Early Life and Education
Peltier was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the eleventh of thirteen children, to Leo Peltier and Alvina Robideau. His father was three-quarters Chippewa and one-quarter French, and his mother was Lakota Sioux on her mother's side and Chippewa on her father's. Peltier's parents divorced when he was four years old. At this time, Leonard and his sister Betty Ann were taken to live with their paternal grandparents Alex and Mary Dubois-Peltier in the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa near Belcourt, North Dakota. In September 1953, at the age of nine, Leonard was enrolled at the Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, an Indian boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). He graduated at Wahpeton in May 1957, and attended the Flandreau Indian School in Flandreau, South Dakota. After dropping out in the ninth grade, he returned to the Turtle Mountain Reservation to live with his father.
Read more about this topic: Leonard Peltier
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Tell my son how anxious I am that he may read and learn his Book, that he may become the possessor of those things that a grateful country has bestowed upon his papa—Tell him that his happiness through life depends upon his procuring an education now; and with it, to imbibe proper moral habits that can entitle him to the possession of them.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)