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Our View: Boarding-school survivors’ stories

Imagine being at home with your family and someone knocks on the door – or doesn’t knock on the door – walks in and takes away your child. It’s difficult to comprehend the terror family members would feel. Now multiply this feeling and this unsolved trauma hundreds of thousands of times, in each direction, for each Native American child forcibly removed from families. It’s monstrous. And it was just the start of many horrors.

This is our immediate, visceral response to the Department of the Interior’s release last week of the first part of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. A full accounting of deaths and everything else that happened is necessary and urgent.

Words about justice would ring false here. Nothing can undo this racialized history. Instead, we appreciate U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s focus on the healing of survivors. And their families. It’s important, too, that support services come in ways that are culturally appropriate with their delivery decided by Native peoples.

Haaland’s first step is deliberate with the launch of “The Road to Healing,” a yearlong tour for boarding-school survivors to share their stories, connect communities with trauma-informed support and facilitate collection of an oral history.

The process will be gut-wrenching. Haaland and others have talked about the U.S. government’s attempt to wipe out tribal identity, language and culture through its boarding-school policies. That past has manifested through longstanding trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, premature deaths, mental health issues, substance abuse and lower graduation rates.

Like any trauma, intergenerational trauma, passed down from survivors to descendants, can keep people locked in survival modes, which limit their ability to thrive. It’s crucial to acknowledge the impact of what Native parents/grandparents/great-grandparents have experienced as children, when the imprint of trauma is most devastating. Here lies the power in storytelling. Haaland is appropriate in her efforts to encourage survivors to talk. A way to shed light, a way to alleviate torment.

Denise Lajimodiere is Ojibwe and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. Lajimodiere’s parents’ stories about their boarding-school time inspired her to write “Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors.” “Mama was made to kneel on a broomstick for not speaking English, locked in closets for not speaking English,” she told Minnesota Public Radio. “They would pee their pants ... then the nuns would take them out and beat them for peeing their pants.”

The fact that documenting an oral history is even achievable hits home how recent boarding schools were realities. These atrocities are alive in the cellular memories of people who are still with us. This means an opportunity to look directly at this history and be accountable for what we can do now, in real time.

The Interior’s investigation found that from 1819 to 1969, the system had 408 federal schools across 37 states or then territories. The investigation, so far, identified marked and unmarked burial sites at 53 schools.

In August, 21 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the Indian Health Service, asking that support services include a hotline and other mental and spiritual programs. This is a good start. We need, though, complete buy-in from Congress. These efforts cannot be politicized.

At Fort Lewis College, which started as an Indian boarding school, 45% are tuition-free Indigenous students. This was one way toward reckoning. Next would be more Native counselors and professors on campus. We are confident this is coming.

What do we do with all of this collective pain? We don’t have the answer. First and foremost, though, we recognize – and honor – that this region is the original home of the Nuciu (Ute) people. Then we listen to what Indigenous people want and how exactly they want to go about this long road of healing.