Boulder-based coalition heals Indian boarding-school trauma
25 May 2016
Let the Healing Begin
By Kay Turnbaugh The story of America’s Indian boarding schools remains a little-known chapter in our history. Beginning in the 1800s and continuing into the 1950s, the federal government forced Native American children from their homes and sent them to often faraway military-style residential schools, a policy that had profound effects and is now recognized as cultural genocide. A movement to bring the story to light and find ways to start a healing process for Native American individuals, families and communities is based right here in Boulder: the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). Created as the result of a 2011 symposium on the Indian boarding-school policy, the nonprofit coalition has about 60 members and is growing. At the helm of the board is retired attorney Jerilyn DeCoteau, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota and a resident of Eldorado Springs.
coalition seeks to heal the multigenerational trauma caused by America’s notorious Indian boarding schools. (photo by Kay Turnbaugh)
accredited high school in 1927. It still operates as a boarding school—the oldest one in the U.S. for Native students. (photo courtesy Oregon State Library)
Bring the Bodies Home
By the late 1800s, an estimated 500 boarding schools were operating in 18 states and territories, including Colorado. By 1930 an estimated one-third of Indian children had passed through boarding schools. As a result, nearly every Indian family has suffered the effect, the historical trauma, of boarding schools. “And certainly nearly every tribal community has suffered loss of culture and institutional stability,” says DeCoteau.
Trauma Through the Generations
The philosophy of Carlisle’s founder, former military man Richard Henry Pratt, was “kill the Indian and save the man.” He stressed civilizing the Indians by teaching them English, converting them to Christianity and giving them a trade. This was the policy the federal government adopted. The students who survived the boarding schools returned home with problems similar to PTSD. “The policy was, at its core, a policy of cultural genocide,” NARF says. Its negative impacts persist today. Studies have shown that trauma can be passed down through generations—a process called epigenetics. And many Native Americans, including McCleave, believe that the spirits of their ancestors are still with them. That too can compound the trauma.Generations of these children … returned to their communities not as the Christianized farmers that the federal boarding-school policy envisioned, but as deeply scarred humans lacking the skills, community, parenting, extended family, language and cultural practices of those raised in their cultural context. — Native American Rights Fund
The Church Connection
NABS is asking the churches that ran Indian boarding schools to contribute to the healing process by doing research on their own roles during the Indian boarding-school era. “Truth-telling is a first essential step in the truth, reconciliation, and healing process,” NABS envisions. The Toward Right Relationship Project, sponsored by the Boulder Friends Meeting, responded to this call when project director and longtime Boulder County resident Paula Palmer received a Cadbury Scholarship—a research grant that provided room and board for several weeks at the Quaker retreat Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania to study Quaker involvement in the Indian boarding schools. Palmer is a sociologist, writer and activist for human rights, social justice and environmental protection who served as executive director of Boulder-based Global Response for 17 years. In 1869, Palmer discovered, the Quakers proposed the policy that became known as the Ulysses S. Grant administration’s Peace Policy. Its goals were to replace the government’s corrupt Indian agents with religious men who would oversee the management of the reservations, convert the Native people to Christianity, settle them into farming lifestyles and educate the children, turning them away from their Native cultures and toward European-American lifestyles. Two branches of Quakerism were put in charge of 16 reservations with a total population of more than 24,000 people. Other Christian denominations managed 56 additional reservations during Grant’s presidency. As a result of her research, Palmer developed a workshop called “Roots of Injustice, Seeds of Change: Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples,” which she and DeCoteau have presented more than 115 times in 18 states at the invitation of churches, schools, colleges, universities and civic organizations.For more information about NABS, visit www.boarding schoolhealing.org. To learn more about the workshops, contact Paula Palmer at paularpalmer at gmail.com.A version of the workshop was created with Native American facilitators for Native audiences, and a similar but shorter program is offered for middle school and high school classrooms. NABS hopes that this Quaker project will provide a model for other church denominations to follow.
Taking Responsibility
A goal of the NABS Healing Coalition is to get the U.S. government to recognize what it did. Native American communities debate whether an apology should be sought, or even would be appropriate, for the wrongs and harms resulting from the boarding-school policy. DeCoteau thinks going to Congress is an important step. She says the federal government needs to accept its responsibilities. “What we are looking for above all is healing, and that has to be defined by the community,” says DeCoteau. She says that after hearing author Sherman Alexie speak in Boulder she realized that her Native communities are depressed: “We are suffering from historical trauma.” And as NABS explains, “Because these harms go on untreated, and until now largely unacknowledged, both the descendants of those harmed and the descendants of those who caused injury are in need of healing.” “Although it’s rare to meet an Indian without a boarding-school background, most people have no idea about this history. A big part of what we’re doing is education, learning how we got to where we are today,” says DeCoteau. “This is our story, yours and mine.”Kay Turnbaugh is the author of several books, including the award-winning The Last of the Wild West Cowgirls and Rocky Mountain National Park Dining Room Girl: The Summer of 1926 at the Horseshoe Inn. www.kayturnbaugh.com
