Mental health programs often don’t address the effects of Native family traumas

WARNING: This story contains details that may be disturbing to some people. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

Archange Ouilmette planned to live out her life with her prized ponies on the 1,280-acre allotment of land she was guaranteed under the 1829 Treaty of Prairie Du Chien.

Faced with hostility in the area, however, and the confiscation of her ponies, the Potawatomi woman and her family were gone by 1838, dispersed to Missouri, Wisconsin and Iowa with false promises of starting a new life.

“It was death by one-thousand cuts,” said Sharon Hoogstraten, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a descendant of Ouilmette. “They were unable to stop poachers on their land. They had to pay court costs for trying to stop the poachers, and their ponies were taken. It was just this kind of constant pressure.”

The Ouilmettes eventually were grouped with other Indigenous people on land west of the

Mississippi River, primarily in what is now Kansas and around Council Bluffs, Iowa. Treaties had promised farming equipment, seeds and supplies necessary to begin a new life, but none awaited them upon arrival.

Sharon Hoogstraten, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, spent 12 years traveling to all nine Potawatomi nations for her book, “Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium,” published in August 2022 by the University of Oklahoma Press. (Photo by Benjamin Apitz, courtesy of Sharon Hoogstraten)

“Council Bluffs was a hellhole,” Hoogstraten said. “They just crammed all the Indian tribes in together, not to mention that none of this land west of the Mississippi was empty land. It belonged to other tribal nations, and it was essentially an act of war to invade those lands.”

It may also have been the start of intergenerational trauma for the family that was exacerbated by the forced removal of children for placement in Indian boarding schools, Hoogstraten said.

Historic events, like what happened to the Ouilmette family, can impact the mental health of descendants — even if descendants do not know what happened — by causing genetic changes that are handed down, according to a growing body of research studying “epigenetics.”

“Many children don’t understand why they’re experiencing what they experience, why they feel the way they do,” said Dr. Albert Mensah, a family physician at the American Indian Health Service of Chicago. “That in part involves what is literally a genetic phenomenon now that is passed on.”

The results can be found in higher concentrations of suicide among Indigenous people, addiction and other problems, according to researchers. The concentrations are particularly evident in the Chicago area, which also served as a landing site for government relocation of Indigenous people in the 1950s.

But because Illinois rarely tracks Indigenous people in the collection of data on these issues, resources are often not targeted toward Indigenous people.

‘Very hard to quantify’

Hoogstraten found Ouilmette’s name on a government subsistence roster, a ledger of debts, as simply, “Old Mrs. Ouilmette, 4 children, a grass widow.”

The “grass widow” reference meant that no one knew the whereabouts of her husband, Antoine, who was a French fur trapper.

Ouilmette died shortly after arriving in Council Bluffs, reportedly in 1840, and her children released the treaty land for sale to the government, having no desire to return to Illinois. About the same time, Ouilmette’s grandson was among 13 boys rounded up by government agents and taken from Council Bluffs to the Choctaw Indian Academy.

The removal may have compounded the intergenerational trauma.

“My mother was not a particularly warm and attached person, and an elder once suggested that happened in Native families because of boarding schools,” said Hoogstraten, who published a book in 2022 on Potawatomi dance.

“I said, ‘My mother never went to a boarding school,’ and they asked, ’Well, did any of her relatives?’ And that, of course, would be Joseph Welch.”

Welch, the grandson of Archange Ouilmette, was born in Cook County. School records list him as age 11 – the youngest student in the group – though Hoogstraten said he could not have been more than 10.

“Do I feel confident that’s why my mother was that way?” Hoogstraten asks. “It could have been an influence, but I also think it could have been the hard times they went through in 1930s Kansas.”

“This is a very important topic right now, the generational trauma, and it’s very hard to quantify.”

Dissolution of culture

For centuries, the Chicago area has been home to various Indigenous communities, who in recent generations have been dispersed throughout the area through urbanization and assimilation under multiple historic treaties.

The relocation creates cultural dissolution within cities, causing forced assimilation as well as the loss of traditional lifestyles and community systems, said James LaGrand, Messiah University professor of American history, who called it “pan-Indianism.”

In 1952, flyers were sent to reservation homes as part of the U.S. government’s Urban Relocation Act, prompting people to move to Chicago and other cities with the promise of lavish homes and nice jobs, according to documents found in the Newberry Library.

Publications such as the Menominee News, which is archived in the Newberry Library, included ads pointing out the “benefits” of relocation including the “desire to do better.” Criticism documented by local relocation officers noted that “Indians are being banished” and the frustrations many felt that could drive them “to drink.”

Urbanization was felt on personal, social, spiritual and material levels, said LaGrand, who is also the author of “Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75.”

Assimilation into Chicago society became contrary to traditional Indigenous beliefs, spreading the problems through generations.

“[Assimilation] causes further problems that I think just compound generational trauma, like the access to housing,” said Kadin Mills, a descendant of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Company and a Northwestern University junior.

“It’s caused mental health problems, depression, anxiety and just general feelings of being lost at an institution.”

The CDC provides programming to federally- and state-recognized tribes. Illinois, however, does not offer state recognition to tribes and there currently are no federally recognized tribes in the state.

RoxAnne Unabia, executive director of the American Indian Health Service in Chicago, said many of the issues the Indigenous community in Chicago faces link to the lack of governmental acknowledgment.

Mensah said the problems have grown over the decades.

“That’s why we talk about keeping the cultures together, keeping the environment together, bringing individuals of similar history together,” Mensah said.

The larger picture

Tracking the impact of relocation and trauma on Indigenous people can be difficult, however, since Indigenous people are often hidden in the data or not counted at all.

In Chicago, Indigenous people are listed in the “other” category for data collection, which generally prevents special funding for suicide prevention and stifles awareness of the Native community’s existence, leading to greater mental and emotional trauma, according to Cynthia Gourneau, the decolonizing data delegate for the American Indian Health Service of Chicago. .

Nationwide, however, non-Hispanic American Indians and Alaska Natives had the highest suicide rate in 2020 among racial or ethnic groups among adults 18 years or older, according to the CDC’s Disparities in Suicide report.

And suicide is the ninth leading cause of death for Indigenous people, but the 12th leading cause of death for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic people of all races, according to the CDC report.

Indigenous communities are included in the CDC’s grouping, Belsie González, a CDC public affairs specialist, said in an email.

It is harder to track the numbers in Chicago.

There are more than 68,000 Indigenous people in Cook County, according to the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative. The complete population count, however, is not reflected in the U.S. Census because only mono-racial groups are represented.

County governmental bodies, such as the Cook County coroner, do not account separately for American Indian and Alaska Native people in data. Rather, Indigenous people are clustered with additional racial groups as “other.”

Still, some funding has made it to urban centers. The Indian Health Service allotted nearly $72 million in 2022 to more than 40 centers in 11 different areas, mostly in the western and southwestern United States. No funding was cited to Chicago-area centers.

The American Indian Health Services of Chicago, however, received $250,000 in behavioral funding for a Zero Suicide Initiative program for five years beginning April 1, 2022, according to documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The Illinois Department of Public Health allotted $750,000 for statewide suicide prevention programming in 2022, but the funds were not specific to any group. The funding marked the first time in six years that a grant had been awarded for suicide-prevention efforts, according to Jill McCamant, a suicide prevention coordinator and project manager with the state health department.

The Chicago Department of Public Health allotted $1 million in suicide prevention programming for the city in the 2022 fiscal year, a $50,000 drop from the previous two years, according to health department reports.

Raising awareness

Zoë Harris, a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found through research that culture-based solutions can be more beneficial to Indigenous people.

“The more disconnected someone is from their tribal community, the worse their health is,” Harris said. “All of the things that we’ve been doing for centuries are important to our mental health, and that tracks. The colonizer mindset was to divide so we need to go back to that traditional mindset.”

Since living in Illinois, Harris said she’s also felt a gap in terms of the state fulfilling the mental health needs of all residents, not just Native people.

“Massachusetts has a better mental health program, but I think in terms of the actual programs Natives have, it’s very much the same in terms of people having underlying problems with depression, intergenerational trauma, the effects that suicide has on our history,” Harris said.

Within her own home community, Harris has noticed a need for more support, especially around feelings such as impostor syndrome and a sense of not belonging in an educational setting.

“Our high school graduation rate has been horrible at 50 percent for a long time. Students aren’t going to college. Why is that? What path are they taking? When they get into the school, they don’t finish,” Harris said. “If you’re the only one, a lot of the burden is put on you to teach people. In addition to dealing with school, Native people also have to deal with what is happening at home and the realities of living as an Indigenous person in a settler colonial state.”

The St. Kateri Center of Chicago blends Catholicism with traditional Indigenous spirituality. The center offers support and resources geared toward the city’s Indigenous community.

A support circle for Indigenous women, for example, creates a foundation for cultural and traditional knowledge while offering prayers and a “community healing blanket,” said Jody Roy, executive director.

The Indigenous youth group teaches tribal experiences to bring social awareness.

“I come from a family of residential school survivors,” Roy said. “I am in support of bringing that awareness and truth though. It’s really important in order for true healing to happen.”

More information on ‘data genocide’
The erasure of American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian people from datasets is not exclusive to Chicago. It is a larger issue that strips governmental resources from Indigenous communities.

The Decolonizing Data Project – which is part of the Urban Indian Health Institute, a public health authority that serves urban Natives nationwide – aims to shine a light on the data disparities to help secure visibility and funding for Indigenous people.
Cynthia Gourneau, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, is the decolonizing data delegate for the American Indian Health Service of Chicago and applied for grant funding through the Decolonizing Data Project.

Data erasure prevents adequate governmental funding, resulting in a cyclical effect of mental health issues for Indigenous people, Gourneau said.

“It’s data genocide. It continues to keep our Native people invisible,” Gourneau said. “That’s why it’s imperative to get this decolonization of data so we can get the funding we truly deserve.”
Fighting to include Indigenous people in datasets is not an easy task, Gourneau said. The effort will take a substantial amount of work that will span all levels of government and institutions, like health care.

Most organizations do not train employees on how to identify an Indigenous person or allow Indigenous people to self-identify. Coroners, for example, do not receive training on how to ask families if the deceased person was Indigenous, according to Gourneau.

“It’s very hard for our Native American people to be categorized as Native American. It’s all about the perception of what the person thinks we are,” Gourneau said. “A lot of Natives have Hispanic last names, or they’re marked as Hispanic. Or they’re just marked as Asian or White, so that makes it hard to get accurate statistics regarding violence, deaths, suicides or how often Natives present for STI’s [sexually transmitted infections] in the area.”

The lack of categorization also returns to the centuries-old idea of who is “legally and officially Native,” a governmental issue that trivializes the vastness of the Indigenous population, said James LaGrand, Messiah University professor of American history.

Rather than recognizing individual people and tribes, data often lumps Indigenous groups together as “American Indian/Alaska Native” and “Native Hawaiian.” This diminishes the diversity and identities of the Indigenous people.

As an example, funding is usually given to tribal nations, which Illinois does not recognize, and there are no tribal trust lands. This eliminates the possibility of Indigenous people accessing governmental assistance.

The Prairie Band of the Potawatomi Nation is fighting to get its land back in DeKalb County, an effort that has made its way up to Congress. If the PBPN is successful, there will be tribal land in Illinois, leading to more governmental support and funding.

Indigenous people – particularly the elderly – oftentimes do not like to open up about themselves.
“I think [it’s] for good reason,” LaGrand said. “I realized this is absolutely warranted.”

Additionally, oftentimes identification is based on the perception of whoever is filling out the form.
“They assume you’re something else. They never assume, ‘Oh, she’s Native,’ unless you’re walking around in full regalia,” said RoxAnne Unabia, the executive director of AIHSC. “We’re the invisible minority. It’s another psychologically damaging effect.”
– Amelia Schafer and Monica Sager