Tim Giago: Indian Country's dirty laundry remains a secret

Monday, August 20, 2018  

Hanging out the dirty laundry in Indian Country
By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji – Stands Up For Them)

There is a lot of dirty laundry hidden away in a hamper and stashed in dark basements across Indian Country. It consists of the many physical, sexual and mental abuses meted out to Indian children during the era of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Mission boarding school days.

When I wrote about it 40 years ago, nobody wanted to respond except to heap hate upon me for having the audacity to bring up such hideous and unpleasant things. When the same thing happened in Boston with the Catholic Church they made a movie of it and focused more on the courageous reporters and editors that brought it to light rather upon the innocent children that were abused. And now the terrible news of abuse by Catholic priests is breaking out all over Pennsylvania and once again it is making headlines all over America.

Where was the media when it was happening to thousands of Indian children?

One Lakota lady read my book and said, “Now I know what was wrong with my mother.”

Well, my newspapers the Lakota Times and Indian Country Today wrote about it. And perhaps it was because we spoke of the abuse first hand from an Indian perspective that victims of abuse came to me in the early 1980s to talk to me about it.

I will never forget the phone call I got from a Lakota lady, who said she wanted to meet with me and bring several of her former classmates to the meeting to talk about sex abuse at a Catholic Indian mission boarding school. Of course I said yes and we met at my newspaper office in the evening after all of the staff had gone home.

Most of these ladies were in their mid or late forties by then and most were confessed alcoholics and drug abusers and some had abused their own children. One of the ladies brought a cooler of beer to the meeting because they wanted to numb themselves to terrible things they wanted to talk to me about.

All of them had been sexually abused by a maintenance worker named Albert Roki at Holy Rosary Indian Mission in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They were abused when they were 8 or 9 years old by this man who lived right on the mission grounds and who used candy and sweet talk to entice these little girls into his house. One of the girls at that meeting was my younger sister and it was she who encouraged the others to step forward. They wanted to sue the Church but were told that the statute of limitation prevented them from suing. Roki left the mission school without ever answering to anyone for his abuses.

When several students from St. Francis Indian Mission on the Rosebud Reservation took the Church to court and laid out for a judge the horrible things that had been done to them by the Jesuit priests and nuns they ran into the same thing: statute of limitations. When I read their testimony on the court transcripts I was brought to tears by their descriptions of abuse.

It wasn’t just the priests that abused the children. Some of the older boys and girls were as bad. There was one older boy who worked in the dairy farm and who was allowed to sleep in our dormitory who was notorious for abusing the young Indian boys. We called him Bull Moose and that that is exactly what he was when he threw young boys, including me, on the gym floor and rubbed his smelly body all over us.

One night when I was about 8 years old I woke up in the dorm with a bad fever. I went to the door of the Jesuit prefect in charge, Mr. Price, to ask for an aspirin. Mr. Price grabbed me around the waist and began rubbing his face all over my body. I pulled away but I was shocked and horrified by his behavior. I was scared to death of him from then on.

As I grew older I wrote the things I saw and heard down so that I would not forget them. Some of them appeared in my book Children Left Behind, a book no one wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole and it would never have been published if it weren’t for a Cahuilla Indian man, the victim of a boarding school himself, who was the publisher of the Indian Historian Press, Inc. When Rupert Costo first read the poems I had stored in a shoe box for 20 years he said, “These poems must be published.” The book was originally published as “The Aboriginal Sin” and later expanded and republished by Harmon Houghton of Clear Light Publishing out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

As you read at the beginning of this column I wasn’t always proud of what I had to write, but I hoped against hope that writing about it would bring to light the more than 100 years of abuse that ruined the lives of so many Indian children. White America didn’t seem to care and still doesn’t and what is worse even some of our own people either don’t believe it or are helping to push it back into the hamper with the rest of the dirty Indian laundry.

Contract Tim Giago at najournalist1@gmail.com

Tim Giago: The church taught us that our ancestors were sinners (August 13, 2018)