To the editor:

In 1953, I graduated from Haskell Institute. It is a place where many different Indian nations came together, where we became a family, the Haskell family. Our hopes and dreams for unborn generations are centered there.

Despite the terrible things that were done at all the government-run boarding schools to wipe out the Indian in us, we are still here. I am at least as Creek in 2005 as when I entered Haskell. Where we overcame adversities is as important to my sense of history as how or when it happened.

Most Americans remember history as timelines. It is presented as a linear thing, a series of progressing events: causes, effects, outcomes. You “preserve” your version of the past by writing it down. Most ignore how easily that kind of record can bend the truth, or make parts that are very important to other people vanish. Much of our Haskell history is invisible to non-Indians.

Place is the “carrier” of our past. Places are at the heart of how we Indians recall, how we communicate, and how we teach our young. Events accumulate. They become part of meaning-filled landscapes. That is why our history lives in the land, reborn in the stories we pass on to our children. Places become sacred by what happened there. We return to sacred places like the wetlands to find peace, to be healed, to reconnect to our past and to renew our traditions. The trafficway should go south of the Wakarusa. It doesn’t belong anywhere in the wetlands.

Martha Houle,

Shawnee Mission