When he needs to escape the bustle of modern life, Kelly England goes to the wetlands south of Haskell Indian Nations University.

In a canoe, he explores the twists and turns of the swamp. He prays at the medicine wheel south of campus, a crop art image of an eagle facing the east, the direction of the rising sun. He hangs wrapped tobacco offerings in trees to purify the area, and uses the sweat lodge to pray for those he cares about. For him, the wetlands are sacred.

“It’s just another form of a church,” England said. “If people would understand how much a church means to them, they would kind of understand how a place like this could mean a lot to somebody.”

But the wetlands are threatened by state plans to build the South Lawrence Trafficway, a proposed six-lane highway with a 12-foot high sound barrier that would cross through the wetlands just south of Haskell’s land. The intended highway, which would connect I-70 west of Lawrence to K-10, has been contested for more than 20 years.

Student and local groups, including the Wetlands Preservation Organization, Save the Wakarusa Wetlands and the First Nations Student Advisory Board, have filed a series of court documents to prevent the highway from being built. So far, the court filings have halted construction by challenging proponents at every turn.

American Indian students and professors point to the painful history of cultural assimilation at Haskell as motivation to fight the trafficway. They view the struggle for the wetlands as a fight for their cultural identity, which has throughout history been effaced by western oppression.

The Highway

The South Lawrence Trafficway, which would cut through the wetlands, was listed as the Kansas Department of Transportation’s fifth-highest priority future highway project in the state. The highway would extend seven miles, running parallel to 31st Street, and is expected to cost approximately $150 million.

Although proponents have fought to build the highway for more than 20 years, K-DOT does not have the funding to complete the project. The state’s 10-year highway funding program ran out in July 2009, and a new State transportation funding program is expected in July 2010. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ environmental impact statement, written to determine the effect the road would have on the surrounding area, summed up the attitude of highway proponents.

“There is widely expressed frustration with the community’s inability to move forward with the construction of the bypass,” the statement said. “A ‘let’s just get it done’ opinion was frequently expressed.”

According to an e-mail sent by Mayor Chestnut, the city and county governments both support the trafficway, but they still have not succeeded in finishing the project. Roger Boyd, retired professor of biology at Baker University and proponent of the highway project, said he thought it would soon be built. Boyd leads a mitigation project meant to restore acres of wetlands to the area, which he hopes will make up for the environmental damage caused by the proposed highway.

Boyd devoted his life to the wetlands after his father died in an accident on the land in 1982. He said he considered the wetlands as sacred as the American Indians did. The wetlands have become simply a platform for activists to fight, he said, and for American Indians to strengthen their cultural identity.

“If you argue against that, what does that make you?” he said. “Well, I’ve been told it makes me insensitive, it makes me clueless, it makes me racist, it makes me a bigot — and there’s a long list of names that I’ve been called.”

Corky Armstrong, head architect for the project, said people should not allow strong emotions and personal opinions to slant their viewpoints or to obscure the facts.

“My point is to do the research, find out what is going on for sure, before you start making judgment calls,” he said. “God bless ’em. The wetlands preservation people made a stand, and that’s fine. That’s based on their principles, what they think is right.”

The Boarding School

For American Indians, the fight to save the wetlands is rooted in the memory of troubling events that transpired there.

Chuck Haines, professor of biology at Haskell Indian Nations University, said the school had a history of American Indian children who were overworked, abused and forced to live in unsanitary conditions. During this time, students tried to escape the boarding school by fleeing into the wetlands. There, students were free to meet with members of their tribe, speak their language, and pray the way they were accustomed to praying.

Many children died of malnutrition, malaria, typhoid, and pneumonia because of the poor living conditions at the school. Haines said it was difficult to get elders, who had been through boarding schools, to talk about their experiences.

“Just think if you lost your kids, if your kids were pulled from you, for no reason other than you being an Indian,” he said. “And if you said ‘no’ you were declared incompetent.”

Called the United States Indian Industrial Training School, the institution was one of a network of off-reservation boarding schools operated by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. These schools forcibly took children as young as 3 years old from their tribal families and attempted to assimilate them into the white mainstream culture. Haskell operated as one of 1,400 boarding schools throughout the country, with a reputation as one of the strictest.

Patrick Freeland, a Haskell senior from the Muskogee nation, said tribes would leave medicine bundles for the students of the boarding school in the wetlands bordering the campus. Medicine bundles contained medicinal herbs specific to each tribe, allowing students to reconnect with the culture they had lost. In part, this is why Haskell students consider the wetlands sacred.

“Imagine if all of a sudden you were taken to Siberia. It was someone else saying ‘I know more about you than you,’” he said. “Haskell’s connection to the wetlands is a synaptic bridge.”

The boarding school was organized like a military camp, and students who tried to run away were called deserters. Successful deserters were hunted by bounty hunters and, when returned to campus, were beaten or sent to a tiny prison building.

“You’re talking about a history that’s horrendous,” Haines said. “If people sat down and looked at it, they would say, ‘This happened in America?’ It was suppression, repression, cultural genocide. It was like anything else — if someone was in your way, you’d get rid of them.”

Kelly England’s grandfather, Archie Hawkins, experienced the strictness of the boarding school first-hand. England said his grandfather was forced to wear shoes that were too small, which bent his feet out of shape and made it uncomfortable for him to walk for the rest of his life.

“He was 70 or so when he finally got his feet corrected,” England said. “They had to re-break his bones. He didn’t seem better, and you could tell in his voice that he didn’t like that.”

Students at Haskell were organized into platoons, forced to cut their hair and sent to various work details in the kitchens, laundry or sewing rooms. They were given English names and banned from speaking in their tribal tongues. If they refused, they were beaten or jailed.

Haines said the proposed highway was the most recent incarnation of this long history of abuse of tribal people. The depth of American Indians’ pain, he said, is what brings the activist groups to court year after year, in attempts to block the proposed highway.

Losing battle

England said he thought the highway would eventually be built. But he said the continuing struggle against it continued to be a matter of American Indian pride and history.

“They’ll succeed, but it might take a while,” he said. “It’s not about a money thing. As students and alumni and everyone that uses this facility, they know that it’s not about money. It’s about our dignity.”

He said the painful past at Haskell deepened American Indians’ concerns for the fate of the wetlands. When he walks through the wildlife south of the school, he sometimes stops at the small cemetery where the children from Haskell’s years as a boarding school are buried. For England, this remains sacred ground.

— Edited by Megan Heacock