is not.

It is a summer morning, and Sharon Schock and her brother are in her dining room, looking at several photocopied documents and images that bring to life a person they never knew their grandfather Frank, too.

It was this unknowing that sparked Sharon's curiosity, and with a bit of encouragement, she decided to write his story.

Grandfather's blood, memories and unbroken spirits.

I didn't know much about him.

My sister.

Younger sister.

Did get copies from Leavenworth prison.

26 pages of my grandfather.

I knew he was in Leavenworth.

And, she says that I had to, write his story.

The story has to be told.

The historical society and the two writers group I belong to were very supportive.

And they did a lot of research for me.

Kristine Carlson, phone records and my cousin phone records, boarding school.

And that's where it started.

And I heard things over the years, you know, about my uncle, how well he was treated in boarding school.

And, my older brother Fred knows more because my dad talked to him about boarding school.

I can't say too much about my grandfather's experience in the boarding school, but I do know my father talked about boarding school.

He was down at Hayward.

And so was his brother.

George was two years older than my father, and he was a little bit bigger.

He was a big man.

They were milking cows in the barn, and George was carrying the milk to the creamery or wherever in the sidewalk was made out of wood boards, and he fell through and spilled the milk while they beat Joel.

And, my dad said he could hardly walk because they hit him along the legs.

That boarding school.

It was bad.

Sharon found out that their grandfather, Frank, was actually at three other boarding schools, in addition to the one in Hayward, Wisconsin.

Through her research, she found other facts about Frank too little.

But those also raised more questions.

Of the sister school in, oh, Dana, Flandreau and then Carlisle, where he was a runaway.

He was 18.

The records show that he was in the fourth grade.

I don't know if that's true.

Just what the papers say, how he made it back from Pennsylvania to Bad River, I, I don't know.

Then we found the records.

Said he was sent to Leavenworth for, selling liquor on the Sanborn, bend River reservation at a saloon.

And he was sent to prison there.

And the saloon guy was only fined $50.

Liquor was not allowed on the reservation.

There was there was a major crime act in the 1895.

And at that time he was not a U.S. citizen.

Sharon's book would not have been written if it were not for alcohol.

My grandmother did make mention about when she left him that time.

He was not good to her.

He was not a kind man.

But my father was telling me that, When he was.

Oh, I can't remember.

Maybe five.

I would think when she left Frank Doolittle and they came by buckboard from bad River up to Cloquet in a buckboard in a horse.

That's a long way.

There was no road.

It was a trail.

The book is written as if Frank Doolittle is telling it.

It is in his voice.

It is speculative on Sharons part, as she does not know if the words in the book were spoken by her grandfather.

That did not deter her, and it is through her book that she expresses the many truths of native life.

The good and the bad.

During a time of great change across Indian country.

Speaking with her hand, ducking from the black robes, the storytelling we hear from the elders, they say Indian children are taken from the village, sent off to Catholic schools many miles from the reservation to learn the English ways.

Plow fields go to mass serve the priests.

Some children never come home to their people.

One person told me it had to be the proper English, but he was only in the fourth grade and I'm sure he was out in the field and he didn't know the proper English back then.

The voice just came out, was very unique.

I was speaking the old Ridgeway, and it's almost poetic, the way I didn't realize I was doing all of that.

Some of the things were coming easy.

But some things were very hard to write.

There are a lot of tears shed when I was writing it, where I didn't know where the words were coming from, and my older brother says he's telling you what to write.

Some of those words just flowed, you know, one word after another.

I need to learn a lot more.

You know, I'm 80 years old and this is my first book, and I am amazed.