Wellbriety Journey for Forgiveness
The Sequoyah High School Story
Tahlequah, OK, June 4, 2009
“I am not brain washed, I am not defeated, and you have failed.”
The Girls Choir of the Cherokee
Youth Group sang for the gathering. The roots of Sequoyah High School in the Cherokee Nation at Tahlequah, Oklahoma go back to 1871, before the government’s official culture cleansing policies of the boarding school era began in 1879. The Sequoyah schools suffered under government control until 1985 when the Nation took over their operation. Today’s campus now consists of 90 acres and more than a dozen buildings. The high school is regionally and state accredited for grades 7-12. Now, Sequoyah Schools enroll more than 300 students representing 42 tribes and 14 different states. It is a boarding school that has survived BIA influences and now serves Indian students under tribal control.
Preparing the Sacred Hoop for entry We began bright and early on a clear and sunny day. All participants met and greeted each other at the Cherokee Nation Complex. Dana Tiger, Visit Coordinator and long-time friend of White Bison was very grateful to have the Sacred Hoop in her community. Her eyes welled up with tears as we prepared to carry the Sacred Hoop into Sequoyah High School. Don expressed to her to go ahead and cry for tears are the highest form of prayer.
This was the eleventh visit on the Forgiveness Journey––how familiar the preparation to carry in the Sacred Hoop had become! Today’s Hoop carriers would be co-coordinators Brenda Golden and Dana Tiger, as well as Dwayne Marshall and Corgney Geshick. Dana’s daughter Christy Tiger would carry in Brandy Jo. Don looked on as Marlin smudged us with sage and cedar. Today the Staff would be carried in by alternative school teacher Mitch Walking Elk who had come all the way from St. Paul, Minnesota with a group of his students for the event. Mitch is originally an Oklahoma boy. He wanted to share his boarding school experiences with us and provide an educational moment for his students.
Mitch Walking Elk from St. Paul,
Minnesota carried in the Eagle Staff Everyone strolled from the Complex over to the Sequoyah High School gymnasium where we had the presentations, sharing and songs. Deputy Chief of the Cherokee Nation Joe Grayson gave the opening prayer and the welcome. We are deeply grateful to the Nation for hosting this visit. They set up the gym, provided lunch, set up tables and the sound system. There were about 50 participants during the day. The tribe allowed students from two of their alternative summer schools to take part, throwing their support behind both the healing and educational benefits of the gathering.
The Cherokee Youth Group blessed us with songs sung in Tsalagi (Cherokee). It was awesome to hear the young people singing in their own language. They were dressed in beautiful ribbon dresses and their presence began the day on a happy note. Their song is such a strong example of the role played in healing by the collective memory we learned about just the day before in Anadarko.
Coordinators Dana Tiger and Brenda Golden gave opening talks. Sharing our boarding school experiences, or what we remember being told in our growing-up families, is what the Journey is all about. Many of us know how important it was to enter the Circle and speak of our own troubles with alcohol and drugs. Sharing those hard experiences in a cultural way is part of Indian recovery. Now we are going further to openly share what we feel are the roots or the causes of substance abuse and other troubled behaviors in the first place. What we are doing is the healing and wellness that comes after recovery––keeping the Indian heart alive.
A few participants in Tahlequah Brenda had no idea that her mother had gone to boarding school until much later in life. It wasn’t talked about. Later, her mother shared stories with her about Seneca Indian School in Miami, Oklahoma where she was sent. The kids wore little white cotton dresses, bobby socks and saddle shoes she said. The matrons would not allow her to speak with any of her brothers or sisters. Brenda brought up for the first time something we hadn’t heard yet on the Journey. She said that during the time her mom went to boarding school is when the schools would perform sterilization on many of the young girls. They might go into hospital for appendicitis or something else only to realize afterward that, for example, they had received a hysterectomy.
Jeremy-a young participant Brenda told us that her mother was unable to go home for the holidays, birthdays or even when someone passed on. Her mother did not know what it was like to love or be loved. She had no family connection. Brenda remembers that she was 30 before she was able to hug her mom or express love. Because Brenda did not receive love growing up, she had a difficult time sharing love with her own children. Reflecting on the forced sterilizations in her mother’s time Brenda said, “By the grace of the Creator, my mother was not sterilized while she was there.”
Mitch Walking Elk shared some songs with us during lunch. He talked about his experience when the State of Oklahoma told his mother, who was deaf, that she either had to put him in boarding school or they were going to take him away and put him in a foster home. She sent him to Seneca Indian School where he was beaten and abused because he wouldn’t follow the rules. Mitch’s spirit knew he didn’t want to go to boarding school. He always blamed his mother for putting him there. Part of his own healing was to understand what kind of pressure she had been under. He told us he has a message for the Government. “I am not brain washed, I am not defeated, and you have failed,” he said.
Walking in the Sacred Hoop Carmen Klinekole, who was also a coordinator at the Riverside (Anadarko) visit, participated in Tahlequah. She told us her daughter attended Sequoyah high school for one semester because she needed to get away from the drugs she had fallen into in her home community. Carmen’s daughter did a paper on boarding schools and her teacher asked her if she was making the information up. It is apparent that this information is not in the school systems she said. Carmen believes we need to get the history into our schools. Carmen then blessed us by singing Amazing Grace, in English and in her Native Language. She proudly tells us that she is Christian, she goes to church, but she is an Indian too.
The day came to a close with a Sacred Hoop Healing Ceremony held at the Tahlequah cemetery just across the road. There are unmarked graves for 32 little ones in the cemetery. Any one of the graves might be that of a family ancestor for anyone in the community. We took the Sacred Hoop onto a path to the cemetery where there are markers. The Cherokee Nation has erected little markers for each of the graves and a pathway to each grave. We walked out to the center of the cemetery and Emmon Spain, a Seminole, sang a traditional Creek song that means, We will meet again. After the song, Marlin smoked us all with sage and cedar and we carried the Hoop back to the cemetery marker where everyone was smudged.
Students from Minnesota
at
the Tahlequah event The day in Tahlequah was powerful and moving. What might it have accomplished? A few days later coordinator Brenda Golden thought a bit about that and said, “I think young people will be freer to talk about this as a result of this gathering. We had people bring their children and we had students from the area. I do believe it opened some eyes. For myself, when I realized what my mother had gone through it helped explain how she dealt with me. So I think that young people can say, ‘Oh! That’s why…’ It puts things into perspective for them.”
~ Forgiveness Journey Team
Click here for an article and photos from the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper... >
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