![]() ![]() HERSHER: By fourth grade, it felt like everything was falling apart. You know - (reading) he would not settle down, kept walking around and interrupting me. SCHIMMEL: You know, you can just look at this. HERSHER: Sam's father, Jeremy, still has a box of printed out emails and progress reports from the time. And it's, like, I can probably just open up any. SCHIMMEL: It was like - this is, like, the danger box. He was getting in trouble for lots of little things, like not following directions. In kindergarten, Sam started at the same school. She got a job at one of the best public schools in the city. HERSHER: Around that time, Rene's life was going really well, too. SCHIMMEL: That took about a couple weeks - all day long, every day. Until you can shoot a ground squirrel through the eye, you can't hunt with us. SCHIMMEL: I remember my uncles saying, here, take this. Sam, who's 18 now, remembers how he loved hearing stories from his grandmother and his great-grandmother and hunting with his uncles. People who study intergenerational trauma have found that grounding young people in their culture is the best way to protect them. HERSHER: Rene and Jeremy vowed to give their son verbal love and protect him from that pain and to give him what had been stolen from Rene's mother, a clear cultural identity. So for me, it was - I don't have that in my - I knew I just didn't want Sam to have that. But it was - it was shown, like, with taking care of you - right? - giving you good food and making sure you had clothes and that they are clean. So I don't think she really ever had love. Right? And I think it came from being in boarding schools. She didn't know how to give praise, didn't know how to say good job or your effort's going, you know, like a teacher would. In many ways, it was a difficult childhood. Rene's mother could be harsh to her daughter. The family survives, but the effects of the trauma are passed down to the next generation. A family goes through something cataclysmic - in this case, a war on their culture. ![]() HERSHER: This is the root of what sociologists call intergenerational trauma. But then when she was home, she was miserable, like, when she'd go back to the village. HERSHER: But she was also taught to hate a lot of who she was - the language she grew up speaking, the way her family in Gambell dressed and what they ate - walrus, seal, whale and fish. She was very curious and learned things quickly. HERSHER: Muddled because, on one hand, her mother did really well academically. HERSHER: What was your mother's conception of her own identity? You know, if you got up late or you didn't clean how you were supposed to clean, you were beaten. So there was a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of physical abuse. SCHIMMEL: They told her how to dress, how to speak, how to hold herself. When Rene's mother was a little girl, she was one of tens of thousands of native kids taken by the federal government and sent to boarding school hundreds of miles away. But from the moment Sam was born, Rene worried that other things in her family's history might hurt her child. Siberian Yupik ways of subsistence hunting and old songs and stories have been passed down in her family for a long time. Rene was born in the native Alaskan village of Gambell on an island in the Bering Sea. HERSHER: They spent a lot of time with Rene's family. You know, yeah, he was a pain in the because he exhausted you. He was catching fish when he was 2 off the dock. JEREMY SCHIMMEL: Well, he grew up outside. Sam's dad, Jeremy, is a wilderness guide. He started walking when he was 9 months old. RENE SCHIMMEL: Busy, busy, busy - he was super active. In home videos, he's always screaming and laughing. REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: When Rene Schimmel was 24 years old, she had a son, an energetic, curious little boy named Sam. And we're tagging an NPR science reporter Rebecca Hersher to tell their story. How do we make sure we stop this cycle, stop the madness before it affects another generation? And today's episode is the story of one family trying to do just that, trying to fix the toxic aftermath of forced assimilation on their community, a tiny Alaskan village in the Bering Strait. And some of that baggage could be due to real trauma, trauma that's been passed down to us from our parents or our grandparents or our great-great-grandparents, you know. How do I make sure I don't pass my baggage and my bs on to my kids? Shereen, neither of us are parents just yet.ĭEMBY: But I feel like we've been talking a lot about parenthood lately on the podcast.ĭEMBY: This episode this week gets at one of those deep, like, parental anxieties that a lot of people who are parents wrestle with all the time. ![]() I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji.Īnd I'm Gene Demby. ![]()
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