Posts Tagged ‘Thanskgiving’
Marie Cowen's life story is about more than the Thanksgiving dinner she started for hundreds of people, more than about the thousands of teddy bears she collects. Read on. (Tom Bauer/Missoulian)
Marie Cowen, of the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, has seen more than her share of sorrow – starting with her removal from the reservation at the age of 9, when she was sent to boarding school in South Dakota.
Vince Devlin of the Missoulian follows the twists and turns of her story far better than we could do. Read it here. It’s a great kickoff to Thanksgiving week:
RONAN – This started out as a feature story about the Ronan Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner and the 82-year-old woman, Marie Cowen, who started it a dozen years ago.
When you walk through the door of Cowen’s home, however, it’s hard to see the turkeys for the bears.
Cowen, it turns out, has been collecting teddy bears for 15 years, buying most of them at garage sales, and to say she’s taken her hobby seriously doesn’t begin to cover it.
The bears are everywhere in Cowen’s little home off Terrace Lake Road east of town, every shape, size and color you can imagine, on virtually every shelf, table and wall in the place – somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 of them, she estimates.
“If you want to count them, go ahead,” she says.
She and a granddaughter once tried, beginning with the teddy bears in Cowen’s bedroom.
“When we got to 2,100, I said, ‘Enough,’ ” Cowen says.
They weren’t even done with the first room.
Tags: buffalo post, Flathead Indian Reservation, Native American news, Thanskgiving