Jim LaBelle, as President of the American Indian Boarding School Healing Coalition, has worked to educate the country about how the United States government used boarding schools and adoptions to assimilate Native American children and erase their cultural identities.
Insight into ICWA, Part 3: Jim LaBelle's family story.
Jim LaBelle can't help but wonder what his life would have been like, had the Indian Child Welfare Act had been in place, when he was a child in need of protection.
Jim LaBelle, Sr. has not only taught history at the University of Alaska Anchorage but lived it. He jokes that he’s had a Forrest Gump kind of existence – that for better or for worse, his own life reflects the events that have shaped modern Alaska Native history.
Just as Forrest Gump ran marathons, fought in Viet Nam and ran a shrimp company, while randomly crossing paths with Elvis, JFK, and John Lennon, LaBelle has lived a remarkable life. But his, is a true story, full of tragedy but also triumph.
Despite a difficult childhood, he’s spent his adult life in service to Alaska Native peoples, as a Native corporation executive, tribal leader, and educator. In his retirement, he serves as president of the National American Indian Boarding School Healing Coalition.
Photo courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
Jim LaBelle with his Mom and Dad. His mother was an Inupiaq from Kotzebue and his father was white. Both struggled with alcoholism but his father had a violent streak.
LaBelle was born in 1947 to alcoholic parents --an Inupiaq mother and a white father. After his father died, he and his younger brother, Kermit, were taken away from their mother and sent to a Native boarding school, where they survived physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Photo courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
Jim and Kermit LaBelle with their mom, who was forced to give them up to attend a boarding school for Alaska Native children in Wrangell. They would visit her during the summer in Fairbanks,until the year she failed to meet them at the airport. The boys lived on the streets for awhile, until Jim was sent to a children's home for the rest of the summer. Kermit disappeared with a family that lived in another village.
LaBelle’s older half-brother and half-sister, Willie and Saigulik Hensley, shared the same mother but had a different father. They wound up being raised by relatives in Kotzebue, when their father died and their mother neglected them. Hensley later became one of the leaders in the Alaska Native Land Claims Movement. LaBelle had one other younger brother, Austin, as well as two younger sisters – Marleah and Tanya, who were adopted out to white families.
Photo Courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
Jim LaBelle sits between two sisters, Marleah (left) and Tanya.(right). LaBelle did not learn of their whereabouts until he was an adult. Marleah was adopted by a Fairbanks couple. She ran away from home as a teenager. Tanya was adopted by an Air Force couple that moved to Arkansas. She discovered she was adopted while going through papers, after one of her parents died. Willie Hensley, Jim's older half-brother is pictured on the far left. Relatives in Kotzebue raised Willie and his older sister, because their mother was unable to take care of them.
All of this family upheaval was pre-ICWA, but for LaBelle, they tell the story of why ICWA was needed.
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Jim and Kermit LaBelle at the Mount Edgecumbe boarding school in Sitka.
Photo courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
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Jim LaBelle spent most of his formative years in Native Boarding Schools. By the time he was ready to graduate, he says his Native identity had been completely erased. He no longer spoke Inupiaq or knew anything about his mother's culture.
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After high school, Jim LaBelle joined the Navy.
Photo courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
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Jim LaBelle's brother, Kermit, joined the Marines and was awarded a Purple Heart after he was killed in action during the Viet Nam war.
Photo courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
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When Jim LaBelle proposed to his future wife, Susan, he was so institutionalized that he told her that they should probably ask the Bureau of Indian Affairs for permission to get married.
Photo courtesy of Jim and Susan LaBelle.
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Jim LaBelle with his brother Austin. LaBelle says he was adopted by a white family who renamed him Jerry and then later gave him up, after he contracted Spinal Meningitis, which caused mental disabilities. He was institutionalized at a hospital in Valdez. LaBelle says he discovered his brother's whereabouts by chance, when he worked as an executive for the Chugach Native Corporation and saw his brother's names in the shareholder rolls. Ten years ago, he became his brother's guardian.
Photo courtesy of Jim LaBelle.
LaBelle says it took years of therapy, as well as love and support from his wife, Susan, to heal from his childhood traumas.
In a conversation with KNBA’s Rhonda McBride, LaBelle talks about ICWA through the lens of his own experiences.
Rhonda McBride has a long history of working in both television and radio in Alaska, going back to 1988, when she was news director at KYUK, the public radio and TV stations in Bethel, which broadcast in both the English and Yup’ik languages.
