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It's a busy road.
It is.
But nobody's seen anything.
That's a dead end, so--
I don't see anybody that has a camera.
But then again, they're all fenced-off, so--
[CHILDREN LAUGHING IN
THE DISTANCE]
Someone knows something.
I dropped her off right here--
Oh.
at the end of this road.
She didn't want that man--
that's her husband--
to know that we dropped her off.
Did she ever say why?
She was scared of him.
You see?
This is their house where she lived.
Do you think they actually
explored this place though?
I don't know.
I think that's a good question to ask.
I don't know if there's scuba divers
or what they can do to look in the lake.
Yeah, if they could get
people to look in the waters--
Do we need to comb the waters here?
Is she somewhere else in the woods?
Every day and every night, I pray.
I pray for you.
I love and miss you, sister.
Come home.
Please, god, please, god, bring her home.
We're here on the Tulalip
Tribal Indian Reservation.
That's the road that we believe Mary
Davis Johnson was last seen,
Fire Trail Road.
She did go missing two years ago on November 25, 2020.
But we do have witnesses that place her walking
on this stretch of roadway.
She was trying to catch a ride, and it's very possible
that she was likely picked up in a vehicle
and taken from this area.
She could have been abducted.
She could have been picked up by a known individual
or by a complete stranger, and possibilities
are limitless of where she may have been taken.
Mary disappearing, I never
thought that would happen.
Mary, she's
feisty.
She'd fight.
She'd never give up.
I think that she might have been taken against her will.
Mary is very giving, very caring, very funny.
She'll do any impersonation just to make you laugh.
I'm very close to Mary.
She'd never give up on me.
She was always telling me, you may be pissy at me
or I may be pissy at you, but we're sisters.
You got to deal with it.
We love each other no matter what.
The day before Thanksgiving, she went missing.
She was
supposed to be meeting somebody at a white church
on Fire Trail Road.
She was supposed to be going to a family in Oso, Washington.
Her cellphone made it there and back to Tulalip.
But we don't know if she was with the cellphone.
She could be out there still alive.
There's many scenarios of what could be happening.
I do have dreams about her every once in a while, but
I don't think she's gone.
And I do wish she would come home.
My name is Terry Gobin,
and I am the chairwoman of the Tulalip tribes.
We are the fishing people.
We are the salmon people, the descendants from the Snohomish,
Snoqualmie, and allied bands.
Native women like Mary Ellen are missing
because they're easy prey.
The numbers of the Native women that are missing
are higher than any nationality throughout the United States.
It is like predators know that this is lawless land.
People use the reservations as dumping grounds for bodies.
For years, no white man who abused a Native person
could be prosecuted through our courts at all.
And it kind of gave non-Native perpetrators
the open field to come in and violate Native people.
She is such a doting aunt.
They are just as worried as we are.
I'm sure the whole family
is going through this.
There's not a family member that doesn't
feel what you're feeling.
When this first came about,
we didn't have any help at all.
No.
It was just her and I, and we were just looking at each other
like what should we do?
And I didn't think it was real at first.
Her husband told us a couple days
before Thanksgiving that she was missing for, like,
two weeks prior.
He told us that we should report her missing, and two,
three weeks after, he moved to California.
And then went and changed his number like a couple of weeks
later.
So he calls you and says that his wife is missing
and for you to call the police?
Mhm.
He didn't want anything to do with this investigation
and basically just washed his hands.
He is a white man.
He left.
Tribal cops can't do anything.
So their hands are tied behind their back.
They already did a cadaver dog search in the place
that they both lived in in Marysville.
They found nothing of it.
But--
But not along Fire Trail Road or anywhere.
Now, I'm at the part where I'm just getting angry now because
there's nothing new.
There's no answers almost two years.
Is that your sister?
Yeah.
What was her name?
It was Catherine Teresa Jo.
She was
27 years old when she went missing.
Life changing, for sure, yeah.
My name is Deborah Parker.
My traditional name is Tsi-Cy-Altsa.
I was the former Vice-chairwoman of the Tulalip Tribes.
Mary Ellen, I know she's been stolen.
There's foul play.
There's just something terribly wrong,
and she deserves for people to fight for her.
Three out of five Native women will be sexually assaulted.
In some communities, it's nearly 100% of the women.
This work that we do
is work from our heart.
It's from our spirit.
So we stand today in honor of the missing
and murdered Indigenous.
We pray for the families who are longing for their loved ones,
and we ask the people who see these pictures
to help us fight.
The colonial system of outsiders coming in,
like, brutally raping our women has not stopped.
We have a high record of non-native men
assaulting Native women and killing, murdering our women.
We've learned through doing research
that some of the men in jail would say
you can go rape a Indian woman, and you
won't be, you won't get caught.
You won't get in trouble.
The reason behind that is because tribal police
don't have jurisdiction over the non-Indians.
They see a crime happen, they have to back off of that crime.
So we still don't have jurisdiction, say, for murder.
So if there's a crime committed here,
then we have to really depend upon federal agents
to come in to pick up the cases and to prosecute.
We do a lot of funerals.
We lost another sister today.
Every tribe, they've been having funerals after funerals back
to back for a long time now.
It's not just Mary Ellen, all of them.
All the reservations are going through the same thing
right now.
They're losing
people, young ladies disappearing.
The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, Haitchka, Haitchka.
I pray for Mary Ellen every day.
I ask God, if she's gone to the other side,
at least give us closure on it.
Just before she disappeared, she was
telling me that her and her husband
were having marital problems.
She was, they weren't getting along very good.
So I didn't go any further than that with it.
That, that's, that's their problem.
I didn't want to get into that.
My sister Mary Jane and David were Mary Ellen's parents.
David worked in, in a big casino for a long time.
Well, that's where he died.
He died in the bathroom at the big casino.
We lost so much.
Everything fell apart.
My Auntie Mary Jane, her husband
was everything to her.
She loved her husband, and her husband absolutely loved her.
She started using drugs because she lost custody of her girls,
and her husband died.
I don't think she knew what to do
to be able to go on with life.
One time I came home to visit, and all the girls were gone.
And I asked my auntie.
I says like, what happened?
She goes,
CPS just came and took my girls.
They accused me of multiple things and just took my girls.
After she did everything in her power
to try to fight for them back, she just
turned to alcohol and drugs.
She got really, really depressed.
And that's how we ended up losing her.
My Auntie Mary Jane wasn't the only one
that went through that.
CPS, like, literally did a sweep through all the tribes,
removing children from families, and
a lot of the families never got their children back.
They were adopted out.
They were put with a lot of white families.
We have a lot of Tulalip tribal members foster children
that don't even know our culture.
They are coming back after they've
turned 18 to know who they are.
Mary Ellen was one of the first girls that came home.
I know she was lost.
You looked at her, her, you looked at her face,
and you looked in her eyes, she was lost.
She wanted to find who she was and where she came from.
She wanted to know her family.
She had questions about her mom.
She had questions about her dad, about her culture.
She came home, and then she was gone.
She disappeared.
The State
and CPS took us away from our parents, our native culture.
I was five.
Mary was four.
I remember the knock on the door.
The police came in, searched the home,
and they ended up taking Mary and I.
We went to this foster home.
And that's when the abuse started.
Mary and I were sexually abused, assaulted.
It was a relief to go to school in the morning,
not having to see this, this man, and then
coming home and dreading.
Oh god, is he going to leave me alone tonight?
Poor Mary was so messed up.
She did unspeakable things for that man.
Years later, Mary followed the path to addiction, drugs
and alcohol.
And a result of
winning against the state of Washington and CPS,
myself and Mary got $400,000 for psychological damage
and being assaulted as young children.
Her husband stole her money, her settlement that we had received
from the state, all of it.
He put it into an account.
I'm not sure where it is or where it's going,
but he took all her money, didn't leave her nothing.
And then he moved to California.
No one's seen him since.
Way back, a long time ago, everybody
knew all their relatives.
We knew our uncles, our aunts, our grandmothers.
When we got into trouble at one place, everybody knew about it.
And the family sort of drifted apart.
By doing what you guys are doing today,
we're taking a step in the right direction,
trying to come back to what we used to be.
So go ahead and enjoy the meal.
Enjoy the company most of all.
Yes.
Did she get you guys a hotel?
No, we're not going to stay the night because we're going
to have the babies with us.
Oh, OK.
I used to live in the Yakima Valley.
Yeah?
And your mom and Auntie Mary Ellen
used to travel all the way over there to come and visit me
and my sister Veronica.
That's pretty nice.
Mary, Mary Jane, Mary Ellen, Auntie Ruby, and Auntie Wendy
would go with my dad to go--
All together?
All together to go visit us.
I'm starting to get used to family.
Yeah.
I've been gone for, I don't know, maybe 10 or 12 years.
I just reconnected with Gerry when our mom passed away.
Well, we're glad that you found us.
Yeah.
Welcome home.
Yeah.
Gerry said I look like Mary, but I don't, I don't really see it.
But I don't--
I see it.
But well, maybe the chin.
Maybe the cheekbones, the nose, maybe.
Maybe.
But Mary was a good sister, and
I hope she actually comes back soon.
So do we.
So you knew Mary for a while?
For a long time,
before she even got with this last boyfriend that she had.
If we seen her walking, we would just pick her up,
and she's, she started opening up to us,
telling us that her husband was very abusive.
If she left without his permission, when she got home,
he'd lock her in the closet.
And I told Mary, if you need to leave, and she says,
I'm trying to.
He stalks me.
He got a lawyer when
this all first happened and gave the police
about that thick of paperwork.
And he took off, and he knows what he did was wrong.
But he's five steps ahead of anybody on the tribal land.
Every day and every night, I
pray, pray for you.
I love and miss you, sister.
Please god, bring her home.
is my tribal name.
My father, Stan Jones Jhelum, he was
close with your grandfather, Joe.
And Joe used to
hang all my dad's gillnets.
So we would come to the house of your grandparents,
and you ladies, you were just little kids.
And that's how I remembered you.
It's with heavy heart that we're here still today,
and we don't know where your sister is.
If it was on the outside, a non-native woman,
there would be a different reaction.
There would be media.
There would be-- it would continue to go on,
but that it's an Indigenous person,
they're not there for us.
We have to be there to stand strong with each other
and keep pressing and keep trying to get these answers.
So my name is Gerry Davis, sister, youngest
sister of Mary Johnson-Davis.
It's OK, Gerry.
I can't talk in front of all these people.
Just take a deep breath.
Yeah, OK.
She may not mean much in others' eyes.
She's just another Native gone missing.
But she means the world to us.
Every life should have the same value.
But somehow in America, it doesn't.
Hey, everybody.
I'm Nona Blouin, the eldest of four girls.
My sister and I went through the foster care
system and addiction.
We went through hell together, being sexually abused
for years by our foster family.
We were abandoned by the state of Washington.
Today, we ask you please, don't abandon us again.
This has happened to all of us.
Every single one of us have suffered through this
through our moms, our sisters, our daughters, our grandmas,
our great grandmas.
And I can remember when my mom told me
when I was a very young boy how she was raped by a group
of men, non-Indian men.
I also recall about how a non-Indian man picked up
my Auntie from Round Valley as she was leaving
a party on the reservation and raped her in his vehicle
and then literally kicked her out the door of the vehicle
into a ditch.
And I'm honored to be the advocate of this family.
And sadly, I'm sitting here, nearly two years later
with the same information that the family has,
which is no information.
All that I know is what's on this poster.
If this ex-husband has left these parts,
and he's in California, the Tulalip Tribes
does not have authority to go find him and investigate him.
The entity with supreme power to find Mary and bring her home
is the United States, the Department of Justice,
and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It is unjust, and it is racist because we
all know that there are predators
living within our communities--
Yes.
- who are doing this to our women--
Yes.
who are non-Indian and tribal--
Mhm.
and they are protected.
Mhm.
My name is Gabriel Steven Galanda.
I'm an Indigenous rights lawyer in Seattle, Washington.
The United States Supreme Court has
said that tribal governments do not
possess inherent criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians.
So Indigenous humanity does not enjoy
the same legal civil rights protection
as the humanity of every other Americans born to this country.
That rule has created havens on reservations
for murderers and rapists.
In an ideal world, you would have every available law
enforcement officer joining arms to find
an Indigenous woman who has been murdered or gone missing.
But that does not happen.
What happens is a game of hot potato.
Oh, this is the tribe's issue.
Oh, no, this is the state's issue.
Oh, no, this is the federal issue.
Oh, that man's no longer at Tulalip.
He now lives in some non-Indian community.
So what they end up doing is playing
political hot potato with the matter,
and no one ever gets to work.
The FBI has robust criminal authority
over reservation crimes and investigate and ultimately
prosecute crimes.
The challenge, however, is that the FBI rarely, if ever,
does that.
They are more interested in counter terrorism,
which is legitimate, and domestic terrorism,
which is legitimate.
But when it comes right down to whether an Indigenous
woman matters enough to receive federal interest when she goes
missing or is raped or murdered, generally speaking,
the interest is not there.
And that is why it's not just Mary,
but it's hundreds to thousands of other women and girls
who are no longer even accounted for.
I need 24 volunteers
to please come and grab and hold one of these missing persons--
I'm so glad you guys are here.
Yeah?
I want you guys to be able to get a photo
with media to share your story.
And I'll put you down on the list
of one of the people that's going
to carry one of those banners.
OK.
OK, thank you.
ROXANNE WHITE My name is Roxanne White.
So when I say--
why you looking nerv--
ROXANNE WHITE
We want our families.
ROXANNE WHITE - which means
walks with the people.
If you're a family member and you got a banner,
please come to the front.
Please come to the front.
When a Native American goes missing,
we don't see anything happen.
There's not going to be a search.
There's not going to be an all-out broadcast.
It's not going to hit the news.
You'll be lucky to see it within that week if it makes it there.
It happens far too often because how
often are our loved ones going missing or being murdered?
But yet, we don't have justice.
Yet, we're fighting for visibility.
Yet, we're fighting for human rights.
Ella Mae Begay, say her name.
Ella Mae Begay.
Say her name.
Ella Mae Begay.
Mary Johnson.
Help us find.
Mary Johnson.
Help us find.
I knew early on that there
wasn't going to be anybody held accountable for what
happened to Mary.
I was once told by FBI that I watched too many crime shows.
And I've heard them say, well, there's nothing you can do
if they don't want to be found.
And that's the assumption.
They just disregard families when families
say this is not normal.
She was supposed to come right back.
She hasn't been on her social media.
Her phone is dead.
Nobody's seen her.
The third leading cause of death for Native women
is homicide.
Why are we being muzzled?
Native families are being muzzled on what they can say
or how they feel about their loved one
being murdered or going missing.
Our women should not go missing or be
murdered and have no justice.
Unless you really fit that, that blonde-haired, blue-eyed
man or woman, or if you're that person that appeals
to white America, then yeah, you, they
might exhaust all resources.
Break the cycle--
- for our future.
Break the cycle--
- for our future.
Break the cycle--
- for our future.
Break the cycle--
- for our future.
Break the cycle--
My name is Richard A. Collodi.
I'm the Special Agent in charge of FBI Seattle's field office,
including the investigation of Mary
Johnson-Davis' disappearance.
Because it's an ongoing case, I can't
speak about the specifics or the facts
as to what investigative action has occurred.
And when we do conduct an investigation into crimes
in Indian country, the FBI is fully engaged,
will commit all of its resources within that investigation.
The decision to use a seeking information and a reward
was to elicit additional information that
may be out there, locate Mary, bring Mary home,
or hold the person responsible for her disappearance.
Just by an individual being missing
does not mean that a crime has occurred.
I think categorizing Indian reservations
or Indian territory as lawless or loopholes
is wildly mischaracterizing what the truth is on those.
Typically, our Indigenous women would be victimized
the same as any other person.
They could be the victim of any crime, just like anyone else.
It would be inappropriate to say they are
targeted for specific crimes.
I don't have statistics that definitively
say that Native women are the most targeted.
I don't have statistics to say that they're
more at risk than others.
The statistics of what the actual number is
varies greatly by reports.
Does Washington underreport or overreport
compared to other states?
That's one of the challenges why there are questions
related to this issue.
A criticism that an agency is not contributing or does not
have enough resources, my response
is that is why we work collaboratively
with all the partners within the community.
The FBI'S mission throughout the United States is broad.
The number of agents is dictated to us.
And so we must prioritize the programs and the threats
that our agents work.
We take it very seriously and are heavily invested
in time and resources to address violent crime
on our Indian reservations.
I haven't wore this in a long time.
And it's one of my old ones.
Dear older ones, yeah.
Well, do you think I should-- these look too big?
No.
Native women have been going missing
since the beginning of time.
Even I was missing, kidnapped and abducted
right from my home after being sexually
assaulted by more than two men.
Violence is a, it's a normal thing here.
To see it happen or to be a victim of it, it's normal.
First, my aunt was shot and murdered in front of me,
and then also my niece Eveona Lakota Cortez
was also murdered with another 13-year-old girl
in Burien, Washington.
And then my cousin Rosenda Strong
went missing October 2 of 2018.
My sister was at this casino
when she went missing.
She was seen here on September 30 of 2018,
and that was the last time she was seen.
When I tried reporting her missing,
I was dismissed as my sister just being
an alcoholic and a drug addict.
She's probably too high or maybe she's too drunk.
She'll come back.
I feel like they just wanted to sweep my sister under the rug.
I went on Facebook every day asking if anybody had seen her.
If they did, please reach out to me.
I just want to know if she's OK.
I got text messages that my sister was injured,
and she wasn't OK, that I needed to find her.
There probably still are people
that are doing drugs and selling drugs around here.
When we came looking for my sister here, me,
my niece, and her two friends, there was people living there,
but they cleared it out.
This is where they would come and dump garbage.
So they figured garbage is here.
This is where we can put her.
Once she was found, two homeless men came upon the freezer.
By the smell, that wasn't an animal.
When they opened it, they could see the hair.
So they called the authorities, and that's how she was found.
It hurts that someone would just
put any human inside something and get rid of them that way.
And then it happened to be my only sister.
We're going to put down some tobacco.
See, this land grieves.
That's what they say.
The land mourns.
A piece of Rosenda, maybe part of her
didn't fully get to rest maybe because of all the places
they took her--
For me, coming back here is healing.
She's not hurting anymore.
Yeah.
Well, I think I'm going to pray right here.
I just want to pray that, that she went home
and she's laid with our mom and she's not
stuck back here in the freezer.
What happened to her shouldn't have happened
or to anyone else, and I pray that nobody
else has to go through this.
And just know that we love you, Rosenda.
We love you, Rosenda.
Rest in peace, cousin.
That's probably where she was walking from.
From where?
That drug dealer's house.
Oh, probably.
So this is the spot.
I guess.
She was supposed to go meet up
with a friend over there at the church and then get a ride,
but her ride left.
And she ended up not being seen after that.
Or maybe the ride didn't leave, right?
Maybe the ride picked her up.
Mhm.
Did they check the church cameras?
I'm not sure if the police did or not.
She never talked
about going to church here.
She met people at the end of the road to get picked up
or dropped off.
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't even know that they lived over that way.
Not very far, right?
Yeah.
I think her husband has something
to do with it because we dropped her off one time right in front
of the house, and he was under the truck,
working on the truck.
And then he got up, and he seen her get out of the van.
And he looked at Veronica and I, and then he grabbed her
and dragged her in the house.
He was pissed.
Why was he so angry that she had family dropping her off?
He never let anybody in their home.
Nobody was allowed there.
She told me one time that he had total control over every penny
she had.
Most of the time when we picked her up, she didn't have money,
and we would buy her chips and a drink.
Did your sister ever talk about trying
to get away from him?
Mhm.
She was on her way to get divorce papers.
She was?
Mhm.
That's where she was wanting to go
right before she disappeared.
The Mary Davis case is complicated.
Mary was a person that was semi-homeless,
doing a lot of couch surfing and living
with various people, not as a primary residence,
but moving around a lot.
And she had her challenges and issues with a very
hard and difficult life.
She had an inner circle of people that are all being
reviewed by the police, and we certainly hear the accusations
and rumors and pointing of fingers
at different people, estranged husbands or family members.
But when somebody is not charged with a crime,
and there's no warrant or subpoena,
we cannot restrict movement.
And we're aware of the history, and the allegations of abuse.
We still are treating this as a abduction-homicide case,
but we don't have a body.
Due to our proximity to a major metropolitan area, Seattle,
and the interstate freeway, which goes from Mexico
to Canada, we know that there is movement and transportation
of women across state lines.
They can be trafficked, moved, murdered,
and their bodies dumped or buried.
And it may take years or sometimes never
to find those missing loved ones.
Often, these are marginalized, disenfranchised women who don't
have a voice, who may be just barely hanging on in society
to survive, and their perpetrators know that.
Somebody knows what happened to Mary.
I believe we do have a killer loose in our community
or in our surrounding area, and somebody knows
or saw or heard something.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
There are so many stories of someone's loved one
going missing or being murdered.
We have here on the Yakama Indian Reservation
the highest rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women
and people.
Girls like that, see?
She's walking around, out of her mind,
a man looking to do harm to a woman
would see someone like her as desperate.
Nobody cares about her.
Look at her.
She's almost a perfect target for a predator.
These young women walking around, that was me once.
They find a lot of bodies.
They find bodies.
These are what you call man camps.
These are farm workers.
Nothing but guys live here.
And they're not from here, not from our community.
There's farmworker man camps.
There's fisheries.
There's those kind of campments that are all on tribal land.
They just fill them with these men that
have no attachments, right.
Maybe they can't even get a good job because
of their criminal history.
On the weekends, they're drinking,
and they'll listen to music.
We know they're partying there.
What do they want?
It's just all guys.
They want women.
It's not like somebody's coming out here to do random checks
on these men out here.
They definitely see us as disposable as sexual objects,
throwaways, garbage.
We're nothing.
We're Indigenous.
I wish I knew
every story
where our women are, where they've been taken
and left for dead or buried.
But the woods are really dense.
On this road right here, when I was younger,
I was told that my aunt, she was raped.
She was assaulted, beaten.
They could barely recognize her, and it was actually
someone who was walking their dog
the next morning who found her.
And every time I drive by, I just think about how,
how afraid she must have been.
I was told there were four, four men who hurt her.
And although she lived
to see another day, she never lived.
She, they, they, they took her life here.
She was never the same.
So are you coming here because of what
happened to Jody then?
Yeah.
When that happened to her,
it was like, oh, yeah, well, that happens.
No big deal.
They knew nothing would be done about it.
We didn't have our own police, and the police,
that so-called police, they don't care about us as women.
So there was no sense of turn it in.
They just said she deserved it or you know how they do.
I just don't understand that violence,
that rape culture.
Why?
Why, why target--
Natives?
- Natives?
Why are we such extreme targets?
To me, it's power.
With Native women, they feel they have the power over her,
and nobody cares.
They can't really tell anybody because nobody
will believe them.
And even if they did believe them,
there comes that prejudice again.
So Great Grandma, my grandma, all of them,
has gone through that.
Your great great grandma was put in the boarding school.
She was raped there.
I don't know if you know that.
But has it changed?
No, we've gone through a lot.
It's a lot I can say, but we're strong women.
That's what's made us strong.
Just a lot of painful,
a lot of painful history.
And like we're born into this world,
and you just, you're a child and so excited
to live your best life and experience and taste
and have a good time.
And then you see your family members hurting
and go to funerals.
And you're like, what happened to us?
What happened?
The ages of these kids is just so sad.
One year and two months before they
died, and they were six years old.
So they came in at five years old and died at six.
But can you imagine what the children went through?
There's boarding school survivors,
but then there's a lot of people who never
survived the boarding schools.
My dad was on council for 44 years.
He was on the board of directors and 26 of those as chair.
He had spent three years at the Cushman Hospital.
It was supposed to be a hospital,
but it was still a boarding school.
His older brother died in there.
Over time, mom has been giving me dad's documents,
and there's a lot of different ones.
This document is from Chemawa Indian School Cemetery.
So it's kind of a little bit hard to read where it tells
all of the names of the children,
their ages, what tribe they were from,
the date they entered school, and the date that they died.
And then I started noticing my dad
started putting marks on each one of these.
Those were his relatives or people he knew.
The kids that came were from all over.
And it's to assimilate them into white society,
to take away their Indian identity,
to take away the existence of Indians.
Basically, if you take the kids, oh, where's the future?
And then you have another page that shows what they died from.
In a lot of them, they say consumption.
And that means that they just get weak and weak as what
I understand.
But there were some that were really weird.
I mean, some of them they put drowned.
There's a lot of no cause.
The government paid the boarding schools for every child
that they had.
They were taken at a young age, could even be four years old,
taken from their families, and put in a boarding school.
The children only knew their language.
They would be beaten if they spoke their language.
Their hair was cut.
There was abuse, sexual abuse.
And a lot of children died.
Taking the kids just devastated the families.
That's where alcoholism came in.
Some of those that were in the boarding schools
have turned around and physically abused their child
or neglected their children.
They lost their parenting skills.
So then that goes down to the next generation.
It's about stopping the generational trauma
and the hurt that's went on.
But we're still being challenged with this.
We're trying to receive all those records
from the Catholic organization for the amount of children
that died and that were buried.
And I'm sure there's a lot of unmarked graves
that we haven't found.
Christine passed away December 27, 1917.
And she was 12 years old.
Ella passed away in September 7, 1903,
and she was six years old.
Wilbur was 13 years old.
And Edith was 14 years old.
Anthony was 18 years old.
The boarding school destroyed the family.
My mother was traumatized by being taken away
from her parents, and then she saw her three sisters
and two brothers pass away.
She was flaunting Lushootseed, but when she went to Toledo
Boarding School, they put soap in her mouth
every time she spoke a word of the Lushootseed
and told her that that was a dirty word.
And so they washed the language out of her.
The boarding schools didn't happen overnight.
The whites wanted more land, and so they had to plan something.
So they took away the spirit of the Indians
and the language and the custom.
My father was from Haines, Alaska.
He was at Chemawa Boarding School for 11 years.
In all the years he was there, he never got to go home.
He was always writing to his mother,
and his mother was always writing to him.
But neither one of them got any correspondence.
And so when he graduated from Chemawa in 1915,
he went back to Haines, Alaska.
He was upset with her and saying that she never wrote,
and she said she wrote all the time.
And he said, I never got any mail.
And she said, I wrote to you, and she never got any mail.
They parted on non-speaking terms.
They were so upset at each other.
The boarding school created this resentment
and animosity and anger.
It was conquer and divide.
Years later, somebody showed up at the door
and was people from the Catholic church.
And my father slammed the door in her face.
Good morning, sir.
Good to see you.
I never heard that story.
Yeah.
It is about justice for the children, hearing the history,
hearing the truth, so we can move forward.
It's taken the testimony from those who have survived.
And then we have many that didn't survive at all.
Thank you.
My name is Deb Haaland.
My Indian name is Crushed Turquoise,
and I'm here to listen to all of you.
Your voices are important to me.
And I thank you for your willingness
to share your stories.
My ancestors and many of yours endured
the horrors of Indian boarding school assimilation policies
carried out by the same department that I now lead.
This is the first time in history
that a United States cabinet secretary comes to the table
with this shared trauma.
That is not lost on me, and I'm determined to use my position
for the good of the people.
In Washington State alone, there were 15 boarding schools.
I'm grateful to each one of you for stepping
forward to share your stories.
I know it's not easy.
This is one step among many that will take together
to strengthen and rebuild the bonds within Native communities
that federal Indian boarding school
policies set out to break.
BOARDING SCHOOL I thought
I might have been the only survivor of boarding school.
But it's so good to hear that we're all the same.
We keep our secrets all the time.
We don't talk about it.
We should talk about it.
We're not healed yet.
In my heart's memory, I think of the kids
I went to school with.
This has never been about religion.
It's been about people been missing
children, men abusing children.
I was one of those that went to the Tulalip Indian
Boarding School being strapped.
Oh, years later, we found out that that strap was,
that kind was also used in penitentiary.
But the physical hurt was not as bad as how
I felt in my own mind.
Well, I don't think anybody quite
realized what it was that was happening
to the Indian children.
All the trauma that we see today,
all the mental health issues.
It stems from the boarding schools.
This genocide has to be acknowledged.
Children were abducted from their home, neglected,
locked in rooms, beaten.
If a parent withheld their child from going
to the boarding school, those parents were put in jail.
The goal was not only to destroy the Native spirit.
There was the term "save the man, kill the Indian,"
which was coined by Richard Pratt,
the founder of the first boarding
school in the United States.
It's a whole manual that was printed by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and distributed to every Indian agent in the country.
So if you read through it, there's a quote that
always strikes a chord with me.
It says, "the goal is not to make scientists or doctors
or lawyers out of the citizens.
The goal is to make domestic housewives
and farmers and laborers."
The terminology that was used was
dirty, savage, uneducated, wild, untamed, murderous.
And so keeping this new population suppressed.
It affirmed their superiority.
It's a history that's been buried intentionally
by the US government.
And of course, there's the stories of sexual abuse.
The trauma has been passed on.
The correlation between the rape of Native women
and the boarding school is we have
this culture where children went missing all the time.
This is still happening, but in a different way.
And it's not seen as a priority to the authorities.
This is just the cycle that we need to break.
Hello?
I've heard through the grapevine
that you used to hang out with my little cousin Mary.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was like a, like a week before--
Yeah.
before she went missing.
Do you remember what kind of conversations you guys had
or what she talked about or--
She was struggling with her husband.
But she was also still, like, hurt from everything
she went through in the foster care.
So did you used to use with her?
Yeah.
Oh.
What was her choice of drug?
She wouldn't take heroin.
And we're just hanging out with drug dealers, which the people
that I was hanging out with when I was around her.
And they weren't in their right mind sometimes.
Or do you think one of them would have tried to hurt her?
Or do you think they wouldn't have hurt her?
It's hard to say.
Like anything's possible.
This is the area right here.
This is the place where, where they always brought them.
She said that was thick full of woods.
Even during the daytime, if somebody was parked back there,
you couldn't see.
They let the guys beat them.
They let the guys rape them.
She said that her and Mary hung out with these guys
because they were drug dealers and that these guys had
everything that they wanted.
So they did everything that they had to to get the free drugs.
That's sick.
Makes me sick to my stomach that people are out there
doing that kind of stuff to people
who can't defend themselves.
Sick.
She also said that she heard the two
men plotting on how they were going to get Mary's money,
not knowing that Mary's husband already had it all.
That's why they kept her around.
Poor Mary.
The young lady has never talked to the police.
She's, she's scared to talk to the police.
She's scared of the two men.
She says they're dangerous men.
I thought it was Mary's husband that hurt her.
But after I heard these stories, I honest to God
don't think it's the husband.
It's one of these two drug dealers that hurt her.
Hello?
My name is Lynette.
I'm Mary's first cousin.
Oh, hi.
We heard that Mary used to hang out here.
Mhm.
She stayed here a lot?
Yes, she did, came over here.
She was getting away from her husband.
Did you want to know about what happened that day
or that night or you just want to talk about Mary?
Yeah, what happened that day would be--
That night, Mary showed up, and she just was really quiet.
And then as the morning progre--
we got here almost to the morning, oh, yeah,
it was, maybe she came over really early.
Now, that I think about it, yes, she
came over like in the morning.
That's what it was.
So all of a sudden, it's getting later on,
and she called somebody to come and meet her
at the church for some reason.
But anyway, she's walking up the hill,
and I never seen her after that.
And that's just weird that she's not around anymore.
It's really, really hard to take.
Do you think she's dead?
I hope not.
But you know what?
They called me up one day after 2 and 1/2 years,
they go, oh, we want to do a lie detector.
Well, guess what?
Because I didn't do that, they came 40 deep into my house,
and they took my phone.
And then I couldn't find, I couldn't remember the code,
the passcode.
There, they thought that I was, OK then, what is it now?
I forgot it.
Then they cut my locks and broke my door down
and took all my electronics.
And I have nothing, nothing to hide.
OK, well, we're going to get going.
He's lying about something.
He knows something, and he's hiding something.
He's covering somebody's ass, or he's
protecting somebody because he was getting pretty nervous.
He was getting sweaty.
The more he stalled and everything,
and he backtracks on what he said,
well, he was talking about her life
and as she, you know, she lived as in like, she
was already gone, past tense.
That right there says something, too, so--
Like he already knows that she's gone.
Yeah.
And the way he was talking, I think we have to find her body.
With the fluff.
We are going to look for all of these cards.
Clam.
Only
Clam.
Here.
I've got one.
Now, we've got
It's [non-english].
Don't come to the shore because octopus is here.
Let's sing "Eagle, Owl, Blue Jay."
Oh, [non-english].