Chooutla

Education got us into this.

– Murray Sinclair

I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks?

I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should I learn? Linda’s response is prompt. She points me to the archive’s residential school records. Chooutla’s. Why? Because they exist. Because the Anglican Church left records.

The Catholic Church hasn’t shared anything, says Linda. No records. We have only survivor accounts. They surged in—the Roman Catholics did—with highway construction.

Anglicans were already around. They were in a real competition for souls. Baptists were around, too. In the forties they founded a school in Whitehorse, the Whitehorse Baptist Mission School. But like Northwest Canada’s Catholic Church-run schools, the Mission School also chose to leave no records.

The only residential school records in Yukon are Anglican Church records. At the archives. They went through and destroyed particularly troubling items. But there’s still lots there. There are restrictions of course—to protect privacy. So there’s lots to see and there’s also lots you can’t see. But, for example, you can still read church workers’ correspondence. There’s a fair amount of it. And you can still page through certain clips from the school newspaper.

I will follow Linda’s advice. And I will see if old papers and pamphlets speak of the histories among us just as rocks and ice do.

That disconnect between what the church thought it was doing—and what students were experiencing—go there. You’ll find parallel universes, never the twain shall cross kind of thing.

The archives are well-lit. The ceiling is triangular and made of something strong but translucent so that light from the sky, from the world, washes over the research tables. I look at the light overhead and wait for an archives technician to bring me Chooutla’s public records from the stacks downstairs. She arrives and unloads a series of trays, placing them on the table in front of me. There are pamphlets, letters, a couple books.

She is curious about the materials I requested, materials she’s pulled from the stacks and carted upstairs. And so she lingers. We page through documents together for a few minutes.

We talk.

Then she leaves.

And I continue alone. I pause over a brief column printed in the Weekly Star on August 27, 1915, entitled titled “Foreman Wood Here.” The column reads, in its entirety:

Jimmie Wood, the Indian boy who has been foreman of the Northern Light office, the Chootla Indian school printing office near Carcross, was here several days this week on his way to his ancestral home at Moosehide where he will engage in teaching other natives the gentle arts of civilization. Jimmie has been a pupil in Carcross school for the past nine years or just half his life, he now being eighteen years of age. Foreman Dech of the Star office gave Jimmie his first lesson at typesetting in the office of the Daily Alaskan in Skagway several years ago since which time the little fellow has become quite proficient at the business. Jimmie may decide to start a paper, the Moosehide Morning Scent, in his own village.

What is behind news like this? The past? Or the future?

I reflect. Those “gentle arts of civilization.” Those gentle, genocidal arts. Every day we fumble our way into the unknown, and every day reporters reflect this wayfinding back to us. Jimmie may indeed decide to start a paper, and if he does, he will daily or weekly or on a schedule of his choice do what reporters do: remind us something has happened, that something is in the midst of happening. Now.

Now.

Those gentle arts.

The Anglican Church ran a school in Carcross, not far from Whitehorse, called the Chooutla Residential School. Chooutla operated from 1911 to 1969. Once it burned down. They rebuilt it then—larger, larger—to account for overcrowding in other schools.

Children from all over Yukon attended Chooutla. Many came from the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Yukon’s farthest north community, Old Crow. Others came from Ross River, Kwanlin Dün, Ta’an Kwäch’än, Tagish Kwan, Tlingit communities from the West, and more. Some students even came from the Northwest Territories and British Columbia.

In Finding our Faces, a book written by survivors about their experiences at the Whitehorse Indian Mission School (run by the Baptist Church), Whitehorse poet Sweeney Scurvey thinks back to the 1940s. He reflects on the region’s schools. He recalls Chooutla’s reputation. “Dad heard about Carcross, lots of deaths, so he kept us away from there,” says Scurvey. In contrast, “When someone came to take us to Whitehorse [Indian Mission School], he okayed it.”

Though Scurvey’s dad kept him and his siblings out of it, Chooutla’s reach was wide. It’s said that all of Yukon’s First Nations people living today either attended Chooutla themselves or have a family member who did.

“Education,” Tosh Southwick says, “is a space of transformation.”

Tosh is a member of the Kluane First Nation. When I speak to her in 2019, she is Yukon College’s (now Yukon University’s) newly appointed Associate Vice President of Indigenous Engagement and Reconciliation. I’ve come to campus to get her take on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Report—the country’s national effort at reckoning with residential school history.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was active from 2008 to 2015. It was a formal, institutionalized effort resembling South Africa’s TRC. Whereas South Africa’s TRC was formed to address apartheid, Canada’s TRC was created to inform all Canadians about what happened in residential schools.

Needless to say—or, essential to say?—at the time of this writing, the US has not held a TRC of its own. Neither to address chattel slavery nor to address genocidal colonialism.

For seven years, Canada’s Commission conducted extensive research, compiled meticulous records, and prepared a comprehensive report on the policies and operations of its residential schools and their lasting impacts. The final report included “Ten Principles for Reconciliation” and “Ninety-Four Calls to Action.” These speak in direct address to all sectors of Canadian society. 

For example, the first call to action addresses child welfare and looks like this:

We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial, and Aboriginal governments to commit to reducing the number of Aboriginal children in care by:

1. Monitoring and assessing neglect investigations.
2. Providing adequate resources to enable Aboriginal communities and child-welfare organizations to keep Aboriginal families together.
3. Ensuring that social workers and others who conduct child-welfare investigations are properly educated and trained about the history and impacts of residential schools.
4. Ensuring that social workers and others who conduct child-welfare investigations are properly educated and trained about the potential for Aboriginal communities and families to provide more appropriate solutions to family healing.
5. Requiring that all child-welfare decision makers consider the impact of the residential school experience on children and their caregivers.

Tosh has two things to say about the TRC’s Calls to Action. First, these are not recommendations. A verb propels the phrase: calls demand movement. Tosh feels that language puts everything into motion. And that makes all the difference to the spirit of the document.

Second, many of the report’s calls to action center on education.

And she reiterates: education is a space of transformation.

In the archives, I read letters from 1912. The Bishop of Yukon writes to someone in the south to ask for free chickens “so that the Indians can be self-supporting.” The letter includes careful calculations about the freight of the chickens, recommends dimensions for their shipping coops, and explains plans to request free freight from the Canadian Express Company, at least as far as Vancouver. They want chickens because Chooutla staff are “anxious to make the training of the children as practical as possible.”

I do not feel, on this day in the archives, clear about my role. I go scrap to scrap. I try to listen. What I’ve elsewhere called a “robust research agenda” and now call, haltingly, “my day?” consists of no more and no less than: show up. Try to do it in a good way.

Today, chickens.

Perhaps, after a time, I get lost in my inner clamoring. Maybe I blush. Yes, I probably agree with my thoughts, the future will come. Canada will, in the future, organize a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look at government-sanctioned social damage on par with apartheid. Yes, that future—and others—will come. But in this letter, the year is 1912, the subject is chickens, and the future is unknown.

I don’t know exactly by what process we, the people, are to enter into relationship with the past. As I linger in the archives, my intent becomes less driven. More basic. If the documents will speak, then … then what? I will listen? It’s hard, bathed in the hubbub of the past’s future, to really listen back in time.

Later staff letters detail flu symptoms (acute), fire damage (high), and garden productivity (low). A 1920 letter reports the death of a child to a father, informing a man somewhere, hundreds of miles away and over a hundred years ago, that he is now bereft of his son. Now.

I don’t know how the chicken project panned out at Chooutla. Elsewhere I read of students sneaking off of school grounds to snare grouse, ptarmigan. In other words, they were hungry. And skilled.

I hold “copy B” of a March 20, 1920 letter typed on Chooutla Indian School letterhead from the school’s principal, Reverend Dr. A. Grasett Smith. Eventually I’ll notice the letter bears a title. In all caps at the top of the page are the words: “night letter.” Sometimes urgency begets brevity. At this, my skin prickles.

“Influenza reported to Dr. Clark, sixteenth,” reads the letter. “He wired you. My report mailed you. Two scholars ill, thirteenth, seventeen by sixteenth, all by seventeenth. […] Three serious cases now, perhaps more later.” The letter names staff, numbers days, and closes abruptly: “everyone over-worked, need another helper.”

Within the week, this same principal posts a letter to Chief Peter McGinty in Fort Selkirk, Yukon. From March 25, 1920:

Dear Sir:—

You have no doubt heard of the terrible epidemic of Influenza which has come over our school, as it has to so many other places.

          All our scholars were taken down with it, as well as four of the staff.

          It was my sad duty to wire you that your son, Paul, had succumbed to the pneumonia which so often takes off those attacked with influenza.

          I am sure it will be a sad blow to you and your wife, and I pray that the God of all comfort may be with you to comfort your hearts.

          Everything possible was done for Paul. We have Miss Kipp, one of the Whitehorse nurses with us, and she was with Paul until the last.

          We shall miss Paul sadly in the school, for he was a bright lad and a general favorite.

          Enclosed you will find a few lines from Miss Bennett, Paul’s matron, who also did all she could for him.

          I am enclosing $2.15 the balance to Paul’s account in the school box. We shall disinfect and send his things as soon as possible.

          Believe me, yours in sympathy,

                    A. Grasett Smith

                    Principal.

Education may be a space of transformation, but I also think about how transformation cuts more than one way. I think of Ovid; I think of his Metamorphoses. Transformation, whether suffered by a nymph, a woman, or a god, is often the result of rape or other attack. Sometimes, as when Daphne is transformed from water nymph into a laurel tree, transformation is the only escape from violence.

In other words, transformation is very often about survival, and survival comes at a cost.

Daphne loses her feet and grows roots; her pliable, muscular body transforms into the stiff but living wood of a tree trunk. There’s loss in the change, but it’s a loss that leads to sovereignty. Daphne, thus transformed, escapes her aggressor. Alongside loss, then, lies both refuge and freedom.

I re-hear Linda’s voice. Chooutla’s the oldest school in Yukon. It served the whole territory—except kids had to be status to go to Chooutla. When she says the kids had to be “status” to go to Chooutla, she’s referring to two legal categories: “status Indians” and “non-status Indians.” I must say what? Because Linda explains: Yukon was formally segregated in schools. You have to know that. Status Indians could not go to white schools. And non-status Indians could not go to status Indian schools.

A status Indian was formally registered under the Indian Act. It was a legal standing, granting education, certain tax exemptions, and health services. For decades, a status Indian woman was stripped of status if she married a white man. Their children would then be non-status. They may be integrated in their First Nations families and cultures, but the government called them non-status and denied them rights and services promised to their status relatives. Bureaucracy can, in fact, fracture families from the inside out. It can pit kin against one another.

I find an internet article about the Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians, formed in 1972. “Losing status,” I read, “resulted in lost rights, benefits and entitlements, including access to health care, housing assistance, justice supports, education funds and most important, loss of identity as a Yukon and Canadian Indigenous person.”

Scattered conversations come to mind.

It’s really only land claims that have changed it, I hear, and I hear this over and over and over.

People say that land claims changed it—changed the specter of “status”—because Yukon First Nations insisted that their land agreements involve everyone, everyone, whether the federal government called them status or non-. Yukon First Nations families were determined, in their land claims process, to be no less than precisely and simply that: family.

Of course, I think of Alaska’s land claims too, and of my hometown across the mountains on the coast on the Alaska side of the border. I think about the child-siloes dividing my classmates during my own early school years. I wonder what it would have been like to be an adult during that child-time of mine, to observe the social fabric beyond the colorful block area and the school gym, beyond the music room and the swing set. A person standing on the border in the 1980s could have looked both backward and forward in time. Alaska’s land claims had begun the previous decade; Yukon’s would begin in the next.

Some moments happen once.

Some moments repeat.

Again, I wait at a long table for an archives technician to bring me Chooutla’s public records from the stacks. The ceiling glows overhead, a tented shell between my long table and the sky. The archives technician arrives and unloads a series of trays, placing them before me. There are pamphlets, letters, a couple books. She stands opposite from me and leans over the boxes, lingering, curious to see what I pull out, curious to see what’s there. We will talk, and she will leave, but in this version of the memory, the talking is central.

I open a folder. The pages inside are all hand-drawn, hand-decorated around some typewriter print. A whole sheet of signatures decorates page two. What is it, she marvels, and I shake my head. I say that I don’t know. It is true. I do not know what we are looking at.

We turn the pages over and around and pass them back and forth and eventually find these words: Our First School Newspaper. From the Chooutla Residential School in Carcross.

Ohhhhh, she says.

My grandma went there, she says.

And then my mom.

It stops with me, she says. That’s why I do my art. That’s why I do my carving. She mimes the curving scooping gesture of carving yellow cedar.

We are two women leaning across a table together, elbows splayed wide, heads bent close. I’ve come to the archives to learn and to think, to do this at my own pace, and to do it without putting pressure on others to relive a painful past. I’m touched by the land’s rocks and by its ice, and I’ve come to the archives to do my due diligence with papers and pamphlets, to close my eyes and see how a document, like a rock, can break the silence.

My grandmother went there, she says, and then my mom. It stops with me. That’s why I do my art. That’s why I do my carving.

Her voice is steady.

I came to hear the documents speak and they do; they sing out from the trays, they sing out from the first person standing next to me. That is how I meet the artist Lorraine Wolfe.

A Chooutla Grayling school newspaper article by Sarah Smarch, Grade three, lists eleven stories about the children:

1. Sandra Sydney is the girl who hides rulers from the teacher.
2. Rita Johnson is always laughing at some little thing.
3. Alice Johnson is always acting silly in school.
4. Dave Jimmy is always jumping around like a flea on a hot stove.
5. May McGundy is always laughing to herself about what she draws.
6. Doris Smith is always quiet in school.
7. Peter Johnnie spends his time drawing pictures.
8. Clara Silverfox always works hard.
9. Blanche Lynn (Lynch) Jimmie is always smiling.
10. Donnie Burns likes the girls.
11. Mrs. Catt’s favorite saying is, “I’ll be down there with the ruler.”

And what of the news beyond the school?

An October 15, 1959, news article headline: “Chooutla Roll Call Larger.” It discusses not only Chooutla in Carcross, Yukon, but also the school at Lower Post in northern British Columbia. At the time of its reporting, evidently 110 out of 180 Lower Post students were from Yukon, “relieving the burden” on Yukon’s own schools like Chooutla.

It bears mentioning that Lower Post will, in later years, emerge as one of the most abusive residential schools in all of Canada. Evidence of the Catholic Church’s full complicity in Lower Post’s physical and sexual abuse will be traced as far as Rome.

A May 21, 1964, newspaper photo caption reads: “Ten little nine little Indian boys …”¹ The caption is paired with a photo of shirtless kids, arms crossed, paper feathers taped to their heads. They are performing something for a group of visitors touring the school. Perhaps I shiver. Inside the world of the captioned photograph, I am aware of the future, a future where child-me and all my classmates will also wear construction paper on our heads; paper similarly cut and colored to play-act Nativeness.

About those paper headdresses. In Appropriate: A Provocation, Paisley Rekdal writes about artistic sampling and other cross-cultural exchanges. In parsing the painful region where appreciation becomes appropriation, Rekdal warns against “stereotypes that link bodily and cultural difference with innate physical and mental characteristics.” Beware, Rekdal argues, of markers that “stand in metaphorically for more profound, interior difference.”² Beware, in other words, of the paper feathers taped to boys’ heads in the Sioux-derived look we recognize from western cinema’s oft-repeated cowboys-vs.-Indians narrative. Beware of feathers that stand in metaphorically for the Indian-as-savage-or-at-least-as-buffoon, integral to the cowboy’s winning plotline.

When child-me and all my classmates wear paper headdresses in the early 1990s, they are not styled like Hollywood feathers. We split the class in two; half wear an eagle design and half wear a raven design to mark the two moieties indigenous to our location. I wonder, though. I wonder. What was that paper headdress activity about? Why did we do it? Was it … respectful? I search my memory. I search.

I am interested in understanding my own life. I am interested in understanding my experiences. But when a fog shrouds the personal, it’s time to back off and come around again—at a slant. I’m saying: A wider, shared past is always there for the pondering. The uncertain personal is, after all, probably nested inside of it.

I page, then, toward the research file’s next newspaper clipping. A 1968 article, “Yukon Experiment in Team Ministry,” mourns the past and examines the future in which “a new concept of ‘mission’ is being created.” The article is strange and troubled and for that reason, resonates. But inscrutably, it ends like this:

The main challenge that any member of a team ministry will have to encounter is lack of response and concern. When faced with discouragement, the members of the Church in Carcross renew their valour by recalling the words of prophecy one of our number noticed inscribed on a washroom wall in Whitehorse: GOD IS NOT DEAD. HE’S HIDING IN CARCROSS.

Diffuse malaise in the file’s news clippings won’t give me much to grasp until it crystallizes in an October 21, 1981, headline that reads: “Mission Schools Produced Rootless Generation.” Now I see the seeds of familiarity, though this language of “rootlessness” will yield to “displacement.” In other words, this line of thought will evolve, and it will become my recognizable present. “The school was run by well-meaning people,” the article explains, “but people incapable of dealing with 300 children from a strange culture.”

I sit in the archives paging through materials brought to me in trays and lingering on scraps that catch my eye. It’s unscientific. Eventually, it occurs to me that sifting scrap to scrap feels less like doing research—and more like showing up for a difficult relationship. I do not feel myself “researching” so much as attempting to stay present, to be in the moment, and to find traction, meaning connection, where it happens to arise.

If the best verb for this essay’s unfolding is no longer “to research,” then perhaps it is “to conjure.” I sit in the archives, paging through trays, conjuring … silk strands, perhaps; something that resembles a spider web, both home and trapeze, gleaming paths strung corner to corner, pulled tight so that we can all walk in sticky safety through open air, abyss all around. Abyss all around and yet averted.

Perhaps I ask Lorraine something about her grandmother and her mother, and perhaps I ask something about her carving, but of course these go hand in hand, and now we are talking about art and the world’s essential forms and, crucially, the grain of the wood.

I love the high cheekbones, Lorraine says, pulling the skin of her own face. And the straight mouth. She holds her index and middle finger at attention, placing her two straight fingers across her own lips. She explains that she is a keeper of classical forms, the high classic rules and ratios.

She’s working now on a moon mask. She’ll bring it to the archives on her next work day. I can stop in and see it then.

I see Lorraine’s hand scooping the air. I recall that Daphne became a tree. Sap-filled and rooted, body strong along the grain of the wood, the grain of sovereignty.

But carving seems like a reversal of Daphne’s transformation. While Daphne escapes her aggressor by becoming wooden, carved wood reveals a face. Where Daphne loses her form for safety, Lorraine transforms yellow cedar into a story coded with the lines and curves of a formline moon.

One may go to the archives to find traces, marks from the past, texts with memories. One may go for the ghosts. One may go to the archives and end up involved with living life—life flushed here and calloused there, malleable, simple, water-soaked life rushing along, in full swing, right now, here, wheeling along under the flat black mouth of the moon which is, in real life, somewhere just past this translucent ceiling.

It stops with me. Lorraine said. That’s why I carve.

And then Lorraine returns to her desk. She is, of course, in the middle of her workday.

I read instructions from the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs suggesting “separate colonies” for ex-pupils.

What is an ex-pupil? A graduate?

Clearly not.

Historian Kenneth Coates writes this of Chooutla:

“The concerted effort to improve native hygiene and to inculcate different work habits of necessity called into disrepute the mannerisms and standards of the children’s parents. […] Ironically, though supposedly educationally prepared to re-enter native society, the students were taught through the residential school to abhor that environment, to look with disrespect if not disgust upon their families’ customs.”

Coates considers the words of a summer missionary at Carmacks. In 1934, that missionary noted students “are potential outcasts of their own people and are not quite up to the standards of the white intellect. In other words, they are ‘betwixt and between’—a condition of pitiful helplessness.”

Ultimately, Coates reads his way into the crevices of Chooutla’s missionary perspective. He concludes that “most missionaries privately acknowledged that the residential school children could not be left entirely to their own devices,” that missionaries recognized their students’ “unenviable challenge ahead,” and, importantly, that “the post-graduation experience of the Carcross Residential School graduates was difficult for the missionaries to accept.”

Here, in the 1914 Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs letter I’m looking at, the superintendent proposes that ex-pupils could inhabit separate colonies so that they are “removed to some extent from older Indians.” He writes not of graduation but of “discharge.” “The Department requires that there should be careful preparation in this most important event in the life of a school pupil,” he writes.

I suppose I see here the professionalism of an administrator handling a delicate situation. Earlier, I saw the elaborate attention given to chicken shipping. And I saw a third grader’s inventory of her classmates’ dispositions.

But I’m aware of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; its national effort at reckoning with the schools’ human rights violations. I’m aware of today’s headlines that repeatedly announce unmarked graves found at closed residential school sites. I’m aware of the assimilationist and genocidal policies driving US and Canadian residential schools. I may have gone to the archives in search of a more functional or tangible relationship with the past, but now that I’m here, it’s the future that looms.

We talk about historic context. We say the past is a valuable way of understanding the present. It can tell us how things got to be the way they are. But what about the inverse; what about futuristic context? Is it actually the future that tells us what on earth happened in that dimly-lit past that today simply soaks us to the bone?

I have to accept that my time in the archives has little to do with research. It’s humbling but true: others have done the research. And they will continue it. Instead, my time in the archives is existential, born from my sense that a shared future here, on the North’s uneasy, melting ground, requires us to enter into right relations with divisive histories. Requires us to pitch in and help carry the difficult past.

Next week, I will return to the archives to see Lorraine’s carving. She will have a clear plastic tote at her desk and she’ll open it up, show me the moon mask she’s working on. It will smell good. She’ll put her index and middle finger together, hold them across her mouth again.

I love the straight lips. The classical forms, she says.

And she says this, too: After Chooutla, my grandmother and my mother didn’t know how to raise me up. They didn’t know how to make me strong. But still, they made me strong. They couldn’t make me strong. But they did make me strong. And I made my own children strong.

They could not make her strong but still they made her strong. Yes. That is what she said.

Let’s parse this. In the present tense, a grandmother and mother cannot make a girl strong—they don’t know how to raise her up. In the past tense, they did it anyway. They made her strong.

Is history really about the past? I lose track sometimes of whether time moves backward or forward.

It stops with me, Lorraine said. That’s why I carve.

Later, she will finish the moon mask. She will paint it white and black. Northwestel, the telephone company, will name her a Directory Art Winner, featuring a photograph of her carving “Tlingit Moon” on the cover of its 2020-2021 phonebook.

It means that at the height of isolation in a global pandemic, if you want to talk to someone—anyone—in Yukon or Northern British Columbia, the first thing you must do will be to find that formline moon. Find the mask of yellow cedar transformed into the face of a story, yellow cedar scooped and sharpened and sanded and painted. Then turn the page. And look behind it.

Notes

Kenneth Coates, “‘Betwixt and Between’: The Anglican Church and the Students of Carcross School.” BC Studies. Issue No. 64: Winter 1984-85.

Paisley Rekdal, Appropriate: A Provocation. Norton 2021.

Mapping the Way is a non-partisan public education initiative created and run by the eleven self-governing Yukon First Nations, the Council of Yukon First Nations, and the governments of Yukon and Canada. Their website is a treasure trove of good history writing. The story “HISTORY OF THE AGREEMENTS: Yukon Association of Non-Status Indians” was of special influence in this essay.
https://mappingtheway.ca/stories/yukon-association-non-status-indians

This essay also draws on history published on the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre’s website. The IRSHD is a University of British Columbia research and public programming powerhouse. https://irshdc.ubc.ca/learn/indian-residential-schools/

The Globe and Mail calls itself “a national icon” and “Canada’s most recognized media brand.” Their staff reporter, Patrick White, wrote a breathtaking piece about Lower Post in 2021. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-lower-post-bc-residential-school/

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1. About the photo caption, “Ten little nine little Indian boys….” Nurse-ryryhmes.org provides all ten verses of the nursery rhyme, traces its initial publication to 1868, and notes the rhyme is “great fun” and “great for learning counting.” If you don’t already know it, the verses consist of small children who are at times “befuddled” and “fuddled” (depending on the verse), and who all eventually kick the bucket in various ways, including a broken neck in one verse and shooting a kid in another. It is a song about systematic demise, abutting in the line “and then there were none.” In short, the photo caption invokes two pretty solid stereotypes, one of Indigenous incompetence, and one of extinction. Nurseryrhymes.org helpfully suggests that if you are singing with girls, you can change the verses from “ten little Indian boys” to “ten little Indian girls,” or, if you are singing with a mixed group of boys and girls, you may alternate between boy-verses and girl-verses.

2. Italics in original. P. 48.