James LaBelle was 8 years old in 1955, when his mother drove him and his 6-year-old brother to the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. He says his mother, who struggled with alcoholism, had been given a choice: send her sons to boarding school or put them up for adoption.
When she chose boarding school, LaBelle says, he found himself literally tied to other Native Alaskan children by a rope threaded through the belt loops of their pants. His destination, where he spent the next several years: the Wrangell Institute, a boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in southeast Alaska.
LaBelle, 77, who is Inupiaq and an enrolled member of the Native Village of Port Graham, still finds it hard to describe the treatment he endured at Wrangell.
“It could have been a prison or a mental hospital,” he says.
When he was 10, LaBelle recalls, the school punished him and another boy for wrestling by dousing them with nearly freezing water from a fire hose. Sexual violence was also rampant, he says, citing the example of a girl who was repeatedly abused by an administrator all eight years she was at Wrangell.
When the lights went out at night, LaBelle could hear other children, especially some of the youngest, sobbing and calling for their mothers.
“It was the only time we could show emotion,” he says. “The entire section of the dorm for the youngest kids were all wailing in the dark.”
Many survivors say the horrors they experienced still haunt them.
“I was just a child, so I couldn’t stand up for myself,” says Anita Yellowhair, who was taken from her Navajo family in Steamboat, Arizona, to live at the Intermountain Indian School, in Brigham City, Utah.