Early Life and Education
Mary Ellen Brave Bird was born in 1953 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota. She is a member of the Sicangu Oyate, also known as the Burnt Thighs Nation or Brulé Band of Lakota. She was raised primarily by her grandparents while her mother studied in nursing school and was working. Brave Bird was influenced by several relatives who followed traditional practices, including her granduncle Dick Fool Bull, who introduced her to the Native American Church.
During the 1960s, Brave Bird attended the St. Francis Indian School, in St. Francis, South Dakota, a Roman Catholic boarding school.
Read more about this topic: Mary Brave Bird
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
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“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
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