President Biden’s boarding school speech took me by surprise. I never thought a president of the United States would offer an actual apology for funding Indian boarding schools for 150 years.
Within those buildings our native ancestors’ spirits were taken and their mouths washed out with soap for daring to speak their own languages. Our cultures went into those schools and most of our ways never came back out again.
Biden said this apology was “one of the most consequential things he had done as president.” AND he launched a federal investigation on the Indian boarding system, beginning in Oklahoma, since we had nearly 80 schools here, more than any other state.
His words were triggering. My father attended a military boarding school, while his mother, a fluent Cherokee speaker entered the Cherokee’s Female Seminary and left never speaking the language again and never allowing her children to either.
Myself I am the product of a boarding school experience. What happened there put me on the road to become a school counselor.
My first year in Teacher Corps I was having trouble finding housing, so as a last resort, I actually knocked on the door of the BIA dormitory and asked if I could serve as afterschool tutor or night help in exchange for room and board.
During some of the last days of the BIA Boarding School era, a mile outside Ignacio, Colorado on the Southern Ute Reservation, down the dark halls, I could hear the 6 year olds crying in their rooms. The young ones missed home and family and got me padding down the hall in sock feet to find them to comfort. The older students found joy with the friends they made there. All three languages Ute, Apache and Navajo could be heard shouted out loud as they looked for the brooms and other house cleaning tools during Saturday mornings.
Many of these young people knew they could benefit from counseling, but had only the federally funded counselor who worked 8:00 to 4:00 while the children were in school a mile away most of that time!
It was these native children who changed my life when they wished I could be their counselor.
I didn’t become their counselor, but spent 27 years being other native kids’ counselor, in Sapulpa and later of course here in Miami.
There is a deep harm and a trauma when your lifeways are removed or missing and a longing can arise in some and drive them to rebel against society, yet some choose a path to seek what was lost and bring it back like bringing back the long lost secrets and standing tall to unveil them.
All these facts are hard to take, so let’s do some cultural adjustments.
What if there was a movie like GREASE with a jaunty song about the Boarding School Drop Out?
Who ran away, found a way to dodge and run back home and stay put and keep the language and old ways and escape the stacks of trauma generations stuff in drawers way beneath their socks and underwear. This Boarding School Drop Out became the community HERO, the Brave one who got away. The Boarding School Drop Out saved the culture and became the elder who gave it all back to the young ones who approached to learn the old ways.
I am liking that song. The tune is catchy.
And it is not one we will have to create. The Indian Boarding Schools of today, the few left integrate culture into the daily lives of those who attend. Students attend by choice. And for some it is the heritage passed down from parents and grandparents to leave their homes and take up the dormitory life. Some have become the “finishing” school for our finest.
A woman I have learned much of my Indian doings from attended first one and then another boarding school, where she fondly speaks of learning to weave, a craft she could probably to this day do in her sleep.
A fellow friend of mine became so excited when his mother who had been widowed, still with 2 younger children to raise, told him he could go to Indian school. His excitement? This full blood Cherokee who spoke the language fluently was thrilled to go, so he could “learn to be an Indian.” Only to find not a word of his native language would be allowed to be spoken. I asked what did you learn? He learned to make his bed so taunt that a quarter could bounce off it.
Resilience? He kept his language and he and his mother wrote letters using only the Cherokee syllabary the rest of her life.
He wasn’t a Boarding School Drop Out, he was a fluent speaker that wasn’t broken by the experience. We’ll have to work him into that song, too.
There is a place for the ones that Got Away and Took the Language back home with them! And there ought to be a song that starts out, “Boarding School Drop Out…”
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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