The healing journey of Robbie Paul
by Mary Ann Reese

When an elementary school teacher told the young Robbie Paul from Craigmont, ID, that she was just a dumb Indian,” Robbie believed it, and struggled, even while earning her BS degree in Home Economics at the University of Idaho in 1972. “My grade point average then was barely a 2 point,” she recalls.

Years later, grief over a divorce led her to examine exactly who she is, this child of a white mother from Kansas and full-blooded Nez Perce father from central Idaho.

Along the way, she researched and wrote about her Nez Perce history, full of trauma, death, courage, and beauty, while earning a Master of Science in psychology from Eastern Washington University. Now she’s on the home stretch of her Ph.D, from Spokane’s Gonzaga University, with a 3.8 GPA. Her journey has helped her embrace historical traumas and how they impacted both herself and generations of her family. The title of this story mimics her doctoral dissertation topic.

“I didn’t really know much about my Nez Perce heritage,” Paul told some 30 University of Idaho Extension educators and other students as she shared her story on the first UI Journey for Diversity and Human Rights in July (see story).

“I’d always heard of the Nez Perce wars, but I had no idea that two of my relatives as young children were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry in 1877. My great grandfather and three more children died of malaria within the next months in captivity in Kansas and Oklahoma. They remain buried in a mass grave in Oklahoma.”

Pain of a divorce launches a healing journey
Robbie Paul told the tour group her healing journey began when she felt suicidal following her divorce in the late 1980s. “That pain forced me to feel. As I was healing from the divorce, I began to realize I’d always felt especially depressed when certain dates came up. Why, I wondered? Then I began to look at my family’s past and historical events that corresponded with them.” Dates when she felt most depressed coincided with dates of historical traumas—wars and disease ending in deaths for her Nez Perce ancestors.

“I began to look at the (Nez Perce) war really closely. I knew my grandfather, Jesse Paul, was there, a small boy in that war. I started reading Yellow Wolf’s book (Yellow Wolf: His Own Story, by Lucullus V. McWhorter). I could only read one chapter at a time because it hurt me so much. When I got to the chapter on Big Hole I was sobbing. I asked myself, ‘Why am I crying so hard?’ I then realized the people Yellow Wolf was speaking about were actually my own relatives, real people, witnesses to this battle.”

Paul next realized she needed to visit these historic sites and “pay my respects to my aunts and uncles.”

Would her father, Titus Paul, a revered Nez Perce elder, like to join her? “I say, ‘Dad, they’re doing a ceremony at Big Hole.’ He says, ‘No.’ So, I continue, because I need to go for me. Two days later dad calls and says, “I’ll go with you.”

“That was our beginning of starting to heal.”

Remembering along the 1,170 mile Nez Perce trail
The 1990s were an especially good time for the Paul family to visit Big Hole, MT. The entire 1,170 mile Nez Perce National Historic Trail from Joseph, OR, in the Wallowas, across Idaho and the Lo Lo Pass to Big Hole, is now part of the National Park System. From Big Hole the trail continues north another 360 miles to Bear Paw, near the Canadian border, where the Nez Perce war ended with Chief Joseph’s famous “I will fight no more forever,” speech. Paul’s grandparents and family were there.

Each August 9, Nez Perce war veterans gather at Big Hole to remember their fallen warriors with a pipe ceremony and traditional dancing. They also remember the women and children slaughtered in a pre-dawn attack in the ugliest possible way. Eyewitnesses say heads were smashed in and limbs ripped off. Nearly 90 of some 700 Nez Perce were killed that day. Mostly women and children. More than 250 Nez Perce were killed during the entire war.

In contrast, one white observer’s account describes “the courageous and almost chivalrous manner in which the Nez Perce conducted their side of the war.” Robbie’s great grandfather Seven-Days-Whipping followed this trail with other warriors of the Chief Joseph band in 1877 in the war that ended all Indian wars in the West.

Accompanying him were his wife Phoebe and six children, one of them Robbie’s grandfather, Jesse Paul, then age 7. Jesse and mom Phoebe were the only family members to survive those traumatic events.

In better days, the Nez Perce had followed that trail to buffalo hunting grounds in what is now Montana.

“I go in silence”
The first thing Robbie and her parents, Titus and Maxine Paul, do when they
arrive at Big Hole is go down to the battleground site. “I am in absolute silence. I am so overwhelmed with the grief of the site itself. Father is very silent.
“We just walk. And I kind of visualize until I feel the horror of the moment. You realize that you’re being attacked. And great grandmother had to protect her children. I have no idea how old the children are, but she is 42.

“My father is one of the descendants of the war there that day. The granddaughter of Looking Glass is also there. Descendants of the cavalry are there, too.

“I am overwhelmed by the grief of realizing that grandfather’s sisters and brothers died. Imagine witnessing that as a child.”
Later Robbie and parents watch a video of the battle at the interpretive center. After the viewing her father says, “That was murder.”
Other visits follow in the next few years, to Bear Paw and the mass grave in Oklahoma, to Indian boarding schools attended by both Jesse and Robbie’s dad Titus. Other traumas occur including death of Titus Paul’s siblings due to bad well water at their Idaho home.

Is she white, or is she Nez Perce?
It’s been more than a decade now since Robbie Paul began her healing journey. Her parents are now deceased. Part of her journey involved
figuring out who she is. Is she white like her mother? Or is she Nez Perce like her father?

“I struggled with that issue,” admits Paul. “When I say I’m Indian, I deny my mother. When I say that I’m white, I deny my father. So I am both native and white, but I’m a human being first.”

Lessons learned for Paul involve the

role of silence and of stories—both

listening and telling.
“We were silenced,” believes Paul. “But also in trauma you tend to silence yourselves. It’s a way to cope, but it doesn’t take away the anger or sadness.” While traumas her family experienced—losing their culture, their land, their people—go back five generations, two more generations have arrived—Robbie’s two children, plus grandchildren.

After her divorce, when dreading the thought of returning to school because of prior mediocre grades, Robbie, at her father’s urging, memorized the Nez Perce creation tale of Coyote and His Battle Against the Kamiah Monster. It ends with the monster slain and various body parts given to create different tribes. The Nez Perce get his heart, courage, and intelligence.

“So I learned I’m not a dumb Indian. I’m intelligent,” she laughs. While completing her doctorate, she heads up Washington State University’s Native American Recruitment and Retention Program for the Intercollegiate College of Nursing.

Her ancestors have come to her in dreams, urging her to heal, and to tell their story. So she does. “As human beings, we are responsible to find healing, forgiveness, and social justice. It can never be all one sided, the victims being first to forgive or the perpetrator first to ask for forgiveness. I alone cannot heal the wounds of all my ancestors, relatives, or friends. But together we can. Learning to forgive and be forgiven is a life long journey.”