Amputated Fingers and a Lawsuit

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In 1922, Joseph Clement Martell, a thirteen year old boy from Turtle Mountain, was ordered to cut bread at the Fort Totten Boarding school with a band driven cutting machine that was old and lacked safety measures that forced the user to push the bread in by hand. In feeding bread into the machine two of his fingers were caught by the knife and were amputated.  A flurry of correspondence and a lawsuit followed.

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