Although Ojibway recommended counseling and medication to treat the patient’s symptoms, the guardian wouldn’t allow it. One of his patients is a young person whose legal guardian is a relative who attended a boarding school. “When you have someone Native themselves step into the medical community saying it’s okay to talk about these things and not hold them in, having that trust is invaluable,” says Ojibway, who graduated from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing last year.ĭespite a deep connection with the Saginaw Chippewa community, Ojibway still runs into challenges. ![]() Ojibway, whose great-grandfather attended the nearby Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, has learned that sharing a frame of reference with his patients helps to establish trust and open lines of communication. Not one of his patients has ever scored zero on the survey. To get a sense of his patients’ experience with respect to trauma, he gives them a detailed intake form, which includes questions from the ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) survey, as well questions tailored to the community he serves, such as whether a relative attended an Indian boarding school. They might not be fully aware that it’s related to the long lineage of suffering and experiences that their ancestors have gone through. “It’s a result of historical trauma that’s been built up and passed on and is just coming to the surface. “They’re coming in now as adults and often times they’re still struggling, whether it be with addiction, chronic depression, anxiety,” says Ojibway, MSN, PMHNP, the tribe's first and only psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. He sees it in his patients at a Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe medical clinic in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Some 700 miles and a few generations distant, psychiatric nurse practitioner Joseph Ojibway too often witnesses the persistence of trauma that Simard battled with for a lifetime. “That’s what the school took away from me,” says Simard. And she got sober at 35.Ī critical part of her hard-fought recovery, she says, was reconnecting with her Native language and cultural traditions. She also managed to build a productive life, marrying, raising two children, and holding down jobs. She depended on alcohol for many years to cope with the anger she buried. Last year, ground penetrating radar identified more than 1,300 unmarked graves at four former Indian residential schools in Canada.Īlthough Simard left the residential school at 11, the painful memories remained fresh and have shaped her life. Still, revelations of horrors at the boarding schools continue. In 2007, Canada took steps to confront the inhumane treatment at Indian residential schools, including a government apology, financial settlements for residential school survivors, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took testimony from survivors and their families and created a national research center. She is among more than 150,000 Indigenous children who were forced into such schools as a means of assimilating them into society. Simard, who still lives in Fort Frances, although not on the reserve, is a third-generation survivor of Indian residential schools operated by the Canadian government from the 1870s to 1997. “In my mind today, I don’t even know if I was one of them. “It never ever hit me until later on that I had witnessed some of the sexual abuse that was going on at the school,” says Simard. She recalls a nun coming in the middle of the night and leaving with a girl or two, then returning with the children, who were crying. ![]() One particularly haunting recollection takes Simard back to the girls’ dorm filled with rows of steel beds with thin mattresses. “It was very, very soothing, and would last me for the week,” she recalls. She remembers her mother stroking her hair, cut short when she arrived at the school. The school, located on the reserve, allowed Simard to return home on Sundays for a few cherished hours. Meals were mainly watery stews preceded by doses of cod liver oil. ![]() The nuns beat her with a leather strap on the hands and back of the legs when she spoke her native Ojibwe or mispronounced English words. She remembers coal oil treatments that burned her scalp to kill nits. It was a brutal place, says the 74-year-old, now Priscilla Agnes Simard. ![]() Forcibly removed from her family home on the Couchiching First Nation reserve in Fort Frances, Ontario, by Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, she spent the next five years at the school run by the Catholic Church. Margaret’s Indian Residential School in 1953. It was the identification assigned to the little girl when she arrived at St. At age 6, Priscilla Agnes Morrisseau became number 332A.
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