An Ojibwe woman and independent journalist Mary Annette Pember recently visited Alaska for a series of stories on historical trauma and Native American mental health practices.
Pember says the troubled lives of Native Americans reflect their troubled history.
In one of her articles, Mary Annette Pember tells the story of Oseira. In 1944, at the age of five, she was removed from her home in a Bristol Bay area village and sent to a Catholic boarding school in Interior Alaska. There Oseira says she and her sister joined dozens of other children in a strictly regimented life of hard work, harsh punishment and little schooling.
Pember says her interest in historical trauma has its roots in her own family history. Like Oseira, Pember’s mother was removed from her Wisconsin family as a child.
“My mother was a boarding school survivor,” Pember said. “She’s passed on now. But as I began this whole looking at historical trauma, I wanted to look at myself and my own family’s struggles with disease, health issues.”
[For more of this story, written by Joaqlin Estus, go to http://www.alaskapublic.org/20...cans-alaska-natives/]
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