By Clarice McKenney
After portraying a young Navajo woman caught in the dual traumas of tribal children forced into US government boarding schools and serving the nation in war, Living Voices actor Lori Tapahonso, herself a citizen of the Navajo Nation, shared a current case of discrimination against Native Americans from our government.
Tapahonso was raised Acoma Pueblo and has over 35 years of experience in theater, performing across the United States, from New York to Oregon. She played a pivotal role in launching two Native American theaters in Kansas and Oregon. When she is not on stage, Lori serves as a cultural consultant.
However, on November 6, when she arrived at Seattle’s Museum of Flight for her performance, she asked for directions to the exhibit. With Tapahonso’s extensive background that includes advocating for accurate representation of Native voices, she was taken aback to learn that while her performance took place in the Personal Courage Wing of the museum that night, the museum has no permanent exhibit on the true, essential roles Natives from around the country played in World War II.
Representing the sponsor of the performance at The Pearl Theater on Friday night, November 14, and shows at two local schools, the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho Tribal Council Member Clare Dunnington introduced Tapahonso. Both briefly addressed the crowd in their Native languages, which set the stage for the performance to come.
“Alice” is a fictional character representing the Native nurses who had spent their childhoods confined in infamous Native boarding schools before enlisting to serve in the war, whose cousin, “Carl,” represented young Navajo Code Talkers. Their voices spoke Friday for the many Natives who served in the war despite terrible conditions they had endured at the hands of the government. The large and appreciative audience at The Pearl Theater was silent, obviously spell-bound by the disturbing facts revealed in Tapahonso’s performance.
Before she began, Tapahonso explained that the performance was “a story of Native American survival.” She said she had spoken with a leader of the Eagle Clan of Navajo in Shiprock, New Mexico, one of her home places. “When settlers saw her,” she said, referring to the photo of the iconic mountain called Shiprock behind Tapahonso, “they thought she looked like a ship, an American government name. Mother Eagle is the English version of our Navajo name for her. Our legends say she rescued us from drowning and declared that she would sit there until we were safe. She sat so long that she turned to stone. There are her three babies,” she said, pointing to three smaller rocks nearby. “From above you can even see her outstretched wings.”
She explained that as a cultural consultant she always says that although November is Native American Heritage Month, “We’re here beyond November. We were here long before first contact.” She explained that today there are more than 570 different tribes officially recognized. Lots of tribes are still dealing with Termination, she added. “Hundreds of tribes are only recognized by states, and many are not recognized by either a state or the federal government.”
Tapahonso gave the audience a memorable contrast between what Native children in government boarding houses beginning in 1870 could expect for their lives as a result of their education versus what children of wealthy white people sending them to elite boarding schools could expect. Rich white children had their choice for the best educations, could expect to receive stays in foreign countries and enrollment in Ivy League schools before settling into comfortable adult lives.
By contrast, Native children were ripped from their families, who sometimes never saw them again because so many children died while in the boarding schools. Even today, there are anonymous Native children’s bodies from the many boarding school cemeteries still being shipped to tribes they’re believed to have been from. The children were whipped mercilessly if they spoke their Native language, tied to chairs kicking and crying as their beautiful, thick hair was cut off. All of them were trained to be workers in domestic and agricultural trades.
The purpose was to force them to assimilate as the old motto of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School stated: Kill the Indian and save the man.”
One of the more notorious Native boarding schools was Haskell Institute. Tapahonso, herself, is a 1989 alum of what is now Haskell Indian Junior College. She spoke with a man from the boarding school who told her it’s important to talk about the experiences of kids who tried to escape the hellish conditions in the schools and died trying, being buried in nameless graves onsite. Haskell, for instance, was more than 30 acres. “Families camped at the tree line on the property’s edge waiting for evidence that their children were alive and still there,” he told her.
Given the atrocities, she said, people often ask why they would serve in the military for a government who abuses them.
“We are always protecting our home (that’s our families). It’s not about patriotism but to ensure we protect our home (families, culture, history). My grandfather was 101 when he passed. He had served almost six years, yet we were not even allowed to become citizens until 1921. He was serving before we even were allowed to vote.”
She showed a photo of a Navajo Code Talker who was more than 100 years old when he died, the last of the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II. “The Code Talkers were never allowed to talk about their Code Talking work, which was just another form of torture for these veterans.”
Although Native Code Talkers were on the same bases as the regular soldiers, they were in separate areas. So, in at least one case, a Code Talker was nearly killed by men in his own Marine regiment until a commissioned officer saved him.
She explained that some Native Code Talkers who were captured by the Japanese were accepted as if they also were Asian, where other captured Native soldiers were required to listen to the Code Talkers that had been recorded, and their captors demanded they translate the code talk. “Only a very few Natives knew the code because it did not just involve our language; each word had been assigned a different meaning. For instance, eggs was the Navajo word but only the actual code talkers knew eggs meant bombs.”
Both characters in the performance spoke of their two worlds. “We got no promotions or medals, but we carry the war even now,” stated an older Carl. “That world wants us to stay secret. I hope to bridge the two worlds.”
It was prophetic because today the code is spoken out loud.
The story of Alice and Carl was painful to hear but beautifully poignant in its portrayal of Native American survival, as the actor had promised.
After the performance ended, Tapahonso invited questions, and Valerie Thompson asked the actor about the differences in boarding school operations in Canada and the U.S.
Tapahonso acknowledged that Canadian boarding houses were far better than ours. Before these differences became public, she said, the problems on our side were side stepped, for the most part. Now a demand for accountability forced a mirror to be faced on our system with the question, ‘What about YOUR schools?’
“A month ago a video was shared from different people in my social circles on line. It showed that seven bodies of children were coming back to South Dakota from Carlisle.”
Carlisle, which operated from 1879 to 1918, was the first and most prominent U.S. federal off-reservation boarding school for Native American children, located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
“They could not trace the bodies to their families, but they knew they belonged there,” she said. “Seven generations (have buried) their children’s bodies.”
Asked how Native people who were taught to be domestic and agricultural workers adjusted as adults, Tapahonso explained, “We’re not individualistic; we’re community dedicated. Even today, there are pockets of Indian folks in cities like Denver, Chicago and Los Angeles where their ancestors were sent to work between 1915 and the 1920s. Generations have grown up there, and now it’s home (because their families are there). It’s our innate nature, and you can’t take it away. No matter where they are, they find a way.”
Karen Pedey asked if they were allowed to build wealth and futures for themselves in the cities where they were sent. “It depended on the community and where they were working,” she answered. “We’re called the invisible people because it’s always been easier to pass as non-Native than to say we’re Native.”
This reporter said that, based on my experience working for tribes in the Everglades, Pendleton and here, I saw Native folks as stoic in the face of such abuse by our government and asked what she thought about that. “Our stoicism is a myth that goes back to photographers Edward Curtis and Frank Rinehart, who made a lot of money (photographing Natives).”
She said Rinehart set up a village in the Chicago World’s Fair that Natives were invited to stay in, supposedly to visit the fair free of charge. He and Curtis advertised to invite the public to “come and see them now. They’ll be extinct soon.”
The photographers went into the village and told each one to pose with grim expressions on their faces.
But one of their photographers, she explained, went into the village at odd hours without Curtis and Rinehart knowing about it and got candid shots. Those better showed Natives living natural lives and included lots of smiles and people enjoying life. “That’s how we are, full of laughter and joy. You hold back folks from moving on if you are sad.”
The leader of the Boundary County Human Rights Task Force, who arranged for the performance, Barb Russell, asked when the story of the Code Talkers actually was revealed. Tapahonso explained that the story of the Code Talkers and their code, which was never deciphered by the Japanese, was not allowed to come out until 1968. Soldiers from the Choctaw Nation worked on it in World War I, and Apache, Mohawk, Comanche, Navajo and many more tribes contributed Code Talkers.
Craig Kelsen added that he had learned that 300,000 Natives had fought in World War I alone. “We Natives represent the highest per capita population serving in the military today,” she said. “Native folks talked about home (our collective home is what we name Turtle Island), she explained. “It is not a flag we serve for but our family, culture and language.”
A Sandpoint resident attending the performance asked if the discovery of humans walking in White Sands, New Mexico, almost 23,000 years ago has affected her culture. Shaking her head, Tapahonso smiled, “We’ve been saying that for a long time. Since the Bering Strait theory started crumbling, others are recognizing that Natives came in all along the Pacific coastline in North and South America,” she said.
Elsie Hollenbeck asked if there was any reticence in giving up the Native language. “I don’t know about other languages, but they classified our Navajo language as unbreakable. The Choctaw solders had to be allowed to use it by their leaders. Ours was a three-layered code, and our language was applied to the military in specific ways. The soldiers in some cases were required to take an oath to kill themselves if they were caught and there was a possibility of giving up the code. Twenty-seven original code talkers had to take that oath.”
Readers who want more information about this presentation may go to www.livingvoices.org.