Bud Mathias, an enrolled member of the Flathead Indian reservation, has lived through a hard and traumatic childhood. When he was young, he and other children were taken away from their homes, their families, and sent to a boarding school in Omak, Washington. They were in second grade at the time they were taken, and for what seemed like forever to these children, they were beaten, their hair was cut, and they endured horrible crimes. Mathias conducted an escape and took along his entire class. They faced dangerous roads and avoided wild animals, search helicopters, and police all to end up back in the boarding school.
“When I was three, back in the day the government didn’t like tribal people speaking the language for some reason. So they raided every reservation and took all the kids away from their homes,” said Mathias. This was the consequence back then when you were heard speaking the language by authority. The whole reservation lost their children to these schools.
Mathias’s story is one of a kind and when you sit down and listen to the history that unfolds is so important and is powerful knowing a little bit of an elders life and all the battles and breakthroughs they had to go through.
Can you imagine living in an area in a time when your kind was hated and despised because of the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the clothes you wore, and the very hair on your head? If you were caught speaking the language, tremendous consequences were given, whether it was getting beaten, threatened, or having your children taken away to be put into these boarding schools.
“Some of us were still speaking our language, and they would make us sleep on fresh graves to try and make us knock it off,” said Mathias, remembering the consequences for speaking the language when they were just children. “And all night, ‘til the next day, we’d go to school until night came again and we were sent back.”
These schools were built to torture and strip natives of their culture, of everything they ever knew. Cutting their hair, and beating the children half to death sometimes; this was a place no person – let alone a child – should have ever been.
Some of the children still spoke the language in secret. They would sneak off to talk to each other, but they had to be careful because they knew the dangers. Mathias would overhear other boys speaking the language and understand them, and, deep down, he knew there was a connection of some kind.
After the escape attempt Mathias was beaten so badly on his legs to the point where he couldn’t even walk. He was lucky enough to have seen a cop and was able to get his attention. That was the end of their time at that school. And it just so happened to be that the boy he communicated with and understood in secret was his brother and they didn’t even know for sure until they were reunited with their parents.
Mathias went on to live his life> He went back to school, graduated and even went to college. He grew up learning how to fish and hunt and to provide for him and his family. He then ended up in the police academy, became a cop and worked for many years as a police officer. Through his struggles, he made the best of it and has never given up.
