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>> Imagine being a child forced from your family and placed in a military style boarding school where the goal was to destroy your language and get you to unlearn everything about your culture, even if it took abuse to do it.

That's how survivors describe life in an Indian boarding school, a network of government institutions designed to assimilate indigenous people into American society.

Tonight, Linda Byron brings us the story of a Renton man whose parents, grandparents, and siblings went to Indian boarding schools designed to strip them of their language, culture, and customs.

And Saint Martin's University, Director of Diversity, John Hopkins, has published several papers on the reconciliation of the Indian boarding school phenomena.

He's joined by members of the Puyallup and Blackfeet tribes.

Indian boarding schools is the discussion next, on Northwest Now.

[ Music ] From about 1879 and well into the 20th century, thousands of Native youths from all across America and Canada were taken to Indian boarding schools for religious indoctrination and job training.

The goal was to have indigenous children, "civilized" out of their savagery and assimilated into American society.

While it's shocking to hear now, kill the Indian and save the man, was a frequently quoted philosophy of an era.

Of course now it's clear it was cultural genocide, and on top of that, many of the children also suffered emotional and physical abuse at the hands of their would be civilizers, who in some cases, buried those who didn't survive in unmarked graves.

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior launched a new investigation into that earlier this year.

There is a significant local story here as well; Northwest Now contributor, Linda Byron, now brings us the story of a Western Washington man who is still overcoming the legacy of shame and trauma inflicted on generations of his family at the boarding schools.

>> My name is, Arlie Neskahi, but my traditional name given to me by my maternal grandfather, [inaudible], is [foreign name].

And I'm from the Dine Nation.

>> Arlie Neskahi grew up in the Town of Ship Rock, on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

But until early adulthood says he felt estranged from his Native culture.

The result of generations of forced assimilation.

>> They always thought that we were filthy, that our culture was filthy, our language was filthy.

This is my mother's mother and this is my mother's father.

To us he's [foreign word] and that means he's my father's father.

So this is my dad, so he went to boarding school.

>> So he went to boarding school, he went to boarding school, he went to boarding school.

>> Yes.

>> Neskahi's grandfathers were among thousands of children taken from their homes by the U.S. government.

>> There's a lot of stories of children crying, of children in terror.

>> Forced into military style boarding schools, many run by churches.

>> Have to strip all their clothes, and then they were given baths in hardcore soap and some people say lye baths, and after that then their hair was cut.

>> Neskahi says his own parents met at Navajo Methodist Mission School in New Mexico, where beatings were common and they were forced to abandon their customs and language.

>> That's a common story among many families that to protect, to protect us from harm and punishment and shame, they didn't speak to us in our languages.

Yeah.

>> Yet even after the government started phasing out forced attendance, Neskahi's parents sent six of their kids to the same school they'd attended.

>> And so because it became normalized that this is the way things are done, parents then sent their kids to boarding school just like they were sent to boarding school.

>> But after Neskahi was born, in 1957, his parents began to question that practice, choosing to send him and two siblings who followed, to a nearby public school instead.

>> My father, [inaudible] Neskahi Jr. And this is my mother, Mary [inaudible] Neskahi, and he's wearing a buckskin shirt and an eagle bonnet that was given to him by the [foreign name] elders.

>> Neskahi's journey of discovery led him to coach and council others, especially troubled youth.

>> What I found with this then is the keys to resolving anger is to listen to it, understand it.

>> And by identifying their needs, help them learn ways of coping.

>> What is the sadness signaling to us that we need, that was taken away from us?

Can we get it back or do we need to grieve and move on?

>> Neskahi says to survive, his ancestors learned don't feel, don't trust, don't talk.

Which is why moving forward sometimes requires looking backward.

>> They say get over it, to me it's just beginning.

And the truth is just now coming forward and being told.

>> More than anything, Neskahi says indigenous people want to be heard.

[ Singing ] He sings a song he wrote, of searching, yearning, and a request.

>> I'm asking for healing for our people.

I'm asking for understanding and I'm asking that after all, as we go through this together, that we can re-knit ourselves together in a way that's even stronger than we've ever been now.

>> For Northwest Now, I'm Linda Byron.

[ Singing ] >> Now coming up on Tuesday, December 7, at 11:00 pm, KBTC is airing an independent lens program called Home From School, the Children of Carlisle.

The film is about the Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the first of its kind.

>> When they brought these children here, you know, they took everything away from them.

>> I imagine them scared, hungry, just trying to understand what was happening.

>> The Arapahoe, we had our own way of life.

We live under this pipe and its teachings.

>> They tried everything to get rid of us.

They resorted to taking our children.

>> Native Americans were, we're gone, we don't exist anymore in this nation.

We exist only in books, on TV, in museums.

>> The children were much more vulnerable to all the European diseases.

>> When one died and then the next one died, you know, and they all died within a year of each other, you know, they needed each other.

>> They're buried here.

They've been here too long, it's time for them to go home.

[ Music ] >> The U.S. Government, Washington State, the City of Seattle, the State of California, and the Nation of Canada, are just a few of the jurisdictions that have started the process of acknowledging the wrongs of the boarding school system, with Canada reaching a 3 billion dollar settlement with boarding school victims about a decade ago.

It all started with church sponsored mission schools in the early 1800s.

But the U.S. Government eventually got involved, building a nationwide boarding school system, where youth were sometimes intentionally cross shipped to break ties with the tribe and their family.

Here in Western Washington, there were several boarding schools on-- [ Foreign Names ] -- tribal lands.

But one of the largest was the Cushman School in Tacoma, where the Emerald Queen Casino now stands.

Joining us now is Saint Martin's University Social Justice Adjunct Professor and Associate Dean of Students, John Hopkins, whose academic work involves the boarding school issue and reconciliation.

Amber Hayward, a member of the Puyallup tribe who is working to restore and document the Puyallup's Native language, and Leon Rattler, a tribal elder from Montana's Blackfeet Nation, who has family that were placed into the Indian boarding school system.

Welcome all of you, to Northwest Now.

It's great to have a discussion about a very important topic and one that's emerging with more information as more stories are collected over time.

And we've got a documentary of course coming up, Home From School, and that is part of this discussion as well.

John, I'm going to start with you; how did you get interested in this area of study and help us understand, what does reconciliation maybe look like possible when we're talking about Indian boarding schools?

>> Well, personally I'm a citizen of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, we're Dakota people from South Dakota and my father was in Indian education for 30 years and I suppose as much as I resisted going into the field of my father, here I am doing teaching and researching and indigenous studies.

I would say certainly as in the scholarship I think what drew me was that personal, personal searching I suppose, for a deeper understanding of my own lived experience.

And that leads me to, for many years, thinking about reconciliation.

Of course we have a number of examples in Canada for example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission up there.

The United States has yet to broach that topic collectively.

But reconciliation as far as I'm understanding this term, is one that begins with the indigenous voice speaking about the experience, for example, of Indian boarding schools.

But all sorts of other you know, experiences in the, what we call the settler colonial structure.

So it's not just schooling, it's all sorts of historical events and strategies that took place.

And reconciliation begins with the, what we call the counter voice, speaking back and speaking from a place of indigeneity.

>> You know, the word that you just said, really jumped out at me, strategies.

>> Yes.

>> This was a strategy wasn't it?

>> It was very much a strategy, the strategy was well, to use the famous Carlisle architect, Captain Richard Pratt, was to kill the Indian and save the man.

That was the strategy.

>> Amber, the Puyallup tribe is really done a deep dive and a great job in terms of saving the language, documenting the language, teaching the language.

Lots of online resources that we're going to give the website for in a little bit.

How does the language piece fit into the Indian boarding school phenomenon and maybe that strategy piece?

Talk a little bit about the language.

>> Absolutely, so, both of my grandmothers on my mother and my father's side both, attended Indian boarding schools.

My mother's side, my grandma came from the Flathead Reservation in Montana and was brought all the way to Cushman Boarding School on the [inaudible] Reservation.

My Puyallup grandmother was sent down to [inaudible] in Oregon.

And I don't believe either one of them spoke their ancestral language, they were heritage speakers so that means they heard it growing up but they were not able to you know, carry on conversations, they were able to make the sounds, they were not able to speak in full conversation in their language.

And again, they both went to Indian boarding schools.

My maternal grandmother, who came from the Flathead Reservation, her mother and her grandmother also went to Carlisle as well and boarding schools on the Flathead Reservation.

So for her, she said that language is already removed several generations before it even got to her.

>> And in the boarding schools, there was punishment consequences and a strategic piece, I keep coming back to that word, to not speak that language, to not carry it on, to let it fade into the past.

>> Absolutely, and so the research that we did on the Cushman Indian boarding school and hospital and St. George's Indian Boarding School here in the Puyallup Reservation, a lot of the elders that speak to us and interviewed with us said that the Navajo and the Alaska Natives that came all the way to the Cushman Boarding School, were treated really, really badly because they didn't speak English well.

Most of these other children were able to you know, speak English but the consensus was that these two groups that predominantly did not speak English were being treated pretty poorly at the boarding schools.

And obviously English was only allowed in the boarding schools.

These particular elders expressed that they would get in trouble if they spoke their ancestral language.

>> Leon, What's your family's experience during the era of Indian boarding schools?

>> Well, I go back to where again, our grandparents and handed down the knowledge that was given to us and the experiences they went through.

We talk about the cultural understanding of that, or the impression of that, one of the biggest things I take a look at is the re-education of ourselves and you know, what is our heritage?

What is unique about our heritage and why is that important to us?

You know, who's my grandmother?

And what song does she have in her family?

Who's my grandfather?

What song is my grandfather's song?

On my mother's side and father's side, we pass that on down to generation to generation.

We've lost a lot of that because of the fact of colonization as part of the wipe out of language, cultural tradition, [inaudible] was given to us, basically turned everything upside down and inside out and weren't allowed to speak or practice any of our traditional ways of life.

You know?

>> Or remember.

>> Well there's some memories there, but not very much you know, and some of the things I'm doing today is I'm putting those memories back together.

I'm glad you said that, you know, because the small piece of the work that I'm doing right now is writing what those memories are.

Putting those in together in four different areas; in the social, emotional, physical, and mental parts of healing.

And what's unique about that for our people to understand why we should bring that back to ourselves so that we can actually feel the unconditional love and trust that we once lost, once had I should say.

And then we lost that due to the fact of non-practice.

>> And the division and the separating of the people and the tribes and their culture.

You know, that's a perfect segue, you did it for me, into this section about collecting stories.

The Home From School documentary on PBS that we're going to be airing is an example of making that diligent effort to save those stories.

Talk about the importance of collecting stories and anecdotes and records and artifacts to promote healing.

There's a social justice piece to this, of course, a historical piece, and there's a personal piece as well.

So John, why is it important that we go back and try to reassemble culture or language or stories about these times?

>> The first thing I would say is that it's still living.

You know, so those of us who did not go through Indian boarding schools, we have relatives who have, right?

So most of my family members are products of boarding schools, on my wife's side almost every member of the generation one or two ago went through the boarding school.

So for us, it's not just a past sort of collective story, it's a story that we live with every time we see our parents, our grandparents, we are talking, whether we're doing it explicitly or not, this is a living sort of experience and so I remember the first time that my wife heard her father speak about his boarding school experience, this was a very traumatic moment for her, right?

He shared it with me, but he wouldn't share it with her because the story was so powerful.

So as I think about it, the collective story means that we're still here, it means that we're still surviving, we're still resisting, the very fact that we exist means that we are resisting these forces, these colonizing structures that no only happened in the past but they reverberate in our current realities.

So the collective stories are also ways of healing, right?

Listening to the stories is a way of thinking about how we work through the trauma that endures.

And so, and we do it, the trick is, is to do it together, to do it in a collective space where we're sitting at the feet of our elders, we're sitting with them and we're listening to how they are helping us understand the enduring presence of what it means to be Native.

And so those stories are power, those stories are theory, those stories enliven us, they make us who we are.

So that's why I think they need to continue.

>> Amber, same question for you but in terms of collecting the language, collecting the artifacts, I know it's been a massive undertaking for the tribe to, the oral traditions, the recordings, writing, trying to come up-- I was talking with the people from the Puyallups not long ago about another project I was working on, getting the typeface set for the language.

Huge job.

Talk a little bit about the importance of that and how collecting those stories, the stories of the language, feeds into healing and why that's important.

>> Absolutely, so definitely because of the boarding school era, our languages were removed from us and fortunately for the Puyallup tribal people, our language always was around somewhere, it never fully, completely left us.

We do not have any first language speakers left, which means that was their first language, definitely impacted by the boarding school era for sure.

And then that you know, the stigma of not passing it on to your kids because you don't want them to be harmed, you know, you were hurt when you tried to speak your language, you don't want your kids to be hurt, you want them to succeed.

There's a lot of shame in all of these different emotions that go along with passing that language on.

And so fortunately for the Lushootseed language, which covers you know, 13 different tribes here in the Puget Sound, we had incredible documentation, we had elders that did speak up that were first language speakers, that allowed linguists or anthropologists to record them.

And some it was their lifelong goal was to continue to language on and make sure these resources were here for people like me today, who I've never met them but we sit here and listen to their recordings.

There is lots of documentation on the Lushootseed language, so we were really blessed to have these type of resources.

>> Yeah, some of the languages, the Native American languages, depending on where you're from and the tribe are just disappeared, right?

They're not, we have nothing.

Is that the case?

>> There are some cases, yes.

>> So I guess, in a strange way, I guess we're lucky in Western Washington that the documentation and what you've been able to do is there.

You know, we, that piece about collecting stories feeds me into this idea about generational trauma.

And I'd like everybody to address this because I know it's something you hear a lot.

Leon, there's a lot of pushback on the idea about going through this reconciliation or collecting those stories for people who want to say that the past is the past and see reconciliation and reparations in cases like the Japanese interment and Canadian IBS schools, World War II era Jewish people, they see that as an actual setback to racial and cultural progress.

What's your view on that?

Do we need to just let the past be the past or no, it's important that we go through these processes and we have these discussions?

>> For the people I know within Indian country and unknown [inaudible] themselves, you can change the mind but you can't change the heart.

That bloodline goes way back and the heritage of that again is that when we start to self-medicate ourselves with alcohol and drugs through that pain of loss of heritage, loss of identity, loss of land, loss of culture, loss of belief systems, all of these different types of losses that we've had, and still be able to maintain some type of identity today, took a lot [inaudible] >> It's a miracle.

>> Absolutely, absolutely.

>> Yeah.

>> Our language and you know, for us we had to start to teach ourselves how to interpret the signs and the symbols so we could understand what the stories were about and how we can read [inaudible], what was unique about them, what was unique about the colors, what was unique about the food, what was unique about the clothing, the housing-- >> And the meanings.

>> Oh absolutely.

So when we talk about this and the importance of that is that, be able to walk today and have the pride, the type of pride that you have in your heart, is something that's very, very powerful.

Nothing can put it down, and the mind I always say, as in the educational world, it's a fool, it's an idiot, because it will change on us all the time, but the heart never changes and so for a lot of us, we had to stand up and hold that very close to us.

>> Education, circling back to you John, you know, we're in the middle of this big cultural war deal in education and I'm sure you hear it too; why do we need cultural studies?

Why do we need to have social justice?

Why do we need to bring, dredge all this up because all it's doing is making, is dividing us, it's not uniting us?

What's your take on that?

>> Well, the take, it's a, obviously a very difficult conversation to navigate but I would say from an intellectual research point of view, the truth matters.

And so if you are going to seriously investigate what it means to be a, say a citizen of a nation state, thinking about who we are, our identity, right, requires us to look very closely, and the word that I use often is reckon with the fact of our past and what that means for us.

And so to avoid that, to side-step that is not to be who you are.

It's also to erase, it's another erasure, another move silencing, so when we think about things like rights, right?

The rights of citizens or the right to, you know, whatever the right is, well there are stories and experiences and occurrences in which those rights have been denied.

So what does it mean to truly live in a democratic nation state in which these things are taken seriously when you avoid certain perspectives, certain groups, from that discourse?

So, so navigating that is to appeal to the very nature of who we think we are.

Well, that requires us to look very honestly at who we have been and how that carries on to the present.

>> And I think that's just a very simple truth that you speak there.

The truth matters.

>> The truth matters.

>> Let's know the truth.

>> That's right.

>> Yeah.

In the educational piece, Amber, how do we get this right?

You know, many tribes are running their own schools now, so how do we get the balance between culture and tradition but learning today's new technology, I mean it's a different world for everybody.

How do we, how do we bring those together?

What's the right answer?

>> So if you go google any of our tribes, you know, you would hope to find something but I feel like we have to share our own stories, and so until the tribes are ready to share our own stories and produce our own materials and resources and start connecting with these public schools or whatever schools or our communities in general, that's when the healing and learning starts to happen and so presently that's what we're working on right now.

My kids all went to our tribal school and then I put them into the public school and it's a complete culture shock and they have to code switch you know, and then you're in a sea of kids and there's, they don't know that my kids are tribal members.

And so just again, making those connections and using our, I guess authority and our influence that we have in the spaces and circles that we have immediate connection with is a really good starting place.

And so that's what we're working on right now.

>> Trying to somehow keep a foot in both worlds and having one world inform the other a little bit about that.

That's a, yeah, that image just came into my head, don't ask me why.

Alright everybody, great conversation.

I appreciate you for coming to Northwest Now and thank you very much.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

>> Let me end with another reminder to watch the documentary; Home From School, the Children of Carlisle, on KBTC, that's Tuesday night, December 7, at 11:00 pm.

If you want more on this topic, the Puyallup tribe is putting together a very comprehensive curriculum and teaching resource at puyalluptriballanguage.org, it is a deep dive into this topic with a very local connection for those of us living and working here in the South Sound.

In the end, one might make the argument that there were good intentions in the founding of the Indian boarding school system.

The bottom line, I'll refer you to the old saying about where the road paved with good intentions ultimately leads.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

To watch this program again or to share it with others, Northwest Now can be found on the web at kbtc.org and be sure to follow us on Twitter @NorthwestNow.

Thanks for taking a closer look on this edition of Northwest Now, until next time, I'm Tom Layson, thanks for watching.

[ Music ]