Docuseries explores ‘ The Apology’ owed to Native Americans, preacher says
The old buildings sitting on property near Ponca City evoked many memories for the septuagenarian who stood before them one sunny afternoon. ● Negiel Bigpond, of Tulsa, a member of the Yuchi Tribe, took a stroll around the buildings that once housed the Chilocco Indian School where he’d been forced to live and suffer mistreatment as a Native American youth. ● Bigpond’s visit to the former boarding school — his first time to return as an adult — was filmed for “The Apology: Part II,” the second in a three-part docuseries. Bigpond, 71, discussed his experiences with The Oklahoman shortly before the recent release of the latest docuseries installment. ● He said he remembered being fed only water and sometimes water tainted with urine. Other times, he was forced to stand for hours with his nose against the wall all night and forbidden to fall asleep. When he inevitably slept out of sheer exhaustion, “they would jam your head against the wall.” ● “I don’t know why they treated us that way. I don’t know why they tried to teach us that way,” Bigpond said.
“If we are going to heal, if the wrongs are not identified, we won’t have healing in this land and that’s when I got really passionate about it.”
Negiel Bigpond
Such abuse is among the reasons he is leading The Apology Movement, which is aimed at persuading the United States to issue a public apology for its mistreatment of Native Americans. Bigpond, pastor of Morning Star Church of All Nations in Mounds, Oklahoma, has been working with Sam Brownback, former U.S senator from Kansas, Kansas governor and ambassador U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, to shed light on the The Apology movement, which they cofounded. Brownback recently joined Bigpond for a phone interview with The Oklahoman. He said he got involved with The Apology movement at a meeting in his congressional office years ago.
Bigpond was in that meeting and the two men agreed that a concerted effort needed to be made to obtain the government’s apology to Native Americans.
History, they said, tells the terrible tale.
The broken treaties and punitive public policies.
The racism and efforts to erase cultural identity, beliefs and practices that were at the heart of the federal Indian boarding schools and other government endeavors.
The displacement and despair caused by the Indian Removal Act that resulted in the Trail of Tears — each of them.
“As I learned more about it, I could see the depth of pain that many people were carrying and I became convinced that this was something that had to be done for there to be healing in this country,” Brownback said.
He said the call for a public apology from the government is included in the “Apology to the Native Peoples of the United States” amendment that he successfully had added to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2010 (H.R. 3326) while he was in Congress.
The Kansas Republican said the law was signed by President Barack Obama but the public apology portion was unfulfilled. His request that Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump, fulfill the public apology portion of the law wasn’t successful either.
The apathy toward his requests was disturbing. Brownback had visited with students at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, when he was first elected to the U.S. Senate.
“There was this anger and bitterness that a lot of them were carrying. The more I looked into the history of what happened in my state of Kansas, a lot of the native tribes were moved here initially from the East and then later relocated again into Oklahoma south as the Overland Trails came through here,” he said.
“It just seemed profoundly wrong to me.”
He said he learned more when Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colorado, a fellow U.S senator at the time, shared oral history stories with him “that were nothing like the history books that I had read.”
“I thought if half of this was true, I would be mad, too,” Brownback said.
“If we are going to heal, if the wrongs are not identified, we won’t have healing in this land and that’s when I got really passionate about it.”
The pair said they hope “The Apology” docuseries will raise awareness about the movement.
And they hope that perhaps the biggest barrier — people’s tendency to dislike apologizing — may be overcome. Brownback said other nations like Canada, New Zealand and Australia have made formal public apologies for mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
In June, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the federal government’s intentions to investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences.” However, no U.S. government public apology to Native Americans has been made.
“It’s the nature of apologizing. People don’t like to apologize and nations certainly don’t like to apologize. And it’s a rare thing for the United States to apologize,” Brownback said. “It’s happened probably less than a dozen times in the history of the Republic. It’s just not something that people do and most people will say well that happened a long time ago, I didn’t do it. Well, no you didn’t, but this is a corporate sin. We did this as a nation and we need to apologize as a nation.”
Return to the past
According to the Oklahoma Historical Society archives, the Chilocco Indian School operated as a federal “off-reservation” boarding school to “house, civilize, Christianize, educate and transform American Indian youth.”
The school, located between Arkansas City, Kansas, to the north and Ponca City to the south, opened in 1884 and thousands of Native children and young adults attended the school, according to the historical society. One hundred and fifty children from the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Wichita, Comanche and Pawnee tribes became students when the school doors opened.
Significant enrollment from the “Five Civilized Tribes” did not occur until after 1910, but by 1925 Cherokee constituted the largest single tribal affiliation at the school. As Native American children were better able to attend public schools after World War II, Chilocco School served students who came from more remote, inaccessible areas such as the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico and communities in Alaska. The school closed in 1980, according to the historical society.
Bigpond said returning to the Chilocco school was emotional.
“I was kind of leery. You don’t want to get in there and tell the world all the bad things that happened to you, all the sad things, but as I began to get into it, it really helped me,” he said. “It helped me to heal. I always tell people you’re not going to forget the bad things but you can forgive. Where I’m at right now, I’ve forgiven.”
Bigpond said some Native Americans have been under the mistaken assumption that he is asking them to forget the federal government’s ill treatment over the years. He said accepting an apology and finding it in one’s heart to forgive doesn’t mean that the offense will be forgotten. However, it does help pave a path toward healing and reconciliation.
“From my perspective, a lot of them are afraid I’m asking them to forget but there’s no way you’re going to forget all that — the broken treaties, the removal act, all the bloodshed, wars and battles,” Bigpond said. “It’s history.”
Both men also said some Native Americans are wary of The Apology movement because they think it may nullify current claims and treaties.
“We realize the Native nations are in Washington every day, working with the government on the treaties,” Bigpond said.
Brownback agreed.
He said a public apology from the government would not impact any settlement of claims because those deal with treaties and other issues.
“This (the apology) simply says a number of acts taken by the U.S. government were wrong and we acknowledge they were wrong and we apologize for them but it doesn’t settle any claims,” he said.
Path to spiritual reconciliation
Both men said The Apology movement has a spiritual foundation and they want people to understand that.
“I want us to say there is a way forward here. There is reconciliation. And that’s what we really need as a nation,” Brownback said. “So my hope is that we lance the boil with this apology and that allows the healing and the reconciliation to begin. That’s what really both of us are after — to be reconciled as a nation. To ask for forgiveness and have it be given and to move forward as one people.”
Bigpond, who comes from a long line of Methodist ministers, shared a similar message.
“There’s definitely a need. This land needs a lot of healing. It’s a very sensitive moment so I think it’s a right-on moment,” he said.