Boarding Schools, Sexual Assault, and Restorative Justice on American Indian Reservations: a Conversation With Former Tribal Prosecutor Elaine Yellow Horse

This interview is a follow up from a recent article on Sherman Alexie and the sexual assault legacy of federal Native American boarding schools. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Joe Flood: Tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you’ve done with criminal justice and sexual assault.

Elaine Yellow Horse: Well, I worked as a tribal prosecutor for over three years. Of the cases that I worked and the people I know personally who were sexually assaulted, the majority were by a family member or a friend. That’s how common it is.

JF: There was a public health official in Pine Ridge who had done a survey of high school girls and found that a majority had been forced to have sex against their will. Does that track with your experience? Those kinds of numbers?

EYH: Yes. It’s very high in my experience. As a prosecutor and also living on a reservation, the numbers are high.

JF: I’ve never heard of a good stat for boys.

EYH: I know it does happen very often to men as well as women. It’s just that the men don’t want to come forward, and talk about it or report it. There was actually a person I knew who recently committed suicide and part of his suicide note was that he was gang raped by a group of guys who were raping his girlfriend. He tried to stop it, then they turned on him and ganged him, and they end up sodomizing him. Then he goes home, and he ended up hanging himself.

JF: Something like sexual assault — and particularly patterns emerging in families and in communities — it’s extremely complicated, but if you were to try to think of original sources and causes, do you have a sense of where this stuff is coming from?

EYH: Yeah, it definitely came from the boarding school era. You’ve got all these people who were sent off to the boarding schools, and we all know what happened in the boarding schools [click here for an article on the sexual assault legacy of Native boarding schools]. My mom, she’s 55 now, and in her generation it’s a lot more prevalent, and you can see it because a lot of her generation were sexually abused by the generation before them, and then it carries on.

JF: As an analogy, you’ve been living in the Boston area quite a bit. Spotlight, of course, is a major movie about Catholic Church sexual abuse and coverups that occurred when I was growing up in the same area. Are there similarities there?

EYH: I would say yes. I can’t explain it, but you can feel it, you know what I mean? With some people, there’s no way they’re going to turn in the Catholic church or go against the priests or anything like that.

JF: It’s almost like a family thing.

EYH: Yeah. It’s like a loyalty thing, and same as families on the reservation. You don’t want to turn your family member in. Family loyalty above everything, I would say, is how it is on the reservation.

JF: You’ve had experiences like this with your own family.

EYH: Yes, my mother turned my relative in for sexually assaulting my cousin. And I remember sitting on the porch one day at that time, and my family was disowning us and telling us “Your mother’s crazy…” and all of this, and I remember feeling really lonely sitting on the front porch step. So many years later my mother is still being ostracized for turning her relative in.

I think what she did was a very noble thing, because she stopped him. But she’s told every day that she’s crazy and that she needs a mental health evaluation, and it’s by family members, it’s by her friends, it’s by community members. Now my generation is also experiencing sexual assault at a high rate. I do think it’s like a domino effect. It just keeps going and going until at some point it has to stop, but we don’t know how to stop it. I have ideas of how to stop it, but it’s going to take a lot of effort from the community and the criminal justice system, and bringing in support systems and things like that. Trying to heal all the victims and families and the communities — I think that’s exactly what Indian Country needs. We need to figure out a way to accept what happened, figure out a way to get through it.

JF: As a prosecutor, you dealt with sexual assault obviously, but a host of other issues in the community. Are there programs that worked better than others in trying to help victims, families, even perpetrators? I’ve heard you talk about using “restorative justice,” this idea that instead of just focusing on punishing wrongdoers, you try and get them to make amends to the community or victims, seek some kind of forgiveness.

EYH: What I liked about our office and my coworkers at the Oglala Sioux Tribal prosecutor’s office is that we were more open to, like you mentioned, restorative justice. For example, we’d give people lots of community service over paying fines, because a lot of people don’t have money. For example, there were these kids that broke into this house, and broke some of the windows. I spoke with the victim and he said, “All we wanted was our stuff back, our belongings,” and they got that back. He was already someone in the community who worked with the youth, so he’s like, “I’m willing to work with these kids, I don’t want them in jail and missing school and stuff like that.”

We agreed that they would go to his house and he would pack them into his truck and he would take them around to elderly houses and have them clean it and pick up trash. One of the things that he was having them do was put screen on the windows in the summertime, and plastic on the windows in the wintertime.

JF: Almost as a reminder of his windows that they broke.

EYH: Yeah, and it really worked, with them and with a lot of other kids.

JF: What other programs worked well?

EYH: I know when I was a prosecutor, we had to get creative to help people, because we had so few resources. When you put someone on probation, there’s nothing for them to do, so what my office did was we tried to have people go to sweat lodges [a traditional Lakota form of prayer] and do a lot of community service, or go to GED classes or college and show proof of that.

A couple of people were excited because they did actually get their GEDs. They would come up to me on the street or at the store and say, “Hey, I’ve been sober for this many days, and I actually got my GED!” It was the most random people, people you didn’t expect, but they did it.

It didn’t always work. There were habitual offenders who were in and out of the system constantly and by the time I got to them as the juvenile prosecutor, they were like, “Put me in jail, I don’t care.”

JF: These are kids without much family support, not going to school, things like that?

EYH: Yeah, that is pretty common. That cycle of addiction and dysfunction gets itself stuck in some families and it can be hard to stop. But education is even more complicated. Even people who have family support don’t necessarily have school stressed to them by the family. Growing up, I was definitely not expected to go to school. If I went to school, it was because I got myself up and got dressed, put myself on the bus. At one point I missed like 60-something days in one year. My mom never had a ride to go to parent teacher conferences or anything like that, so she was absent from my schooling, but not from home.

JF: That seems like another legacy of the boarding schools, what education means in the community, why some families don’t make sure their kids go to school. So many people in the older generation suffered so much in these schools, they have a lot of bad associations with the school.

EYH: Yeah, growing up on the reservation it was definitely not pushed on me that I had to go to school. I more so probably went for the food, and for the sports. I liked playing basketball. That’s pretty much what helped me graduate from high school, because you have to keep a 2.0 GPA to play sports.

JF: Right. Well, and your mom is an example of someone who really had a hard time in the school system, coming in as a young child who spoke Lakota, and was abused for speaking the language. I wrote out the “typical” first day of school story for a lot of people I’ve interviewed and your mother was one of the people whose story matched that “typical” one so well, being physically abused as a young child.

EYH: Yeah. She definitely had a rough time in school. She liked learning things, I know that. I remember when I was little I used to watch her hitchhike to her college classes. I would walk her up to the stop sign in Wounded Knee where I grew up and just watch her as she walked out of sight or until someone picked her up, and then I’d walk home.

JF: It’s interesting, that you saw that, your mother really working and sacrificing to learn and go to the tribal college. I imagine that’s a thing that must have made a big impression on you, maybe even without you realizing it. So many kids on the reservation grow up not seeing their parents go to work, not being told to go to school, and so they never learn those habits. Did your mother’s commitment to college have something to do with you really committing to your education and going to the tribal college?

EYH: Yeah, I used to do the same thing she did to get to college, hitchhiking when I didn’t have a ride. I guess it made an impression on me. And for me it was just part of re-connecting with myself, with being Lakota. I think the people on my reservation need to be connected to our ceremonies and our traditions, because I think a lot of us either lost that or we don’t know that part of who we are. For us to reconnect ourselves to that way of life I think is going to be something that helps us go forward. I know from experience, I used to be crazy myself, I used to drink a lot, and go to jail a lot, things like that. Then I kind of calmed down, I began to pray more, and go to sweat more, just kind of made myself a part of that community, you know?

JF: That community and traditional connection is thing with jobs and work too, on the reservation. I remember I had a job at the Boys & Girls Club and there was a guy working there who showed up to work one day and his truck was stinking, and he was like, “Check it out!” In the back he’s got a porcupine that he found on the side of the road and he was going to harvest all the quills. Then he missed three or four days of work doing the harvesting, which was hundreds of dollars in pay that he missed, to harvest a lot less than that in quills. Economically it made no sense, but that was a way of making money that he felt valued in doing. It connected him to the community, to culture, to tradition, in a way that the job just didn’t for him. That really made a big impression on me in terms of how important it is to integrate the cultural and the traditional aspect of life with even modern or Western things like work, or the school system. Are there programs on the reservation that are working on bringing together the traditional with the modern?

EYH: Oh yes. There are now Lakota language immersion schools. There’s a girls’ school that opened and they’re incorporating traditional ceremonies and values and things like that into their teachings. I think that’s really cool. Then you have the ‘becoming a woman’ ceremony and ‘becoming a man’ ceremony that’s happening every summer now. Granted, they only have enough funding for a few dozen kids, but still that’s better than no program at all, you know? There’s a horse camp that happens every summer, I used to teach the archery there. It’s happening slowly, but it is happening, you know? I think we’re headed in a good direction.

But there is a long way to go. I still don’t think people have outwardly connected the boarding school era to what’s happening on the reservation. I don’t think they’ve made that connection, but working in the criminal justice system and speaking to elders about their experience in the school systems when they were younger, it’s obvious that the connection is there, we just need to figure out a way to bring that out and make it apparent to everyone.

JF: We have a mutual friend who had talked to her mother recently about her mother’s time in boarding school for the first time. She learned what an impact the boarding school system had had on her mother, and then she could see the impact in how her mother had raised her and her brothers and sisters. She said it was like an “Ah-ha!” moment: “That’s why she raised us like that, that’s why she would get so upset about this thing and that thing.” She said that conversation made her whole upbringing make more sense. But she started telling friends about this and she said that basically no one she talked to had ever had that kind of conversation with their parents and elders before.

EYH: Yeah, that’s true. Growing up you’re not taught to question your elders. You listen to what they say to you. You don’t question.

JF: It’s not a topic that people immediately start talking about.

EYH: Yeah, because it’s something that’s really hard to even bring up. It’s dangerous in a way. I really want to do a project talking with people about their boarding school experiences, but you need to have a lot of resources to do that right, because you bring all these emotions up in these people and all of these traumas. And all of a sudden as interviewers we’re gone, and now they’re left at home to deal with those issues. It’s a hard thing to try to do. You can bring counselors with you, social workers, but at the end of the day, this person’s going to end up alone at night, you know? I struggle with that, wondering what is the right thing to do.