Summary

In “Native Tongues (1909),” Yung has been in America for seven years, and still has nightmares about the U.S. Immigration Bureau’s holding facility. Conditions at the facility were horrible; Yung had “been crammed into that warren for months with fifty or sixty people, Chinese and Japanese, all of them sharing three copper buckets for washing” (48). Yung has been acculturated into American society through reformatories and state-run boarding schools, and everyone now calls him Ernest Young. Ernest laments the conditions at his current boarding school, the Holy Word Academy, but recalls that he was first mistakenly transferred to a residential school in Tulalip, where conditions were even worse for Indigenous children, who were “whipped for accidentally speaking in Klallam, Okanagan, or Salishan” (49). Eventually, the school burned down and Ernest was taken away to the Washington Children’s Home before...