Healing Our Communities:The Residential School

Experience & Intergenerational Trauma

Sadé Ali, MA, CADC, CCSHeart of the Hawk, Mi’kmaq First Nations

Pictou Landing Reserve, NS, Canada

Sometimes it takes a policy

“Quaker” Peace Policy- President Ulysses Grant– Grant signed the Indian Appropriation Act, which established

Indians as national wards and nullified Indian Treaties, March 3, 1871.

– A major part of Grant's Peace Policy, this act caused the government to recognize for the first time the need to ensure the welfare of Indians as individuals rather than as tribal entities.

– This was the first step in years of federal initiatives toward Indian policy reform that ultimately led to the Indians' citizenship.

– Under Grant's program, educational and medical programs were institutionalized in the Interior Department, and tons of food, clothing, and books were donated by churches and relief organizations to tribes.

– Between 1868 and 1876 the number of houses on reservations climbed from 7,500 to 56,000. The amount of land under cultivation increased six fold. The numbers of teachers and schools tripled. Indian ownership of livestock increased by over fifteen times.

There were some good points, but………………….

The People were not having it…•Ghost Dance

•Wounded Knee Uprising leading to massacres•More uprisings

So more policy was created•Military agents stationed to live on, provide surveillance, and oversee

welfare disbursements and assimilation policies on reservations (1870s)

•Regular Congressional appropriations for Indian education and assimilation begin (1870s)

•Treaty making abolished (1871)

•Indian Police Force created (1878)

•“Civilization Regulations” outlaw Native religions, healing practices, and leaving of reservations (1880)

•Dawes Act (1887)

It got so bad… even the U.S. did something about it

…and then did more…

•Indian Reorganization Act 1934- Dawes Act terminated. Still, what little sovereignty remained was undermined by the imposing of a U.S. model of government systems…ironic

• Indian Land Claims Commission Act (created allegedly as a “thank you” to those Indigenous people who served in the war but once funding for land was accepted by them, Native people lost their tribal status, 1946)

• House Concurrent Resolution 108 (beginning of revocation of sovereignty, 1953)

….and the results?•Death by disease, malnutrition and abuse•Punishment for speaking one’s language, practicing ceremonies and traditions•Forced labor•Physical abuse•Sexual abuse•Forced sterilization•Medical experimentation•Familial and intergenerational trauma•Destruction of kinship models

GENOCIDE

The UN laid out a plan 1948

•Article 3•The following acts shall be punishable: •(a) Genocide; •(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; •(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; •(d) Attempt to commit genocide; •(e) Complicity in genocide. •Article 4•Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. •Article 5•The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3. •Article 6•Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.

But that didn’t stop very much……Carlisle, PA Indian School Graduates,

1894

“When you destroy a person's language, it destroys their world view. They're left with only fragments. I speak Spanish, and I speak English. When you think in Spanish, it's totally different. When they leave the school and go back to the reservation, they're still Indian, but not anymore."

- Jorge Estevez (Taino), participant coordinator, Museum of the American Indian, New York, 2000

Carlisle Residential School, Carlisle, PA, 1879-1918

“Convert him in all ways but color into a white man.”

Capt. Richard H. Pratt

In 1973, 60,000 American Indian children are estimated to have been enrolled in an Indian boarding school.

Many large Indian boarding schools closed in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In 2007, 9,500 American Indian children lived in an Indian boarding school dormitory.

This includes 45 on-reservation boarding schools, 7 off-reservation boarding schools and 14 peripheral dormitories.

From 1879 to the present day, hundreds of thousands of American Indians are estimated to have attended an Indian boarding school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_boarding_school

Children in Schubenacadie Residential School, Nova Scotia

The erosion of Native American sovereignty was swift and unrelenting. Propelled by a hunger for land, gold, other natural resources, power and control, it swallowed up everything in its path, including communities, languages and religions. No matter the Nez Perce were distinct from the Navajo, the Seneca from the Seminole, the Coeur D'Alene from the Crow. They were Indian. They were one in their difference.

In the box “Race” on my Grandfather’s birth certificate is the following:

SauvageSauvage=Savage in French

Canadian Residential School Survivors at the apology by the government

What made it okay for them?

There was a general attitude by the dominant culture that Indigenous people were….

*Without soul*Less than the dominant culture*Lacking religion or spirituality and *Lacking access to Creator

Connecting this to how the creation of “otherism” (identity of one group created and

defined by another group outside itself) makes it possible to do inhumane things to people

because the “other” is not fully recognized as human.

Whether the term means “Savage” or “People of the Forest,” it is what was able to happen to

entire populations as a result of being labeled as something other than “my brother, my

sister, my relation.”

Canadian Government’s Response to the Survivors

June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologizes to Canada’s Inuit, Métis and other First Nations for abuses in

residential schools; the last of which closed in 1996

Funding for treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, alcohol

and other drug use and other behavioral health challenges accompanied the apology.

Survivors in Canada have applied for and received restitution.

Many Native communities in the US have decided to be proactive in their own healing since the US Government

response to the multitude of Indigenous lives that have been

negatively impacted by the mission/residential/boarding school experience has not been the same

White Bison & the Wellbriety Movement

•Four Journeys of the Sacred Hoop across the US

•The Wellbriety Training Institute with workshops and training on The Wellbriety Movement for Indians and Intergenerational Trauma (among many other offerings) as well as technical assistance and continuing education units.

•Journey for Forgiveness visiting the sites of the former boarding schools across the US with the creation of a DVD chronicling the stories of those who survived the atrocities of the residential school experience in the US and why forgiveness is a necessary element of healing

•Petition to the US Government urging the issuance of a formal apology to Indigenous people for the genocide of life, mind and spirit as a result of the residential school experience in the US ………and much more

•whitebison.org

•http://boardingschoolhealingproject.org/

•American Indian Boarding Healing Project

•http://elders.uaa.alaska.edu/reports/other_boarding-school-project.pdf

•http://www.incite-national.org/

……….and many more individual and collective tribal efforts