WSU Press Memoir Explores Intergenerational Trauma in Nez Perce Author’s Family

“Later in the night, I felt another stirring inside me. Something I had buried and denied for over 20 years began to make itself heard. I cried out, ‘Who am I? Am I Indian—or am I white?’ I heard a voice, and it told me, ‘Go home.’”

On Feb. 20, 1993, Roberta Tawlikitsanmay’ (Woman of the Forest) Paul attended a Spokane, Washington, conference on suicide prevention for Native Americans. At the time, Paul served as director of WSU Native American health sciences in the city.

During a showing of a documentary on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania called “In the White Man’s Image,” she learned details of Native American children’s introduction to boarding school life—and the erasure of their identities.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” Paul said in a previous article. “I had to run out of the conference.”

Paul said she felt uneasy at various times in her life surrounding specific dates, but didn’t know why. Later, as she learned about her family’s experiences in Indian boarding schools, she discovered that her grandfather, Jesse Paul, arrived at Carlisle at the age of 10—on February 20, 1880. He was stripped of his buckskins, and his hair was cut short; he was then given a bath with lye soap and issued a stiff wool uniform to wear. He was also given his Christian name, no longer known as Ka-Khun-Nee, or Black Raven.

Paul recounts the extensive history of the Paul family, the emotional and spiritual scars passed down to each generation, and her road to healing in her new WSU Press memoir, Listening to the Birds: A Nez Perce Woman’s Journey of Self-Discovery and Healing.

An enrolled member of the Nez Perce Tribe, Paul was born and raised on the reservation in north-central Idaho. She endured years of severe emotional pain, but through repeated encounters with birds, she sensed her ancestors and began listening to their messages.

Over time, with help from her relatives, she uncovered five generations of her family’s people, including a Nez Perce chief who met explorers Lewis and Clark in Idaho and a warrior who died fighting alongside Chief Joseph in the Nez Perce War of 1877.

Three generations of Pauls attended government boarding schools, including Carlisle. Founded in 1879, it was the first off-reservation Indian boarding school in the continental United States and a model for other federal Indian boarding schools to follow.

U.S. Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt—who infamously said of Indigenous assimilation “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” at the 1892 National Conference of Charities and Correction—started Carlisle, served as its first and longtime superintendent, and put in place the system of cultural genocide that became the prevailing policy with regard to Native American peoples, in the name of “civilizing” and “Americanizing” them.

For 40 years, until the school shut down in 1918, about 7,800 Native American children attended, taken far from their families, homes, and communities. An estimated 180-200 of them never returned home, buried in Carlisle’s cemetery after dying from disease, abuse, overwork, lack of food, and no family contact.

Paul now gives presentations for survivors of intergenerational trauma, where she teaches that sharing stories is a Native way to heal wounds. But, she says, “If you don’t know the story, you can’t heal.” Unearthing her family’s past became her own first step toward healing wounds of racism, relocation, and assimilation. In addition, she teaches workshops on healing historical trauma using a 10-step model she developed—one she describes in Listening to the Birds.

Paul has also donated a collection of papers, 1996-2014, to WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, and the Paul Family of the Nez Perce Tribe Collection is housed on the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal.