BRINGING ANASTASIA HOME

The sites of former boarding schools for American Indian​ and Alaska Native youth contain the graves of thousands of Indigenous children. This is the story of bringing just one of those children home.

by Jenna Kunze
Photography, Brian Adams

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and co-published by Native News Online and ELLE.

Descending from the sky, the remote village of Old Harbor, Alaska, appears in vivid color, dwarfed between a screaming-green mountainside and a spit of ocean. Anastasia Ashouwak was away at Indian boarding school for 121 years before the wheels of our propeller plane carrying her remains touch down in early July.

On the runway below, more than a dozen vehicles idle, filled with residents waiting to welcome home a distant relative they only recently learned they’d lost. Children sit in the beds of pick-up trucks and dangle out of windows, silently watching adults who work in a line, unloading the cargo from the plane: paper goods for the potluck, a frosted cake with Anasasia’s name emblazoned in pink icing, and finally Anastasia herself. Her remains are carried in a small coffin, painted sky blue and decorated by her descendants to mimic Sugpiaq/Alutiiq petroglyphs. (Sugpiaq is the oldest term that Indigenous Kodiak islanders use for themselves, meaning "Real Person." Alutiiq is a self-designator formed by Native speakers from the word Aleuty, a term used by the Russians for most coastal Native Alaskans. Both terms are in popular community use.)

“It’s just amazing that this happened,” Lloyd Ashouwak, 60, tells Native News Online. Lloyd is Anastasia’s direct descendant through his late father, who was Anastasia’s nephew.

Lloyd and his brother, who were born about 70 years after Anastasia, only learned of their relative who was buried across the country when the nearby Alutiiq Museum, which is leading a repatriation project, reached out a year ago. Although Lloyd grew up hearing stories about his grandfather, Peter Ashouwak, he never heard of his aunt Anastasia, who was taken away to Indian boarding school at 13-years-old.

“It’s like losing a loved one you’ve known all your life,” Lloyd says to Native News Online as her coffin is lowered into the ground, beside her brother Peter, and her nephew, Lawrence Ashouwak, at the oceanside cemetery. Though none of the residents knew her, they could have been her. “The feelings are the same: sad, mad that this happened, joyous [she’s home].”

THE INTENT

Anastasia was one of more than 100,000 Indigenous youth removed from their families and communities—some as young as three-years-old—and sent to Indian boarding schools as part of the United States government’s century and a half policy to assimilate Native youth, according to an estimate from historian David Adams in his book, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. No official count has ever been conducted, though Alaska Native scholars say that number is a conservative guess.

Indian boarding schools were “designed to separate a child from his reservation and family, strip him of his tribal lore and mores, force the complete abandonment of his Native language, and prepare him for never again returning to his people,” according to a 1969 report by the US Senate Special Subcommittee on Indian Education.

Sickness, neglect, and abuse was rampant at many of the institutions, though it was brushed under the rug and only recently distilled in an initial investigation into Indian boarding school history. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo, the first Native American cabinet member, launched the investigation last June. The report, released eleven months later, found that at least 500 Native children died at boarding schools throughout the country. The death toll is expected to rise to the “thousands or tens of thousands” with continued review of the more than 400 boarding schools run or paid for by the U.S. government. Twenty-one of the Indian boarding schools were in the state of Alaska.

In 1879, Carlisle Barracks, a former military outpost, became the site of the nation’s first government-run Indian boarding school. It was operated by the Department of the Interior until 1918, under the motto of “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” It worked to forcibly assimilate 7,800 Native American children from more than 140 tribal nations through a mix of Western-style education, hard labor, and language and culture eradication.

In 1901, Anastasia Ashouwak and 10 other Alaska Native children were taken by a government agent from a Baptist Mission orphanage in Southwest Alaska to a boarding school in the eastern half of the lower 48 states, some 6,000 miles away: Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

At least 186 children died there, of disease often made worse by poor living conditions and abuse.

Anastasia was one of them. Her records say she was studying “housework,” and that she was loaned to a local farm during the summer as a servant. She died of tuberculosis three years after her arrival, at age 16.

She was then buried on school grounds, under a headstone that misspelled her name as ‘Anatasia Achwack.’

Now, she is among the first two dozen children to be returned home to their next of kin. On July 6, the U.S. Army– which took over the property from the Department of the Interior when the boarding school closed– disinterred and returned Anastasia’s remains to four of her family members at a transfer ceremony in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Photo Album: Family Tree

The U.S. Army began returning a few children a year beginning in 2016. Its decision to do so is largely thanks to the work of a Northern Arapaho Tribal member, Yufna Soldier Wolf, who won a 10-year battle to bring home three Arapaho children who are now reburied on the reservation in Ethete, Wyoming.

Since 2017, the statewide nonprofit First Alaskans Institute has been focused on acknowledgment of the truths of the past and generational trauma.

First Alaskans Institute President Liz La quen náay Medicine Crow (Haida/Tlingit) spoke at a Senate Committee hearing in June of 2022, and stressed the urgent importance of collecting oral histories from survivors while they are still able to share them. Medicine Crow advocated for the passage of a bill that would establish a federal Truth and Healing Commission that would investigate the impacts and ongoing effects of the Indian Boarding School Policies.

“While we focus on the importance of the children who were taken, it is also incredibly important to focus on the communities that they were taken from,” Medicine Crow said. “I often wonder: what would it be like to come from a place with no children? This is what was imposed on our people.”

THE RESISTANCE

Despite the atrocities committed at boarding schools, they did not succeed with their goal of stamping out Native culture. Instead, Anastasia was welcomed home with traditional Sugpiaq/Alutiiq dance, dress, food, song, and painting. “It was to honor her,” Cassey Rowland, Anastasia’s great-great niece, says of the cultural aspects included in the Pennsylvania ceremony, and amplified at the local ceremonies in the hub City of Kodiak, where Anastasia’s remains had a stopover, and again in her home village of Old Harbor.

Rowland had traveled from her home on Kodiak Island to Pennsylvania to receive Anastasia and bring her home, “to show her that she was loved, and that we were bringing her home, where she was wanted. Even when she was born, our culture was being stripped from us. I felt like showing her that our culture did not die with her. It’s still strong.”

Perhaps the most powerful evidence of resistance to the government’s policy is found in the front row at Anastasia’s dignified transfer, or the official ceremony at the Carlisle Barracks on July 6, where the Army gives Anastasia’s remains back to her family.

THE RETURN

After three days of dense fog that shrouded Kodiak Island, the sky cleared, and a 9-seater plane took Anastasia 30 minutes down the southeast coast of the island to the village of Old Harbor.

Under the blue dome of the Russian Orthodox Church in Old Harbor, the priest invited on Anastasia’s repatriation journey, Father Innocent Dresdow, tells locals the story of Anastasia’s short life. At one point, he compares the legacy of Carlisle to “Nazi Germany” and then expresses the significance of Anastasia’s homecoming.

“I believe we need to speak of those things openly, to bring that healing process,” Dresdown said. Although the Russians were the first colonizers of Kodiak Island in the mid 1700s, when they enslaved Sugpiaq men to hunt for them, the Russian Orthodox Church is largely embraced by Sugpiaq/Alutiiq people today. While the Baptist missionaries attempted to eliminate Native culture entirely, the Russian Orthodox approach to educating Alaska Natives incorporated existing cultural practices, including their own language, Alutiiq Museum’s April Counceller says.

“Nothing can be done to right the wrongs. We can't go back and rewrite history,” Dresdow tells the residents of Old Harbor. “But [we] can do this. I pray for each and every one of you gathered here today that this will be a healing moment as we give her a proper burial.”

After mass, a procession of community members follows Lloyd Ashouwak, with Anastasia’s coffin on his shoulder, up the grassy hill beside the church to the cemetery.

Barking dogs weave between feet as a group of Alutiiq dancers perform for Anastasia. A few elders weep, while bored kids wander towards ripe salmon berry bushes.

“It’s really incredible,” says Trinity Inga, 22, still wearing her Alutiiq facial markings across her cheeks and chin. “It’s the history of our village, and actually being able to bring someone back that was taken from here is heartwarming. We couldn't ask for anything else, except to bring her home.”

One boarding school survivor, 71-year-old Carol Christensen, asks the question nobody is able to answer: ‘What took so long?’

Later, the village comes together in the local bingo hall to feast on smoked salmon, fresh bread, meatballs, and other potluck dishes. Residents echo words of “finally” and “home” and “healing” as they dig into the frosted cake that could be mistaken for a birthday cake. It’s for Anastasia. Under her name, only her birth date is written, a seemingly an intentional gesture towards eternal life.

“It’s going to open people’s eyes,” Lloyd Ashouwak says of his great aunt’s homecoming. “They’ll say ‘where are the other family members?’”