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The transcendence of violence and survival: To ‘Kill the Indian’ then and now

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The transcendence of violence and survival: To ‘Kill the Indian’ then and now

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Content The transcendence of violence and survival:
To ‘Kill the Indian’ then and now
by
Andre Lawes Menchavez
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)
December 2022
Copyright 2022 Andre Lawes Menchavez
DEDICATION
I first want to dedicate this thesis to my elders who have come before me, especially the ones who have informed me
of my histories as a member of the Morongo nation in the last year. Mary Ann Andreas and Aaron Saubel are to
thank for all the ancestral knowledge bestowed upon me and I cannot thank them enough for their vulnerability in
their cultural storytelling of even their most brutal battles they’ve faced because of their Indigenous identities. I am
strong because of them and I will forever be.
I want to dedicate this thesis to my family as well, who although took a while to grasp how to properly raise such an
unapologetic force of a queer child like myself, ultimately grew to love and support me despite our pasts. My
parents, my siblings Jeyan, Angel and Frankie, my Uncle Jeff and Auntie Carol, my cousins Emily and Nico, my
Mama, Papa, Lolo and Lola, my sister-in-laws Lora and Issa, my nephews and nieces Jaeden, Jaxon and Leilah (who
encourage me to continue fighting for a better future for our people, for their future) — this is for you all. Thank you
for supporting me through my life’s journeys and all the ones ahead.
I want to dedicate this thesis to my chosen family as well. Jane Brazeau and Benneth Salanga, thank you both for
supporting me in the last year while undergoing this extremely personal and traumatic journey of writing this thesis.
Even upon undergoing a lot of health issues in the last year, you both were just a phone call away, always making
sure I survived these battles. I wouldn’t be here without you both. Leo De Asis and Josh Teodoro, I dedicate this
thesis to you both as well. This thesis was all about how, although trauma and violence has transcended through time
in my community, and with my own body, community and our people are what truly heals us all. Thank you both for
showing me what true love feels like out here in Los Angeles, you are reminders that even though the world has so
much darkness as mentioned in this thesis, that there are bright lights amidst it all like the shining stars you both are
in my life.
I’d like to also dedicate this thesis to Rob Roth from Queerspace Magazine in Seattle, Clare Kenny who was my
lead when I worked at GLAAD and Arik Korman from the League of Education V oters who gave me mentorship in
the most challenging time of the summer of 2020. Thank you three for taking a chance on me and seeing something
special in me. Your belief in my abilities has given me the strength to endure the most strenuous tasks and I would
have never been able to defeat the behemoth of graduate level education and this very grueling Master’s thesis if it
weren’t for your support and love when I was just starting to pursue my passion in writing.
I also want to dedicate this to my committee. Dr. Richardson, Professor Tolan and Mark Trahant — you three are
such prime examples of the kind of writer I want to be in the future. The way you all utilize your remarkable talent
in writing to uplift so many communities has inspired me greatly and is what made me aspire to pursue stories that I
truly believe in. Thank you for your time and care with this thesis, and with me. I felt truly believed in in the pursuit
of this thesis and I was strong enough to do so because of you all.
Lastly, I would like to dedicate this to my younger self. Andre, we did it. We’ve always told ourselves at the hardest
times in our lives that “we’ll get through this, like we always have, like we always will.” Our mantra has always
been so true. I am so proud of you for overcoming every beating to your soul, body and spirit — this thesis is a love
letter to you, to our resiliency and I hope I’m making you proud.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication........................................................................................................................................ii
Abstract..........................................................................................................................................iiii
Introduction......................................................................................................................................1
Chapter I: Boarding Schools Then, Conversion Therapy Now.......................................................3
Chapter II: The survival of my earth, my body..............................................................................15
Bibliography……..........................................................................................................................23
iii
Abstract
Growing up I’ve always had a yearning for knowledge about the Indigenous side of my family
and identity. Being so far away from my reservation, or Res, has meant that I never had the
accessibility to obtain what I was longing for. Our family trips to the Res every summer when I
was a child were short and I’ve always known I’ve wanted more. Alongside this childhood of
longing for a grasp of my Indigeneity, I also experienced a lot of violence in my youth — more
specifically in the case of this thesis, I dealt with a lot of violence involving sexual assault and
surviving conversion therapy.
My thesis was initially grounded in the pursuit of exploring my Indigenous heritage now that I
live in Los Angeles, but through conversations with my elders, it evolved into a story about the
transcension of trauma and survival. Through my research of the boarding schools and the dark
history of my tribe’s past that my elders guided me on, I was able to gain an understanding that
this was more than a trip back to the Rez to learn about my history — it was a trip that
enlightened me on the fact that my traumas have connections to my people.
Through this longform narrative thesis, I explore just how trauma and violence has transcended
through time in my people by connecting my elder’s stories of past and ongoing colonialism to
my modern day stories of sexual violence and conversion therapy. Ultimately, I found through
this thesis that despite this trauma that has passed down through our Indigenous blood, our
community continues to persist and reclaim ownership of our power and our bodies.
iiii
A warm sun shone down on the lands of the Morongo reservation in Banning, California –
aboriginal lands that are 35 miles east of Riverside. Two descendants of the tribe maneuvered
past a line of olive trees toward a restricted access gate on the reservation, or the “Rez” as my
people call it. They crossed onto a secluded plot of land in the shadows of the San Gorgonio and
San Jacinto mountain peaks, towering above at 11,000 feet.
One descendant was Mary Ann Andreas, a councilmember of the Morongo Tribal Council, who
has lived on the reservation her whole life. The other descendant was me. I was born to a Filipinx
father and a Morongo and Filipinx mother, and raised in Daly City, California, hundreds of miles
away. After 22 years, I was finally ready to trek beyond the surface of my tribe and explore what
was unseen in my upbringing. Mary Ann, my closest tribal elder, led the way.
When my siblings and I were kids, my mom would take us to the Rez once a year. We drove the
cramped eight-hour drive in our family Suburban from the fog of the Bay Area to the heat of the
tribal lands. Our trips were brief and mainly consisted of my parents gambling at our tribal
casino, my siblings and I laying out by the pool at the Morongo resort and, on our last day,
ordering my usual steak and eggs with Mary Ann and my other elders for a family brunch. It was
always smiles at that brunch table, the laughter from all of us filling the air, all while my siblings
and I were hidden from the darkness of our Indigenous histories. These secrets lay in our tribal
grounds, well-hidden beneath the bright lights of the casino and the poolside palm trees.
1
In 2021, among the ruins and beyond the restricted access gate, Mary Ann and I explored a
common history that included the findings of dead bodies of tribal children in reservations like
ours and across the nation. These histories of religious assimilation and brutal intolerance
connected us both, three generations apart, in ways I never imagined.
2
Chapter I: Boarding schools then, conversion therapy now
Mary Ann Andreas next to the gated St. Boniface Cemetery. Photo by Andre Lawes Menchavez.
“There have been reports of mountain lions, bears and snakes beyond this gate,” Mary Ann
warned me, paying no attention to the “Do Not Trespass” sign. Her hands gripped a steering
wheel that was covered with a textile woven by our people. The same design covered my seat
belt, offering protection from the dangers ahead. “We’ll be fine, though,” Mary Ann chuckled.
“Don’t you worry.”
We rode past fragments of walls, torn-down bridges and remnants of stoned walkways, and
stopped at a parched hill beneath a large shaded tree. I turned to Mary Ann. Behind her, in the
distance, stood broken-down tombstones that have weathered the test of time. The gated
cemetery is one she easily could’ve been laid in if she hadn’t survived this place.
A plaque on the ground before it read, “Saint Boniface Cemetery — May we never forget those
resting here.”
3
The entryway plaque at the St. Boniface Cemetery, Photo by Andre Lawes Menchavez
This cemetery and the fragments of buildings were all that were left of the St. Boniface Church
missionary school, built in 1888 by the Los Angeles bishop Frances Mora. Its location was
chosen due to Banning’s proximity to various reservations such as the Morongo, Soboba, San
Manuel, Twentynine Palms, Cabazon, Pala and Pechanga tribes that were all located within 70
miles of it. It opened its doors in 1890 and began its pursuit of assimilating tribal children and
stamping out their native identity. (Morongo Tribal Historic Preservation Office, 2021) In the
19th and 20th centuries, there were about 350 boarding schools like this one across the nation,
with assimilationist roots in the Indian Civilization Act of 1819. Its widespread prevalence in the
country led to nearly 83% of Indigenous children being forced into these schools by 1926. (The
National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, 2020)
These schools aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man” — a phrase coined by Capt. Richard
Henry Pratt, who understood that these schools and their religious instruction were the only way
to civilize “savage” Indigenous peoples — and became part of the legacy of Christianity on our
tribal lands.
Superintendent Father Benedict Florian Hahn of St. Boniface believed that our tribal community
was so damaged by Spanish colonization that the only way to civilize us from that trauma was to
force tribal children into these schools. After 88 years and about 8,000 students later, there were
at least 21 recorded deaths of children in St. Boniface before it closed down. The school reported
that children mainly died from tuberculosis. (Shadrick, 1995) “They’re saying that basically
every single child that died, died from TB,” Mary Ann said with a shrivel in her brows,
questioning the validity of this report. “That’s convenient for them [to say].”
4
The only recorded deaths of St. Boniface were the deaths of people that were able to be buried at
the cemetery Mary Ann and I were standing in. It was eerie to receive the records and read the
names down the list and finding multiple death reports from people with the last names of Martin
and Saubel — the last names of my tribal elders, many of whom were the ones that would attend
those brunches with my family during our trips to the Rez. One record of a Saubel death in St.
Boniface was a child who was eight years old. Even more sinister was seeing that 18 of the
names on that burial list had unrecorded causes of death. (Morongo Tribal Records, 2021)
In 2019, our tribe requested the Institute For Canine Forensics to come to the reservation and
investigate our people’s concerns that there were more deaths from St. Boniface that were not
recorded, beyond the cemetery. Our fears were true.
The dogs that were specialized in detecting human remains had 22 alerts of human remains
where St. Boniface once stood. One detection of human remains was suspiciously located
beneath the ground where a St. Boniface building once stood, raising concerns as to why a body
was buried beneath the school unrecorded. (Institute of Canine Forensics, 2019)
Our tribe is hoping to eventually utilize a ground penetrating radar to find more bodies of stolen
tribal children at the hands of St. Boniface. US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose
grandparents survived boarding schools, is currently directing an investigation into the history of
our nation’s assimilation schools, attempting to uncover the same hidden history Mary Ann
knows has yet to be uncovered in tribes like our own.
“Many students endured routine injury and abuse,” Secretary Haaland stated in her Federal
Indian Boarding School Initiative memo. “Some perished and were interred in unmarked
graves.”
Dennis Banks, leader of the American Indian Movement, was four years old when he was forced
into the Pipestone Indian School in Minnesota in 1943. Banks painfully recounted that in that
school, the “beatings began immediately.”
“Kids were ordered to get a club or a broomstick, line up six feet apart, and [those in charge of
the schools] would tell [the kids] to drop their pants,” Banks said. “They’d be naked, they’d be
bent over and they’d hit them.”
Banks once walked in on an assistant boys advisor sexually assaulting another young boy. “We
would raise our voice and let them know that people were watching, then they would stop,” he
said. “There was a lot of brutality like that.”
5
Before his death in 2017, Banks shared the further impact these schools had on his family. After
spending nearly ten years in boarding schools, Banks distanced himself from his mother upon
returning to the Rez, overcome with pain after his mother never wrote to him while he was away
despite his mother telling him she always did. “I thought she abandoned me,” Banks said.
This led to years of resentment and distance so heavy that Banks had “no emotions” when
burying his mother when she passed away. Years later, during the making of a documentary
detailing Banks’ life, his daughter found a shoebox while searching for his school records — the
shoebox contained years of letters written by his mother to the Pipeline Indian School, begging
for the release of her son. “Please send my son back home to me,” one letter read.
“I went to my mother’s grave site,” Banks said. “Going there this time, with the letters, I was
reading the letters with a chair by her grave... I knew she loved me then.”
—
“When you hear these stories, like reservations recently finding 200 bodies of murdered children
at these schools, it makes you wonder how they slept at night knowing all those kids were dead
and murdered,” Mary Ann said. “And yet, they called us the savages.”
Mary Ann walked slowly through the ruins of the school that once kept her hostage, dressed in
black, with her thick black hair blowing in the wind — an emulation of unapologetic Indianness,
of power, and the opposite of her very first experience in boarding school. She recounted that all
the children had their hair forcibly shaved off, chipping away at the first bit of their power. This
stripping of Native identity evoked the sinister history of hair scalping of Indigenous peoples in
our country, dating all the way back to the 1800s.
6
Robert McGee showing the effects of being scalped as a form of assimilation as a child. Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
“Hair is our backbone,” Mary Ann said to me. The wind cast ripples through her hair, which felt
like distant hello’s from our ancestors, from the found and unfound children who were killed in
those schools. “They wanted to kill the Indian and save the man, to take away all the Indian from
us kids. That included losing our hair.”
The sun casted her resilient Indigenous shadow onto the ground, laying her silhouette beside the
various broken tombstones of our stolen tribal children. She easily could have been one of those
bodies laid to rest beneath us — that is, if her body was one of the few that would have been
found.
Mary Ann remains as the only living survivor of boarding schools in our tribe.
“They’re all gone now,” Mary Ann said, her words unwavering with the force of the wind in our
faces. “I’m sad that all my friends are gone. All my people.”
—
Despite being at St. Boniface for three years, Mary Ann was only six years old when she first
entered the school, and everyone she knew that were in those schools, including her siblings, are
7
now just hugs from the wind from beyond the grave; broken tombstones beside us in this
cemetery.
She pointed north of us, to where she’d sneak into the garbage bins of the priest's homes and eat
their leftover food, desperate after they wouldn’t give her and the other children enough to eat.
She pointed south, to where she’d be out in the sweltering heat picking olives for the nuns,
parched hands in the desert heat, sweat dripping from her forehead. And all around us, she
remembered, stood the classrooms — “psychological spaces,” she called them — where religion
classes were forced upon the children.
“I can’t give as much depth to these stories as my older siblings could,” Mary Ann then
confessed. “But I can say they didn’t care about me and the results of boarding schools were
psychological. Some people gave in completely, became nuns, priests or never even came back
to the reservation.”
Mary Ann doesn’t remember everything that happened to her, but researchers have found similar
records of mass death lists of children in boarding schools like St. Boniface.
“They would bring [children] to the school late at night, and they would take long travels to
make sure they wouldn’t know where they were going, and when they finally got to the school,
they separated the terrified kids, separated the siblings,” said Mary Ann’s nephew, Aaron Saubel,
as we sat together at a quaint diner in the middle of the Rez. Aaron is an oral history specialist, a
practitioner of cultural storytelling — the kind of practice that schools like St. Boniface tried to
stamp out. He learned the stories at community tribal gatherings, passed on by grandparents and
other elders who survived boarding schools. This time Aaron was the elder, and I, the grateful
recipient.
“If they did anything wrong, they would damage their psyche,” Aaron said in a clear, forceful
voice. “If one girl for example fought back, they would take the girl and put her in a room and
lock her in it for weeks. No lights, no nothing. They would only open the door for food. No
talking.”
8
Some of the remains of St. Boniface, Photos by The Dessert Way
In a report done by Pat Murkland, a oral historian who works for the Dorothy Ramon Learning
Center that works to educate the community on Native stories, stated that each school day at St.
Boniface was “military-like” in its schedule, complete with many drills and child labor from the
manual building of the school to the picking of crops in the heat.
All of these stories are now just fragments that remain on the Rez, haunting the land as figurines
of what once was. St. Boniface may be nothing but rubble in the middle of our land, but for me,
its effects can still be found — especially in my childhood. As we walked through the remains of
the school that day, I told Mary Ann about my own haunted past; an intergenerational trauma,
like Mary Ann’s, deeply imbued with the destructive force of religious intolerance.
—
I explained to Mary Ann that far away from the Rez, in the Bay Area town of Daly City, I found
myself facing my own troubles with Catholicism. It was ten years ago; I was only in middle
school.
In the principal’s office, the nun in charge asked me why I had been acting out. In an act of
survival and an extension of trust, my principal became the first person I ever came out to. I
explained that I was coming to terms with being gay; a process that left me in a dysphoric state
of angst. Without any response, my principal abruptly scheduled a meeting with my parents.
When we arrived in my principal’s office days later with my parents beside me, they sat across
from me at a large wooden table that was cold to the touch. The room was just as icy with one
too many religious statues in it, their scalding eyes piercing me from near and far. And as I
barely sat down and adjusted into my seat —
“How does it feel for you both knowing your son is gay?” my principal blurted out.
9
I had confided in her with trust and yet she cut me open with what felt like a hot iron scythe on
my bare skin — diminishing my consent, violating me, prompting me into a potential position of
danger and outing me with no indication of remorse.
I was then forced to attend weekly “counseling” sessions with penance-like treatments where
there was an extensive focus on my queerness as an issue needing to be fixed in my life — an
issue that praying to God could help accomplish. Through recent years I’ve come to terms with
acknowledging this to be a false “guidance counseling” order from my principal, but rather an
attempt to stamp out my nonconformity in the name of God. It ultimately, to me, was conversion
therapy, as the reasoning behind me entering it and leaving it boiled down to my queerness and it
needing to be absolved. It seemed like the only way out of these sessions was to just comply with
their idea that what made me different was wrong, and thus, I needed to then assimilate. I can
only imagine my ancestors and elders like Mary Ann feeling the same way in those boarding
schools too.
Most people think conversion therapy is shock therapy in some far away secluded land or in an
asylum as popularized in television. Mine took place in a room next door to my school’s convent
where the nuns lived. These sessions were mandatory, like a sentence my principal ordered me to
serve for the crime of liking men. For two years I’d sit in that cramped, dark, room with only a
small window near the ceiling every week, undergoing sessions where my queer identity was
pinpointed as the reason behind why my family, friendship and academic problems persisted.
I was in the 7th grade, only twelve years old. And now, at 22, back on the Rez, I found myself
finally being able to heal from that experience.
“I’m sorry that happened,” Mary Ann said in disbelief as we circled around the cemetery
alongside bodies whose non-conformity led to their own demise. “They just have this idea of
who a ‘good’ person should be… and all they want is to just force their religion onto us.”
It was an unfamiliar comfort that surged through my body when I was able to share my story
with Mary Ann and hear her condolences to my trauma aloud, because there was a resonance
there I’ve never felt with anyone before.
“Well, they tried their hardest and they didn’t succeed,” I responded. “Ten years later, and I’m
still very, very gay.” Mary Ann laughed.
We’ve both felt the slash of that religious scythe in our lives attempting to stamp out our
identities. But — both of us survived. And these conversations reminded me that my people and
I always will.
10
—
Archived photo of St. Boniface during its establishment, Photo courtesy of the Banning Library District
“It was cold, I felt empty, and I felt very alone,” Mary Ann said as she stared toward the spot
where an old building once stood, where her battles with assimilation took place. Here lived nuns
that ran the school. “I remember longing for my mother, for my home, for my reservation. And
you get no sympathy when they just pound their religion into your head.”
Something as miniscule as her word choice exemplified the power of speaking to my elders. The
pounding of religion. It truly encompassed the repetition, the force and the pressure behind the
tactics used in my conversion therapy. The invisibility I’ve always felt as a result of what
happened to me as a child was suddenly cloaked by the knowledge that my struggles and
persistence are not alone, but rather were a part of a lineage of powerful resiliency extending
through the generations from elders like Mary Ann. We were separated by several generations.
But this resonance felt like a pull between our souls. I may have experienced conversion therapy
alone as a child, but knowing Mary Ann’s stories now has made me ease into an unfamiliar
comfort in knowing that maybe I was never alone after all.
We sat on a worn out stone bench in the cemetery alongside the graves of lives that never made it
back. We both knew Mary Ann could have been lying among them, another name in the
11
database, another tombstone covering the plains, another story of violence and death passed on to
be told to the generations that followed.
It was on that bench where Mary Ann shared with me one of the last things she remembers
hearing her mother share with her when she was a kid.
“When my little sister Katherine died when she was three, we had a noon to noon memorial
tribal ceremony. I’ll never forget that after the wake, my mother told my father, ‘I’m glad my
baby died, at least she’ll never have to experience what the rest of the kids are going to go
through.’”
Mary Ann stared beyond the plains ahead, past the ruined buildings before us. We listened to the
tree branches rustling against the strong currents of wind. She had survived what her mother
feared she’d one day face, but that silence loudly reminded us that she’s the last one alive who
did.
—
As we left the cemetery and drove towards the edge of the Rez, I wondered more about what
once was. What other violence occurred on the ground beneath our feet?
“They used to handcuff Natives inside the corrals, alongside the animals, even the babies,” Mary
Ann said, with no inflection in her voice. A pit in my stomach grew at the thought of it and a
great sorrow flooded me as I realized this was something that she was desensitized to to say
aloud. “They gave babies tiny little handcuffs.”
It was horrifying to think about the extent in which colonizers wanted to assert control over us —
dominating our youth before they could even learn how to speak or walk.
I stared out the window of the van, looking toward the mountains. I wondered if my ancestors
looked at this same view while enduring violence — and if maybe the sight of those peaks gave
them as much comfort as it gave me in that moment.
The conversation reminded Mary Ann that the tribe was coming together that afternoon for a
baseball game where the kids would be gathering. I welcomed the offer of light after a morning
of visiting death and violence.
When we entered the baseball field on the Rez, parents lined up on the outside of the fences with
tea and lemonade, sitting on camping chairs made of our tribal print, as the warm sun of the
plains beamed down on our resilient brown skin. Young tribal girls with their braided thick
12
Indian hair cheered for each other from in and out of the dugout. One young woman went up to
bat and swung so hard that the ball looked like it could reach the peaks of the mountains framing
our lands. “She’s got offers already to some big colleges,” Mary Ann said with a proud smile.
“Look at her go. She’s one of us!”
I met my aunts and cousins who insisted they cooked me up a popover in the kitchen, evoking a
sense of home and belonging despite being away from this community my whole life.
My cousin Bea came over and gave me a hug with one arm, a baby held in the other. Mary Ann’s
story was still fresh in my mind. Handcuffed babies and children corralled with animals. The
baby smiled at me as I noticed his garment — a chunky hooded jacket made out of our tribal
print that was as bold as our people are, those dark thoughts starting to dissipate. His small hands
playfully waved at me, his wrists shackless. I was full of warmth seeing the tiny smile on his face
and the community so proudly existing around me.
It became more clear that Mary Ann and I survived what we had gone through, and our
community has too.
—
There has always been a void in me, a wound that seemingly could never be fully stitched
together to allow me to heal. Being a survivor of conversion therapy affected my mental health in
profound ways — and more specifically, created a distrust with therapists that detracted me from
ever seeking help, further contributing to the increasing numbers of mental health issues in
Indigenous communities.
This pursuit of returning to the Rez allowed me to fill that void. My ancestors, elders and
histories, and their resilience in the face of their own traumas, are key to this.
My principal’s act of violence in outing me to my parents and forcing me into two years of
conversion therapy left lasting traumas thinking of what could’ve been. What if I came home
after that meeting and my parents bloodily beat me for being gay? Kicked me out of my home?
Ended my life just like many other stories of queer kids across the country who’ve been outed?
Even as ten years have passed, I still fear that the nun wanted such a fate for me — that she may
have wanted to kill the Indian in her own way. Although my experience in conversion therapy
was not explicitly anti-Indigenous, it shared the same sentiment people like Father Hahn had
when running St. Boniface: assimilate their non-conformity with religion at all costs, even if it
means losing their life.
13
Despite those fears and the post-traumatic effects of my experience, I now feel an unwavering
strength, buoyed by my elders and my time on the Rez. I feel ready to endure the aftershocks of
trauma from my ancestral history that come my way, and even more prepared to return the favor
of my elders to this next generation who will inevitably battle the behemoths of generational
trauma ahead. But my pursuit of returning to the Rez healed more than just my lived traumas
surviving boarding schools — it repaired my wounds as a survivor of sexual violence too.
14
Chapter II: The survival of my earth, my body
When I met with Aaron Saubel at the quaint 1950s themed diner stamped in the middle of our tribal
reservation, where he shared with me our elders stories of surviving boarding schools, we had also
uncovered another aspect of both of our lives that tied us together — and further another aspect of my
lived traumas today that connects to my dark, yet resilient, Indigenous histories.
We were both coping with being survivors of sexual assault and felt a deep connection to our land as part
of our bodies.
Aaron Saubel outside of the diner we met at for lunch, Photo by Andre Lawes Menchavez
Aaron and I were ushered into a back booth in the diner filled with vintage paraphernalia, our table lit by
a singular overhanging light. The workers greeted him with hugs and smiles notioning he was a regular
with an energy they evidently enjoyed. I first met his enigmatic self when I was 18 when I came back to
the Rez in the Summer of 2017. I was taking a weekend-long tribal sovereignty course and was assigned
Aaron as my instructor. Instead of the typical sovereignty courses usual tribal students would take, Aaron
adapted the lesson plan and instructed me individually — centering me in the queer Indigenous
experience on the Rez. We connected deeply after sharing our stories of being queer and bonded over my
background in HIV/AIDS activism. I still remember being in the kitchen of his home on our last day of
the weekend, recapping the lessons I’d learned and making popovers when he thanked me for my
activism work. It was then when he shared with me his battles with his HIV positive diagnosis,
connecting us even more deeply.
Four years later in this quirky timewarp of a diner, we reunited on the Rez over slices of fragrant apple pie
and decadent double-chocolate cake in that diner booth. His HIV diagnosis was just a fragment of his
traumatic life story, and it was in that diner where I learned more about his journey and the histories of
our tribe that grounded us together in ways I never imagined. Beyond being queer Indigenous people,
we’ve both shed blood when our bodies were violently abused at the hands of men. And even further, this
15
connection we shared reflecting on our traumas ignited a new connection beyond ourselves that extended
into generations of treatment of our people and our land today.
And so we continued to consume bites of the dessert in front of us as we unfolded our stories, piece by
piece, unraveling together our tribal histories of Native bodies being used for violent consumption. I was
no longer alone in my pursuit of survival from sexual violence. I had Aaron. I had my history.
—
“Sexual abuse is a part of my life,” Aaron said to me. He confessed his traumas to me without a shake in
his voice, his eyes unwaveringly connected, evoking a chilling sense of numbness to the darkness behind
his abuse. “I was 5, 6, and 7 years old.”
His stories of sexual violence were one of his many wounds that scathed him in his early-childhood.
He would often be told as a child that he was an “abomination that God didn’t want” by members of the
community due to his queerness. This response from the tribal community showed an important insight
into the fact that despite these horrific colonial pressures of boarding schools in our history, there was still
Catholic presence within the tribe — there are even a number of Catholic churches still on our reservation
today. This provided me a lot of context to what Mary Ann was telling me about how the effects of
boarding schools really stayed with people, such as, in this instance, creating conservative ideologies that
target our own people by our people.
Aaron also endured physical abuse as a child, and as a result, this treatment left him with lifelong traumas
and a forced pursuit of survival.
“I was beaten so badly that I started to believe that in order for someone to listen to you, you had to beat
them,” Saubel said. “I believed that. Sometimes I still have to stop myself from believing that. It’s in me
now.”
When your body is bloodily violated and robbed of its autonomy, there’s something that you can never get
back after all that’s forcibly taken from you. Aaron tried to fill that void through alcohol, a result that is
not rare in this country for Indigenous peoples.
In a study done by the American Addiction Centers, Native Americans “experience substance abuse and
addiction at much higher rates than other ethnic groups.” (National Survey on Drug Use and Health,
2018) Further, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) released a study that revealed that
“American Indians are twice as likely to experience a rape/sexual assault compared to all races.”
(Department of Justice, 2004)
Aaron’s sexual assault and the further abuse that occured as a result of these traumas marks him as one of
many Native Americans in the country being plagued by this violent cycle — one of whom, is myself.
—
16
When you’re 15 years old, you’re supposed to be learning how to adapt to highschool after graduating
from the 8th grade. You’re not supposed to be googling how to heal your body after you’re bleeding from
forced insertion by your first partner despite saying “No.”
When you’re 16 years old, you’re supposed to be figuring out what classes to take next to advance you
into higher courses for college nearing ahead. You’re not supposed to be panicking after your partner
reveals their HIV positive status to you after raping you, sending you into a spiral of a potential HIV
exposure with no support system around you to confide in.
When you’re 18 years old, you’re supposed to be enjoying your first year of college and meeting new
people. You’re not supposed to be closed off to all the men romantically and platonically you meet after
being drugged, undressed and then taken advantage of by a sober person you thought you loved.
When you’re alive you should be allowed to live. But being constantly violated when I was 15, 16 and 18
years old made me feel like there was always something, or someone, that didn’t want me to. I couldn’t
pinpoint or put a name to this phenomenon that crept its way into my life, challenging my ability or
wanting to live.
Aaron and I’s conversation at the diner was a monumental awakening, my lived experiences with sexual
violence beginning to heal through our conversation and putting a name to the phenomenon by connecting
our abuse to a root cause of our past.
“I think the abuse in our community is actually just a symptom of our history,” Aaron said.
He explained that our Indigenous histories engrained harmful institutions and perceptions that have
trickled down generations, leading to our social and systematic marginalization today.
Some may think that knowing that your violence happened to your people in the past may be destructive
or counterproductive to my healing. But what this did for me was remind me of where I have come from
and that my people have overcome this violence before — meaning I can too. I too can fight off these
generations of trauma in hopes for a better future for the next generation of my people.
When Aaron and I left the diner, I snapped a photo of him outside at the parking lot. I look at that photo
often since my trip and am reminded of the sentiment he offered after I thanked him for everything he had
ingrained in me that day: “Please, never forget to remember where you come from.”
—
17
The Morongo Canyons. Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons
The conversations I had with Aaron were pivotal in my healing as a survivor and in helping me
solidify a framework of understanding that our traumas today are not just of the present, but are
echoes of a too familiar past for our people. Another way he explained this was through the
perspective of our land and how healing our bodies can be done when we pursue a framework of
viewing the recovery of our bodies in relation to our land.
He shared with me a story that is deeply rooted in our tribe, what he called the “creation story.”
It’s a tale of the genesis of our lands and bodies after our greatest ancestor, the Creator, passed
away. The story takes place long before the carnage of mankind was able to abuse our Earth —
and us.
When our Creator died, their body was burned and as their ashes orchestrated through the
currents of wind, they dispersed onto the soil below, leaving plants erupting from where the
Creator once stood. All the remains of the Creator’s body reincarnated into sustenance for our
people to live. Corn grew from the remains of the Creator’s teeth, the soil became a foundation
of flora and fauna made to adorn and replenish our bodies externally and internally for
generations to come.
My people would use the plants the Creator left for us for three main purposes: housing, food
and medicine. Homes were constructed with fragments of the sprouted vegetation offering our
people shade from the hot desert sun. We sustained our bodies with the herbage, becoming a part
18
of our meals and rituals. They became medicinal necessities, the Earth healing us as our bodies
shared a familial bind with it.
“All the way from the beginning, we as people understood the importance of the land,” Aaron
said to me. “We used the land and its plants because they were given to us for a specific reason.
We are very close to the land, we live off the land, and we understood our connection. If the
Earth wasn’t right, we wouldn’t be right.”
The World Meteorological Organization reported that greenhouse gas concentrations have
reached record levels, where the amounts of carbon dioxide “... were 413.2 parts per million
(ppm), methane (CH4) at 1889 parts per billion (ppb)) and nitrous oxide (N2O) at 333.2 ppb,
respectively, 149%, 262% and 123% of pre-industrial (1750) levels.” (World Meteorological
Organization, 2021)
These reports were from 2020, and the organization has since reported these statistics have
increased in the last year.
As Indigenous peoples, we have a deep connection to the land beneath our feet. Our land has
constantly been destroyed over time, used by the most powerful elite to their own capitalistic
advantage and have been commodified as powerless spaces destined for dominance — evoking
familiar wounding sounds that our people and our bodies have heard screeched into our skulls
for generations.
Understanding this connection between the land and our bodies, highlighting these horrific
histories of domination, provides a deeper contextualization of what it means to be a survivor of
sexual assault as an Indigenous person. Because these histories have created cultures of violence
affecting Indigenous communities like my own, deterring our ability to survive the traumas we
endure.
However, despite this, we have and always will resiliently attempt to overcome them.
—
The Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act of 1830 are major pinpoints of history that
represent how our past has conditioned a culture of dominance and abuse of Indigenous bodies
and our land.
President Andrew Jackson created the act, “exchanging” the lands west of the Mississippi River
for the land of Indigenous peoples in the East. This exchange was not a voluntary or peaceful
trading of resources, but rather a forced removal of Indigenous peoples, violently clearing us
19
from the East coast, utilizing military enforcement led by the government in a genocidal fashion
after generations of already violent settler colonial processes.
This settler colonial process includes the occurance and impact of settlers like Christopher
Columbus — a prominent historical figure that raped and beheaded Indigenous peoples during
his colonial conquests.
Our tribe received federal recognition by the then President Ulysses S. Grant in 1876 half a
century later as our tribal reservation was created under an executive order. Despite this progress
of government sanctioned control veiled as tribal “sovereignty,” history continued to repeat itself
in the 1950’s through the 1970’s in a number of mechanisms used to “solve the Indian problem.”
The “V oluntary Relocation Program” was created between 1952 and 1972 and aimed to move
Native Americans out of their reservations and into cities to clear out tribal lands. Tribal
members were provided only a one-way transportation out of the Rez and a couple of hundred
dollars from the government.
The goal, veiled again as an innocent relocation of Indigenous people, was a genocidal tactic
aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples into white culture by moving them out of their tribal
homelands and then commodify the empty lands of the reservations as spaces the government
could then use to tax and offer up for purchase.
These histories evoke the same sinister sentiment that Indigenous peoples, our bodies and our
lands were made to be dominated and used to our oppressor’s gain.
With these stories in mind, I confided in Aaron with my disappointment in the US government
for generations of failing to protect our communities. It was a statement that Aaron had a quick
response to that I haven’t been able to forget.
“The government didn’t fail in protecting us,” he said. “They never wanted to. In my heart I
believe that you can’t fail at something that you’ve never tried to do.”
—
One could take these historical pinpoints that I’ve laid out and say that this is all in the past, but
these moments have undoubtedly created a domino effect of intergenerational trauma that Aaron
mentioned to me at the diner — and the statistics prove this is gravely true.
The National Institute of Justice published a study in 2016 that showed that over four in five
American-Indian and Alaska-Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their
lifetime — and 56.1 percent have been victims of sexual violence. (Rosay, 2016)
RAINN also released findings that showed that, on average, there 5,900 cases of sexual assault
per year in Indigenous populations over the age of 12. The U.S Department of Justice further
20
stated that Indigenous women have a murder rate that is 10 times the national average.
(Department of Justice, 2004)
As for the land, Aaron has seen the impact of the climate crisis on our Rez.
“Nowadays plants at higher elevations are ripening at different times, and normally we’d have
cycles that allowed our people to know when to start gathering and preparing,” he said.
“Nowadays, it’s all screwed up because of climate change.”
To Aaron, the worst effect on our planet today are the encroachers of our land, something he
learned early on as a child seeing windmills being placed all over the Rez, destroying the views
of the mountain scenic landscape he’d view from where he lived.
“My grandma hated windmills being placed on our lands,” Aaron said. “It stopped us from being
able to go out and gather specific plants since the land now belonged to people who weren’t our
people. They’d put up fences to stop us from going into their spaces that were ours to begin with,
or even worse, they’d just destroy everything to build concrete roads and buildings over it.”
It’s no surprise that our planet and communities are dying and are being taken advantage of when
the histories of this country, and the culture it has created, has a foundation of violence that was
willing to end Indigenous lives in the most brutal ways possible. But just like our histories, we
rise even when we’re burned to ashes.
“I think of the plants that erupt after fire, they continue to just grow,” Aaron said. “And that’s
what we do as Native Americans, through everything, we grow.”
—
Aaron taught me a word in our Native language that really embodies what this return to the Rez,
uncovering its deepest parts and connecting it to my own lived traumas meant to me — Ivaka.
“Ivaka means power, it means energy,” Aaron said to me. “Ivaka is in everything, it’s in the
wind, it’s in our Earth, it’s in the both of us. This is a power given to us as Native people by our
Creator. We are resilient people.”
The beauty about returning to the Rez after living away from it all my life and meeting my elders
is that, although I was being informed of the darkest parts of my history that resonate deeply with
my own previous traumas, I was uncovering that the depths of that trauma coincide with the
depth of cultural resilience I had within me all along.
21
When I was raped as a child and I bled out onto the floor beneath me, in that moment a part of
myself died. But just as my Creator birthed a new era of strength and sustenance for the future
generations to thrive off of, just as my ancestors revitalized our tribal communities after histories
of colonial pressure to erase them — I will too.
With this all in mind, I think deeply about the gift I was given at my last session of conversion
therapy: a rock with an engraved lettering that said “HOPE” alongside an engraved butterfly with
blue rhinestones filling in the inner portions of the wings. It was made to be a reminder that with
hope, God will always save me.
I still have the rock with me, though its meaning to me differs. The rock sits on my coffee table
in my apartment here in Los Angeles. I kept it all these years because it used to remind me of
what I’ve overcome. But now, the rock symbolizes who I have in my life to help me in the
process of overcoming what’s ahead.
“My boarding school experience molded me into the person I am today,” I recall Mary Ann
saying to me. “I was alone then, but it showed me how much I cared about my family… how to
fight for my family.”
I have my people now, I have my Ivaka, and we don’t need God to save us.
22
Bibliography
Andreas, M. (2021). Personal Interview.
Department of Justice. (2004). “Native Americans Are at the Greatest Risk of Sexual
Violence.”
Harley, R. (1995). “Readings in Diocesan Heritage, V olume VIII, Seek and Ye Shall Find:
St. Boniface Indian Industrial School, 1888-1978.”
Morongo Tribal Historic Preservation Office. (2021). “Remembering St. Boniface School &
Cemetery.”
Rosay, A. (2016). “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men:
2010 Findings From the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.”
Saubel, A. (2021). Personal Interview.
Shadrick, I. (1995). “A Study on Historic Diocese Records.”
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2018). “2018 National
Survey on Drug Use and Health Detailed Tables.” 2018
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. (2020). “US Indian
Boarding School History.”
https://boardingschoolhealing.org/education/us-indian-boarding-school-history/.
World Meteorological Organization. (2021). “State of the Global Climate 2021: WMO
Provisional report.”
23

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Growing up I’ve always had a yearning for knowledge about the Indigenous side of my family and identity. Being so far away from my reservation, or Res, has meant that I never had the accessibility to obtain what I was longing for. Our family trips to the Res every summer when I was a child were short and I’ve always known I’ve wanted more. Alongside this childhood of longing for a grasp of my Indigeneity, I also experienced a lot of violence in my youth — more specifically in the case of this thesis, I dealt with a lot of violence involving sexual assault and surviving conversion therapy.
My thesis was initially grounded in the pursuit of exploring my Indigenous heritage now that I live in Los Angeles, but through conversations with my elders, it evolved into a story about the transcension of trauma and survival. Through my research of the boarding schools and the dark history of my tribe’s past that my elders guided me on, I was able to gain an understanding that this was more than a trip back to the Rez to learn about my history — it was a trip that enlightened me on the fact that my traumas have connections to my people.
Through this longform narrative thesis, I explore just how trauma and violence has transcended through time in my people by connecting my elder’s stories of past and ongoing colonialism to my modern day stories of sexual violence and conversion therapy. Ultimately, I found through this thesis that despite this trauma that has passed down through our Indigenous blood, our community continues to persist and reclaim ownership of our power and our bodies.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Menchavez, Andre Lawes (author)

Core Title The transcendence of violence and survival: To ‘Kill the Indian’ then and now

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 10/17/2022

Defense Date 10/17/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag boarding schools,climate change,Conversion therapy,Filipinx,indigenous,intergenerational trauma,land rights,LGBTQIA+,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sexual violence

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Richardson, Allissa (committee chair), Tolan, Andrew (committee member), Trahant, Mark (committee member)

Creator Email amenchav@usc.edu,andrelawesmenchavez@Gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112124634

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Legacy Identifier etd-MenchavezA-11269

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Rights Menchavez, Andre Lawes

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