For Noah, Simon, and Elijah, three more years came and went before they left for home. For Lucy, four more years passed. Without her friends, the last was the hardest and loneliest. In between, most students graduated and returned to wherever they were from, to where it was they had once called home: to north or west, east or south. Some did not return home; they simply left Wellington, left everything, ran away. Either way, their departures emptied beds for new arrivals to take their place. Indian out, Indian in—forever new, forever the same, a relentless machinery that lasted for almost a hundred years. A story such as this one can have no happy ending, no tidy or joyful resolution, no coming-of-age or lessons learned. There were none. Too many lives were impacted and irrevocably changed. The lost years could not be recovered; the lost identities could not be restored. Many of the children who returned home after graduation were never fully accepted as Indian.
