Remembering the children

By PAMELA JANSSON

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Watersmeet TOWNSHIP - Sunday afternoon in Watersmeet was long, sad and heavy, but also full of love, light and hope.

It was the setting for a panel discussion by local Native American survivors of former re-education efforts, which existed in the early to mid-20th Century as a result of governmental directives and the cooperation of various religious institutions who willfully removed children around the nation from their own homes and placed them in foster care with white families and/or in designated boarding schools.

Sponsored by the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the Sunday session took place at the Northern Waters Casino Event Center.

The afternoon began with tribal drummers performing a welcoming song, followed by a bear song, which tribal chairman James Williams Jr. said is intended to impart strength.

The panel consisted of Linda Cobe of Naubinway, Robert ("Bob") Hazen of Bruce Crossing and Tom Biron of Marquette.

"I was raised here until I was five," said Cobe regarding her childhood in Watersmeet.

But she added that she and her sister had been adopted out to a white family in Baraga, where they then spent several years of their childhood.

Hazen said that he was removed from his own Watersmeet home in 1955, between the ages of five and six.

"I spent eight years in Harbor Springs (in the Lower Peninsula)," he said of a boarding school there, followed by time in a Baraga foster home and then two more years in a school near Tecumseh.

Biron also was taken as a child from Watersmeet and spent extended time in Harbor Springs.

All three of them spoke of the efforts made to erase their association with their own Native American culture.

Biron said that the institutions they attended had been created specifically "to have the Indian taken out of" them.

Although the boarding school experience he and his fellow panelists experienced was Catholic, he said the policy was based in the national government. Nationwide, other types of religious institutions also were complicit.

"They tried to change us into white people," said Hazen of his own experience.

He likened it to cross-breeding a labrador and a poodle: "You just get one ugly dog."

As he put it, the attempted process of "learning not to be Indians" created "intergenerational trauma."

"They confused us," said Hazen of the people trying to reshape them. "They just tore our spirit."

Cobe also spoke of her time with a white foster family.

"They weren't all good homes," she said, adding that in her own case, the foster father was an alcoholic and she and her sister resulted in being sexually abused.

In general, she said that the "constant humiliation" in foster care or boarding schools "does a number on your psyche."

Regarding the boarding schools, Cobe said of the people running them, "They decided they were going to run these schools like military bases and they did. They were very rigid and cruel."

While in her own designated school, she said she recalls hearing the youngest children falling asleep at the end of each day. "Every night you'd hear the kids start sniffling for their parents - they just wanted to go home," she said.

Hazen remembered being beaten for speaking his native language or for no reason at all and said the experience, overall, resulted in us "not wanting to believe in anything" except sensual pleasures.

Biron said that white culture's attempt to change them never really worked as intended. "They didn't fix us," he said.

He recalls, while in boarding school, being told to kneel for hours and said that, as a result, he learned to define religion as "doing something over and over again that hurts and that scared the heck out of me."

After serving in Vietnam, Hazen said he developed PTSD, which he ultimately learned was leading back to his childhood.

"It drove me to the extent that I ended up in a psychiatric ward in Tomah, Wisconsin, for two and one-half months," said Hazen, explaining that he had reached a point in life wherein he hated everyone, including himself, and came close to both suicide and homicide.

"I took it out on everyone every chance I had. I relished causing pain to other people."

Biron said he also struggled to understand what had happened to him.

"Nobody would listen to what I was trying to tell them," he said, "and I didn't know what I was trying to tell them. I was so mixed up."

He remembered a moment of watching other children play when he was ill, presumably because the boarding schools had a policy of getting children's clothing from hospitals and nursing homes, and it sometimes carried disease.

Hazen credits V.A. medical and psychiatric staff for helping him to reclaim himself.

"It's been quite a journey," he said. "It was a learning experience to realize what was behind all that self-destruction and chaos in my life."

"What happened to us was a lifelong affliction," said Biron, who added that "great healers" also have helped him along the way, and he ultimately also trained in mental health and then engaged in related tribal administration.

He also has undergone academic research in relation to the history of boarding schools, but is mindful that his interest is also personal.

Regarding "the little facts and figures" that he has studied, he said, "It might help put me back together."

As they spoke, all three panelists worked toward the broader insight they have gained throughout their struggle to come to terms with their past.

There are regrets, of course.

Cobe, who has four children, said, "I wasn't able to teach my children about their heritage."

Hazen came from a family of nine kids but never got to know his siblings or his parents. His father died when he was seven, and he added that he never connected with his mother.

"I ended up, more or less, raising myself," he said, but credited the help of other tribal families, when he had access to them.

Hazen said he now promotes the value in concentrating on positives, not negatives.

Cobe strives to learn about the culture she lost and added, "As we learn our old ways, I think it's essential that it be respected."

A young woman in audience nodded along.

As someone who also was diagnosed with PTSD, Cobe added that it's important for Native Americans to decide upon their own resolutions and not lose their voices in the process or let other cultures say "this is how you should heal."

Biron, who now teaches at Northern Michigan University, summarized in a breaking voice that Native American education is based in respect, love and truth.

"We need to repair our relations with each other," he said in relation to individuals, cultures, churches, government, etc. "Let's clean up these messes we've made. We've just got to quit fighting over whose God is bigger or tougher or right or wrong. It didn't make sense to me when I was five."

He also emphasized the importance of listening. "I'm into story-telling," said Biron, " not so much interpreting."

Leora Tadgerson of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan in Marquette served as moderator for the panel.

She said of the stories told at large, "As this all gets collected, it needs not just to sit on a shelf. It needs to be living. It needs to have synergy."