Through the turmoil forced upon me by a system designed by the u. S. Government to destroy my culture. I am finding my way back to the lakota way of life. I didnt know the medical words, so i called the problem what i felt it to be the thick, dark fog. [slow electric guitar melody] youre supposed to get look excited. [laughing] see . Happy. Oh, my god. Its a book. [laughs] its not even the hardcover. Its a start. Walter decided that he wanted to write down his memories for his children. And shortly into it, he reached a block where he had started talking about his boarding school years and he couldnt keep talking. He withdrew. He became very tearful. My own children im estranged from them, simply because i never figured out how to be a father or even how to be a human being. And i realize that they didnt know anything about me, because i never talked to them about what i was. It took us four years before we finally came to the end of what he had to say. So when the roads are bad, you know theyre not gonna come after you. Trying to remember if this is the road here. I think it is. This is the old road that i followed. Just one thing on my mind just to get home, not get caught in between here and home. And i know i ran all day long, about 16 miles. The quicker i got home, the better off im gonna be. I knew they would take me back to school, but just being in that house for a few minutes, that was good enough. This is a very peaceful place, and you can get spoiled living here. 20 years ago, a man in the community i lived in in connecticut started a clothing drive for indians on this reservation, and he said that they were dying of the cold and they were starving. Friend of mine came to me all in tears, upset over it, and i said to her, what do you mean . What indians . There arent any indians left. Like so many, i have lived a life blocked by fear, led by fear, and governed by fear, that was created in those childhood days. Nightmares of the Government Boarding School, the loneliness, the beatings, they seem to be on my mind every minute of the day. I had been punished to instill a different way of life that i didnt understand, nor want it. [breathing heavily] [grunts] the Government School had tried to force me to forget the lakota language, and i wouldnt do it. Yeah, we had a deep sense of preservation for our culture, our language. So we would go and hide in order to speak lakota. If we got caught, they were allowed to beat us with whatever they could, but we took that chance. The lakota language is something that comes from deep inside of you. It comes from. How you look at things and how you see things. Sometimes i feel like im not able to communicate with a nonindian. The lakota feeling is what forms my language. So i try to put that into the english language, but itat times it just doesnt seem to work, and i lose a lot of confidence in myself. Thats fine. Everything helps. Weve been really busy with the holiday. So this is where we need an interpreter. Okay. Thank you so much. One night, i went to a 7eleven store to pick up some things, and i passed by a rack of magazines, and one magazine fell off the shelf, and it had opened to an article about a man called Walter Littlemoon who had been helping his family and the people in wounded knee. So i bought the magazine, and i went home, and i called him. And since then, weve become friends. I learned of the Living Conditions out on a lot of our reservations, and it was all news to me. In march of 1985, walter drove across country with a friend of his. He spoke at the local library. Were just about in this little area right here. Its a 2 million acre tack that was given to us by the United States government. We had other ideas of where to live, but our ideas werent that important, i guess. After that, i we tried together various ideas that would be helpful for the people in wounded knee. In 1998, he asked, did i want to move out here and stay for a time and see if if this was where i wanted to be. And thats how i came to live with him. If everybody gets a share. This boarding School Experience had a did a lot more damage than we realized. We were made ashamed of our culture. We were called uncivilized. We were called savages. We were forced to submit to something that we dont even know and didnt even want. We will never be able to forget what happened to us. Those memories will be with us all the time. If you dont learn how to live with it, you just blank it out. You just and you dont talk about it. And then all of a sudden, you Start Talking about it, and you cant remember pretty soon, cause you blanked it out so damn many times, and, you know, you just you know theres something you want to say, but its not there. You know, back then, we didnt see it as abuse. We didnt even know the word as abuse. [all laughing] beat up. We got beat for just about everything. Got beat because you look like an indian, beat because you smelled like an indian. Said the wrong thing. To me, it wasnt just physical abuse. It was mental abuse too. Oh, yeah. They got in there. To me, what they were trying to do was turn us into a white man, but still, they couldnt do it. Come on, hootie. This is, uhyou probably hear it in the movies the sacred tree of lakota. Thats this ash wood. Its a hardwood. And a lot of it grows thats what they used to make the bows and arrows out of a long time ago. Yeah, they were pretty stout. But pollution has got to them, to where theyre just rotted on the insides. This tree was here when i was a little boy. So if you look up that way, you see these little red those are plums, wild plums. I was the youngest of my mothers ten children. By the time i was three, all the rest were away from home. We learned to be lakota in the natural way, as easy as breathing. No one sat us down to preach at us. Adults guided us as life presented different situations. The bright and positive memories of those childhood days had stayed buried within me for nearly 60 years. I had to remember and see clearly how i had been shaped and twisted, mentally and emotionally, by something outside of our culture. [children singing in native language] indian boarding schools were created by henry pratt, a military career man whose motto was, kill the indian and save the man. He felt that by removing the children from the influence of their families and their tribes and forbidding him to speak any native language, they could be shaped into the image of the dominant society. You either sent your kid to school or you could find yourself in jail. Or the government would just take them and might tell you where they are, might not. And there was every imaginable abuse to getting these kids into these schools and keeping them there. Shortly after my fifth birthday, in 1947, a car pulled up to our home with two strangers in it. My mother was crying. She told me i had to go with the people in the car. I had no warning, no preparation. What is this on the left here . This is the boys building. Was this here when you went to school . No, this was a its a different building. They finally stopped at a strange, Foreign Place with tall buildings. I was overwhelmed by strange smells, sounds of children talking and crying, and everyone speaking in a language i didnt understand. All of this stuff is new. Even the old girls building is gone now. I used to sit right here. Now they got a bunch of buildings i dont even recognize. No, this girls building is still the same. Now, we can go along here. Oh, looks like we got a snowball fight. You ever do that when you were here . No, they wouldnt allow us to play like that. Got too noisy. We couldnt throw snowballs at each other. All the stuff like that, it was all forbidden. With all of this modern stuff, with all of these new designs, with all of the New Buildings and playgrounds, that still doesnt change anything. I still hate this place, and i dont like it. And, you know, the sooner we leave, the better off im gonna be. This is where they brought you the first day . Yeah. Well, actually, they brought me right where that white pickup is. There used to be an Old Gymnasium there. And the buses would pull up like that and just dump you off there. Within minutes, i was stripped naked and scrubbed with a harsh, yellow soap and a stiff brush until my skin was raw. My older sisters went to boarding school, had their hair cut, so i wanted a haircut, and my grandmother said, hiya no. Until i die, or mama die or daddy die, no. In lakota, she told me. [speaking lakota] nobody does that. You do not ever cut your hair. You can trim it, but you dont cut your hair until you lose a loved one. And then they march you across, right through here. And then thiswell, the builng used to be here, and thats where theyd cut your hair off, change your clothes, take your clothes away and give you old clothes. I tried to run, but the matrons caught me and run they grabbed my hair by my braid and just cut it. I started crying, cause, you know, i didnt give him permission to cut my hair. And i cried, cause i felt they killed my spirit. All the thoughts going through my mind at the time now all i remember was, who died . Did my mom die . Who died so theyre cutting all of our hair . Whats going on here . Every time we tried talking about his boarding school years, he reached the same block. We went to his doctor at the v. A. Hospital, and his doctor said, keep talking. As painful as it is, the key is to keep talking. Bring all those memories out. And he said, dont be afraid of any of the emotions that come with them. Go with those emotions. Let those emotions come out. So we started writing down his memories. The sound of a car, the smell of food, the crying of children a lot of these things trigger flashbacks. Emotionally, psychologically, youre right back at boarding school at five years old. [screaming] you never knew what kind of a beating was coming. [grunting] sometimes youd get thrown across the floor, or sometimes youd get hit with a book. Sometimes it was things that we said. Sometimes it was the way we looked at people. But just small things like that that never made any sense at all, but you got beat for it. Yeah, we got hit a lot, strapped, and mean things saying mean things to us, calling us names and jerking us around by the little hair in the back of your head or the ear. Usually, after the third hit, you dont feel nothing. And thats what gets em even more angrier, and they just beat you harder. You dont feel it. Physically, you just dont feel it. You shut it out after a while. Youd have to put your hands on the desk, and the desk lifted up the lid would lift up, and youd put your books in there, and then it would come down, and thats what you would write on. Well, youd put your hands there, and theyd slam the desk down on your hands. Yeah. Can you remember the day your mother came to visit you . Yeah, there used to be a tree right by this power line, and thats where i remember her walking from there towards the rail. It was a sense of familiarity, but then again, i didnt recognizei couldnt quite make that connection. You didnt remember who she was . No. And that was after three months from home . Yeah. What happened to me, and it happened to a lot of other kids the case of not recognizing your own parents. [speaking lakota] i just completely broke that connection. As she was leaving, you did remember her, so something finally clicked in yeah, it clicked in. So i ran down this way to try to catch her, but it was just too late. And i dont know what happened after that. Iiup to this day, i just dont remember. But i knew that i told myself, im not gonna forget anymore. [thunder rumbling] walter kept talking. His memories would come out in fragments, so id write down whatever he said, and as time went by, we started cutting those pieces of paper and putting memories together that belonged together. And then jane brought in a book trauma and recovery, bythe author, i think, was judith herman. And this was based on the holocaust, but when she was reading, i was able to take out a lot of the words and replace them with the lakota, with pine ridge, the environment here. And it began to make sense, and thats when i realized that my mind lacked focus. It was fragmented. And i would change the subject to stay away from a lot of the pain. And i didnt even know where the pain was coming from. I came to meet Walter Littlemoon and his wife jane through my work here at the victims of Violence Program in cambridge, somerville, massachusetts. When walter and jane walked into this building, Central Street health center, it was very clear that he was in a lot of pain. This is a picture of my mother. This is the way she looked, as i remembered her, growing up. I dont remember exactly when this was taken, but this is probably one of the last pictures that we have of her, cause when my sister took all of these pictures, then her house caught on fire, and just about all of these pictures burned down. So this was her family, and these are all the older brothers. And this is moses. Thats ben george. And this is me here. But this one is the last picture that we were able to salvage. This picture is about my mother and my father. I never knew my father. But this was taken somewhere in brussels when they were there with the wild west show. The thunder beings came and took my father home when i was six months old. [thunder rumbling] so this is where my father was killed on that day that my family had stopped here to rest. A single small cloud appeared in the otherwise blue sky. That stove sat right just about right here. And my mother and i were on this side. And i think my dad was sitting right here, right in this area. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning shot down through the chimney, blew open the woodstove door, and struck my father dead. My two brothers were on each side of my dad but never got hurt. But it killed him instantly. As i uncovered the stories of each generation and added them to the memories of my life, i begin to realize that the trauma that we lakota have experienced for so many generations is a part of who we are today. Even before the reservation was established, a lot of the wars or the massacres that took place, all of that gets passed from generation to generation through memory, genes, through behaviors, through flashbacks. We still experience a lot of the pain, a lot of those memories. And people want to know why they drink so much. People want to know why they are abusing their own families. Walters experience embodies the context of intergenerational trauma. So you have a culture thats survived neargenocide on its knees, and then you pluck a child out of this family and everything thats kept them alive. There was no safe context in which to talk about the abuse and things that he suffered. You know, he had to keep it secret. He had to keep it silent. He had to bear it alone. There wasnt a place where these words were welcome. Ride, ride, over the big divide singing along to the song of the pioneers surround them. Fight wagon train. [whooping] and every saturday, we would go into the theater. They forced us into these movies. We never had the choice. Everything that we saw was all western movies, and it was always roy rogers, gene autry. [trumpet fanfare] the cavalrys coming. There was always the cavalry there, riding the horses. There was always the indians there. Just before we went in, there would be somebody standing there, and they would say, whenever you see the cavalry, you start clapping your hands and you start stomping your feet. If the indians get killed, dont say anything about it. You know, down deep, you always wished the indians would win, and they never would, you know, cause the movies dont, you know, let you do that. Oh, yeah. And you did a lot of cheering and stuff, you know, that the indians would win or whatever, you know. I cant even remember what movie it was. And thats what we did, is cheered for the indians. They marched us out of that theater. [all laughing] they come down there and got us. Yeah. Shined a flashlight on us and marched us out. Now, were not here to fight the indians, as the customs been in the past, but to make friends with them. He dont know nothing about redskins. No. Hes a good indian. Aint no such thing. We werent allowed to talk. We werent allowed to go to the bathroom. We werent even allowed to buy popcorn. We just had to sit there. Ahh i didnt learn much that first year. All i knew was that i wanted to go home. Vacation the end of the school year and you know your mothers there and theres gonna be something to eat and you can take your shoes off and throw em away, go barefooted for the rest of the summer. First thing you do is, you go check the water to see if its warm enough to go swimming. So that was the best time. About the second or the third week in august, the whole community would just suddenly become a little bit more quieter. It was almost like a death in the community. No matter how you worked it, no matter how you looked at it, it always came down to the same thing that we were leaving. Can you talk about bringing things from home to try and to school, in order to keep that link between that you could bring something from home, Little Things that would maintain that link with home that were important to you . [crying] by the middle of the fifth grade, i decided i didnt want to go there anymore. I started running away. Id run home, 16 miles straight across country. There was only one thing that always went through my mind that was to get home, and that was it. It didnt matter whether i ran or whether i walked. I just knew the certain area, certain routes that we had to take in order not to get caught. And you run as far as you can and dont look back, cause there was always somebody that would be out there looking for you. If you could destroy the Indian Society at its roots, which is the family, then you destroy the society. And children are the core, obviously, of any family, but especially, i think, indian families. He had never seen children being beaten before by adults. In traditional lakota culture, your children are your most precious resource, and who would ever think to harm the children . So i think we learned that it was okay to beat up on kids, and it was also okay to beat up on your next of kin, your siblings, or whatever. And so that behavior carried right into marriage. I know i slapped my wife around a number of times, but ive always felt bad afterwards. When i had my own family, it took a long time for me to realize that. That all i did was punish them and discipline them. There was no love, no respect, no nurturing, no honor. It didnt come from me naturally. That wasnt even part of me. It came from someplace. It came from here, the boarding school. That whole trauma associated with shame about who they are, being told by the government, youre woe than the rest of us. Youre less than the rest of us. Is it any surprise, then, that they become a