The Pine Ridge Sisters Were Found in 1974 — What They Revealed Had Been Hidden for Generations

In the winter of 1974, two elderly women were discovered living in a farmhouse outside Pine Ridge, South Dakota. They had no electricity, no running water, no contact with the outside world for more than 40 years. When authorities finally entered that house, what they found wasn’t just neglect.

It was a time capsule of horror, a preserved monument to something that had been deliberately erased from public memory. The sisters spoke in a dialect no linguist could immediately identify, they flinched at the sight of automobiles. And when investigators asked them why they’d been hidden away, the younger sister said only this.

We were the ones who remembered. What she remembered would unravel a conspiracy of silence that stretched back generations involving forced assimilation, stolen identities, and a government program that officially never existed. This is that story. Hello everyone. Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re from and what time you’re watching.

That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one. The Pine Ridge sisters were named Mary and Catherine, though those weren’t their birth names. Nobody knows what their birth names were. Those had been taken from them in 1928 when they were just children, ripped from their family, and placed into a system designed to erase who they were.

By the time they were found in 74, they were 71 and 68 years old. They had spent most of their lives in hiding, kept secret by a family that feared what would happen if the truth came out. And when that truth finally did surface, it revealed a network of lies, cover-ups, and deliberate erasia that had been sanctioned at the highest levels of government.

This wasn’t just about two sisters. It was about thousands of children who vanished into a system that promised education and delivered trauma. Children who were told to forget their language, their culture, their families. Children who were punished for remembering. The story of the Pine Ridge sisters begins not in 1974, but in the autumn of 1927 in a small Lakota community where two young girls were about to be stolen in broad daylight.

And no one would stop it. No one could. It happened on a Tuesday morning in October of 1927. Federal agents arrived at the Pine Ridge Reservation with a list of names and a mandate that carried the weight of law. They called it the civilization fund program. They called it education. They called it progress.

But what it really was was systematic cultural extermination dressed up in bureaucratic language. The agents went door to door, extracting children from their families with the promise that they would return educated, civilized, ready to enter American society. Most of those children never came home.

And the ones who did were so fundamentally altered that their own parents could barely recognize them. Mary was 9 years old. Catherine was six. They were taken from their grandmother’s house while their parents were away working in the fields. There was no warning, no paperwork presented to the family, no opportunity to say goodbye.

The grandmother tried to hold on to Catherine, wrapping her arms around the little girl and refusing to let go. One of the agents pried her fingers loose one by one, while another man restrained her. The girls were loaded into a truck with 11 other children from the reservation. Some were crying. Some sat in frozen silence.
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Catherine would later recall that her sister held her hand the entire ride, squeezing so tight that her fingers went numb. They traveled for three days, sleeping in the back of the truck, fed nothing but stale bread and water. By the time they arrived at the boarding school in Nebraska, Catherine had stopped crying.
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She had learned the first lesson of survival in that system. Silence was safer than screaming. The school was called the Morris Industrial Training Institute, though there was nothing industrial about the education provided there. It was a conversion facility, a place where indigenous children were stripped of everything that connected them to their heritage and remade into what the administration called civilized Americans.
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The moment Mary and Catherine stepped through those doors, their hair was cut, their clothes were burned, they were scrubbed with lie soap until their skin was raw. the matrons telling them they needed to wash the Indian off. They were given new names. Mary became Margaret. Catherine became Caroline. They were told that speaking their native language would result in punishment.
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And the punishments were severe. Children who spoke Lakota had their mouths washed out with soap. They were beaten with leather straps. They were locked in dark closets for hours, sometimes days. Mary witnessed a boy no older than seven dragged into the basement for singing a song his mother had taught him. He came back different, hollow.
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She learned quickly that survival meant forgetting. It meant swallowing every memory of home and pretending it had never existed. But some things couldn’t be forgotten. And Catherine, the younger sister, refused to let them go. The Morris Industrial Training Institute operated under a simple philosophy articulated by its founder in 192.
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Kill the Indian, save the man. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a literal blueprint for cultural genocide, funded by the federal government, and endorsed by churches, civic organizations, and philanthropists who genuinely believed they were saving savage children from lives of ignorance. The curriculum was designed not to educate, but to erase.
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The children learned to read, but only from books that depicted their own people as bloodthirsty villains. They learned American history but from a version that erased their ancestors entirely or painted them as obstacles to progress. They were taught trades, carpentry for boys, domestic service for girls, but always with the understanding that they would occupy the lowest rungs of society.
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They were being trained to serve, not to lead, to assimilate, not to thrive. Mary and Catherine spent six years in that institution. Six years of being told that everything their family had taught them was wrong, primitive, shameful. Six years of watching children disappear in the middle of the night. Some sent to other facilities, others simply gone with no explanation provided.
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The school kept meticulous records of admissions, but curiously incomplete records of deaths. When parents wrote asking about their children, the letters often went unanswered. When families traveled to the school demanding to see their sons and daughters, they were turned away at the gates. The children inside were told their families had abandoned them, that no one was coming, that this was their home now.
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Catherine got sick in the winter of 1932. Pneumonia swept through the dormitories, and the school’s response was to isolate the infected children in an unheated building behind the main facility. No doctor was called, no medicine was provided. The staff believed that illness was a moral failing, a sign of weakness that needed to be overcome through discipline and prayer.
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Catherine’s fever reached dangerous levels. She hallucinated, crying out for her grandmother in Lakota, breaking the one rule that could never be broken. Mary snuck out of her own dormatory in the middle of the night, risking severe punishment, and found her sister delirious and alone in a room with four other dying children.
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She held Catherine until the fever broke. She sang to her in the language they’d been forbidden to speak. And in that moment, Mary made a decision. They were going to survive this, and they were going to remember. When Catherine recovered, something had shifted between the sisters. They began speaking to each other in whispers.
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Only in Lakota, only when they were certain no one could hear. They created a private language within a language, encoding their memories into stories they told each other at night. They became each other’s archive, each other’s proof that they had existed before this place, that they had belonged to something beautiful before it was taken away.
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But the school was watching. It always was. In the spring of 1933, the sisters were separated. The headmaster had noticed them whispering together, had seen the way they looked at each other with a understanding that transcended the broken English they were forced to speak. He determined that their bond was preventing their full assimilation.
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Mary, now 15, was sent to a domestic training annex 200 m away, where she would be prepared for placement as a servant in a white household. Catherine, just 12, was to remain at Morris. The separation was meant to be permanent. It lasted 3 weeks. Mary escaped on a moonless night in April, stealing clothes from the laundry, taking bread and apples from the kitchen, and walking away from the annex with nothing but the memory of where her sister was being held.
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She traveled at night, hid during the day, and survived on what she could forage or steal. It took her 11 days to reach the Morris school. She didn’t have a plan for getting Catherine out. She just knew she had to try. What happened next was never fully documented, but the official records show that on April 23rd, 1933, two students went missing from Morris Industrial Training Institute.
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An investigation was opened. Search parties were organized. And then abruptly, the case was closed. The girls were listed as runaways, their files stamped with a single word, absconded. But they hadn’t run far. They had gone home, or rather to what was left of it. When Mary and Catherine finally made it back to Pine Ridge after weeks of walking, hiding in barns, begging for rides from sympathetic strangers, they discovered that their family had been told they were dead.
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The school had sent a letter 2 years earlier informing their parents that both girls had succumbed to influenza and had been buried in the school cemetery. There had been no bodies returned, no confirmation, just a letter and a bill for their care up until their supposed deaths. Their father had died shortly after receiving that news, his heart giving out from grief.
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Their mother had remarried and moved away, unable to bear living in the place that reminded her of her lost children. The only person still there was their grandmother, now ancient and nearly blind, living in a small house at the edge of the reservation. She recognized them by touch, running her weathered hands over their faces and weeping.
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She told them they couldn’t stay, that if the government knew they were alive, they would be taken again. Worse, they might be imprisoned for escaping federal custody. The grandmother had a brother who lived off reservation, a man who had married a white woman and owned a farm in an isolated area where few questions were asked.
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She sent the sisters to him with a warning. You must disappear completely. You must become ghosts. And that’s exactly what they did. For the next 41 years, Mary and Catherine lived in hiding on that farm, cut off from the world, existing in a state of deliberate invisibility. Their uncle told neighbors they were distant relatives who were simple-minded and couldn’t be around strangers.
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The sisters never went into town, never appeared in public. They worked the farm, tended the animals, and lived as though the modern world didn’t exist because for them it couldn’t. The farm where Mary and Catherine disappeared into obscurity was a 40 acre plot of land that seemed to exist outside of time. No telephone lines reached it. No postal service.
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The nearest neighbor was 3 mi away, separated by dense woods and a creek that flooded every spring. The uncle who took them in, a man named Thomas, understood something essential about survival, that sometimes the only way to protect people is to make them invisible. He never asked the sisters about what happened at the school.
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He never pushed them to integrate into society. He simply gave them space to exist. And in return, they helped him survive. Thomas died in 1956. The sisters were alone then, truly alone. But they had learned how to sustain themselves. They kept chickens. They grew vegetables. They preserved food using methods their grandmother had taught them before the agents came.
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They lived without electricity because they’d never had it. They lived without running water because the well and the rain barrels were enough. They spoke only to each other and only in Lakota, the language that had nearly been beaten out of them. Every word they spoke was an act of resistance.
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Every story they told each other was a refusal to let the erasure be complete. They were living memory, breathing archives of a world that the government had tried to destroy. But here’s what makes their story even more disturbing. They weren’t the only ones. Throughout the 1930s,4s, and 50s, there were whispered reports of children who had supposedly died in boarding schools showing up years later, alive, but fundamentally changed.
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Families who received letters declaring their children dead, only to have those children appear on their doorstep a decade later, traumatized and unable to reintegrate. The schools kept poor death records. Bodies were buried in unmarked graves. Parents who demanded proof were told that the remains had been cremated.
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Even though cremation was against the cultural practices of most tribes, the system was designed to make children disappear. And when they resisted, when they ran, the easiest solution was to simply declare them dead and close the file. Mary and Catherine knew this. They knew that if they revealed themselves, if they tried to reclaim their legal identities, they would have to explain why they were alive when official records said they were dead, they would have to confront a system that had already erased them once and would have
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no problem doing it again. So, they stayed hidden. They became rumors. Local children sometimes claimed to see two strange women in old-fashioned clothes wandering the woods near the abandoned farm. Hunters occasionally reported smoke coming from the chimney of a house that was supposed to be empty, but no one investigated.
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No one cared enough to look closely. If you’re still watching, you’re already braver than most. Tell us in the comments what would you have done if this was your bloodline. The sisters lived this way until 1974. Mary was 71. Catherine was 68. They had survived by erasing themselves from history. But history was about to find them anyway.
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In January of 1974, a land surveyor named Robert Hutchkins was mapping property lines for a development company that had purchased several hundred acres of unused land outside Pine Ridge. The area was being evaluated for potential commercial use, and Hutchkins was tasked with documenting every structure on the property. Most of what he found was abandoned collapsing barns, empty grain silos, foundations where houses had once stood.
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But when he reached the far northwest corner of the tract, he found something that shouldn’t have been there. Smoke rising from a chimney. Fresh footprints in the snow. A house that, according to every record he’d been given, had been vacant since 1956. Hutchkins approached cautiously. He knocked on the door. No answer.
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He knocked again, louder this time, and heard movement inside, shuffling footsteps, whispered voices, then silence. He called out, identifying himself, explaining that he was just doing a survey, that he meant no harm. The door opened just a crack, and an elderly woman peered out at him with eyes that held more fear than he’d ever seen in another human being.
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She said nothing, just stared at him as though he were a ghost, or perhaps as though she were the ghost, and he’d just proven that she could still be seen. Hutchkins didn’t know what to do. He asked if she was all right, if she needed help. The woman shook her head slowly, then began to close the door.
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That’s when he saw the second woman, younger but still elderly, standing in the shadows behind the first. She was holding something he couldn’t tell what, and her expression was one of absolute terror. Hutchkins left, but the image stayed with him. That night, he called the county sheriff’s office and reported what he’d seen.
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Two elderly women living in conditions that appeared to be decades out of date, possibly in distress, possibly unable to care for themselves. The authorities arrived 3 days later. What they found inside that house became the subject of a sealed report that wouldn’t be declassified until 2003. The interior was preserved like a museum exhibit from the 1930s.
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kerosene lamps, a wood burning stove, furniture that had been meticulously maintained, but was clearly ancient. No modern conveniences of any kind. The sisters had been living exactly as they had when Thomas took them in 41 years earlier. They wore dresses made from flower sacks. They had no identification, no birth certificates, no social security numbers.
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When the social workers tried to communicate with them, the sisters responded in a language the workers didn’t recognize at first. It took 3 hours and a call to a linguistics professor at the state university to identify it as Lakota, spoken in a dialect that hadn’t been commonly used since the early 20th century. The sisters were terrified.
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They believed they were being taken back to the school. They believed they were going to be punished for escaping, for surviving, for refusing to forget. Catherine collapsed and had to be revived. Mary kept repeating the same phrase over and over. And when a translator was finally brought in, they learned what she was saying. We are the ones who remembered.
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Please don’t make us forget again. The authorities didn’t know what to do with them. There were no records of Mary and Catherine ever existing as adults. Their childhood records listed them as deceased. Legally, they were ghosts. The discovery of the Pine Ridge sisters created a problem that no one in the state or federal government wanted to acknowledge.
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Here were two women who had been declared dead by a federally funded institution who had spent four decades hiding from a system that had brutalized them as children and whose very existence proved that the official records were fraudulent. If Mary and Catherine’s deaths had been fabricated, how many others had been? How many children had been buried in unmarked graves with no proper documentation? How many families had been told their children were dead when they were actually alive, lost in the system, or escaped and too terrified to come home?
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The investigation that followed was quiet, deliberate, and heavily controlled. A small team of federal investigators was assigned to interview the sisters, to verify their identities, and to determine what had actually happened at the Morris Industrial Training Institute. What they uncovered was a pattern of systematic abuse, neglect, and record falsification that spanned decades.
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The school had reported dozens of deaths from disease, but had never provided bodies for burial. Parents who requested their children’s remains were told that health regulations required immediate burial on school grounds. The cemetery at Morris contained more than 200 graves, most of them marked only with numbers. When investigators began the process of exumation in 1976, they discovered that many of the graves were empty.
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Others contained remains that didn’t match the ages or genders listed in the death records. Mary and Catherine were questioned extensively, but gently the investigators who spoke with them were horrified by what they heard. Stories of children beaten until they couldn’t stand. Of girls as young as eight being farmed out to white families as unpaid domestic servants and never seen again.
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Of boys who resisted assimilation being sent to psychiatric facilities where they were subjected to experimental treatments. The sisters described a system that wasn’t designed to educate indigenous children, but to destroy them culturally and in many cases physically. and they described how they’d survived by creating a secret archive of memory between them, preserving their language, their stories, their identity, and whispered conversations that spanned four decades.
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The final report on the Morris Industrial Training Institute was completed in 1978. It confirmed widespread abuse, fraudulent recordkeeping, and gross negligence, resulting in the deaths of an unknown number of children. The school had closed in 1962. its records scattered or destroyed.
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Most of the administrators were dead. There was no one left to prosecute, no one left to hold accountable. The report recommended reparations for survivors and families, recommended a formal investigation into other boarding schools operating under the same system, and recommended a public acknowledgement of what had been done.
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None of those recommendations were implemented. The report was classified, filed away, and forgotten until it was declassified 25 years later. Almost no one knew it existed. Mary and Catherine were granted legal identities in 1975. They were given social security numbers, birth certificates that listed their approximate ages, and a modest settlement from the government, $5,000 each, which worked out to roughly $122 for every year they’d spent in hiding.
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They were offered placement in a care facility for elderly indigenous people, but they refused. They wanted to go back to the farm, back to the only place they’d felt safe in nearly 50 years. The state allowed it, assigning a social worker to check on them monthly. The sisters lived there together for another 8 years. Catherine died in 1983.
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At the age of 77, Mary followed 6 months later. At 80, they were buried together on the farm under a headstone that bears both their Christian names and finally their original Lakota names. The names that had been taken from them when they were children. The story of the Pine Ridge sisters is not an anomaly.
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It’s a pattern. Between 1879 and 1973, more than 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in boarding schools across the United States and Canada. Thousands died. Thousands more disappeared into the system, their fates unknown. The schools were designed to eliminate indigenous cultures, languages, and identities, to replace them with a version of civilization that required the complete destruction of everything that came before.
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Mary and Catherine survived by refusing to forget, by holding on to their language, their stories, their sense of who they were before the agents came. They survived by becoming invisible. And when they were finally found, what they revealed wasn’t just their own story. It was the story of a systematic attempt to erase entire peoples from history.
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An attempt that nearly succeeded. The last boarding school didn’t close until 1973, just one year before the sisters were discovered. The children who attended those schools, the ones who survived, are still alive today. And many of them are still carrying secrets that have been hidden for generations. Still carrying trauma that was never acknowledged, never treated, never even named.
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The Pineriidge sisters were found in 1974, but the truth they revealed is still being uncovered, still being reckoned with, still demanding that we look at what was done, what was hidden, and what we’ve chosen not to see. Their story ends here, but the story they were part of is far from