Historic trauma: Menominee Reservation to address boarding school issues

KESHENA — Marie Warrington Floring doesn’t recall much of her childhood.

But some painful memories of growing up in a boarding school for Native Americans still linger.

Violating rules was met with harsh discipline; even worse punishment was meted out for speaking Menominee. For Floring and others — who went months each year without seeing parents or siblings — feelings of isolation were the worst of all.

“Staying there, it was sad to be away,” from family members, Floring said. “Being left somewhere where they didn’t know somebody ... one got to be so lonesome.”

Floring was among an estimated 100,000 Native youths forced by the federal government to attend the boarding schools, established with the intent of assimilating American Indians into white society.

Stories about the boarding school era were heard earlier this month during a summit held on the Menominee Reservation, part of an effort to help Native Americans begin to open up and heal the wounds caused by “historical trauma.”

According to the summit’s leader, Dr. Anne Bullock, historical trauma is a relatively new area of study that developed from a better understanding of post traumatic stress disorder, and gaining an understanding of its dynamics will help Native Americans break cycles.

Historical traumas, she explained, are events usually intentionally afflicted at more or less the same time to a defined group of people.

“As Indian people, we didn’t create the trauma, but we’re literally passing it on to each other,” said Bullock, a physician who descends from the Fond du Lac band of Ojibwe.

Bullock said a relationship exists between historic trauma and problems that disproportionately affect American Indians — specifically alcohol, drug, physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

While the Menominee Tribe suffered from numerous historical traumas ranging from 1634 to the present time, a focus of the summit was on the so-called boarding school era from 1856 to 1954. (See list on A7.)

During that time, tribal children were required to attend boarding schools as part of a U.S. government scheme to “civilize” American Indian children. The children were separated from their families, prohibited from conducting traditional religious activities, and forbidden from speaking their native language. Many children were subjected to emotional and physical abuse.

The impact of the boarding school experience on the Native Americans was acknowledged about nine years ago by Kevin Gover, then Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs for the Department of the Interior. The legacy of the policy haunts tribal members across the country, he said.

“The trauma of shame, fear and anger has passed from one generation to the next, and manifests itself in the rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence that plague Indian country,” Gover said. “Many of our people live lives of unrelenting tragedy as Indian families suffer the ruin of lives by alcoholism, suicides made of shame and despair, and violent death at the hands of one another. So many of the maladies suffered today in Indian country result from the failures of this agency. Poverty, ignorance, and disease have been the product of this agency's work.”

The effect over multiple generations of children having to attend such schools has been devastating to the Menominee Tribe, said Dana Warrington.

Warrington, a graduate of Menominee Indian High School and College of Menominee Nation, said stripping children of their heritage hurt everybody.

“When they came back, they had new values, new understanding — they could not relate. Parents had lost the ability to pass on cultural knowledge to their children.”

Bullock said more than 80 percent of Indian children across the nation attended boarding schools, and most were only 5 years old when they were removed from their families.

More in today's Leader.

Historic trauma: Menominee Reservation to address boarding school issues

KESHENA — Marie Warrington Floring doesn’t recall much of her childhood.

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