$166 Million Settlement Against Jesuit Order that Abused Native American Children

I heard this story on NPR as I was waking up this morning. Huge.

This is an excerpt from the New York Times:

SEATTLE — A Roman Catholic religious order in the Northwest has agreed to pay $166 million to more than 500 victims of sexual abuse, many of whom are American Indians and Alaska Natives who were abused decades ago at Indian boarding schools and in remote villages, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Friday.

The settlement, with the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, known as the Northwest Jesuits, is the largest abuse settlement by far from a Catholic religious order, as opposed to a diocese, and it is one of the largest abuse settlements of any kind by the Catholic Church. The Jesuits are the church’s largest religious order, and their focus is education. The Oregon Province includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

“There is a huge number of victims, in part because these Native American communities were remote and vulnerable, and in part because of a policy by the Jesuits, even though they deny it, of sending problem priests to these far-off regions,” said Terry McKiernan of Bishopaccountability.org, a victims’ advocacy group that tracks abuse cases.

...snip...

John Allison, a lawyer based in Spokane, Wash., represented many clients who were abused in the late 1960s and early 1970s while they were students at St. Mary’s Mission in Omak, Wash., near the reservation of the Colville Confederated Tribes, one of the largest reservations in the country. The Jesuits ran the St. Mary’s school until the 1970s, when federal policies began to encourage more Indian control. St. Mary’s is now closed, though its building stands beside a new school.

...snip...

One of the plaintiffs, Dorothea Skalicky, was living on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in northern Idaho in the 1970s when she said she was abused by a Jesuit priest who ran Sacred Heart Church, in Lapwai. Ms. Skalicky, now 42, said that her family lived across from the church for several years, and that she was abused from age 6 to 8.

This should be a message to the perpetrators that they WILL be caught, as well as to the victims to keep on keeping on....justice is actually possible now.

Bear Chief: Abuse survivors must be able to tell their stories

Thanks Jessica Yee for forwarding this article from Indian Country Today. I'm just going to put the whole thing here, since it's an important message.

By Ken Bear Chief
Story Published: Sep 20, 2010
Story Updated: Sep 17, 2010
I wish we lived in a perfect world where every Indian child has felt loved, valued and accepted; and where they could have all been safe from harm and abuse by others. But, sadly this is not our history. Treaties were made and broken, we were confined to reservations, our traditional ways of life were taken away from us, and our independence was replaced by new laws, a new religion, and a new culture.

We may have all been of different tribes, languages, traditions, and our own religious beliefs and practices, but one thing binds us together, we all suffered the same holocaust, and genocidal events. At the residential schools every kindness, every act of aggression, control and dominance, was done in order to accomplish a goal, “to kill the Indian, and save the man.”

After more than 100 years of abuse at the residential schools, the history of that method is finally being exposed in all its ugliness. The historical telling of this period of Native American history has been told by the government and the religious orders given the task of accomplishing the integration of Indians into white society. There is also our own account of what happened to our people during those turbulent years and to the children who were taken from their families and sent to the residential schools.
I wish we lived in a perfect world where every Indian child has felt loved, valued and accepted. What was stolen from the survivors of rape and molestation at the residential schools and missions was their sense of control and trust – in their world and in their relationships. The harm and loss was so great that in most cases abuse survivors were never fully able to trust or feel safe again. Survivors of sexual abuse not only have difficulty trusting others, but live their lives suffering from the effects of trauma caused by childhood abuse. This often created a spiral into a lifetime of abuse – emotional, sexual or physical, and they often suffered manifestations of abuse which include depression, anxiety, anger, fear, and substance abuse to name of few of these trauma traits.

What I have learned is that this has created a multi-generational cycle of abuse that affects our reservation communities to this day. We must recognize this fact, and begin a community healing to restore our balance and well-being by using our own traditional ways and by speaking openly about this so we can begin restoring our communities from within.

Recently, many victims of childhood abuse started coming forward and seeking justice for the physical and sexual abuses they suffered at the residential schools. There have been efforts to do this in the past with limited success and much failure. But now, they are being represented by Tamaki Law Offices of Yakima, Wash., and other law firms in the Northwest and in South Dakota who are knowledgeable and committed to their Native American clients.

Most childhood sexual abuses committed at the residential and boarding schools are unreported. The reasons for this are varied: Lack of support by the families of the victims or the community; the victims are unaware that they may still have a right to seek justice; there are deadlines to file claims before they become time barred; or that a state has changed its laws affecting the rights of victims as was done in South Dakota.

Even when victims of abuse come forward, reactions of others in Indian communities can exacerbate the harm. Most people are not comfortable with this reality. They would prefer to ignore or downplay its impact on the survivor, or feel this should remain in the past. Responses from friends and family range from silence, to placing inappropriate blame and responsibility on the victim, even accusing them of lying, or that they are causing embarrassment for the families and the community, resulting in wrongly placed self-blame by the victims which only adds to their pain.

Survivors of abuse need to be able to tell their story. Otherwise, subconsciously and cognitively their emotions are frozen in the past. Their lives were irreversibly changed due to the sexual, physical and emotional abuses they suffered at the mission schools. Either by coming forward in the legal process or by talking about it with others begins the healing process and they start to pull their lives together and create a new restored being. I believe self-worth can be restored after trauma. How we all share in the responsibility of helping our Native American brothers and sisters who were victims of abuse to heal is up to each of us individually. Ultimately, we must always remember what our elders taught us. Mine told me to treat one another, and ourselves, with respect and compassion.

Ken Bear Chief, Gros Ventre, Nooksack, Nez Perce, is a paralegal/victim liaison with Tamaki Law Offices of Yakima, Wash. Since 2008, he has been investigating clergy sexual abuse of Native Americans who attended the Catholic/Jesuit/Oblate operated residential schools during the period of 1940 – 1980, and has interviewed nearly 200 victims of abuse throughout reservations in Washington, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota.

More Evidence of Boarding School Abuse and Intergenerational Trauma

I received this through the Boarding School Healing Project list. Since this is an editorial, I'm including the whole article. If you look at the author's background, I'm sure he'd want this information out there in full. The article appears in Indian Country Today.

Boarding 'school' brutality
By Steven Newcomb - April 06, 2009

A statement made in 1882 by Hiram Price, then U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, may be taken as representative of the kind of thinking that went into U.S. Indian policy in the area of "education." In his annual report, Price declared that certain white men and women had "gone among the Indians. . for the higher and nobler purpose of helping these untutored and uncivilized people to a higher plane of existence."

Regular educational and missionary work among the Indians was the key, said Price: "In no other manner and by no other means, in my judgment, can our Indian population be so speedily and permanently reclaimed from the barbarism, idolatry, and savage life, as by the educational and missionary operations of the Christian people of our country."

In keeping with the above thinking, Indian residential "schools" were established by the U.S. government. (I use quotation marks around the word "schools" because it seems strange to use such a positive-sounding term to refer to those institutions) .

Thousands of Indian children were subjected to indoctrination and humiliation in those "schools," and this enforced institutionalizatio n of Indian children was designed to mould them into a form designed to match the white peoples' idealized mental image of what Indian people ought to be, and how they ought to live. The often dehumanizing and terrible conditions found in these "schools" continued from the late 19th century to at least the 1970s.

In 1932, Robert Gessner published a book entitled "Massacre: A Survey of Today's American Indian." In a chapter titled, "Flogging Children," Gessner recounted testimony delivered in May 1930 before "the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs" The testimony concerned numerous instances of brutality committed against Indian children in the boarding "schools."

"The evidence was as startling as it was indisputable, charging the chief disciplinarian, Jacob Duran, and his assistant disciplinarians. . of beating a large number of children with leather straps, striking them on the head and mouth with fists, knocking them down, and kicking them with boots." Such dehumanizing treatment of children was undoubtedly designed to "reclaim" them from "barbarism, idolatry, and a savage life."

R. E. L. Daniel, head of the Yankton Sioux Agency in South Dakota, had not only received a pension "for his good behavior." He had also "received complete protection from the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs for having 'children beaten with leather straps, knocked down for sarcasm to the disciplinarian, struck with fist and hard objects until covered from face to knees with blood."

At the Phoenix boarding school, one boy, "Francis Makill, was beaten by the disciplinarian, " when the boy "asked him for a pair of khaki pants. The facts of this beating have been sworn into affidavit of March 22, 1930."

Ernest Somegastava, 21, in a sworn affidavit, stated "that during the past four or five years he has seen Jacob Duran 'whip boys between the ages of 10 to 14 years with a leather strap, two thicknesses sewn together, giving them five or six stripes each, respectively. " One former student, Willie Curran, testified "that he, being a big boy, was on one occasion commanded to participate in the mass flogging of 80 Indian boys, much smaller than he."

What "crime" had resulted in these Indian boys being flogged? They had, said the affidavit, gone off to a merry-go-round that was nearby the playgrounds of the Phoenix School. The disciplinarian, Elario, ordered the bigger boys to gather up the younger children and bring them to his office. He personally flogged six or seven of the young boys, and then ordered the larger ones to flog the rest. Two harness straps sewn together were used for the whipping.

Mr. H. J. Russell, a construction engineer with the Indian Service, wrote about what he had witnessed: "I have seen Indian boys chained to their beds at night for punishment. I have seen them thrown in cellars under the building, which the superintendent called a jail. I have seen their shoes taken away from them and then forced to walk through the snow to the barn to help milk. I have seen them whipped with a hemp rope, also a water hose." He saw them forced "to do servant's work for employees and superintendent without compensation under the guise of industrial employment and education."

Another man, W. Carson Ryan Jr., someone who had been charged with investigating such instances, described the jail he found on his trip to Wahpeton, N.D.: "The superintendent showed me a dungeon in the basement previously used for girls, up to his coming two years ago." The dungeon was described as 18 feet by eight feet, and "absolutely dark." "Girls told the superintendent, " said Ryan, "of two or three of them sleeping there on mattresses and rats crawling over them at night. Their food was bread and water."

These examples, and countless others that could be chronicled, clearly demonstrate intergenerational dehumanization and intergenerational trauma inflicted on Indian children in the so-called boarding schools. Such trauma has had a destructive psychological impact on indigenous nations and peoples that we still deal with to this day.

Steven Newcomb, Shawnee/Lenape, is indigenous law research coordinator in the education department of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation in San Diego County, co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and author of "Pagans in the Promise Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery" (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008).

14 Claim Abuse by Priests in Marty Boarding School

Here we get at the root of why there is so much domestic violence in Indian Country: generations of children were severely abused in Indian boarding schools just like this one. Here are some excerpts from an article in the Argus Leader.

Fourteen former students of what is now the Marty Indian School have accused Catholic priests, monks, nuns and others of repeated sexual abuse.

Their lawsuits filed Thursday in Minnehaha County Circuit Court are in addition to a 2003 lawsuit involving eight other ex-students, which still is pending.
...snip...

According to the complaints, nuns routinely beat female students and forced them to beat the younger girls, forced them to strip naked and fondled them under the auspices of reprimand or concern for their health.

Priests, especially one called Father Francis, are alleged to have fondled and/or engaged in oral sex with boys and girls alike, and a monk allegedly beat a boy while he was naked.

The abuse is alleged to have taken place between 20 and 50 years ago. For most, if not all, of the 14 accusers filing Thursday, the statute of limitations has expired for prosecution.

But their lawyers say the civil actions should proceed because the plaintiffs realized only in the past three years that their symptoms are related to clergy abuse.
...snip...

At a news conference in front of St. Joseph Cathedral, John Manly, a California lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he wants Bishop Paul Swain to name all alleged perpetrators in the diocese and stop what he says is a common practice of settling victims' complaints in secrecy. Victims must be allowed to go public with their stories, get help and seek prosecution of their abusers where possible, he said.

"You don't tell victims to shut up," Manly said.

The same lawyers who filed these suits also filed them against the St. Francis Indian School.

So, if you hadn't been aware of this issue, this article should alert you to to why there are generations upon generations of adults in Indian Country who have grown up not only with no example of how to treat their own children, and not only within an education system whose stated goal was to "kill the Indian, save the man," (i.e. viciously destroy a culture), but with a seething, yet unacknowledged, internal anger from being abused as a child. Often, that anger has no healthy outlet.

I truly hope that additional victims of these particular schools step forward and tell their stories. It would be a painful, but very productive step onto a healing path, which in many cases also includes dealing with the impacts of post traumatic stress disorder.