True Left

On the the cover of Donna Council’s new book is a picture of a little Indian girl. With her big, sorrowful eyes, puzzled expression and a bottom lip that trembles with hidden tears, she is the scared, abused, confused child Council was when she was a child. Council and her four little sisters were taken from their parents and sent to Marty, the St. Paul’s Indian MIssion boarding school about 70 miles south of the family home in Mitchell, S.D.

Donna was 12 at the time and her terrible years at the school included bullying by other kids and nuns and dozens of rules that brought punishment if broken. The frightened children, who didn’t understand why they were taken from their homes, were told their parents didn’t love them and treated as though they were “just Indians.”

The U.S. government-run boarding schools for Indian children, begun in the 19th century to integrate the Indians into white society (which meant taking their land), lasted into the early 1990s in some places. Nobody knows how many children died, or were killed, in those bleak buildings that housed three generations of Indian children, some of whom committed suicide.

Yet, there was no one to protect them. The Catholic Church controlled the schools and the kids’ lives. If they survived, many grew up to feel worthless and afraid. Like Council, many later learned they had PTSD but they had stuffed their feelings The author’s mother and grandparents were in the boarding schools but never discussed their experiences. “They kept their pain deeply hidden inside,” Council writes of the generations before her.

Now, she is opening the door to let light shine into those dark corridors, dormitories and punishment rooms.

Council grew up, had two children and was a counselor for Indian youth. But that little Indian girl was always inside her. She acted like an adult, but the generational trauma from the boarding school never went away.

Last week's release of the report on the purposeful and deliberate plan by the federal government to destroy Native families also brought back memories of an interview I did with American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks (Ojibwa) in the fall of 2009 at Grand Valley State University. During the interview, Banks recounted his experiences attending various Indian boarding schools. He told me the experience caused him to maintain an indifferent attitude towards his mother because he felt she had abandoned him during the years he attended Indian boarding schools.

Banks recalled on certain occasions, school officials would announce a mail call so that students could get mail from home. He would show up, but he never received any mail. He felt as if his mother did not love him.

Years passed by and he eventually was able to go home when he was in his late teen years. He said the first day home was awkward, but on the second day home, his mother made him a blueberry pie because she knew it was his favorite. He felt then perhaps things could return to normal. So, he began talking to her and asked her why didn’t she ever send him any letters or try to bring him home. She told him she did.

He did not believe her.

For the rest of their lives together, he told me, he would look at his mother and have a sense of indifference towards her. This feeling lasted until she died.

Decades later, while he was in his 70s, Banks saw an Internet advertisement with information about how he could obtain his own Indian boarding school records. He followed through on the offer and received several boxes with his school records.

In the boxes, Banks found 14 unopened letters from his mother. He took them to his mother’s grave, where he sat in a lawn chair reading them one by one. Inside of one of the letters was a money order to pay for a bus ticket home for him.

In that moment, Banks, one of the greatest Native American warriors of the last century, wept at his mother’s grave and asked her for forgiveness. He had been lied to by the Indian boarding school officials, not his mother.