(Music) >>I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't know who I am.

>>No matter what happens in life that the sun will always you know rise and set the same way.

>>As you can tell I love using my language.

I love seeing how language can really change the world.

>>Build our community because that's what makes us strong.

>>Love lessons in a time of settler colonialism.

They too know all too well that some cracks were built just for us to fall through.

We live in a world that tries to steal spirits each day; they steal ours by taking us away.

From industrial schools to forced assimilation, genocide means removal of those who birth nations -our living, threatens.

Colonization has been choking us for generations.

>>When the first European settlers began colonizing North America, they also began forcing young Native people into western education.

As early as the 17th century missionary schools took young Indians away from their cultures, so that Indigenous values could be replaced by Protestant ones.

As colonization moved West, Indian boarding schools sprang up across the United States and Canada, run by either the federal government or Christian churches.

There were well over 300 of these institutions.

An estimated 100,000 Native American children were often brutally erased.

So, can there be reconciliation for stealing someone's language, religion, and even life?

Today Fort Lewis College has inherited the shameful history of Fort Lewis Indian boarding school.

One of the places that followed the rallying cry of "Kill the Indian, save the man."

>>If you kill the Indian, you're gonna save the person.

That was the notion.

And it is so wrong because if you look at it, language and culture is what distinguishes us as Indigenous people.

Assimilation is cultural genocide.

>>The state of Colorado had, to my knowledge, four boarding schools, there was Fort Lewis Indian School, the Indian school in Grand Junction that became known as the Teller Institute.

And then there were day schools at Ute Mountain Ute in Towaoc, Colorado and then a day school in the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio.

The U.S. government operated hundreds of boarding schools.

Stories of kidnapping are told by their families being picked up and taken to boarding school and parents finding out later that you can't have your child back.

Parents could have their rations withheld until they were compelled to send their child or children to school.

These rations annual annuities of cash payments were already promised in treaties.

The goal of off reservation boarding schools was to be at a greater distance from the communities.

>>My biological parents, and my aunts and uncles attended these boarding schools, so when they spoke in Navajo they were punished or they were beaten.

And when I asked my mother questions about her experience, she doesn't elaborate too much.

>>My grandma didn't really talk about it.

She's the only surviving grandparent I have right now, and she went to a boarding school in California.

My other two grandparents who went through boarding school also never really talked about what happened.

>>Children found ways to survive, and some of those ways of surviving meant that you lost your Indigenous language.

The goal really was to remove the cultural markers to have children not know their spiritual teachings so that they would be these cultural blanks that could be reworked and made in the image of the dominant society.

>>My grandpa, he was a boarding school survivor, and it definitely took a lot away from him.

He used to speak Cherokee fluently and he lost that connection to his culture and to his language.

>>That trauma takes generations for it to circle back and for families to talk about it.

Recently in Canada, a few dozen grave sites have been located in Kamloops, British Columbia and then now at that number has swelled to over 5000 graves that have been located in Canada.

In the US we're getting to that point where we are acknowledging and understanding the history of Indian school and now the follow-up is to put forward the same energy into finding and locating children who didn't survive Indian boarding school that they are buried having never been returned to their families.

>>My grandpa, he died when I was a kid, so he never talked to me about it.

But my mom told me when her and her siblings were kids, he took them out to the place where he went to boarding school and then he pointed out to one tree and he said that's the tree where my 12-year-old cousin hung himself.

And I don't know, it really makes you think, makes you think about what was going on... what they were subjected to that would make a 12-year-old kid be that desperate.

>> I know for Dakota people and for my Dakota community.

We know that children joined their ancestors.

Just give me a moment.

You know it's just kind of hard because everyone has a connection to a relative.

>>With this discovery in Canada, we knew that we were going to be asked questions about the Old Fort site.

>>And the historical record from Fort Lewis Indian School is incomplete, but in the few years that we do have records of, I've tracked, you know, several dozen children who have died while attending Fort Lewis Indian School.

The college has been this past two academic years have been really in just the initial process of acknowledging even its own history as an Indian boarding school.

The clock tower panels really were the tipping point for that conversation to happen.

So, Fort Lewis College we have a clock tower and underneath the clock tower are three panels, each depicting eras of Fort Lewis history: Fort Lewis as a military post, Fort Lewis as a two-year agricultural mechanics college, then the Indian Industrial School.

The depictions of Indian boarding school, some of the language casts a positive light on Indian schools in general, and as Fort Lewis being a good thing that happened to Native people.

And of course, we know that that's not the case.

There's a darker history that those panels don't fully encapsulate.

>They are missing a huge portion of what's happening there.

We're not talking about the children who've gotten sick, or the fact that those children have been removed from their parents.

It's kind of hard to put a happy note on something that could be so devastating for a whole family and a generation and now multiple generations.

It's not just that what was said was bad, but that what's not said is also problematic.

>>When you look at those photos no one, none of the children are smiling.

I see loneliness, despair, depression, sadness, and just missing home, missing their family.

missing their parents, their grandparents, the language, the culture, the food.

>>I was just puzzled as to why these panels they were there when I was in undergrad and hadn't changed.

I decided to chat with a few other faculty members to get their insight and then drafted an email to President Stritikus on how we could be more inclusive as a campus.

When I was putting the email together, I had to revisit some of my own family history of my grandparents who had to go to boarding schools throughout the US.

So for me it was very important and personal and I knew that I wasn't the only one as a faculty or staff, but also a lot of our students have that in our history.

>>And she was right, and then that's what led to the genesis of the formation of the History and Reconciliation Committee for Lewis College.

>>A committee that was tasked to figure out, you know, what could we do with these panels?

How do we have a community driven discussion?

And how do we get insight from not just students, faculty and staff, but the greater community who is impacted by this through generations.

>>Fort Lewis College is undertaking an examination of its past because we are very deliberately thinking about our future.

We serve over 40% Native American students and part of serving those students successfully means that we're creating a climate of well-being and belonging on campus.

But an aspect of that is being honest about our history.

Being honest about the trauma caused by Federal Indian boarding schools.

Being honest about the loss of language, the loss of culture that deliberately were a part of the boarding school movement.

Being honest about how that impacts our faculty, staff, and our current Native American students.

>>For Doctor Joslynn Lee to be an undergraduate, for her then to come back as a professor of chemistry, and to say why are they still here?

Speaks to how generational change is slow in an institutional context, but that it took also the insistence of Doctor Lee to share the story with the campus and with the college president and then for it to fall on ears that were listening and ears that said that you're right, this needs to be removed.

Let's begin that thoughtful process.

>> The ceremonial program is really about inviting tribal leaders and elders to provide a blessing and acknowledgement of that history and then the removal will allow for the birth of a new chapter in the college's history and evolution.

>>I was particularly touched by the sharing of stories of one tribal elder's experience at Indian boarding school.

It's important for our students to see that we're only one generation removed from parents and grandparents, great grandparents, you know, who attended an Indian boarding school.

For me it really opened my eyes on how we as an institution can do better and to be even more inclusive and to really celebrate the diversity of our student body.

>>When we have these opening open talking sessions with students and faculty and staff, there was the request that we not just get rid of these panels and throw them away and forget about the mistakes we made, but to instead preserve them and use them to talk about like why, why they're inaccurate, why they're wrong, and how we can do a better job of talking about our history.

>>I think just taking them down would have let Fort Lewis off the hook.

It would have potentially hidden something that we should have questioned.

Why did we think it was okay to present this very whitewashed version of history?

Why did we think that was okay?

And what does that say about where we are and where we've been?

>>So, to just simply tear them down and destroy them or throw them in the trash doesn't allow for that conversation to happen.

>>The question related to how is this not just a check the box activity.

I think relates to what comes after that because this is not just a point in time.

This is about ongoing work that will continue to have on campus to acknowledge the history of the boarding school, where we are here in Southwest Colorado, whose ancestral and ceremonial lands this is.

So, this is ongoing work that goes on beyond the removal of the panels.

And it did strike me recently as we've been having conversations about this that, you start something and it's not clear where it finishes, and I think that's where Fort Lewis is in this journey.

>>And we are taking our time.

you know we're not in a rush to to hurry it along because that too can be equally damaging.

>>Even though they are an inaccurate depiction of that history, there sort of a historiography in that they they're good example how we talk about history and how that is evolving.

The goal is for people to be able to interact with them and have those conversations about why it didn't work and how it made people feel.

Museums are great spaces to open up conversation and dialogue about difficult topics.

>>The ideas are coming in on what we can put in place of those panels.

Could it be Indigenous artwork?

Could it be a more accurate portrayal of that era?

>>While Fort Lewis College is in Durango Colorado, the original Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School was located about 20 miles away in Hesperus.

And tragically, it is believed that there are unmarked graves of children who died here.

Graves of our relatives similar to the ones discovered in Canada.

>>A conversation will have to happen with tribal nations to see what is the process moving forward.

Tribal nations have a diversity of cultural protocols from let's return and repatriate and put into a final resting place the bodies of their ancestors to tribal communities whose spiritual beliefs say that bodies can't be disturbed once they are buried.

>>And we're being very intentional about how we want to work with tribal nations, really respecting tribal sovereignty and bringing tribal nations into the conversation about how they want to proceed.

And that would be Southern Ute Indian tribe, Jicarilla Apache, Mescalero Apache, and the Navajo Nation.

Other tribes, such as some of the Pueblos in New Mexico, may have sent children here, but that has not been determined.

>>So, we're not yet as an institution to that point where we could tell more truth about what happened.

>>These are really deliberate conversations and very delicate and sensitive, and emotional conversations that we need to have with tribal nations.

>>Truth telling needs to be done in a way that doesn't further traumatize.

>>And that's why we're not rushing into this.

>>Refered to as the Old Fort, these 6000 acres that once hosted such deprivation, are now a laboratory of abundance.

Fort Lewis students and others can come here and learn to farm.

The aspiration for this land is to honor the past while creating learning opportunities for the future.

>>We open it up to anyone at Fort Lewis College that's interested in having academic labs, senior seminar projects.

And then we have programs that we have developed: our farmer-in-training program and 300 acres of irrigated hay.

And then we have 120 head of cows.

>>I think it's important for me to take my students out to the Indian School site to have my students centered in the landscape and to see when we talk about Indian school and children performing military drills up and down the parade grounds, how big those parade grounds were.

Much has changed, but it's still important even in the absence of buildings and of dormitories to see the space.

>>We are always asking the question, how can what we do here be informed by this history in the most positive way possible?

Kind of in a way that goes against everything the boarding school and the Fort stood for.

Our answer to that question is kind of taking shape in three ways right now.

The first way is that we are really grounded in creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for everyone who farms here.

Even in the course of very busy farm days when the work list is endless.

The second way we're responding is through incorporating Indigenous foods and traditional practices into what we do here.

Knowing that agriculture was used as a tool of assimilation during the boarding school era, it feels necessary to continue incorporating Traditional Knowledge.

>>For us to be teaching agriculture is something that we have to think about and have to be sure that we're using it in a positive manner.

>>So, at the beginning of our farmer training programs, we acknowledge the way agriculture was used, and we acknowledge that there are many ways of doing farming, and we want to incorporate those and elevate them, and make it clear that we have great respect for them.

And then the third way that we're answering this question is through supporting Native American farmers who want to farm on this land and really giving them abundant support.

And this has been something that we've been able to realize more fully through the Native American Agriculture Fund Grant.

And we're using much of the funding from that grant to support students to do food and farming related internships, so that they not only make minimum wage, but they also receive a housing and food stipend.

And also, we have that money available for Native American incubator farmers.

>>Just having my hands in the dirt every single day this summer was awesome.

I was out here with a team of four other farmers, four other young farmers, learning how to sustainably grow my own food.

We treat the land really respectfully and we go about it sustainably.

We don't use any pesticides, we only use machines when we absolutely have to, and it's like a far cry from most monoculture industrial agriculture that you see today.

To reinstate those traditional practices is just like the first step, and I think we just need to continue doing that and just listening to Native voices that haven't been heard for so long.

We can't change the history here, but what we can do is we can move past it and we can heal.

I think that's what we're doing here is through sustainable agriculture we are healing the land and we're also healing the people, especially Native students who are working here as well.

I asked my mom, do you think Grandpa would be proud of what I'm doing out here and she said he would be proud of you.

He lost a lot of his culture, and he lost a lot of his language.

But the thing that was always the most important to him was food and the healing that food brings.

And like the few words that he could remember fluently, like speak about fluently in Cherokee were food words.

>>It feels like I'm planting the question, how can we be informed by the history of this land?

Because I don't think I'm the one to answer it and it feels like this exciting way of opening up the future over and over again to say what's next?

And how can this be more beautiful and more in service to everybody?

>>We grew, our Three Sisters Plot, which was Navajo blue corn, and then our squash and beans and our tobacco, and at the end of this season we asked our boss, Elicia, we're like Elicia, like, "Where's all this food going to go?

Where's all this traditionally grown food going to go?"

And she was like, "well, where do you guys want to go?"

And we were like, " we don't want it to go to Sodexo to like sell it for a profit, like we don't want to do that."

Like I don't know that didn't feel right.

We were like, "how about we donate it all to the Native American Center?

Give that food back to Native students?"

And so that's what we did, and I think that's what reconciliation means to me.

>>For me, reconciliation is just acknowledging the history, educating everyone about that.

For Fort Lewis, it would be giving students the same opportunity that their peers would have.

So, if you are an Indigenous student.

Or a student from those historically underrepresented, I want those students to have an experience that some of their white peers would have, so they don't have to have these stressors outside of school.

>>A lot of us as Indigenous people throughout the Americas, we carry this intergenerational trauma because of what our grandparents have endured, and our ancestors have endured.

And part of that is really recognizing the experiences that my parents went through, and I have the opportunity now to create change, to affect change and in ways that weren't possible before.

It's important for us again to acknowledge this terrible chapter in the history of the institution but also to acknowledge those, the people, the children who attended this institution, and treating them with dignity and respect because they were humans and who spoke up for them?

No one.

And how do we acknowledge that and how can we now honor that history and those people, those children, and then move forward?