""When the nuns wanted you at night, they'd come get you from the dorm," recalled Mary Jane Wanna Drum, 64, who as a young child lived at one of South Dakota's several Catholic-run boarding schools for Native American children.
"My older sister would tell them I had an earache. 'Take me,' she'd say. It wasn't until this year, when my siblings and I began talking about all this, that I realized she protected me whenever she could. How do I thank her for that?" asked Drum.
The sexual abuse suffered by Drum and her seven brothers and sisters as grade-school students was both continual and depraved. In a phone interview, she recalled nuns, priests and lay employees subjecting both boys and girls to a barrage of violent assaults and bizarre molestations. Among many examples, the mother superior forced girls to simulate sex acts with a large doll before abusing them herself. Priests raped boys and girls, and the priest in charge also placed girls as "foster children" with single men.
"Whoever paid," said Drum. "I don't know how any of us are alive today."
Students rarely received treatment for injuries, including those resulting from savage beatings or caused when children were sexually penetrated, said one of their attorneys, Rebecca Rhoades, of Manly and Stewart, a national firm headquartered in Newport Beach, Calif.
"We found no records of doctor visits at any of the boarding schools. This was all kept very quiet," Rhoades said."
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