PIPESTONE is different in a number of ways from most accounts describing Native American experiences in boarding schools.

For one thing author Adam Fortunate Eagle describes his experience as mostly beneficial. His brothers and sisters and Adam were sent there after the death of their father. His mother was pregnant with another man’s baby, and she was moving to Sisseton, South Dakota. Adam also arrived there during the thirties when a lot of Indian families struggled to put food on the table. Some children arrived at Pipestone suffering from malnutrition. Many of them existed on lard sandwiches or rice.

When Adam arrived at Pipestone he was only five years old. The woman in charge of the younger students was Mrs. Burns who would become a second mother to Adam as well as her other charges whom she loved.

As he grew older, Adam gained knowledge in his various assignments such as learning how to bake and work in the carpentry department. He and his fellow students became so proficient that they took an old barrel, separated the staves, heated them up to bend the tips and made themselves skis they used on a farmer’s hill close to the orphanage.

Adam and his fellow youngsters were sometimes quite mischievous as well. They once broke into a shed behind a bakery in Pipestone where second hand bread, sweet rolls, and pies and cakes were stored. The owner and the school administrator knew they were doing this but they looked the other way, feeling sorry for the boys who never really got enough to eat. Another time the boys were hired by the school administrator to apprehend some runaway girls. They surrounded them in a corn field and brought them back at twenty-five cents a head.

During Adam’s last years at Pipestone, WWII would begin and many of the boys, including his brothers, left when they turned seventeen to join the army. His brothers Stanley, Wally, Curtis, and Alton would serve honorably and heroically.

Adam himself was too young to serve by the time the war ended. He went on to become a voice for the American Indian and was the leader of a group that occupied Alcatraz. According to Laurence Hauptman, who wrote an afterword for the book, one difference between Adam and other Indian activists was his sense of humor.