In The Heartache, She Finds A Connection

The pain can be traced back to Ka-Kun-Nee or “Black Raven,” a Nee-Mee-Poo Indian.

Known to non-Indians as Jesse Paul, Ka-Kun-Nee belonged to the Joseph band of the Nee-Mee-Poo or Nez Perce Tribe. As a 7-year-old, he survived the massacre of his people during the 1877 Battle of Big Hole. En route to a new reservation months later, the boy watched his father and six siblings die. They were buried in a mass grave.

Ka-Kun-Nee later lived through other ordeals, including the Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Penn.

His granddaughter, Robbie Paul of Spokane, never met Ka-Kun-Nee. He died in 1936 - 13 years before she was born.

Still, there is a connection, the granddaughter says. The trauma that her grandfather experienced a century ago is also very much her own.

“What happens to a culture, happens to family, happens to self,” says Paul, a coordinator for the Intercollegiate Center for Nursing Education. “My grandfather is very much alive in me.”

Like stories and family recipes, suffering is also passed along, says Paul. She calls this “historical trauma.”

It makes sense to many Indians, a people driven from their land and confined to reservations. But it also rings true to non-Indians who study history.

“The past is about the pain in the present,” says James Stripes, a Washington State University instructor who teaches American Indian history. “The events and memories that affected our grandparents affect us today.”

Documents show that Ka-Kun-Nee was one of the first children sent to the Carlisle Boarding School. He was 10 years old.

Paul has a photo of him at the time: The expressionless face of a young boy in a dark suit and cravat. His hair is cut short like the other boys in the photo, his right hand hidden inside his jacket.

Paul first discovered a spiritual link to Ka-Kun-Nee in the fall of 1993 when she attended a suicide prevention conference for Indians. During one of the workshops, a film about Carlisle showed what happened to Indian children in the late 1800s. She was horrified with the images of Indian boys whose braids were cut. She watched in anguish as they were given Christian names from a government list, punished for speaking their tribal language.

She broke down in tears.

For many Indians, pain wasn’t the only thing they inherited from their ancestors. As they learned the ways of the white world, some forgot their legends, songs and traditions, boarding school graduates say. They replaced them with knowledge of the Bible, Christian hymns and a strict, military-like discipline. Instead of Indian culture, they passed down the ways of Europeans.

Jennifer Mason Ferguson, a Colville Indian of the Arrow Lakes band, never attended boarding school. But her mother, Virginia Seymour Mason, was at DeSmet for six years. There, she converted to Catholicism and learned the hard regimen of boarding school life. She bestowed this knowledge to her eight children.

Ferguson, now 46, was baptized and confirmed Catholic.

She never heard of Coyote, the trickster in many Indian legends. She never danced the Circle dance or heard the voices of her people honoring the Creator. She didn’t even realize she was Indian until the third grade, when a public school teacher told the class she had darker skin because she was left out in the sun too long.

It was Enneas Seymour, her grandfather, who helped her find her identity.

He took his grandchildren to pick huckleberries and told them stories in his native Salish.

Ferguson was 27 when she first danced at a powwow. At the time, her 7-year-old daughter, Yvette, had just been crowned Little Miss Colville.

“The boarding schools didn’t just take away culture,” says Ferguson, now a resident of Post Falls. “Indians and their children lost their pride. I wasn’t in one, but I am a product of the boarding schools.”

Paul, who also considers herself part of the cycle of Indian boarding schools, found a link between history and herself. While recording her family genealogy, Paul compared the dates of her ancestors’ births and deaths with historical Nee-Mee-Poo events. She soon realized that the dates coincided with times in her life when she felt an overwhelming sense of loss, a profound sadness.

In a thesis she wrote as a graduate student at Eastern Washington University, she concluded it was “unresolved grief” passed down through the generations.

Before she found that connection to her grandfather - an experience triggered by a painful divorce when she was 39 - Paul knew little of her culture. She grew up during a time when Nee-Mee-Poos no longer wore buckskin or spoke their native Sehaptin.

The feelings that were passed down from Ka-Kun-Nee brought sorrow to her life, but they also drove her to regain her people’s heritage.

To find peace, Paul visited Big Hole, where her grandfather’s people were killed. She returned to places where they walked, lived and died. She wanted to let go and forgive, she says.

Paul still sees herself as Presbyterian, the daughter of a Nee-Mee-Poo and a woman of Irish, German and English descent.

But for the first time in her life, she was able to accept her Indianness without shame or discomfort. During a naming ceremony six years ago, she took her grandmother’s name - Tow-Le-Kit-Wa-Son-My.

She became “Woman of the Forest.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)

MEMO: See related story under headline: Hard Lessons