Road to Healing event draws more than 800 boarding school survivors and descendants

Aug. 14—PELLSTON — A journey like no other began Saturday for survivors of the U.S. Indian boarding schools.

Descendants and survivors packed into the gymnasium of Pellston High School to share their experiences during the second stop on the U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's Road to Healing tour.

The room emitted aromas of fresh-lit sage and the sound of muffled discussion between young and old. Traditional drummers carried out song.

Until now, former students of the institutions were largely ignored, surviving separation from family, culture and language, and navigating through generations of trauma left by the legacy of the boarding schools.

Kim Fyke, an elder of Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians, donned a shirt that read "survivor of the holy schools."

Fyke, 61, is a survivor of Holy Childhood, one of the longest-operated Indian boarding schools in Michigan. The institution once housed thousands of Native American students from throughout the Great Lakes region.

She described physical and sexual abuse at the hands of school employees. School leaders knew of the abuse but did nothing to stop it, she said.

"I was once locked in a cooler at the institution, beaten, and deprived of all love ... I want answers why, why did they do this to little children?"

As a result of the institute, Fyke said she never knew her own language or culture, and faced a lot of emotional turmoil.

"We are still suffering from the generational legacies left from these schools ... I've lost so many people to these institutions."

Fyke said it was incredibly stressful to attend the event, "but I need to be here, for all of the people that were there when I was there and cannot talk, many of them are lost in addiction or took their own life."

About a dozen people spoke publicly Saturday at the hearing, with Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland presiding over a crowd of more than 800 people. Additional testimony continued behind closed doors to offer privacy to the survivors.

Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, and Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, sat at a table in front of the crowd, taking notes and quietly bearing witness to the testimonies. Haaland is the first Indigenous person to serve in a presidential cabinet position, and she had family members who attended boarding schools.

The crowd sat with muffled tears, attentive to those sharing. Survivors, many of whom are now elders, spoke without interruption. Their voices often broke with emotion but their words for the first time entered into the federal historical record.

The United States operated 408 Indian boarding schools between 1819 and 1969, according to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report.

More than 150 were run by churches, about half each by Catholic and Protestant groups, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

In addition to the Federal Indian Boarding Schools, the Department of Interior also identified more than 1,000 additional federal and non-federal institutions that didn't fall under its definition, like Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories that worked similarly in assimilating Native children.

By 1926, nearly 83 percent of Native American school-age children attended boarding schools. Many were sexually abused, beaten for speaking their language, and stripped of their culture and traditions.

Efforts are underway across the U.S. and Canada to identify graves, many of them unmarked, of students who died while attending the schools and were never returned to their families.

Newland promised those at the Pellston event Saturday that the Interior Department's next steps will include identifying unmarked burial sites and cemeteries, as well as determining the total amount of funding spent by the federal government on the boarding school system.

Halaand told the audience she was thankful for all those who suffered through assimilation, because they survived to carry on traditions seen in the gymnasium.

Residential boarding schools affected everyone in the room, she said.

Halaand also affirmed her determined to use her position to help heal the traumas the institutions placed onto Native American communities.

"I'm on this journey with you," she said.

Report for America corps member and Indigenous affairs' reporter Sierra Clark's work is made possible by a partnership between the Record-Eagle and Report for America, a journalism service project founded by the nonprofit Ground Truth Project. Generous community support helps fund a local share of the Record-Eagle/RFA partnership. To support RFA reporters in Traverse City, go to www.record-eagle.com/rfa.