Residential School in Pennsylvania, Richard Henry Pratt, described his goal of residential education as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”<\/a> Simply put, the goal of these residential schools for Native American children was less about education and more about forced assimilation.<\/p>\n In May of 2021 news broke in Canada of bodies being found buried in the grounds of residential schools.\u00a0 Hundreds, then thousands, of bodies were discovered and these discoveries were how many people across North America even learned that residential schools existed, much less how recently they were still open and what kinds of atrocities occurred inside their halls. Stories began to be shared from survivors about the abuse they endured at these “schools.”\u00a0 But how do you teach this topic to young children?\u00a0<\/em>Why is it called I Am Not A Number?\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n
What is a Residential School?<\/h2>\n