When Northeastern State University celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day in place of Columbus Day for the first time last week, they invited longtime native rights activist Casey Camp-Horinek of the Ponca Nation to speak.
She said Native Americans have recently begun to reassert themselves after centuries of being forced to see themselves as less than human, and she urged fellow Native Americans to begin a process of decolonization.
For about a century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs kidnapped native children and took them to boarding schools under an assimilation policy. Camp-Horinek’s mother was taken when she was 6 years old, along with four of her cousins. Camp-Horinek told the story.
"You know, there was a judge one time who said all natives have PTSD to a degree. And for her, it had to have started at that time, at that age. You know, first of all, to be the first generation born in Oklahoma, to hear the stories of her own father, who was 8 years old, on that forced removal, and to hear the stories of her aunties, one of whom had to carry her dead brother across the state of Kansas on her back because they wouldn't allow a native to be buried in Kansas at that time.
"To have all those stories within her, and then these people come in and kidnap her to a boarding school still made her cry. She could barely talk about it. She ended up at Chilocco.
"And at the age of 15, she told me she was sitting at a desk at Chilocco in a history lesson where she had dared to ask a question about native history, knowing that even if she spoke in Ponca to those around her, she would be punished. She still asked that question. The history teacher didn't answer her, but later in that history class, the history teacher walked up behind her with this huge book and whacked her on the side of the head and knocked her out of her desk and onto the ground.
"That was her moment of decolonization, because she got up and grabbed the book and smacked that woman in the head and knocked her to the ground. Yeah. And she walked home — 25 miles. Happily.
"And when she arrived at her home, everybody celebrated. They had a little giveaway of what little they had, and they had a big dinner and they fed her and she reintegrated herself into her original Ponca ways to the best degree that they could be at that point.
"And it became a moment of celebration in our family from that moment on, to say that there is a time when everybody has had enough and it's time to begin to declutter your mind and decolonize your spirit and go back to the original teachings of your people, the original instructions that came, to the best degree that we can."
For young Native Americans today, that can take the form of activism. For example, Camp-Horinek said natives blocking pipelines aren’t being contrarian. They know fossil fuel is a finite resource.
"We should be in a position already where we're doing just transitions into renewable energies," Camp-Horinek said. "It's kind of like natives used to live, right? Sunlight, wind, water. Organic food — that's something else that we used to have in abundance."
And her call isn’t limited to Native Americans. Camp-Horinek said at their core, everyone is an indigenous person.
"Earth fostered her children in a healthy way at one time all around the Earth," Camp-Horinek said. "Wherever you're from, whatever your roots are, your people had a way of growing food, developing gardens and sharing with one another, just like we do."
