Human Rights

1 Part History, 2 Parts Shrine

The following reports on the work of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a network of historic sites dedicated to documenting human rights and justice struggles and to provoking dialogue that bridges the past with contemporary issues. The coalition is a Ford Foundation grantee.

Published in The New York Times: March 17, 2009
By Julia M. Klein

A DESCENDANT of Cheyenne chiefs, Walter Richard West Sr. was educated at government-run Indian boarding schools that tried to extinguish Native American languages and culture with military-style discipline. Mr. West, born in 1912, nevertheless became one of the nation's leading Native American artists — and taught at his alma mater, a former vocational school in Lawrence, Kan., that is now Haskell Indian Nations University.

W. Richard West Jr., founding director emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, said his father, who died in 1996, "told me stories of having his own head banged against the blackboard by Anglican nuns" for speaking the Cheyenne language at a boarding school. Later at Haskell, "he trained to be a bricklayer and carpenter — at which he was very good. But he really wanted to be an artist."

"There's sweet irony and poetry in him coming back to Haskell" as an art professor and dean, Mr. West said of his father.

Today, Mr. West is working to preserve the emotionally charged history of Indian boarding schools through a pilot project supported by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, on whose board he sits. In cooperation with alumni — some of whom call themselves survivors — the coalition intends to use buildings at Haskell and other former boarding schools to tell stories about forced assimilation, the sense of community forged in classrooms and the challenges faced by American Indians today.

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