Sad and bitter memories are there, along with lighter childhood stories, but from all I have read and been told, Jesse Lee was overall a benign institution, not in a category with the Bureau of Indian Affairs institutions recently and infamously in the news. Throughout the Home’s 75-year history at Unalaska and then at Seward, however, the announced aim was to de-Native the kids, albeit benignly. An early superintendent wrote, “One small part of one generation is scant time to work perfection. Scientific experts in eugenics [aside: the “science” of eugenics …] tell us that to get near perfection in a human we should begin with the great-grand parents, but at least a start is made in the right direction.” At Jesse Lee as elsewhere, the route to perfection wasn’t a bridge between cultures but the elimination of one culture (or many) and the triumph of the other. Or as a Jesse Lee boy who was at the Home in the 1960s said, “The trouble was, they wanted us all to be white. And we