Washington state acknowledges government’s role in Indian Boarding School abuse by Frank Hopper

An old Tulalip man stands in front of a painting at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Tears stream down his face. The man’s grown son approaches, concerned about why his father is crying. The son looks at the painting. In it a cowboy drives cattle in a driving snowstorm.

“What’s it mean?” the son asks.

The father says, “That was me when I was 8 years old.”

When Washington State Senator John McCoy, D-Tulalip, told that story on the Senate floor last week, his eyes filled with tears. He was the son who found his father weeping and the memory of it never left him.

In that instant years ago, McCoy felt the depth of his father’s loss at being abducted from his home on the Tulalip Indian Reservation as a little boy and forcibly taken to the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. It was a wound felt by thousands of Native American boarding school victims, one passed down to Sen. McCoy, and one he became determined to heal.

Native American boarding schools - the forever trauma

Sen. McCoy’s story came as part of the adoption of Senate Resolution 8703, “Remembering the surviving children of Indian Boarding Schools,” which acknowledges the government’s role in the abuse of Native children at state-funded boarding schools.

Sen McCoy (Tulalip) speaks on Boarding School resolution

“Between 1869 and the 1960s, Native American children were removed from their homes and families, often involuntarily, and placed in Boarding Schools far from their homes… where children were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen as representing traditional or cultural practices, shorn of their hair, stripped of traditional clothing and all things and behaviors reflective of their native culture, and shamed for being Native American,” the resolution states.

“You’ve heard about it,” McCoy told members of the Senate. “Yes, it did happen. And consequently it’s the forever trauma. It’s the part of our lives that just won’t go away.”

The growing movement for acknowledgement

“Similar resolutions have been passed in recent years by many national Native American organizations and tribes.” Crystal Florez, of the White Earth Ojibwe Tribe and a member of Sen. McCoy’s staff, said in a recent interview.

Florez was the principal author of the resolution. With the help of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, she researched previous resolutions acknowledging the dark history of the program.

The main difference with her resolution is it includes a specific date when the federal government’s responsibility officially began. On March 3, 1819, the Indian Civilization Fund Act was signed into law to provide money to various Christian churches to open residential schools for Native children.

“This resolution acknowledges what happened. It acknowledges an important date that we should remember and it also acknowledges the survivors, the living survivors, and then those who have passed on, of boarding schools, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. And I’m part of that,” Florez explained.

Acknowledging means breaking the silence

Florez suspects her grandparents were boarding school victims, but doesn’t know for sure.

“My family doesn’t really talk about that. And my grandparents have passed on, so it’s kind of lost history,” she said.

Florez feels this reluctance to talk about what happened is the main obstacle to healing. Victims often don’t want to relive the trauma. Also, feelings of guilt and low self-esteem from years of physical and sexual abuse add to the reluctance.

As a result, families often carry a vague sense of guilt for generations without knowing the full details why. 

“I still have a lot of unanswered questions,” Florez admits, “and I know I’m not the only one. I know there are a lot of families like that.”

Will the federal government ever apologize?

Although many Native organizations have made similar resolutions, such as the National Congress of American Indians in 2016, Florez knows of only one other governmental body that has done so.

1893 - 1953. Pipestone Indian Training School campus, Pipestone, Minnesota. Pipestone County Historical Society

On October 7, 2015, the city of Seattle passed a resolution that also acknowledges the harms inflicted and includes a call for the federal government “to promote truth and healing, and to provide and fund reconciliation, redress, and justice for those harms.”

That resolution came about mainly due to the advocacy of Lakota Native rights protector and editor of Last Real Indians, Matt Remle.

Last summer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom formally apologized to Native Americans for his state’s brutal violence against them.

In 2007, Canada passed the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which provided financial compensation for Canadian First Nations boarding school victims and also established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document abuses and help reconcile relations between Native people and the government. 

In 2009, as then chairman of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators, Sen. McCoy was a vocal supporter of the Native American Apology Resolution, which was signed by President Obama. That resolution did not mention Indian boarding schools and no financial settlement was included.

A resolution blessed with tears

In a later interview, the senator provided a few additional details about his father’s experience at the Chemawa Indian School.

“He was taken there. He was forcefully taken there. He talked about when he would get beaten for speaking the language. And then when he was 8 or 9 he ran away and made his way back to the Tulalip Indian Reservation.”

But after he returned, the young boy on horseback driving cattle in a driving snowstorm was no more. The beatings he received and the humiliation he endured changed him.

When McCoy recalled in the Senate chamber how he found his father weeping at the loss of such an idyllic childhood, he himself wept. The tears his father shed as an old man gazing at the painting years ago now reverberated across generations to become the tears of the son, now an old man himself. In that way, tears born of Historical Trauma blessed the resolution.

Frank Hopper is a Tlingit freelance writer, born in Juneau, Alaska. He has two cousins who were boarding school victims.