10 at 10: The Surprising Childhoods of Ten Remarkable People
INTRODUCTION It's not easy being ten There are things to learn rules to follow teachers to impress friends to make bullies to avoid and your body is about to get weird on you Ten is an important year because you have survived what psychologists call the formative years That's just a fancy way of saying your personality has started to take shape But you are not done Think of yourself as a lump of clay In the next ten years your personality will squish and squash in ways that may surprise you and everyone around you It will get molded and formed before it hardens into something magnificent Take for example Albert Einstein At the age of ten did Einstein know he would someday come up with the theory of relativity Hardly At ten he was your typical smart kid with a lot of questions rolling around his head and an attitude that annoyed most of his teachers How about Louis Armstrong If you could peer into a magic looking glass and see his life at ten you would likely not have predicted that he would become a world class jazz musician Then 6
there is ten year old Audrey Hepburn who barely made it out of war torn Holland alive and Frida Kahlo who had polio as a kid and went on to create art that would speak to people across the world Bruce Lee spent his tenth year fighting on rooftops getting terrible grades and tormenting his teachers After his formative years he matured and started to see things differently He then began filling up notebooks with his life philosophies Later he wrote All knowledge ultimately means self knowledge What Bruce meant is that knowing yourself is the most important step in gaining outside knowledge You can't begin to understand others until you understand yourself This is called self awareness None of the people in this book knew what path they were on at the age of ten They were all ordinary kids with everyday hopes and fears And it's really hard to be ourselves when we don't fully know ourselves yet That's why we look to role models to figure it out They are our brave guides who light our path I hope the following stories of courage and perseverance will inspire you 7
ZITKÁLA ŠA 1876 Zitkála Šá is born 1876 1938 Age 8 Attends White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute As a young girl Zitkála Šá spent her time leaping and bounding over rolling hills and past the rising smoke of her home on the reservation in Yankton South Dakota When she stopped the scene stopped When she jumped it jumped No matter how fast she ran she was a part of the land When she was eight years old Quaker missionaries visited to recruit Native children to the White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash Indiana At first she was excited to go The white people promised to take her away on an iron horse a train to lands where she could eat big red apples and learn to read and write Her mother warned her Their words are sweet but my child their deeds are bitter Her mother had good reason to be distrusting Years earlier gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory and prospectors took over lands belonging to Dakota Lakota and Northern Arapaho people During that same time period US leaders such as President Ulysses S. Grant encouraged killing bison as a way to eliminate Native Americans because they were dependent on the animals for meat clothing and utensils And Indigenous people were also being coerced into signing treaties forced onto reservations and required to adopt farming instead of hunting and gathering By the time missionaries arrived to take Zitkála Šá away the landscape where thirty million bison had roamed had been reduced to herds of just five hundred and the Yankton Western Dakota people had been forced to leave their ancestral lands as protectors of the Pipestone Quarry Her mother's warning proved correct When she arrived at her new school all the apple trees had died And so Zitkála Šá began her new life with new clothing a new language and a new name Gertrude She would Missionaries cut off her hair Age 11 Returns to the Yankton Reservation but feels like she has lost her culture 9
