Cindy Sohappy was 16 when she died of acute alcohol poisoning at her
boarding school in December 2003.
After a six-month investigation and consideration of involuntary
manslaughter charges against federal employees of the U.S. Bureau of Indian
Affairs’ residential school, the U.S. Attorney announced this week that no
charges will be filed in the case.
The U.S. Inspector General in the Interior Department, where the BIA is the
largest agency, continues to investigate the role of the school’s employees
and policies in the student’s death.
Cindy Sohappy was in the 24-hour care of federal teachers and employees at
the Chemawa Indian School, which is located in a wooded area in Salem, Ore.
If anyone at the school noticed any signs of prior alcohol abuse, they
didn’t notify her relatives at the Warm Springs Reservation north of
Portland.
No adults missed her inside the school while she was outside drinking.
Someone of age bought the booze she drank on the federal school lands. No
security officers stopped her from getting drunk, so drunk that she could
not sober up on her own.
Some adult federal employees of the school left her behind bars in a
holding cell. They did not take her to a medical facility for observation
or detoxification. They did not even watch her to see if she was breathing
or choking. They left her behind in a jail-style, closet-sized room.
According to their own procedures, the Chemawa employees were supposed to
check on students in any of the four cells every 15 minutes.
A videotape of her holding cell shows that no one checked on her when she
started convulsing or when she stopped moving. Cindy Sohappy was left
behind bars for three full hours. When the grown-ups finally attended to
her, she was dead.
The legwork for the Inspector General’s final report has been done and
practically written by a team of investigative reporters of The Oregonian
newspaper, led by Kara Briggs, former President of the Native American
Journalists Association.
Briggs and the rest of the team uncovered the details surrounding young
Sohappy’s death and the neglect that contributed to it. The paper’s
reporting set the pace for all other coverage of the tragedy and the series
was cited for its excellence by CNN’s Aaron Brown in his review of front
pages around the country.
The BIA changed its policies and vowed never to use the holding cells
again.
Briggs tried to interview the newly installed head of the BIA, Interior
Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Dave Anderson, but was denied access
by his BIA press flak. When Anderson traveled to Chemawa a few months after
Sohappy died, Briggs didn’t think that he would say the paper had done a
good job or compliment her as the Indian reporter at the helm, but she did
expect him to answer her questions.
Instead, Briggs said she had to endure the “harassment (of) Anderson
telling me I was ‘culturally inappropriate’ for asking him questions about
the case.”
Briggs ought to be recognized by the Native American Journalists
Association with the Richard LaCourse investigative reporting award,
because the series is solid and the honor well deserved. NAJA also should
give her the award to send a signal to Anderson and other BIA officials
that they cannot treat Native reporters or Native women in that manner.
Sohappy never got the chance to be a woman or to have a profession or a
family. Briggs was trying to report on why and how that happened under the
care and responsibility of the federal government. Along the way, she
brought about changes in BIA policy that may save other young Native women
in federal boarding schools from Sohappy’s fate.
The “culturally inappropriate” charge was leveled by a Chippewa/Choctaw man
who, by his own account to Native students and tribal leaders, has only
been sober and proud of being Native American for less than 10 years.
This means that, when he was Lac Courte Oreilles Chippewa CEO – his major
tribal position before he made a success of his “Famous Dave’s” BBQ joints
– he was a self-hater and a practicing drunk and drug user who, as he tells
the tale on the BIA Web site, stole money from his wife’s purse to feed his
habits.
Anderson talked to the Chemawa students about not using alcohol or drugs,
and encouraged them to take pride in being Native Americans. Neither he nor
other BIA officials talked to them about Sohappy, and no federal employees
ever provided the Chemawa students with counseling to deal with her death.
Anderson made a small tour of Indian schools, using motivational techniques
from his LifeSkills Center for Leadership, where his “team facilitates
proven processes needed to empower and encourage youth to reach their full
potential.”
The top federal Indian official also proselytized to the students about
Christian beliefs. In a time when students in federal Indian boarding
schools should enjoy religious and cultural freedom, it is not the best
practice for a federal official to push non-traditional religions,
especially in settings where Native children were once beaten up and
starved for expressing their Native religions and cultures.
As part of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs’ oversight of the No
Child Left Behind Act and the effect of the BIA reorganization on the
education and well being of Native children, it should find out what
Interior and BIA officials are pushing on students in their care, why Cindy
Sohappy was left behind bars until she died and why no one is responsible
for that.
Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the
Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for Indian
Country Today.
