Carolyn King’s mother was a student at Haskell Institute in the 1940s.

“She came from a very large family that was very poor,” said King, one of about 150 people attending a Wednesday workshop at Haskell Indian Nations University on American Indian boarding schools and their long-term consequences.

“My mother came to Haskell  it was a high school back then  by choice, and she liked being here. But while she was here, they sort of farmed her out to a family here to clean house, and while she was there, one of the people, a man, abused her.”

That abuse, King said, forever changed her mother.

“It brought problems into my family that weren’t there before,” she said. “After what happened, it became much easier for my mother to get angry. And that’s something we  my sisters and brothers  dealt with the whole time we were growing up.”

King said her mother, who died about three years ago, had been a victim of what’s now called “Boarding School Syndrome,” or the consequences of the confusion that accompanies people’s loss of their culture.

King, who works for the Youth Extension Project at Haskell, said she couldn’t help wondering what her mother would have been like if she had stayed home, if she had been able to hold on to more of her native customs.

King’s mother was not alone. Most American Indian families are, in some way, still dealing with the effects of Boarding School Syndrome, said LaRee Bates, who, as archivist at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, has interviewed dozens of boarding-school alumni.

Bates led Wednesday’s workshop.

“The early days were horrendous,” she said, referring to the United States’ post-Civil War use of boarding schools to convert American Indian children to European values, regimen and religion.

These efforts, Bates said, were backed by the federal government’s realization that it was cheaper to “educate the Indian than it was to kill him.”

“This was the American holocaust,” she said.

Between World War I and World War II, boarding-school American Indians gradually were allowed to hold on to much of their cultural identity. This, Bates said, explains why many Haskell alumni from the 1930s to 1950s, a group that includes King’s mother, often offer fond testimonials on their days at the school, despite some of the hardships they endured.

Boarding-school students from earlier times probably would have harsh memories of their experiences, Bates said.

Kevin Peniska Sr., publisher of Well Nations magazine, said American Indians should learn to embrace the consequences of the boarding-school experience because that’s the only way to “know the reality of it, and until we own it, it owns us.”

Understanding the effects of Boarding School Syndrome, Peniska said, will help American Indian leaders and counselors deal with alcoholism, substance abuse, domestic violence and diabetes among American Indian people.

The workshop, one of many, was on the first day of a three-day seminar, “Wellness Journey 2002,” sponsored by the Sac and Fox, Potawatomi and Kickapoo tribes of Kansas.

After the workshop, participants adjourned for a memorial service at the Haskell cemetery to pay respects to American Indian children buried there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.