Linda Raye Cobe (64), is a member the Lac Vieux Desert Band, Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe. Her healing journey led to her publishing a brief, courageous, and straightforward memoir in 2015. Red, White & Blues. She tells the story of what happened to her right before her sixth birthday. She and her siblings and cousins were taken away from their homes in Watersmeet in Michigan to the Holy Childhood School Harbor Springs, an Indian boarding school, five hours away. Cobe writes of arbitrary beatings raining down from the nuns as they screamed that the holy children under their care, whose childhoods they were ending with their fists, were “good for nothing, stinking little, dirty Indians.”
That trauma was followed by another — adoption out of her family and tribe to a white family in Baraga, a village on the Keweenaw Bay of Lake Superior named for Bishop Baraga, a near mythical figure (in local white lore)The shrine, which measures 35 feet high, is a local attraction. Though just a little more than an hour’s drive from home, it too was a world apart, which was the point of the forced assimilation of Indian children into the white world. At first, her adopted parents lavished her with toys, dolls, even a bicycle, none of which she’d ever had. However, her fourth grade teacher noticed that her adopted father was routinely sexually exploiting her. It continued until Cobe, the first of four children, finally got away.
Though it’s still difficult for her to speak publicly about the toll of victimhood and the price of survival (the further assimilation of her own four children), Cobe went to the Pellston, Michigan, stop of U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s “Road to Healing” tourAugust 13, 2022. It was a long and emotional day, and she honestly wasn’t sure if she was going to testify or not. But in the end, she did speak, because Cobe hadn’t heard anyone else make her point: While she was only at boarding school for one year, her parents had been so weakened and overwhelmed by their powerlessness at having their children removed to a boarding school, that it was easier for the state to pry her and her younger sister away from her family into adoption. Cobe was the very last speaker on that historic day in which the crimes committed against her, and the atrocities against so many others, became part of this country’s official record.
On September 30, Cobe spoke again at a remembrance ceremony on her tribal homelands in Watersmeet on “Orange Shirt Day.” Orange shirts are worn in recognition of the need for a truth and reconciliation process about the horrors of Indian boarding schools and in solidarity with the pain of those who suffered from enforced assimilation. The ceremony included a sunrise water ceremony, honor songs, prayers, and a two-mile walk. There was also a community lunch. As she and her cousin Bobby Hazen spoke about the anguish of what had happened to them at boarding school, little children sunk into the safety of their parents’ arms. After their remarks, some older boys joined the drum circle and a few girls danced in the traditional jingle dress.
This interview was a result of conversations with Linda Raye Cobe, Watersmeet, and at a similar Indian school remembrance event in July in Baraga.
Frances Madeson: What’s it like to come back to a place as beautiful and alive as this, surrounded by lakes and dense forests, but one with so much personal history, and so many layers of experience?
Linda Raye Cobe: It’s mixed.
In Watersmeet, we were so poor, my parents went and brought a couch home from the dump; that’s what my sister and my two brothers and I slept on — the four of us slept on the couch, and I think that one green wool blanket we shared was one [my father]brought back from the Korean War. There were bugs on the couch, and I still have scabs from being bitten. There was no running water or electricity in our outhouse. We didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas or anything because we didn’t have money for toys and cakes. But we were happy; we didn’t know what we were missing. We made our own fun; we didn’t need friends because I had so many cousins that lived right next to us. And we were always into mischief, and exploring, making toys — the boys would make bows and arrows, and the girls, we’d go picking berries and apples, we’d chase animals in the woods, that kind of thing.
And then the culture shock was that strangers come and get you and your little cousins, and the adults not being able to act… I mean someone comes to get your kids today, what would you do, you know, if they say they’re taking your kids, and there’s nothing you can do about it? It would push you over the edge. It was all about land grabs. If we were assimilated into their society, then they could have the land for free, and they didn’t have to fulfill the treaty obligations.
After Watersmeet, I didn’t really have a childhood, it was stolen from me. I was 5 years old when they took us away. We were so far from home. As a child, you don’t understand what is happening, why they are taking my parents away, and breaking up our family.
And then they drop us off with the nuns and there’s no more running around in the woods free as a bird. You’re in boot camp, military boot camp. They got you up before the crack of dawn, 4 o’clock in the morning, to get up and ready and dressed for church every morning before school. Then they would come and inspect your bed, and it better be straight, and if it has a wrinkle it’s getting torn apart and you’re gonna have to make it again. It was so cruel that they would beat you for everything. We were terrified to death to see the children get beaten. You don’t know where it’s coming from, you can’t look up, you can’t look down, you can’t open your mouth, you can’t smile. I was slapped on the face for smiling at my cousin across a room. So, your whole identity’s taken from you, and you don’t know what you are, and you don’t know why.
I was adopted to a white family in Baraga and that was a continuation of losing my culture after going to boarding school for a year, and in the family that I lived with, the father was an alcoholic and sexually abused my sister and me for years, so there’s a lot of traumatic memories in that regard.
I’m trying to find my way back. And the way to find your way back is once you reach a stage in your life when you’re introspective, and you want to know who you are, what is your purpose in life?
It’s really difficult for me to get up and share my story. I keep thinking it’s gonna get easier, but it’s not. I’ve always been a self-conscious person; when I went to college I did horribly, horribly, when I had to get up in front of the whole class.
It’s difficult to bare your soul, and yet it’s the truth of what happened. Why is it that I carry all the shame from the abuse and trauma? But it’s the voices you have to reverse, all of that self-talk — “What a worthless nothing piece of crap you are, you’ll never amount to anything, your parents don’t love you. You’re dirty, you’re stupid” — all of that negative verbal abuse, and then the physical abuse, and the sexual abuse. It takes a lot to fight back and to change your self-talk and believe again in yourself. It’s part of our intergenerational trauma that many people still don’t know about what we survived just to be here alive.
So here you’re already well on your individual path, and over the horizon comes the rise of the Indian boarding school healing movement?
It’s exciting, because we’re finally being heard and taken seriously. Deb Haaland is a role model for us. Her inspiration and hope gives you the strength to keep moving forward.
What are your goals?
The truth will eventually come out. And those who harmed or raped or killed innocent children will be held accountable. The church — it’s not just the Catholic Church, but all of the denominations — that did that.
We hope that our people will heal; that’s the biggest hope, that we heal and change our communities so our children will have a future to look forward to, and they can be proud again of who they are.
And what?’What is the inspiration?
Inspiration came from hearing my Canadian and American sisters share their stories. And that they survived.
My brother took his own life; he couldn’t get past what happened. I look at my family and I see all of the disparity that other families didn’t necessarily have to go through, but it’s so common on reservations — fatal accidents, for instance. My brother was killed in a car accident; my younger sisters died from diabetes; my mother passed away from diabetes; and my father died from alcoholism, cirrhosis, and liver disease.
We lived in poverty and were victims of domestic violence. Now I understand white privilege. We didn’t have toys, we didn’t have books, we didn’t have sheets and warm blankets on our bed. We struggled. For years, we had to go school and face children who made fun of our struggles. And you didn’t fit in and always felt awkward and out of place. You felt like no one cared.
And then after a year, the nightmare was over but it doesn’t ever really leave you?
My parents split up shortly before I arrived home. My father was beating my mother so badly that he nearly killed her. She took the youngest daughter and moved to Milwaukee. Back then, they had a relocation program; they hooked her up with a good job in Milwaukee, and so our younger sister didn’t go to boarding school, but she didn’t get to grow up with her siblings, either. My dad stayed with me and my two older brothers. [Social Services] took my other sister and me because they said he couldn’t take care of us, that we were being neglected. Because we were poor.
We returned home in July 1964. I can recall everyone being at the house on August 3, 1964. When everyone’s over at the house, it makes me remember the day they came and got us to take us to school. It was kind of the same thing, everyone was coming over to the house, my uncles and everyone was like, they were on the verge of “You’re not taking my kids” — kind of one of those situations.
The social worker and the foster mother came, they knew my dad was an alcoholic, and came and said, “We brought you this beer, and we’re gonna take these girls because we can provide a better home for them than you can,” and he’s like, “OK.” Later down the road, I heard that he had told somebody that he thought it was gonna be temporary. But after he’d seen what they did, what they had the authority to do, to take us kids to boarding school, I think he wasn’t gonna fight the foster care. They had already talked him into giving up his rights.
But you know all we heard was “Your parents didn’t love you, don’t love you, that’s why they gave you up; your father’s nothing but a drunk, your mother’s a whore.” They would totally badmouth anything to do about my culture and family, so I didn’t know anything about it. I’m still finding relatives I didn’t know I was related to.
What’Is that what you would like?
Strange, because I didn’t meet my grandparents on my mother’s side, the Oneida side. I think I only know a few cousins; there’s so many I haven’t met yet. I don’t know, I guess I’ve accepted so many things over my 64 years that it’s just one more thing, that Oh well, what can you do? Nothing.
That’This is the truth. What about reconciliation?
I don’t think 10 “Our Fathers” and five Hail Marys is gonna cut it, or an apology from the church. I think it needs… words mean nothing… what is the action you’re going to take?Where are the prosecutions located?Some of these people are still living. That’s a crime what they did, and we don’t even know how many are buried in this country. Just look at Canada, so you know it’s gonna be… there’s even more boarding schools in our country than there was in Canada. In the early 1900s, 80 percent of Native children were in boarding schools. And it gets in your DNA, the grief and trauma, and going back to the Indian wars when they would wipe out the total tribe, and whoever made it didn’t have time to grieve or provide decent burials or anything. So many people have lost their entire families. Now what?
And they never acknowledge all the contributions we’ve made. Our country’s highways are built using Native-engineered trails. Our government model was inspired by the Iroquois. Natives were the first to wear tennis shoes. They would soak their feet in the sap from the rubber tree. The Boys and Girls Scouts’ principles are built on, you know, how to build a fire or survive in the world, is built on our culture. After being beaten for their language and forbidden to speak it, the Navajo code speakers saved the war. How could they have won it without them?
Why did you write your book, and why?
People would ask me about my childhood, my family and how I got there. I was shocked when they told me that I went boarding school all my life. “What’s that? What are you talking about?” A lot of white friends and even Natives, the young assimilated ones, a lot don’t know about boarding school and still don’t to this day. In all of my counseling I have been taught that I was a victim, but also a survivor, and I thought why not use that to help another victim so that she doesn’t feel like, well… I always felt like the only one that all the stuff ever happened to you. That’s how you feel when it’s happening to you, when you don’t know why, or what, and you don’t know how to make sense of it.
One survivor at PellstonHe said something profound: that our Native culture was taken from us. We didn’t have our coming-of-age ceremonies when you would go fast and find your vision quest. So, our spirit is crying for our culture, and that’s why they drink themselves to despair and turn to drugs, because it was stolen. It’s like a soul wound.
What ceremonies have your done since you returned to your culture?
I’ve done sweat lodges, led by women with only women participants. It’s very spiritual. You go in there and you pray, it’s like going to church, but better — it’s a cleansing.
You know, I used the Bishop Baraga shrine. Now, I could just spit it.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited to ensure clarity.
