A look at the nearly two-year ‘Road to Healing’
Kalle Benallie
ICT
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has been conducting her “Road to Healing” tour for more than a year, meeting with Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian survivors of U.S. boarding schools to finally tell their stories and experiences that have largely gone unheard.
Between 1819 through the 1970s, the government operated 408 boarding schools in 37 states. Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), have visited some of those states since July 2022. They started in Anadarko, Oklahoma at the Riverside Indian School and continued that year to Michigan and South Dakota.
Then in 2023, they visited Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, California, Alaska and New Mexico on Oct. 29.
Her tour came to an end with the final stop in Bozeman, Montana in early November. Wizipan Garriott, principal deputy assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, was also in attendance.
Transcripts are available from Haaland’s nine stops. About 215 people shared testimonies about their own Indian boarding school experiences or experiences from their family or friends. Hundreds have heard their stories in person.
New Mexico is the state with the third most Indian boarding schools with 52. Oklahoma is first with 95 and Arizona is second with 59. The number includes schools that were federally operated as well as those operated by church institutions, in which the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition identified. It also raised the total number of Indian boarding schools to 523.
People carry the Boarding School Healing Totem Pole to later raise it at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, Alaska. Oct. 22, 2023. (Joaqlin Estus, ICT)
Haaland first announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in June 2021. Almost a year later, the first volume of an investigative report was released which called for connecting communities with trauma-informed support as well as creation of a permanent oral history from survivors.
“I want you all to know that I am with you on this journey,” Haaland told the crowd in her Oklahoma stop. “I am here to listen, to listen with you, to grieve with you … Federal Indian boarding school policies have touched every Indigenous person. I know some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry the trauma in our hearts.”
Some people have talked about their physical and sexual abuse, how they were threatened to go to the cemetery if they reported their rapes, traditional clothing being burned, siblings separated, hearing crying at night from the children and more.
Survivors and their descendants are offered additional testimony behind closed doors to offer privacy.
But through the suffering, the survivors and their loved ones are able to find healing or comfort at the hearings. Haaland’s historic visits, where testimonies of boarding school survivors are taken down in federal record for the first time, allow direct acknowledgement from the very government that orchestrated it.
Related:
— Deb Haaland’s Road to Healing tour stops in Arizona
— Arizona boarding schools survivors and descendants speak up
— Road to Healing: Deb Haaland pledges boarding school truths will be uncovered
— Hearing on boarding schools wraps up with healing totem pole raising
— Survivors tell grim stories of boarding school experiences
— Deb Haaland visits Tulalip to hear from boarding school survivors
— Boarding school survivors: Stories will be heard
In Anchorage, Alaska, after the October hearing, people celebrated with a Dena’ina-Haida potlatch and the raising of a totem pole called “the Boarding School Healing Totem Pole.”
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Richard Chalyeesh Peterson, president of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, said the people are the solution to each other and “taking those hard topics and discussions of boarding schools and the abuse that happen, the loss of our languages, pulling that out of the dark and putting it into the light so that we can have those conversations is truly what's needed. It's truly what's going to happen to be healing for our people.”
Although Peterson said his attendance at the optional public Mt. Edgecumbe boarding school was not troubling; he said his mother was impacted negatively from her mother going to the Wrangell Institute.
“Federal Indian boarding school policies have touched every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland said in Washington. “My ancestors and many of yours endured the horrors of Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”
The Associated Press reported that a survivor in South Dakota who attended the St. Francis Indian Mission School shared her horrific experiences to hopefully get past them.
"But I let it go," Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier said. "I'm going to make it."
James Nells, Navajo, a U.S. combat veteran, carries an eagle staff as part of the color guard presentation beginning the "Road to Healing" hearing at Riverside Indian boarding school in Anadarko, Oklahoma, on Saturday, July 9, 2022. Survivors of boarding schools told U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, of the abuses they sustained at the schools. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember/ICT)
Donovan Archambault, chairman for the Fort Belknap tribal council and former chairman for the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, spoke about his experience at Haaland’s last stop in Montana. He said he was 11 years old in 1950 when he was sent from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation to a government-backed Native American boarding school in Pierre, South Dakota, where abusive staff forced him to abandon his community's language and customs.
Archambault emerged bitter from the experience and said he drank alcohol for more than two decades before he finally pulled his life together, earning a master's degree in education.
“It was probably the most brutal time of my whole life," Archambault recalled, “and it all stemmed from the trauma we suffered in the Pierre Indian School.”
The Interior said it plans to publish Volume 2 of the investigative report in the coming weeks before the year’s end. It will focus on burial sites, the schools’ impact on Indigenous communities and also try to account for federal funds spent on the troubled program.
The department also announced in September that the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition will create a permanent oral history collection to document and make accessible the experiences of the federal boarding school system. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History is in ongoing discussions about how to support this work.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs gave the coalition $3.7 million in grant funding, part of which the National Endowment for the Humanities made possible. In April 2023 the National Endowment for the Humanities committed $4 million to support the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.
“The Road to Healing has been an incredible opportunity to share with folks from across the country – and one that has left an indelible mark on how we will proceed with our work,” said Haaland in a press release. “This is one step, among many, that we will take to strengthen and rebuild the bonds within Native communities that federal Indian boarding school policies set out to break. Those steps have the potential to alter the course of our future.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story
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