The school shooting at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota on March 21 was the largest mass killing of high school students since the Columbine High School tragedy in 1999. The total of 10 dead and 21 wounded is the largest mass homicide in Minnesota history. Moreover, the Red Lake shooting is the first recorded incidence of a Native American school youth committing mass slaughter against other Native American youth.
Lisa Prue Spellman, writer and editorial assistant in UNMC’s Public Affairs Department, is a Lakota Sioux from the Rosebud Tribe of South Dakota and a member of the UNMC/The Nebraska Medical Center Employee Diversity Network (EDN).
She was invited by EDN to offer her reflections on the Red Lake incident and its now historic place in the on-going struggle against alienation and cultural breakdown among America’s Native Americans.
On Monday, April 18, Spellman will present “Shadow of Red Lake: Alienation in the Indian Nation” from noon to 1 p.m. in Wittson Hall Room 3010. The program is open to the all campus students, faculty and staff.
Spellman is the daughter of Barbara Bright and Ronald “Sonny” Prue. Her father is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and a product of the boarding school system – an experience that had a major impact on his life. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs Boarding School System has been formally acknowledged by federal authorities as a crime against the American Indian people.
On Sept. 8, 2000, at the ceremony acknowledging the 175th anniversary of the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover, assistant secretary-Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, made the following comments:
“This agency forbade the speaking of Indian languages, prohibited the conduct of traditional religious activities, outlawed traditional government, and made Indian people ashamed of who they were. Worst of all, the Bureau of Indian Affairs committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools, brutalizing them emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. The legacy of these misdeeds haunts us. The trauma of shame, fear and anger has passed from one generation to the next. Many of our people live lives of unrelenting tragedy as Indian families suffer the ruin of lives by alcoholism, suicides made of shame and despair, and violent death at the hands of one another.”
Growing up poor in south Omaha, Spellman saw the effects of the confusion, self-loathing and hatred that scarred her father’s upbringing. Sonny’s struggle with his identity and finding acceptance between the Indian and non-Indian worlds he lived in have led to a lifetime of alcoholism. Today he lives with the physical and emotional results of his addiction.
“At age 66, my father is a shell of the man he once was,” Spellman said. “The emotional toll on his life affected my siblings and me in many ways. I watched my father transform from a generous, kind-hearted individual into a man possessed by the demons of alcoholism.”
She watched her parents’ marriage dissolve because of the alcoholism, her mother’s emotional breakdown and attempted suicide, and the growing discord between her brother and their father that culminated in a violent confrontation in which her father – in a drunken rage – shot his oldest son.
“I often feel like I’ve lived two different lives,” Spellman said. “One is when I was younger and my parents were married, then divorced and all the fall-out from that. And then there is a rebirth as I approached adulthood and began to explore my father’s past, our heritage and finally find my own place in the world.”
Today Spellman is happily married with three children. She lives near her father and siblings, prays for his soul and assists with his health needs. In addition to her position as writer and editorial assistant in UNMC’s Public Affairs, she is editor of the RHEN Focus, a newsletter for the Rural Health Education Network, and is the media representative for UNMC’s College of Dentistry.
After graduating in 1994 from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a bachelor of science degree in communications, Spellman worked for the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil, where she covered education, crime and the courts. She then spent 13 years at the Omaha World-Herald, where she wrote feature stories covering entertainment news to family life. In 2000, Spellman received the Thomas C. Sorensen award for her role in the newspapers’s five-part series, “Broken Promises,” an investigative series focusing on American Indians and education.
Spellman joined UNMC in 2003.