Monday November 23, 2009    3:07 AM

By Rob McDonald - Staff writer
from the Spokesman Review - Tuesday, July 6, 1999, pp. A1 and A10

Sometimes it takes 100 years to tell a sad story.

When the Fort Spokane Indian boarding school opened in 1900, Native American children were taken from their parents on the reservations and brought in by wagon.

They were separated from their traditional culture so they could learn what boarding-school documents called "the civilized life," A school superintendent of the era said an Indian student would benefit from white teachers because they would expose him to "the good manners of the superior race."

Students' hair was cut. They weren't allowed to speak their language. Those who ran away were tracked down and brought back.

For nine years, Fort Spokane housed the Indian boarding school, a place that holds painful memories for survivors and their descendants.

Documentaries and museum exhibits around the country have explored the sensitive topic of Indian boarding schools. But Fort Spokane never had told its own story -- until now.

The National Park Service opened an exhibit at Fort Spokane last week called After the Soldiers Left."

Established in 1891 to police nearby Indian reservations, Fort Spokane was home to the U.S. Army until 1898. Indian agents turned the complex into a school and later a hospital before it was closed in 1929.

Organizers say the exhibit marks the first time local tribes and the National Park Service have worked together to build an exhibit.

Rather than rehash old government records, new research was pulled together from the Colville and Spokane tribes. Selections also wen added from a traveling exhibit produced by Cheney Cowles Museum, "They Sacrificed for Our Survival: The Indian Boarding School

Experience."

"To really do this correctly, we needed to go beyond what the books contain:' said Dan Hand spokesman for the National Park Service who worked on the project. "We did not wish to whitewash it, which is easy to do if you just look at the (old) government records (which considered the school a success)."

Old records never took into account the pain and cultural damage inflicted by the schools. As the exhibit explains, some scholars assert that the schools produced a psychological disorder known as "historical trauma" that's been passed down.

Hand, a non-Indian, hired a Colville Tribes member, Tim Brooks, who navigated the project to completion. It's not a large display, just nine big panels inside the brick guardhouse. But it became "a way to explain our ancestors' way of life and how it all changed because of the boarding school," Brooks said.

The panels ask viewers to imagine themselves as small children who have been taken from parents and put into a military setting. When they arrived, they were not allowed to speak or act like they did at home. The rules were strict.

The exhibit also captures the day-to-day activities. Girls were taught to sew, cook and clean. Boys were taught farming and mechanical skills in the belief that most of them would take up farming when they returned home to the Spokane and Colville reservations. One panel talks about how leisure time was spent playing games and riding sleds drawn by horses.

The schools closed in 1909 soon after reservation schools opened and Indian parents were allowed to pull their kids out of boarding schools.

The exhibit attempts to tell the story from the tribal point of view because that has been the missing piece for nearly a century, Hand said. He had been mulling over a display like this for years.

The panels ask viewers to imagine themselves as small children who have been taken from parents and put into a military setting.

In about 1986, he stumbled onto the school's history while helping redo signs around the complex. When he revealed his interest in expanding the Fort Spokane displays, he was cautioned that the boarding school topic was extremely sensitive.

At that time, there wasn't much official contact with local tribes, Hand said.

Three years ago, Hand returned to the area after working at Yellowstone National Park and the Florida Everglades. As he settled in, he found a more open dialogue between the tribes and the Parks Service.

A year ago, he decided to pursue the idea. A co-worker suggested he talk to Brooks, who worked for the Colville Confederated Tribal Museum in Coulee Dam.

Brooks had been temporarily laid off and was available.

During his interviews with elders, Brooks said he was at first overwhelmed by his own emotions. He heard stories of children who were dunked in tanks of kerosene to kill hair and body lice. Braids were cut off. People were beaten for speaking their language.

"When I looked at this way of life, it really affected me as an Indian," Brooks said.

He turned to his grandmother for support and he spoke to other elders. Brooks was encouraged to create a display that would start the healing process -- acknowledge the pain, but then move past it to explain what life was like there.

"There were times I really felt confused," Brooks said.

Bit by bit, the pieces came together. In June, tribal representatives signed off on the finished panels.

At an open house Last week, Brooks said he wasn't sure what to expect. Tribal people came up and told Brooks, "It had to be done."

More in-depth exhibits on the Indian experience at the boarding school will follow, Hand said.

"This is like the introduction. Chapter one will follow."

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December 21, 2004