Lyric Aquino
Underscore Native News
WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
On Aug. 25, The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) made its 14th stop on a 20-stop national tour in downtown Portland, becoming a place of remembrance and community. Children ran around the decorated banquet tables of the Hilton Embassy Suites, as elders joined together in conversation, laughter and prayer as a hand drum echoed through the second-level hallways.
“Our goal is to provide a safe space for survivors to share their story,” said NABS’ co-director Lacey Kinnart. “It’s to give them this opportunity to speak their truth and record it because a lot of times they’re sharing something for the very first time.”
Last November, NABS made a tour stop in Hilo, Hawaii, to interview Native Hawaiian attendees of boarding schools. Kinnart, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, said the language used to describe boarding schools in Hawaii is different than in the U.S. and Canada, with students referred to as “attendees” and their schools referred to as “reformatories” and “seminaries,” but the horrors remained the same.
Although Oregon was home to nine federal Indian boarding schools, Kinnart said the stop was important to gather stories from Native Hawaiians who live on the mainland and attended one of the seven reformatories on the islands.
For around 100 years, the U.S. government abducted Native children, kidnapping them from their homes and sending them to boarding schools to force them to assimilate. In these schools, Native children weren’t allowed to speak their Indigenous languages, stripping them of any aspects of their culture and identity, while many often suffered physical, mental and even sexual abuse.
By 1926, an estimated 60,000 or 83% of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools. There were more than 526 government-funded, and often church-run, schools in the U.S., in which many children lost their lives at the hands of the government.
“Indian boarding schools have been in this country and on this land. It’s American history,” said Kinnart. “It’s not just Native American history, and the general public deserves to know it.”
The collection is the first of its kind in the U.S. and is composed of oral history interviews from federal Indian boarding school survivors. It will be permanently housed in the Library of Congress within the next few years.
How the process works
According to NABS co-director Charlee Brissette, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, survivors use their interview time to achieve personal goals, including sharing their story to leave a legacy for their family, to pass down their story to future generations, to educate others about what happened in the schools they attended and to release a burden to find healing.
NABS strives to make the interview process as culturally sensitive as possible, with several steps in place to ensure that survivors are supported mentally and emotionally. A preliminary phone call is conducted with an oral historian to ensure the process is explained thoroughly and to address any questions.
Then, survivors travel onsite to visit where the NABS oral history project is taking place and spend time in the welcome room. Once at the site, survivors take professional portraits and are interviewed separately. Interviewees are then led to a space where the only people present are the interviewee, their support partner and the oral historians.
After the interview, they head to the quiet room and spend time with an Indigenous licensed clinical therapist who is trained in Indian boarding school trauma. They can spend as little or as much time as they need in the room. Then, survivors head back to the welcome room where they can have a snack or meal, depending on the time of the day, and receive an honorarium and travel stipend.
During the following weeks after the interview, oral historians reach back out to check on the survivors and follow-up. The process takes several months, during which time survivors receive a copy of their interview on an engraved flash drive or DVD, along with a transcript of their interview and a care package sent to their homes containing goods from Native artisans and crafters across Indian Country.
“They have that immediate care. But then even afterwards, they’ve gained a whole family,” Kinnart said. “It’s not like we come in and extract their story and leave. No, they’ve gained a whole family. They’ve gained grandchildren, they’re part of the family.”
Kinnart said recording these stories by Native people makes all the difference in how Native history is remembered and reported.
“I think it’s important for everybody to have access to information directly from the people that experienced it,” Kinnart said. “Oftentimes, the American history books are written about us, but not by us. They’re written historically that we’re not here anymore, or that Indian boarding schools are a thing of a long time ago. But no there’s still survivors here that are alive, that we can learn from, to not do it again and to not perpetuate the same things.”
If survivors or attendees weren’t able to make it to a past tour date, they can visit bit.ly/OHPsignup.