By Nancy Marie Spears, Image: Nick Oxford for The Imprint, The Imprint, July 9, 2022
Amid a thunderous beating of red animal-skin drums and powerful song, survivors of Indian boarding schools met in southern Oklahoma this morning with the nation’s ranking official in charge of strengthening tribal self-determination in Indian Country and upholding the government’s treaty obligations to tribes.
Hundreds of former students and their descendants had come to give testimony about the legacy of Indian boarding schools. But first, a dancer in a tasseled buckskin dress and feathers moved among those gathered in a rural gymnasium filled with women in colorful ribbon skirts and men in crisp, plaid button-down shirts. Then, they stopped to pray with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a descendant of the schools that have haunted so many Native American families over centuries.
Today’s meeting in Caddo County marked the first stop on Haaland’s year-long Road to Healing Tour, in a region ringed by the Gypsum Hills, the Red Bed plains and the Wichita Mountains.
“I want you all to know that I am with you on this journey, and I am here to listen. I will listen with you, I will grieve with you, I will weep you with you and I will feel your pain,” said Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member from New Mexico and the nation’s first Indigenous cabinet secretary. “As we mourn what we have lost, please know that we still have so much to gain. The healing that can help our communities will not be done overnight but it will be done.”
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