A small Durango college is trying to reckon with its dark legacy — and help students do the same

Sunday, May. 05, 2024

Story first appeared in:

DURANGO — On a breezy March morning, with the scent of sourdough perfuming the air, three Hozhoni Days Powwow ambassadors, one past and two present, gathered at Bread cafe for eggs and avocado toast and to talk about the year they’d just lived through, emotional and taxing. 

Jordyn Begay, Selena Gonzales and Audrey Leonetti are students at Fort Lewis College, one of six Native American-serving nontribal universities in the United States and the only one in Colorado.

Begay is Diné from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, Leonetti is Yupik from Anchorage, Alaska, and Gonzales is “Mud Clan born from the Hispanic people,” also from a small community on the Navajo Nation about 35 minutes from Begay’s home.

The women were buzzing with excitement. Today was the culmination of the 58th annual Hozhoni Days Powwow, which celebrates Indigenous arts, culture and student scholarship. The Hozhoni Days Exhibition, a competition centered on students’ knowledge of Native American customs and beliefs, is a key component of the celebration. At the powwow in a few hours, the outgoing ambassador, Begay, and the incoming ambassadors, Leonetti and Gonzales, were going to be honored.

But a sense of melancholy set in as the conversation turned to the painful research project History Colorado, under order from Gov. Jared Polis and House Bill 1327, conducted into the abuses and deaths of Native American students at Colorado boarding schools at the turn of the 20th century. Chief among them was the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, which operated in Hesperus between 1892 and 1909, and later became Fort Lewis College.

For a year starting July 1, 2022, a team of researchers led by History Colorado’s state archeologist Holly Norton spent hundreds of hours examining thousands of archived documents trying to learn what became of children who attended Native American boarding schools across Colorado and to identify those who attended the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School. 

Nine federally funded schools in Colorado at the turn of the 20th Century, along with others throughout the U.S., existed to strip Native children of their language, culture and customs “with the intent to destroy Native Americans as a legal identity — and thus incorporating them, and their resources, into American culture,” says the History Colorado report. Or, to use a phrase coined during the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver in 1892 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the notoriously punishing Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the intent was to “kill the Indian” and “save the man.”

At Fort Lewis, the methods for attempting to assimilate Native children were severe. Their hair was cut, their traditional clothes taken and their names changed, the report released Oct. 3, 2023, found.

Under Thomas Breen, the Fort Lewis boarding school superintendent from 1894 to 1903, the school maintained a kindergarten class for children as young as 6 despite guidance from Washington that this was too young for children to be separated from their families. 

Dangerous living conditions resulted in deadly illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis. Physical abuse was rampant, like that inflicted on two young boys forced to sleep in a coal shed on cold winter nights. In 1903, investigative reporter Polly Pry (real name Leonel Ross Campbell) broke a story about Breen sexually abusing and impregnating Native American girls as young as 14. Academic failures kept Native youth from competing with other American children. And while it was standard practice for sick children to be returned home, this was not always possible, and deaths occurred at Fort Lewis and Grand Junction Indian Boarding Schools, the History Colorado report says.

At Fort Lewis College in Durango, around 30% of students are Native American or Alaska Native. They come from more than 110 tribes and villages and receive free tuition based on a mandate created when the federal boarding school was transferred to the state with the agreement that it would become an educational institute that wouldn’t charge tuition for Native American students. Today, the school website says, “the college awards more degrees to Native American students than any other four-year, baccalaureate-granting institution in the nation — about 26% of all degrees awarded.” 

Begay and Gonzales appreciate the opportunity to attend a college both affordable and near their communities in the Four Corners region. They also love the diversity and inclusion at the school, which supports multiple Native American and Indigenous student organizations, a Native American and Indigenous studies program, academic support for Native students, and a cultural kitchen shared by members of the Native-led Diversity Collaborative. 

But the History Colorado project revealed what the women and others see as gaps in the school’s interactions with Native students. Leonetti and Gonzales say it hasn’t been forthcoming enough about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School legacy. Begay says administrative support for Indigenous students fell short once the History Colorado report came out. And Sahalee Martin, who is Hopi and Chicana from northeastern Arizona, says the school needs to allocate more funding to its Native American population for things like Indigenous counselors its Native American Center, which “isn’t adequate for the amount of Indigenous students we have,” and “to make sure Indigenous students get what they need to succeed in higher education, because reconciliation is part of their mission statement and they should follow through on that.” 

Heather Shotton, a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendent, citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the school’s vice president of diversity affairs, said Fort Lewis since 2019 has been doing “intentional work” around what it means to be a Native American-serving institution — before and after the History Colorado report came out — “with an emphasis on serving.” She said “part of that is telling our story” and “thinking about how we’re centering Indigenous culture and knowledge in the curriculum and the programming.” 

But these students say the administration could have done a better job of “centering” them after the report’s release, given the gravity of the information they had just received. Martin says students deserve more in general, “especially at Fort Lewis, which has such a dark history of assimilation of our people.” The school is working to heighten its profile as a Native American-serving institution and create more support for Indigenous students even as they and their Indigenous faculty continue to grapple with a history that for decades was largely hidden and push to understand how that history informs them and the college.

Recognizing a doctored history 

Another entry point for this story is the day in 2019 when Joslynn Lee, a Fort Lewis chemistry professor who is enrolled Pueblo Laguna and also of Acoma Laguna and Diné affiliation, bicycled past a panel beaming out from the clock tower in the middle of campus.  

The panel showed photographs from the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School in which the students were depicted as being in good hands. Under a headline that read “Walking a New Road” the text described the school as “receiving high praise for its ‘extremely good literary instruction’ and ‘excellent work’ in all industrial departments.” It showed a boy’s baseball team, which did exist, and students in a classroom with their hands in their laps. “The children are all ‘well-clothed and happy,’” the panel read. A practical education was stressed. 

Lee remembered seeing the same panels when she was a Fort Lewis student in 2002. She knew a different story, one in which forced assimilation, abuse and physical struggle were the norm. So she approached Fort Lewis College president Tom Stritikus to discuss removing the panels. 

Their discussion turned into a year of talks with a “thoughtful community collective,” of Indigenous faculty, staff and student representatives, Lee said. It culminated with a public healing ceremony and removal of the panels in front of hundreds in September 2021. 

Shotton said the panel removal kicked off a major effort “to reconcile the dark history of FLC” and emphasize opportunities to educate people “about the atrocities and continued impact of the boarding school era.”

But Leonetti and Gonzales, who enrolled at Fort Lewis after the panel removal, say the school could be doing a better job at relaying the history of the institution to prospective and new students.

Leonetti says she did not know when she enrolled that Fort Lewis is linked to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, or that historical reports indicate Native students died while in attendance and some of their remains are likely still on the original “Old Fort” campus where some classes are held. Ground-penetrating radar was used to examine the cemetery site and identified 46 graves believed to be children, more than the 31 children History Colorado’s archival research found who did not return home from Fort Lewis and are likely buried there.

Old Fort is 20 minutes from Durango in Hesperus. The 6,000 acres it sits on is owned by Colorado State Land Board and managed by Fort Lewis. A highly regarded farmer-in-training program operates there, and students from other school disciplines are often invited to visit. 

Begay said as a Diné tribal member, she “traditionally isn’t allowed” to visit sites where her ancestors are buried. But during her first year, she went on a tour of the Old Fort without being told about the boarding school trauma. She says she went into one of the buildings and saw photos of the students and “was very emotional and I was, like, I don’t know why I’m so emotional. Then my first year was the worst year I’ve ever had because I was mentally, physically and emotionally not doing really well. 

“So obviously I had to do a ceremony,” she said, referring to the traditional Diné healing ceremony for individuals suffering from emotional distress. During her ceremony, healers “told me where I went — I wasn’t supposed to go there.” (Other Native students, including Diné, have reported having positive experiences learning farming techniques at the 6,000-acre property.)

Leonetti said she had no idea about the boarding school when she arrived from Alaska last fall and was stunned when ​​an email from school leadership circulated that informed her, “Oh, by the way, Oct. 3, this report is gonna come out. I really, honestly didn’t know about it at all, especially being from so far away. Like, I wasn’t in the region to know that that had happened.”

Though three generations of her family attended Fort Lewis, Gonzales added that she was only “slightly aware” of the boarding school history and has been struggling with the History Colorado discoveries since they were released a few months into her freshman year. 

Making Fort Lewis more inclusive 

When Stritikus came on as Fort Lewis’ president in 2018, he entered a college trying to understand its history. 

The school had a troubled past when it came to its dealings with minorities. From 1962 to 1994, for instance, its mascot was the Raider, a cavalry soldier wielding a flag and riding a horse into what one assumes is battle (notably, cavalry soldiers killed 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1862).  

The mascot then became the Skyhawk, a concept combining the hawk, a raptor known for its soaring flight and sharp vision, and sky, a nod to the 247-acre campus’ 6,872-foot-high perch on a bluff above the town of Durango. 

As he got to know Fort Lewis and spurred on by Lee, Stritikus along with Indigenous faculty and staff decided to dig into the college’s troubled past and create a new vision for Fort Lewis. 

It started in 2019 with the establishment of the Committee on FLC History and a multi-year conversation about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and its historical impact on Indigenous students and communities. Fort Lewis also consulted with multiple tribes in the rewording of its land acknowledgement recognizing them as the original stewards of the boarding school and college lands “to give it a living perspective,” Lee said. The school’s board of trustees created a “resolution on commitment to reconciliation” that “supports and endorses a comprehensive approach focused on healing, maintaining respectful and reciprocal relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities, and caring for Indigenous students at Fort Lewis College.”

A tribal advisory council now provides opportunities to students from tribal nations and communities, explores opportunities to collaborate and partner with them, and keeps them up-to-date on the school’s reconciliation work regarding the federal boarding school history. 

And there was the removal of the panels, which Lee ultimately gets credit for. 

During this period “was the discovery of the mass graves in Canada,” Stritikus said. “That’s what set us on the course to really involve tribal nations more directly. To say, ‘Hey, this is not just Fort Lewis. You need to make this decision with us.’” This is why they backed House Bill 1327, which was signed by Polis at Fort Lewis, he said.

But none of these significant steps toward reconciliation prepared students for the History Colorado report. 

Students, the report and Fort Lewis’ support 

Begay remembers a heaviness enveloping the campus once the report came out. Students were invited to meet in the Native American Center with Shotton, Stritikus and faculty from in the Center for Indigenous Research, Culture and Language space. Faculty from the sociology department and representatives from the Sexual Assault Services Organization also came. The group went through the report in detail. It took four hours. 

“It was very hard reading the report, knowing my people were the highest number to go to the boarding school,” Begay said. Navajo students outnumbered others by more than three times at the school. “That was the hardest thing because I didn’t think it was that many. It was also a very emotional day across the school and we were crying together.” 

Begay texted her mother and then called her. “And I started crying because I was like, this is what they did to our relatives, Mom. This is what they done to us. And the first person I thought of was my grandma, who went to boarding school but she barely talks about it. She told me a few things that they did do to her but it wasn’t as harsh as what she was seeing her classmates getting. But I tend to see with my grandma how it definitely impacted her.” 

“But I feel like the faculty were like, ‘Oh, this happened, but you guys have schoolwork,’” she continued. “And we were like, ‘We understand, we understand that.’

“But they also needed to understand that our people never came back and we are intertwined together,” she added. “Knowing we were experiencing that and knowing some professors were, like, ‘You still have a paper to do, you still have an exam to do.’ No, they did not get it.”

Leonetti said the day after the report came out, none of her teachers talked about it in class. “None of them even acknowledged it. I didn’t go to classes all day the day it was released, and I had one professor mark me as absent — even though there was a facultywide email sent out telling faculty to give students leniency. So I had to go talk to that professor and explain like, ‘Hey, I was kind of going through it that day. You’re supposed to excuse me.’” 

And Gonzales said while the Native American Indigenous Studies and psychology departments gave her leniency that week, by the following week “it just, they just stopped talking about it. And then, I like to nag people a lot. I like to be very upfront. So every now and then, if we’re talking about a topic, I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, remember the boarding school? Remember when the report came out?’” 

Fort Lewis College’s student-run magazine, The Independent, reported that two days after the report was released, administration established a “resilience room” where the school community could “reflect, relax and heal.” Free therapy sessions were offered through the counseling center. And in late October, Jennie Sturm, a geophysical archaeologist History Colorado hired to search the boarding school grounds for graves using ground-penetrating radar, came to Fort Lewis and held a listening session with students to go over her findings. 

COVID kept Norton, from History Colorado, from attending but she said there was good turnout and the students were “very engaged.” School administrators “and Dr. Shotton, in particular” were “really concerned about the students and how they were experiencing this and what their perceptions and reactions were and to how best to care for them.”  

Begay, Leonetti and Gonzales agree that Stritikus and the Indigenous faculty and staff have been available and supportive throughout the reconciliation process. 

“When the president decided, when we all decided, to take the panels down, I remember a lot of my friends that are Native were, like, ‘Oh, that’s a win for us knowing that we’re slowly getting ourselves back, that Fort Lewis is finally listening to us,’” Begay said. 

And with the boarding school report, Leonetti said, “I feel like Tom did a really good job. I talked to him the week that happened and he was very supportive.” 

When Stritikus heard this feedback during an interview with The Colorado Sun on March 29, he seemed delighted. 

“When we started this work, when I came on the campus, what I felt was that for as Indigenous as we were, in a school that had been doing Native American waivers since the beginning of time, the Native American students were not visible in the way that they should be. Thinking way back, this has always been about building an inclusive community for students, and a place where students could show up as their whole selves.” 

“So the fact that students met with you and said they both appreciated what the president did but had critiques for the president, that’s awesome,” he added. “Because to me, that says no matter what, at the end of the day, we’ve created a culture where students get to share what they think, show up as who they are and voice their opinions. I’m elated that students are sharing their thoughts with people, as we’ve tried to create that culture from the beginning.” 

And as for the school’s response to students in the aftermath of the release, Stritikus said, “our team, certainly on the week the report came out and the week after, did an incredible job of supporting students. So students who feel like, ‘wait a minute. We put this report on the shelf. What’s happening here?’ That’s a fair point we should listen to, but what I also always try to talk about is this is less about history. We’re not a museum. We’re not a historical society. We’re an educational institution.

“So the momentum that should be created from the report is that responsibility Dr. Shotton has so clearly laid out,” he added. “Fort Lewis has an obligation to build in the students those things that the boarding school took away — language, wellness, leadership and Indigenous ways of knowing.”   

The mission will have to carry on without Stritikus. He has been hired as president of Occidental College in Los Angeles. His last act at Fort Lewis was presiding over graduation Saturday.

Lee said, “We’re still working through reconciliation as an institution and will even after Tom leaves. It’s in our board of trustees resolution and they are committed to supporting our Indigenous students even as anti-DEI measures are happening in other states.”

Moving through generational trauma into a brighter future

The History Colorado report says collectively, the “suite of negative impacts” inflicted on Native Americans through the federal government’s assimilation process “is often referred to as intergenerational trauma. This is a widely accepted concept that trauma experienced by an individual can be passed down to subsequent generations, psychologically, emotionally and even physically.”  

Fort Lewis student Shenay Atene, who is Diné from Monument Valley, Utah, and a psychology major who graduated Saturday, said this trauma is sometimes expressed in drug and alcohol abuse among some Native Americans “and it can lead to everything else, and they can even pass away from it.” 

One way Fort Lewis Indigenous students have coped through the reconciliation process is by creating art about their history and experiences.

Atene participated in an exhibit through the Center of Southwest Studies called As Seeds We Grow: Student Reflections on Resilience, which explored student identity and cultural resilience with consideration to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School history. 

The United States has 183 Bureau of Indian Education-funded elementary and secondary schools and residential facilities, of which 55 are bureau-operated and 128 are tribally controlled. They are nothing like the boarding schools of the past.

Atene has a complicated relationship with boarding schools. From first through eighth grade, she attended Kayenta Community School in Kayenta, Arizona. She didn’t want to go; her father made her. He said he wanted her to be independent, but the experience was difficult. 

Not in the way the original Native American boarding schools were in Colorado — not even close to that, she said. But as a little girl, she went to bed at night fearing someone would hurt her or steal her. Shenay’s grandparents attended the kind of boarding schools where students were punished for speaking their language. Speaking Navajo was discouraged when her dad, now in his 50s, attended. 

Learning details about the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and relating them to the fact that her parents sent her to a boarding school evoked emotional trauma that Atene needed therapy to process. “I didn’t necessarily need to work through it,” she said, “but to realize what I went through was hard.” 

One way she healed at Fort Lewis was through facilitating a traditional sheep butchering on the Old Fort grounds. When reports of Indigenous child abuse started surfacing in Canada, she said, the kill became “much more meaningful.”

“The way the Navajo people heal is through community and that’s through food,” she said. “What better way to process the boarding school information than through traditional foods? Slaughtering a sheep on the old boarding school grounds meant so much more because they couldn’t have that. We really are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

In the As Seeds We Grow exhibit, she contributed the traditional Native American jingle dress she wore throughout her childhood, which went with her “from different states to different schools.” 

She wore the necklace and belt she danced in starting at age 5. They among the few remaining items she has from her grandmother.  

Three paintings she made recall her years in boarding school. The most powerful is called “The Nights,” about which she wrote, “There were always girls that cried through the night, but we never spoke about it with each other. It wasn’t until after a few months of being in Peewee Hall that I accepted that this was my life. This was our life.”  

In March, she described the work she did for the exhibit as “healing.” But, she added, at home, where her pieces are now safely stowed, she keeps “The Nights,” which has dark swirls coming out of a door with a window through which she imagined she was being watched, covered with a sheet. 

There is still healing to be done. And History Colorado has yet to fulfill its entire mission mandated by House Bill 1327. It is ordered to collect oral histories to help deepen what’s known about the boarding school experience. But Norton doesn’t know if the oral histories are needed. 

In the report, she asks the state to “identify the purposes” of them, saying, “It cannot be simply a performative action.”  

“Many people note that their parents and grandparents did not speak at great length about their experiences,” she said, cautioning, “oral histories must serve a greater purpose than simply recording the trauma of already victimized people, who do not owe the state their emotions or stories.”

New legislation currently under consideration requests an additional $1 million for History Colorado to continue its research through 2027.

Meanwhile, Atene graduated Saturday and now is off on a journey to become an Indigenous geriatric psychologist, a career she’s inventing to help the elders in her community. She said her experience at Fort Lewis was “amazing because of all the supportive staff and faculty. They helped me learn how to become a leader, embrace my past, and make it a useful tool when helping others.” 

She was quiet for a moment while she gave the momentous occasion more thought. Then she said, “We’re Native in a Western educational institution. Who would have thought 200 years ago this would have happened? We’re our ancestors’ prayers coming through.” 

Link to original article