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The National Native Boarding School Healing Coalition will be sending teams to Minneapolis this month to collect stories from boarding school survivors.
As KNBA’s Rhonda McBride reports, they recently spent a week in Anchorage to listen and learn.
About 20 people came to the Alaska Native Heritage Center to share their stories about boarding school abuse, some for the very first time.
Denise Lajimodiere is one of the oral historians for this project, and says survivors ask her why, after all these years, they are ready to talk.
“And they said, I don’t know why I’m telling you. And I said, because we asked.”
Lajimodiere has heard more than a hundred different stories and bits and pieces of Jim Labelle’s story, when he served on the Healing Coalition’s board.
When the National Native Boarding School Healing Coalition sends teams to collect survivor stories, they begin with a dancing and other cultural practices to create a space for sharing. (Photo: Rhonda McBride)
Now, she will document his entire story.
“I’m glad that he will get his story get reported formally – that his kids and grandkids and anybody that wants to know about what happened to us will be able to access his story.”
A story about how he was taken away from his family when he was eight years old, along with his younger brother, and sent to the Wrangell Institute in Southeast Alaska, where children were physically and sexually abused.
LaBelle first disclosed what happened about twenty years ago. But back then, he wasn’t always believed.
“A lot of people saying, including some of our own Native people saying, ‘That happened a long time ago, get over it. So how do you get over losing ties to your family. How do you get over losing your identity?’”
But LaBelle kept telling the story, so that others could tell their stories. Indigenous researchers like Benjamin Jacuk calls boarding school abuse one of America’s best kept secrets.
“In order to heal, we need to know what we’re healing from.”
Before sharing their stories, boarding school survivors like Jim LaBelle were smudged as a form of protection. (Photo: Rhonda McBride)
LaBelle says his story is one of many.
“I’m hoping my story, collectively with all the other stories that are gathered together, will go into the future so that future historians, researchers and policy makers can see the harm that was done.”
Jim LaBelle believes, for many Native families, boarding schools are the root cause of intergenerational trauma, homelessness and Alaska’s high rate of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Personally, he knows of boarding school students, who later wound up on the streets of Anchorage and died.
Project leaders call Jim Labelle’s story a gift – one that was given at great cost, that will be honored and respected in a permanent collection of oral histories at the nation’s capital. LaBelle and all the other boarding school survivors will be offered emotional support in the coming weeks, should they need it.
There will also be regular check-ins.
“These kinds of things are never the end. They’re the beginning – the beginning of a new future for all of Alaska Native peoples.”
Colorado River in Utah. (Photo: Ken Lund / Flickr)
Six tribes that use water from the Colorado River have signed an agreement with the river’s Upper Basin states.
Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico are promising to work together on sharing the shrinking river in the future.
KUNC’s Alex Hager reports for the Mountain West News Bureau.
Tribal leaders say it’s a good step since Indigenous people have long been excluded from talks about managing the river.
Avery Tafoya is a councilmember with the Jicarilla Apache Nation.
“It does open the door for all of us to have our voices heard and to be at the decision making table. And I do believe it’s going to have an impact.”
The new alliance comes amid contentious talks about the future of the Colorado River.
More than half of the thirty tribes that use its water have co-signed a letter asking the federal government for better representation going forward.
Berryessa expansion. (Photo: Bob Wick)
California tribes are among those applauding the Biden administration’s announcement that President Joe Biden will use his authority under the Antiquities Act to expand the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in California.
The actions will protect nearly 120,000 acres.
The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in Northern California has a connection to the Berryessa Snow Mountain monument, where ceremonies are practiced and sites were once trading routes.
Tribal chairman Anthony Roberts, in a statement, thanked the president for the expansion.
In Southern California, Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians President Rudy Ortega Jr. also thanked Biden for the expansion of the San Gabriel Mountains monument saying his people have long cared for the area.
Other California tribes are seeking additional designations in the state.
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