<Begin Segment 48>

AI: Right before the break you were telling about the Indian Boarding School that your mother went to work at. If you could describe a little bit about it and what she did there.

EH: Well, this was an old boarding school, remarkably. A three-story building, and kind of isolated. There wasn't much, anything else around the place. But I think there were eighty or so Indian children between first grade and eighth grade. And the faculty were all... I think German Reform Church people, who had built the school. Very stern teachers, and of course, the Indian kids really didn't, didn't like school. They weren't that enthusiastic. They had to be there because their parents were migrant workers, particularly working in cranberry bogs in Wisconsin. And my mother's job was -- I don't know whether she operated the big laundry area, she was cons-, she was called the house mother. And a good deal of her time was trying to keep the kids in order. They had to, they, everybody ate at the same time. And part of, part of her job also was to keep the kids in routine, bathing and all that. And my sister, my youngest sister remembers that the kids were relatively unhappy kids, and kind of belligerent. And bedwetting was a major problem, which made my mother's job doubly hard. And my mother finally talked the staff into letting her try Nihonburo, Japanese bath system, the deep hot baths. And my sister claims that it worked, that, that the bedwetting, to some extent, stopped. Probably because it was also, if it's so hot it, I think Japanese baths relax you terribly. You're ready for bed, you're, it's too hot to suffer under. And you're, and if it's cold, you're (going to) jump into bed from that hot tub. But anyway, they all, they always ate their meals regularly.

The other thing my mother enjoyed again was on Sundays, she spent Sunday afternoons with farm women, and this must have been in, in the town of Nielsville, and I don't know how she -- oh, she did have her car. So she enjoyed joining the farm women with canning, string beans and whatever. And she was awfully impressed that, how hard the Wisconsin farm women worked. Of course, a lot of the menfolks were on the war front, and, but they had to milk cows in the cold barns and all. And she was impressed about how hard -- and she, she likes to socialize that way, or find out about lifestyles and that kind of thing.

The other thing she enjoyed tremendously was bracken, fern bracken picking. Warabi picking. It's very common in the Seattle area, but in California, it's too dry for ferns. So I've never seen it before. And, but the Germans apparently love fern shoots. And they had a couple of weekends, fern shooting, fern picking, and, and the Indian kids knew it. It was kind of traditional, but they loved being outside, and they would say, "We're wild, Mrs., Mrs. Ishikawa. You can't catch us." And my mother certainly didn't try to catch 'em, but they enjoyed being out in the wild environment. And my mother was just delighted to find warabi, 'cause she had not seen warabi since she left Japan. And, and for her, to find out that other people enjoyed them, and she said... my sister Anna was the one that had the handicap, the amputated leg, she said Anna particularly, certainly ate a lot of warabi. Though the one thing that I, I thought of was (asking) and I never got around to it, you must have missed shoyu. If, if you had vegetables like that, you always had to have soy sauce. That's all right, she -- when she came to visit me for the first time in Seattle, maybe the second or third time, but I had some bracken shoots, just stray ones popping up in the, in the yard. And she saw that and she just said, "Why didn't you eat this?" "Naze tabenakatta?" I said, "What is it?" I, I didn't know what bracken shoot was. And so, thereafter, I would go along Lake Washington or in the arboretum, and later I found them right there in my backyard in the Ravenna creek, along the Ravenna creek. And I would send her a shoebox full. And she loved it. [Laughs]

<End Segment 48> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.