G. Wayne Miller's Blog, page 19
March 29, 2017
"Are you feeling lucky today?"
I had a tooth extracted today. Doesn’t matter why; suffice it to say that Miller teeth have been less than Hollywood-perfect since cave days. It was way back there in my mouth and I didn’t need it, anyway.
My dentist is a fine practitioner, but when his first question to me was “Are you feeling lucky today?” my heart sank.
I thought: Sure, playing Marathon Man ALWAYS makes me feel lucky, but of course I just said, “Yes I am. Why?”
Well, he said, HE needed luck to complete a swift procedure, given the particulars, which I totally did not understand and did not want to.
So that was the good luck. What was the bad, I asked?
He launched into something about how bad luck would force him into digging around down there if the damn thing cracked, or one root came out but the other didn’t, or if I was some genetic freak and the roots of this particular tooth went through my jaw into my spinal cord and up into my brain.
OK, I imagined that.
Still, “digging around down there” -- these are NOT words you ever want to hear in association with your mouth. So my mind went spinning off to some other universe where people do not need teeth to enjoy a good meal.
When it returned, my dentist asked me to inch back on the chair farther than seemed possible without falling off. That was so my head could be adjusted downward at such an angle that I could almost see the floor.
Access, I thought, correctly. My dentist did the usual turn this way and that thing repeatedly, until he found what I assumed was a suitable approach.
Then he said, and I quote: “Hmm, no leverage.”
Leverage is another word you never want to hear associated with your mouth, especially when the man saying it is holding a Cow Horn dental extractor in his hand. I believe leverage was the last word Dustin Hoffman heard before Laurence Olivier got down to it.
And, yes, Cow Horn is the technical name for the specific pliers used for this procedure. I know, because I managed to ask. I’m insatiably curious that way. I wish I weren’t.
Of course, I also had to ask how it got that name – you can see I was stalling big-time here – and my dentist said, well, it looks like a cow’s horn. And it did, a tiny one, but then my mind, which had returned from that universe where they do not have such things, thought of cows, which brought me to bulls, which have man-killing horns, as Spanish matadors can attest.
Feeling chatty now, I remarked that the Cow Horn must have an ancient lineage, given that for centuries, all dentists really could do was pull – ahem, extract – teeth. My dentist was not interested in history at that moment. He had the Cow Horn in his hand, and no leverage.
Stalling only works so long, by the way, in a dentist chair. My guy locked onto my tooth with his Cow Horn and began to wiggle back and forth, slowly at first. That’s when I began to wish he HAD found leverage.
The Cow HornHe asked if I could feel it. Dumb question, I thought.
Which is when I wished I had opted for sedation, not Novocain. My thinking had been that I wouldn’t feel groggy the rest of the day without sedation and I could get some actual work done, not write a silly essay. Stupid thinking, Wayne.
“Are YOU feeling lucky today?” my dentist then asked his assistant.
I am not making this up.
The assistant didn’t answer. I interpreted this to mean she was NOT feeling lucky, and my mind completed another round trip to that universe, which I think I will name the Happy Place. Maybe they only eat plain yogurt and cream cheese there, but I’m OK with that.
Back and forth with the Cow Horn, the dentist went. I was booking another trip to The Happy Place when he said, AGAIN, “luck.” Actually, he exclaimed: "Luck!"
And he’d had it. Really. The tooth was out. Total time elapsed? Maybe five minutes.
As I said, I have a fine dentist. He’s of Irish descent, and surely has a four-leaf clover.
Also, an Irish sense of humor.
My dentist is a fine practitioner, but when his first question to me was “Are you feeling lucky today?” my heart sank.
I thought: Sure, playing Marathon Man ALWAYS makes me feel lucky, but of course I just said, “Yes I am. Why?”
Well, he said, HE needed luck to complete a swift procedure, given the particulars, which I totally did not understand and did not want to.
So that was the good luck. What was the bad, I asked?
He launched into something about how bad luck would force him into digging around down there if the damn thing cracked, or one root came out but the other didn’t, or if I was some genetic freak and the roots of this particular tooth went through my jaw into my spinal cord and up into my brain.
OK, I imagined that.
Still, “digging around down there” -- these are NOT words you ever want to hear in association with your mouth. So my mind went spinning off to some other universe where people do not need teeth to enjoy a good meal.
When it returned, my dentist asked me to inch back on the chair farther than seemed possible without falling off. That was so my head could be adjusted downward at such an angle that I could almost see the floor.
Access, I thought, correctly. My dentist did the usual turn this way and that thing repeatedly, until he found what I assumed was a suitable approach.
Then he said, and I quote: “Hmm, no leverage.”
Leverage is another word you never want to hear associated with your mouth, especially when the man saying it is holding a Cow Horn dental extractor in his hand. I believe leverage was the last word Dustin Hoffman heard before Laurence Olivier got down to it.
And, yes, Cow Horn is the technical name for the specific pliers used for this procedure. I know, because I managed to ask. I’m insatiably curious that way. I wish I weren’t.
Of course, I also had to ask how it got that name – you can see I was stalling big-time here – and my dentist said, well, it looks like a cow’s horn. And it did, a tiny one, but then my mind, which had returned from that universe where they do not have such things, thought of cows, which brought me to bulls, which have man-killing horns, as Spanish matadors can attest.
Feeling chatty now, I remarked that the Cow Horn must have an ancient lineage, given that for centuries, all dentists really could do was pull – ahem, extract – teeth. My dentist was not interested in history at that moment. He had the Cow Horn in his hand, and no leverage.
Stalling only works so long, by the way, in a dentist chair. My guy locked onto my tooth with his Cow Horn and began to wiggle back and forth, slowly at first. That’s when I began to wish he HAD found leverage.
The Cow HornHe asked if I could feel it. Dumb question, I thought.Which is when I wished I had opted for sedation, not Novocain. My thinking had been that I wouldn’t feel groggy the rest of the day without sedation and I could get some actual work done, not write a silly essay. Stupid thinking, Wayne.
“Are YOU feeling lucky today?” my dentist then asked his assistant.
I am not making this up.
The assistant didn’t answer. I interpreted this to mean she was NOT feeling lucky, and my mind completed another round trip to that universe, which I think I will name the Happy Place. Maybe they only eat plain yogurt and cream cheese there, but I’m OK with that.
Back and forth with the Cow Horn, the dentist went. I was booking another trip to The Happy Place when he said, AGAIN, “luck.” Actually, he exclaimed: "Luck!"
And he’d had it. Really. The tooth was out. Total time elapsed? Maybe five minutes.
As I said, I have a fine dentist. He’s of Irish descent, and surely has a four-leaf clover.
Also, an Irish sense of humor.
December 13, 2016
My Dad and Airplanes
Author's Note: I wrote this four years ago, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of my father's death. Like his memory, it has withstood the test of time. I have slightly updated it for today, December 13, 2016, the 14th anniversary of his funeral. Read the original here.
Roger L. Miller as a boy, early 1920s.
My Dad and Airplanesby G. Wayne Miller
I live near an airport. Depending on wind direction and other variables, planes sometimes pass directly over my house as they climb into the sky. If I’m outside, I always look up, marveling at the wonder of flight. I’ve witnessed many amazing developments -- the end of the Cold War, the advent of the digital world, for example -- but except perhaps for space travel, which of course is rooted at Kitty Hawk, none can compare.
I also always think of my father, Roger L. Miller, who died 14 years ago Sunday.
Dad was a boy on May 20, 1927, when Charles Lindbergh took off in a single-engine plane from a field near New York City. Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later, he landed in Paris. That boy from a small Massachusetts town who became my father was astounded, like people all over the world. Lindbergh’s pioneering Atlantic crossing inspired him to get into aviation, and he wanted to do big things, maybe captain a plane or even head an airline. But the Great Depression, which forced him from college, diminished that dream. He drove a school bus to pay for trade school, where he became an airplane mechanic, which was his job as a wartime Navy enlisted man and during his entire civilian career. On this modest salary, he and my mother raised a family, sacrificing material things they surely desired.
My father was a smart and gentle man, not prone to harsh judgment, fond of a joke, a lover of newspapers and gardening and birds, chickadees especially. He was robust until a stroke in his 80s sent him to a nursing home, but I never heard him complain during those final, decrepit years. The last time I saw him conscious, he was reading his beloved Boston Globe, his old reading glasses uneven on his nose, from a hospital bed. The morning sun was shining through the window and for a moment, I held the unrealistic hope that he would make it through this latest distress. He died four days later, quietly, I am told. I was not there.
Like others who have lost loved ones, there are conversations I never had with my Dad that I probably should have. But near the end, we did say we loved each other, which was rare (he was, after all, a Yankee). I smoothed his brow and kissed him goodbye.
So on this 14th anniversary, I have no deep regrets. But I do have two impossible wishes.
My first is that Dad could have heard my eulogy, which I began writing that morning by his hospital bed. It spoke of quiet wisdom he imparted to his children, and of the respect and affection family and others held for him. In his modest way, he would have liked to hear it, I bet, for such praise was scarce when he was alive. But that is not how the story goes. We die and leave only memories, a strictly one-way experience.
My second wish would be to tell Dad how his only son has fared in the last 14 years. I know he would have empathy for some bad times I went through and be proud that I made it. He would be happy that I found a woman I love, Yolanda, my wife now: someone, like him, who loves gardening and birds. He would be pleased that my three wonderful children, Rachel, Katy and Cal, are making their way in the world; and that he now has three great-granddaughters, wonderful girls all. In his humble way, he would be honored to know how frequently I, my sister and my children remember and miss him. He would be saddened to learn that my other sister, his younger daughter, Lynda, died last year. But that is not how the story goes, either. We send thoughts to the dead, but the experience is one-way. We treasure photographs, but they do not speak.
Lately, I have been poring through boxes of black-and-white prints handed down from Dad’s side of my family. I am lucky to have them, more so that they were taken in the pre-digital age -- for I can touch them, as the people captured in them surely themselves did so long ago. I can imagine what they might say, if in fact they could speak.
Some of the scenes are unfamiliar to me: sailboats on a bay, a stream in winter, a couple posing on a hill, the woman dressed in fur-trimmed coat. But I recognize the house, which my grandfather, for whom I am named, built with his farmer’s hands; the coal stove that still heated the kitchen when I visited as a child; the birdhouses and flower gardens, which my sweet grandmother lovingly tended. I recognize my father, my uncle and my aunts, just children then in the 1920s. I peer at Dad in these portraits (he seems always to be smiling!), and the resemblance to photos of me at that age is startling, though I suppose it should not be.
A plane will fly over my house today, I am certain. When it does, I will go outside and think of young Dad, amazed that someone had taken the controls of an airplane in America and stepped out in France. A boy with a smile, his life all ahead of him.
Roger L. Miller as a boy, early 1920s.
My Dad and Airplanesby G. Wayne Miller
I live near an airport. Depending on wind direction and other variables, planes sometimes pass directly over my house as they climb into the sky. If I’m outside, I always look up, marveling at the wonder of flight. I’ve witnessed many amazing developments -- the end of the Cold War, the advent of the digital world, for example -- but except perhaps for space travel, which of course is rooted at Kitty Hawk, none can compare.
I also always think of my father, Roger L. Miller, who died 14 years ago Sunday.
Dad was a boy on May 20, 1927, when Charles Lindbergh took off in a single-engine plane from a field near New York City. Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later, he landed in Paris. That boy from a small Massachusetts town who became my father was astounded, like people all over the world. Lindbergh’s pioneering Atlantic crossing inspired him to get into aviation, and he wanted to do big things, maybe captain a plane or even head an airline. But the Great Depression, which forced him from college, diminished that dream. He drove a school bus to pay for trade school, where he became an airplane mechanic, which was his job as a wartime Navy enlisted man and during his entire civilian career. On this modest salary, he and my mother raised a family, sacrificing material things they surely desired.
My father was a smart and gentle man, not prone to harsh judgment, fond of a joke, a lover of newspapers and gardening and birds, chickadees especially. He was robust until a stroke in his 80s sent him to a nursing home, but I never heard him complain during those final, decrepit years. The last time I saw him conscious, he was reading his beloved Boston Globe, his old reading glasses uneven on his nose, from a hospital bed. The morning sun was shining through the window and for a moment, I held the unrealistic hope that he would make it through this latest distress. He died four days later, quietly, I am told. I was not there.
Like others who have lost loved ones, there are conversations I never had with my Dad that I probably should have. But near the end, we did say we loved each other, which was rare (he was, after all, a Yankee). I smoothed his brow and kissed him goodbye.
So on this 14th anniversary, I have no deep regrets. But I do have two impossible wishes.
My first is that Dad could have heard my eulogy, which I began writing that morning by his hospital bed. It spoke of quiet wisdom he imparted to his children, and of the respect and affection family and others held for him. In his modest way, he would have liked to hear it, I bet, for such praise was scarce when he was alive. But that is not how the story goes. We die and leave only memories, a strictly one-way experience.
My second wish would be to tell Dad how his only son has fared in the last 14 years. I know he would have empathy for some bad times I went through and be proud that I made it. He would be happy that I found a woman I love, Yolanda, my wife now: someone, like him, who loves gardening and birds. He would be pleased that my three wonderful children, Rachel, Katy and Cal, are making their way in the world; and that he now has three great-granddaughters, wonderful girls all. In his humble way, he would be honored to know how frequently I, my sister and my children remember and miss him. He would be saddened to learn that my other sister, his younger daughter, Lynda, died last year. But that is not how the story goes, either. We send thoughts to the dead, but the experience is one-way. We treasure photographs, but they do not speak.
Lately, I have been poring through boxes of black-and-white prints handed down from Dad’s side of my family. I am lucky to have them, more so that they were taken in the pre-digital age -- for I can touch them, as the people captured in them surely themselves did so long ago. I can imagine what they might say, if in fact they could speak.
Some of the scenes are unfamiliar to me: sailboats on a bay, a stream in winter, a couple posing on a hill, the woman dressed in fur-trimmed coat. But I recognize the house, which my grandfather, for whom I am named, built with his farmer’s hands; the coal stove that still heated the kitchen when I visited as a child; the birdhouses and flower gardens, which my sweet grandmother lovingly tended. I recognize my father, my uncle and my aunts, just children then in the 1920s. I peer at Dad in these portraits (he seems always to be smiling!), and the resemblance to photos of me at that age is startling, though I suppose it should not be.
A plane will fly over my house today, I am certain. When it does, I will go outside and think of young Dad, amazed that someone had taken the controls of an airplane in America and stepped out in France. A boy with a smile, his life all ahead of him.
November 10, 2016
Humbled and honored, twice
On Wednesday evening, November 9, Yolanda and I attended the annual fundraiser for Butler Hospital, the world-renown treatment, research and teaching hospital (The Warrant Alpert Medical School at Brown University) in Providence, Rhode Island. I was there to receive a community-service award for my decades of writing and filmmaking about mental health and neurological disorders. For Yolanda, a mental-health therapist who once studied and worked at Butler, it was a chance to see many old friends. For me, a high and humbling honor. This was not a contest one enters, but an award that came my way out of the blue.
My remarks below.
I, too, saw some friends – some I knew were would be there, some not. In the latter category were Cindy and John Duncan, farmers from Richmond, Rhode Island, who lost their teenaged daughter Cassie to suicide on Christmas Day 2005. Cindy found her.
“Her door was locked,” Cindy would recall. “I banged on the door. I didn’t hear anything. Then I smashed open the door. She was gone.”
From that terrible tragedy, the Duncans brought great good: a growing public crusade that includes the Rainbow Race, the yearly fundraiser they organize and host that benefits the Rhode Island chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
“We have to take the dark cloud of stigma and fear away from mental illness and replace it with the rainbow of hope!” the Duncans declared in announcing the 2016 race.
Wanting to help such a good cause, I spent part of a day in May with the family and wrote a story and shot a video for The Providence Journal, which you can read here.
And I left a favorite jacket at the Duncans’ house. When I later got back to them, they said they would keep it at their farm stand for the next time I happened to be in the area. It was closed the one time I went by.
So there they were, surprise (to me) guests at Wednesday’s Butler fundraiser. It was wonderful to see them, introduce Yolanda to them, and just be in their company. At one point, Cindy said that having learned I would be there, she had brought my jacket. I could hardly believe it. How thoughtful! Cindy pointed to a shopping bag under the table. I looked, but did not open.
The Duncans had left by the time I did look. More than a jacket was inside:
Inside was a beautiful print of a flower. Cassie had made it. Among many other wonderful things in her short life, she was an artist.
“Hi, Wayne,” read Cindy’s note attached to her daughter’s art. “This print is one of Cassie’s and I would like you to have it. Thank you for all your help, ♥ Cindy and John.”
I nearly cried. Actually, I did cry.
I will frame Cassie’s flower, place it in my study, and treasure it always, a reminder of how precious life is -- and how, especially at a time when so many bad things happen, there are inspiring and loving people who selflessly work, one day at a time, in their neighborhood, town or state, to make the world a better place.
Thank you, Cindy and John, and thank you, Cassie.
Community service award, Cassie Duncan's flower.
My remarks after receiving the Lila M. Sapinsley Community Service Award:
Thank you, Dr. Price, and my thanks to the Butler Hospital Foundation. I am humbled and honored to receive this award. I knew Lila Sapinsley and always admired her many causes that benefitted so many people. Her heart was big. I’d like to think she would approve of my name now being associated with hers.
Let me also thank The Providence Journal, which has supported my work for so long and given me the time and resources needed to bring it to fruition. Our publisher, Janet Hasson, is here tonight – thank you, Janet, for your commitment.
Let me also thank someone who is not here: former editor Joel Rawson, who more than 30 years ago assigned me to cover the state-prison and child-welfare systems, and what was then known as the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals. That assignment began my long career in social-justice journalism, which remains my passion.
Thanks to my wife Yolanda, a mental-health therapist who imparts her greater wisdoms to me about the field that connects us.
Thanks, too, to the many other clinicians, educators, scientists and others involved in the treatment and research of mental illness and neurological disorders who have shared so generously of their time and expertise over the decades. Some are here tonight. To all of you, my heartfelt appreciation.
When I began writing about mental health in the 1980s, stigma was one of society’s worst cruelties – a legacy of the days when the mentally ill were shackled in cellars or burned at the stake, a savagery that Butler Hospital replaced with humane care when it was founded in 1844. Stigma remains an obstacle to understanding, acceptance and care – there is still work to be done -- but today, more people view mental illnesses as they do the so-called physical ones, where recovery and fulfilled lives are possible. Which is as it should be.
So I especially want to thank the countless individuals living with mental illness, along with their family members and friends, who have allowed me to tell their stories. Without them, my writing and films would be little more than facts and statistics, important though those are. What power stories have.
These many good people, who courageously let me use their real names and images and publish the most intimate details of their lives, have done more to strike a blow against stigma than anything else I can imagine. I salute and admire them. One by one, they are helping to better the world.
My remarks below.
I, too, saw some friends – some I knew were would be there, some not. In the latter category were Cindy and John Duncan, farmers from Richmond, Rhode Island, who lost their teenaged daughter Cassie to suicide on Christmas Day 2005. Cindy found her.
“Her door was locked,” Cindy would recall. “I banged on the door. I didn’t hear anything. Then I smashed open the door. She was gone.”
From that terrible tragedy, the Duncans brought great good: a growing public crusade that includes the Rainbow Race, the yearly fundraiser they organize and host that benefits the Rhode Island chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
“We have to take the dark cloud of stigma and fear away from mental illness and replace it with the rainbow of hope!” the Duncans declared in announcing the 2016 race.
Wanting to help such a good cause, I spent part of a day in May with the family and wrote a story and shot a video for The Providence Journal, which you can read here.
And I left a favorite jacket at the Duncans’ house. When I later got back to them, they said they would keep it at their farm stand for the next time I happened to be in the area. It was closed the one time I went by.
So there they were, surprise (to me) guests at Wednesday’s Butler fundraiser. It was wonderful to see them, introduce Yolanda to them, and just be in their company. At one point, Cindy said that having learned I would be there, she had brought my jacket. I could hardly believe it. How thoughtful! Cindy pointed to a shopping bag under the table. I looked, but did not open.
The Duncans had left by the time I did look. More than a jacket was inside:
Inside was a beautiful print of a flower. Cassie had made it. Among many other wonderful things in her short life, she was an artist.
“Hi, Wayne,” read Cindy’s note attached to her daughter’s art. “This print is one of Cassie’s and I would like you to have it. Thank you for all your help, ♥ Cindy and John.”
I nearly cried. Actually, I did cry.
I will frame Cassie’s flower, place it in my study, and treasure it always, a reminder of how precious life is -- and how, especially at a time when so many bad things happen, there are inspiring and loving people who selflessly work, one day at a time, in their neighborhood, town or state, to make the world a better place.
Thank you, Cindy and John, and thank you, Cassie.
Community service award, Cassie Duncan's flower.My remarks after receiving the Lila M. Sapinsley Community Service Award:
Thank you, Dr. Price, and my thanks to the Butler Hospital Foundation. I am humbled and honored to receive this award. I knew Lila Sapinsley and always admired her many causes that benefitted so many people. Her heart was big. I’d like to think she would approve of my name now being associated with hers.
Let me also thank The Providence Journal, which has supported my work for so long and given me the time and resources needed to bring it to fruition. Our publisher, Janet Hasson, is here tonight – thank you, Janet, for your commitment.
Let me also thank someone who is not here: former editor Joel Rawson, who more than 30 years ago assigned me to cover the state-prison and child-welfare systems, and what was then known as the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals. That assignment began my long career in social-justice journalism, which remains my passion.
Thanks to my wife Yolanda, a mental-health therapist who imparts her greater wisdoms to me about the field that connects us.
Thanks, too, to the many other clinicians, educators, scientists and others involved in the treatment and research of mental illness and neurological disorders who have shared so generously of their time and expertise over the decades. Some are here tonight. To all of you, my heartfelt appreciation.
When I began writing about mental health in the 1980s, stigma was one of society’s worst cruelties – a legacy of the days when the mentally ill were shackled in cellars or burned at the stake, a savagery that Butler Hospital replaced with humane care when it was founded in 1844. Stigma remains an obstacle to understanding, acceptance and care – there is still work to be done -- but today, more people view mental illnesses as they do the so-called physical ones, where recovery and fulfilled lives are possible. Which is as it should be.
So I especially want to thank the countless individuals living with mental illness, along with their family members and friends, who have allowed me to tell their stories. Without them, my writing and films would be little more than facts and statistics, important though those are. What power stories have.
These many good people, who courageously let me use their real names and images and publish the most intimate details of their lives, have done more to strike a blow against stigma than anything else I can imagine. I salute and admire them. One by one, they are helping to better the world.
October 17, 2016
Historical injustices against Native Americans continue into today
As part of The Providence Journal's
The massacre, on Dec. 19, 1675, is far and away the bloodiest event in Rhode Island history. It still reverberates today, nearly three and a half centuries later.
Publication Date: October 26, 2015 Page: 1 Section: A
Providence Journal illustration by Tom Murphy.
A gentle rain falls on Paulla Dove Jennings as she stands by a monument deep in the South Kingstown woods. She has come here on this autumn morning to tell the story of the Great Swamp Massacre, in which white colonialists slaughtered and burned alive hundreds of her Narragansett and Niantic ancestors. Many were elders, women and children.
The massacre, on Dec. 19, 1675, was far and away the bloodiest event in Rhode Island history. Its repercussions are still felt today, nearly three and a half centuries later.
The backdrop was King Philip’s War, during which English settlers and some of New England’s Native American tribes fought, with devastating consequences for all. At the start, Jennings’ ancestors declared their neutrality, but they feared a white offensive. As winter approached that first year, many hundreds of them sought sanctuary on a remote island, farther into the wilderness from today’s monument.
They were living in long houses — large timber lodges that provided shelter for dozens of extended families.
“There was warmth,” says Jennings, 75, an educator, author and nationally acclaimed storyteller. “There was food stored. You shared. It was all right there so they could get through the winter.”
Extreme cold that December of 1675 had frozen the swamp solid, providing easy access for the colonialists, who suspected that the Narragansett and Niantic people were providing sanctuary to members of the Wampanoag tribe, the whites’ principal adversaries. On the afternoon of Dec. 19, they stormed the island with guns, blades and fire. In her telling, Jennings assumes the persona of a Native grandmother who was there with a young child.
“You could feel the pain. You could peek out and look and you could see people on fire, people being slaughtered, people being shot. Children, falling dead. And I’m thinking of how to get away, how do we survive, with these flames and these guns going off and people with daggers and swords and spears — and they’re trying to kill us, and you’re seeing the blood and you’re hearing the cries and you’re hearing the moans.
“And after all of this, the shock of it. How can man’s inhumanity to man be so strong? How they could be so hateful? When it was our land, our people.”
The colonialists captured a number of survivors and later sold some into slavery. Some of those who escaped fled as far away as Wisconsin, while others retreated deeper into the woods and swamps of South County, into parts of what are now known as Charlestown, South Kingstown and Westerly.
Further tragedy awaited them and the other tribes that ultimately were defeated in King Philip’s War, which left many Native communities and white towns in ruin, including Providence, founded by Roger Williams, an early friend of the Narragansett. Diseases introduced by the English claimed many. Tribal lands were taken, until, by the late 1700s, Narragansett territory had been reduced to about 15,000 acres, a fraction of what had been theirs for thousands of years. The Founding Fathers disparaged them in the Declaration of Independence, writing this often-overlooked clause near its end, referring to King George III:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
“That always just astounds me,” Jennings says. “We didn’t come with the cannon. We didn’t come with the gun. We didn’t invade [settlers’] territory. And yet we’re vilified.”
The Narragansett and Niantic struggled into the latter part of the 19th century — and then came another blow, one more injurious than words. In defiance of federal law, the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1880 “detribalized” the Narragansett, abolishing tribal authority and eventually selling all but two acres of the tribe’s land. In her Exeter home, Jennings keeps a copy of the poster that announced the first offering.
Sale of the Indian Reservation, it begins. There will be sold at public auction, in the town of Charlestown, commencing on Tuesday, July 11, 1882, at 10 o’clock a.m., at or near the Indian Meeting House … first parcel embraces the Indian Cedar Swamp, including ‘School House Island’…
The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought the federal policy of “forced assimilation” of members of the Narragansett and other tribes across the United States. Government officials intended to essentially remake Indians into whites by forcibly remanding them to specialized boarding schools where their Native American culture was stripped away.
One of the most notorious was the United States Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 by Army Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, who wrote that a Native American “is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of a civilization and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.” His motto was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Records at Exeter’s Tomaquag Museum, which preserves the culture and history of Rhode Island’s indigenous people, chronicle the fate of the Narragansett men who were sent to Carlisle.
“The entire purpose,” says museum head Lorén Spears, who is Jennings’ niece, “was to take you far away from home, keep you there for years on end and strip of you everything you know — your language, your culture, your community, your family. Change your clothes, change your hair, change your religion — literally strip you of everything you know as being Narragansett or any Native American nation group.”
In 1978, after a land-claim lawsuit, ownership of about 1,800 acres, a pittance, was returned to the Narragansett. In 1983, the federal government recognized the tribe as a sovereign nation. The State of Rhode Island, however, remained antagonistic.
As the 20th century wound down, the Narragansett sought to build a casino that might improve their economic circumstances, much as casinos across the border in Connecticut have for the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot peoples. But a 1996 budget-bill rider authored by the late Sen. John Chafee required the Narragansett to receive statewide voter approval. Voters have not granted it. None of America’s other 565 federally recognized tribes must get voter approval.
In 2003, another economic-development effort was crushed when the state police, acting on orders of then-Gov. Donald Carcieri, shut down the Narragansett’s tax-free smoke shop on July 14, the day after it opened. Police stormed the shop on tribal lands on South County Trail in Charlestown. Seven unarmed adult Narragansett were arrested, and several women and men, including Jennings’ son Adam, were injured.
“It looked like a war,” says Jennings. “We were all stunned.”
Carcieri called the raid “truly regrettable, but truly necessary,” and prompted by Narragansett’s “flagrant violation of state law.” Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas, one of those arrested, said the state ignored “the federal status of the tribe,” which allowed it to operate the store. “Governor Carcieri should be ashamed of himself,” Thomas said.
“Not once have the Town of Charlestown, the state police, or the State of Rhode Island come and apologized,” Jennings says. “And they need to.”
The immediate effect on the Narragansett community was demoralizing, says Spears, and not only because once again, an economic opportunity was denied: the violent arrests and injuries, recorded by many media outlets, brought viscerally to the surface earlier injustices dating to the Great Swamp Massacre.
“As a mother, my heart bled,” says Spears. “I thought my kids weren’t going to have to deal with this.”
In the wake of the smoke shop raid, Spears says, many Narragansett, including her and her aunt, were regularly followed and stopped by police without cause — and occasionally still are.
“We’re tailed because we are brown in an area of Rhode Island that is very white,” says Spears, whose husband, Robin Spears Jr., is a tribal environmental police officer. “I know there are good police officers, but the fact is that our family members get harassed. My mother was stopped not too long ago. Somebody didn’t believe it was her car because she drives a Volvo.”
The Rhode Island Indian Council website has a page on historical trauma, defining it as “the collective emotional and psychological injury both over the life span and across generations, resulting from a shattering history of genocide.”
The theory, embraced by many Native Americans but controversial in some quarters, seeks to help explain the significant rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse and domestic violence found in some Native American communities with long histories of suffering injustice and atrocity.
The autumn rain continues during Jennings’ visit to the monument marking Dec. 19, 1675.
Paulla Dove Jennings, left, and Lorén Spears.As she stands with her aunt, Spears describes the effect in metaphorical terms she heard from Elizabeth Hoover, a Brown University professor of American studies who is the daughter of a Micmac and Mohawk family. Passed down by an elder, the metaphor is of the succession of heavy bags of sand that Native Americans have carried, beginning with the 17th-century introduction of disease and loss of their homelands.
“Each generation is trying to let one bag off, Spears says, “but it’s hard because we’re carrying all the pain of all those bags, and when the next generation after that is trying to pull their families back together, they’ve been so victimized and beaten down that they’re carrying the social woes — alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness — just despondency.
“And you’ve got to try to start healing from that in order to take a bag off. I think our community has come a long way, but we’re still carrying the weight of a lot of those bags on our shoulders.”
At the monument, Jennings concludes her retelling of the Great Swamp Massacre by describing the connection she feels to the grandmother and child in her story.
“I always pictured that child as my grandmother Dove’s great-great-great-grandmother,” she says. “Without her surviving, my grandmother wouldn’t have been here. If my grandmother wasn’t here, my father wouldn’t have been here. And if my father wouldn’t have been here, I wouldn’t have been here. My children wouldn’t be here. My beautiful niece wouldn’t be here.
“But the inner strength that the Creator gave us — Cautantowwit gave us — to help us survive and nurture one another in any way that we can is why we come here and pay homage to those that were slaughtered.”
Says Spears: “It’s really a blessing and a powerful feeling to know that our ancestors truly are not only watching over us but their spirits are washing over us. They’re giving us what we need today to survive this period in time to bring our community forward.”
********
Publication Date: October 25, 2015 Page: 1 Section: A
EXETER – On this fine autumn morning, Paulla Dove Jennings welcomes a visitor into her house at the edge of woods with a handshake and a warm smile. She pours tea, sits at her kitchen table, and begins relating some of her life’s story, which in its essential elements mirrors that of her relatives and ancestors, Rhode Island’s Narragansett and Niantic people.
A tribal elder now at age 75, Jennings has been a waitress, chef, clerk, author, historian, educator, museum curator, state Indian Affairs Commissioner, Narragansett leader, and more. Gifted with words and possessing a keen memory, she today is a celebrated storyteller -- a woman who laughs easily, and who also can feel anger and pain at how some whites have treated her people since the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 that nearly obliterated them. The Narragansett and Niantic are among the state’s original inhabitants, here for thousands of years.
“Oppression” is one word Jennings sometimes uses to describe that treatment.
“Racism” is another.
“Rhode Island has close to the same racism as in Mississippi and I’ve lived in both places,” says Jennings, a direct descendant of the great 17th-century Niantic sachem Ninigret.
“Rhode Island has close to the same racism as in Mississippi, and I’ve lived in both places,” says Jennings, a direct descendant of the great 17th-century Niantic sachem Ninigret.
Growing up in Rhode Island, Jennings says, she was called “dumb Indian” and “redskin” and the N-word. When she was a young married woman, landlords wouldn’t rent apartments to her family because she was brown-skinned. She watched her father, husband and other Native relatives and friends endure employment discrimination, a practice that continues today, she says.
“I couldn’t understand where this was coming from,” she says. “My family has always said that even though there are houses, there are roads, there are buildings, ‘this is your land, this is your home. Mother Earth is there underneath all this other stuff.’”
In the wake of the July 14, 2003, Smoke Shop Raid, in which state police arrested seven Narragansett, including her son, injuring several, she and other Natives were followed around — racially profiled — and that practice continues, she says. And there are many other ways, she says, in which historical injustices against her people continue to have impact in 2015.
“It just hurts my heart,” says Jennings. “I’ve reached the stage where I want good things to happen, uplifting things. I want the next generation to feel good about themselves and want to stay here and not leave Rhode Island, but that’s what’s happening. They’re leaving — those that get the education, that get the opportunity.”
The numbers
Of Rhode Island’s just over a million people in the 2010 U.S. Census, 803,685 were white, and only 14,394 were Native American: 6,058 residents who identified themselves as being only Native American, and another 8,336 who identified themselves as of mixed Native and other race. Of the total, nearly half live in Providence, Pawtucket and Warwick; East Providence, Cranston and South Kingstown round out the top six.
With nearly 3,000 people on the Federal Recognition rolls, the Narragansett constitute the largest tribal group. Pequot, Wampanoag, Nipmuc and others make up the rest.
None of these numbers bring power in a white-dominated state.
“It’s such a small segment of the population,” says Darrell Waldron, a man of Narragansett and Wampanoag descent who heads the Providence-based Rhode Island Indian Council. “When you have a very, very small ... community by numbers, you’re ignored. The only time we are visually seen or we are visually respected is when we dress up in clothing that’s 500 years old and perform for somebody. And that is sad.”
More numbers reveal other disparities. Less than a third of Indian households own their homes, compared with nearly two-thirds of whites, according to the 2010 Census. Native household median income is $28,750; whites’ is $62,188, according to the Bureau’s 2013 five-year estimates. Thirty-three percent of the state’s Native people live in poverty; 9 percent of whites do.
Nearly 30 percent of Native Americans ages 18 to 64 reported having no health insurance, compared with 11 percent of whites in that age group, according to the Bureau’s 2013 five-year estimates. Almost a quarter of all Native American adults reported being unable to afford a doctor’s care when needed at least once a year, compared with 11.5 percent of whites, according to the state and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Health Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2011-2013.
Given the small size of the samples and some people’s distrust of government, which discourages them from sharing information, the true numbers could be somewhat different. But no one disputes that in Rhode Island, Natives are on an unequal footing with whites.
Heartache
As she waits for her 97-year-old mother, Eleanor Dove, to come downstairs, Jennings shows a visitor the many photographs of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and other relatives and friends that fill her kitchen. She has been blessed, she says. And she has experienced heartache, personally and in the larger, tribal sense.
One of the four children of Ferris and Eleanor (Spears) Dove, Jennings grew up in Charlestown. The late Ferris, known as Roaring Bull, was the last traditional Narragansett war chief; a graduate of Bacone College, in Oklahoma, he became a supervisor at Electric Boat and was a postmaster in Rockville, and Exeter town moderator and tax assessor. He and Eleanor founded and for many years ran Dovecrest, a popular restaurant and trading post, now closed. They succeeded against odds, unlike some of their people.
Jennings attended public schools, deciding in her senior year to leave North Kingstown High School, where she was the only Native in her class, after wearying of racial mistreatment, she says. When she expressed an interest in medicine, perhaps dentistry, a guidance counselor suggested a dental assistant would be more appropriate for someone of her background.
“I dropped out because of racism,” she says. “I had one friend. That was because of the color of my skin.” Decades later, she earned her GED and attended the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island, where she began to develop her talent for storytelling.
In 1960, she married John Jennings, a carpenter of Cherokee, Natchez, white and black descent and moved with him and their young daughter to Mississippi, home of Natchez Indians. One day in 1962, Jennings says, white supremacists sprayed 18 bullets into his car, nearly killing him. Ambulance drivers refused to bring him to a hospital, so a cousin who ran a funeral parlor brought him in a hearse. Released from the hospital, he was fined $75 for disturbing the peace.
A couple of years later, they returned to Rhode Island with daughter Heidi and baby son Shawn. The family then moved briefly to Detroit, where John was stabbed during the city’s 1967 race riot. In 1972, Shawn died in a mechanical accident. He was 10.
In the 1990s, with the family back in Rhode Island, Jennings became involved in the Narragansett campaign to build a casino that might replicate the success of Foxwoods, which had helped alleviate tribal poverty among Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot people. But a 1996 budget-bill rider authored by the late Sen. John Chafee impeded the cause. Because of Chafee, the Narragansett, unique among America’s 566 federally recognized tribes, would need statewide voter approval. That approval has never come.
Desperate for economic development, the Narragansett, like other tribes in America, opened a tax-free tobacco shop 12 years ago. The state stepped in to halt the untaxed sale of cigarettes. Jennings was on duty at the smoke shop on July 14, 2003, when Rhode Island State Police stormed the compound, arresting seven unarmed adult Narragansett; several women and men were injured, including Jennings’ other son, Adam, who suffered a broken ankle and, in the aftermath, posttraumatic stress disorder.
“It looked like a war,” says Jennings. “I said, ‘This is happening in my country, in my state?’ The pain will never go away.”
The man who ordered the raid, then-Gov. Donald Carcieri, was unapologetic. “Today’s actions were precipitated by the Narragansett Indians and their flagrant violation of state law,” Carcieri said at a news conference during which then-state police Col. Steven Paré and then-Attorney General Patrick Lynch stood with him.
Enduring myths
The morning is advancing when Eleanor Dove descends the stairs. She greets Jennings’ guest and retires with the morning paper to her chair by the massive stone fireplace that relatives built. Like her daughter, Dove is a faithful follower of the news.
Jennings has clipped two outside columns recently published on the op-ed pages of The Providence Journal: one on white privilege and another on King Philip’s War and the Great Swamp Massacre. Both contain derogatory stereotypes and historical inaccuracies, Jennings says, that offended her and many of her people and prompted them to write letters to the editor. Such perspectives still anger her, even though she has read and heard them for a lifetime.
“Outrageous. Filled with myths and falsehoods and sanctimonious lies,” she says.
These perspectives, she asserts, derive from paternalization that dates to the time of Roger Williams.
“‘Great White Father’ always thinks they have to support us, and tell us what to do, and how to do it — that we don’t know our heritage, our culture, how to take care of ourselves,” Jennings says. “It’s all about power. And I get frustrated and angry. I’m 75 now. And maybe I’ll get over the frustration or things will begin to change before I go to the Sky World, but until that time, I’m going to say what the truth is.”
Like Jennings, Thawn Harris, 37, a Narragansett who lives in Charlestown and teaches physical education at the Met School, has been subjected to insults. He, too, has been stereotyped.
“Being a Native person, you get asked some crazy things and people look at you in crazy ways, like they expect you to be able to talk to animals or ‘can I make the rain stop, can I do a sun dance?’” he says. “Absolutely ridiculous questions like that.”
Questions like, “Are you full-blooded?” which has been put to Jennings many times.
She says: “Who else gets asked those questions: ‘Are you all white? Are you all black? Are you all Asian, Chinese, Korean, whatever?’ It’s unfair, it’s dehumanizing, and it’s hurtful.”
Confining image
Among the stereotypes is what Harris calls “this Hollywood, mystical feeling of how Native Americans should be, how they should look.”
Except for occasional ceremonial events honoring their traditions, most dress in contemporary fashion, of course. Paradoxically, that fosters what Harris, Jennings and other Natives describe as “invisibility” — and not only visually.
“If we’re not walking around in leather skins with feathers hanging off us, if we don’t have that stereotypical look, if we don’t have long hair — if we’re not living a life that is not like out in the middle of nowhere, not living in a teepee, which we never lived in — they don’t even see us,” says Harris, who wears his hair short.
“We are very much invisible, not recognized at all; in a lot of things, we’re overlooked and forgotten. When people do think of us, it is, whether pro or con, in the light of ‘oh, the Indians want a casino.’”
Stereotyping is at the heart of the controversies embroiling the Indian names and mascots of some sports teams, notably the National Football League’s Washington Redskins, whose owner has refused demands to be more sensitive to the many Native Americans across the country who hold the word “redskin” to be offensive.
Jennings puts it this way:
“OK, let’s change the Yankees name to ‘The Honkies.’ Or ‘The White Trash’ or something else that’s negative and nasty and shouldn’t be said out loud.”
‘A beginning step’
Progress will require a better understanding of disparities and a commitment by officials and others to address them, says Waldron.
“Until we can begin to sit at the table and really discuss poverty disparities with families and equal access for all of our people regardless of what color they are, these problems are going to continue to be there,” he says.
Progress also will require education, say Jennings and niece Lorén Spears, 49, a former teacher who now directs Exeter’s Tomaquag Museum, dedicated to the culture and history of Narragansett, Niantic and other indigenous peoples. Most Rhode Island schoolchildren are taught little about the history and contemporary circumstances of the state’s original inhabitants.
Tomaquag’s exhibits and programs tell that story. So does Spears in her one-on-one encounters with museum visitors, many of whom are white.
“I’m not blaming them for any of this history,” Spears says. “And if they apologize, I say ‘You don’t have to apologize. You didn’t do this, but I do want you to understand it so we don’t repeat it and that you can help other people understand.’”
“What I would like to see happen is actual Native culture taught in the Rhode Island schools, as a beginning step,” says Jennings. “To do away with some of the myths that are on the history books, the social-studies books, and give what actually went on. Our true history, not made-up history.”
With reports from staff writer Paul Edward Parker.
The massacre, on Dec. 19, 1675, is far and away the bloodiest event in Rhode Island history. It still reverberates today, nearly three and a half centuries later.
Publication Date: October 26, 2015 Page: 1 Section: A
Providence Journal illustration by Tom Murphy.A gentle rain falls on Paulla Dove Jennings as she stands by a monument deep in the South Kingstown woods. She has come here on this autumn morning to tell the story of the Great Swamp Massacre, in which white colonialists slaughtered and burned alive hundreds of her Narragansett and Niantic ancestors. Many were elders, women and children.
The massacre, on Dec. 19, 1675, was far and away the bloodiest event in Rhode Island history. Its repercussions are still felt today, nearly three and a half centuries later.
The backdrop was King Philip’s War, during which English settlers and some of New England’s Native American tribes fought, with devastating consequences for all. At the start, Jennings’ ancestors declared their neutrality, but they feared a white offensive. As winter approached that first year, many hundreds of them sought sanctuary on a remote island, farther into the wilderness from today’s monument.
They were living in long houses — large timber lodges that provided shelter for dozens of extended families.
“There was warmth,” says Jennings, 75, an educator, author and nationally acclaimed storyteller. “There was food stored. You shared. It was all right there so they could get through the winter.”
Extreme cold that December of 1675 had frozen the swamp solid, providing easy access for the colonialists, who suspected that the Narragansett and Niantic people were providing sanctuary to members of the Wampanoag tribe, the whites’ principal adversaries. On the afternoon of Dec. 19, they stormed the island with guns, blades and fire. In her telling, Jennings assumes the persona of a Native grandmother who was there with a young child.
“You could feel the pain. You could peek out and look and you could see people on fire, people being slaughtered, people being shot. Children, falling dead. And I’m thinking of how to get away, how do we survive, with these flames and these guns going off and people with daggers and swords and spears — and they’re trying to kill us, and you’re seeing the blood and you’re hearing the cries and you’re hearing the moans.
“And after all of this, the shock of it. How can man’s inhumanity to man be so strong? How they could be so hateful? When it was our land, our people.”
The colonialists captured a number of survivors and later sold some into slavery. Some of those who escaped fled as far away as Wisconsin, while others retreated deeper into the woods and swamps of South County, into parts of what are now known as Charlestown, South Kingstown and Westerly.
Further tragedy awaited them and the other tribes that ultimately were defeated in King Philip’s War, which left many Native communities and white towns in ruin, including Providence, founded by Roger Williams, an early friend of the Narragansett. Diseases introduced by the English claimed many. Tribal lands were taken, until, by the late 1700s, Narragansett territory had been reduced to about 15,000 acres, a fraction of what had been theirs for thousands of years. The Founding Fathers disparaged them in the Declaration of Independence, writing this often-overlooked clause near its end, referring to King George III:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
“That always just astounds me,” Jennings says. “We didn’t come with the cannon. We didn’t come with the gun. We didn’t invade [settlers’] territory. And yet we’re vilified.”
The Narragansett and Niantic struggled into the latter part of the 19th century — and then came another blow, one more injurious than words. In defiance of federal law, the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1880 “detribalized” the Narragansett, abolishing tribal authority and eventually selling all but two acres of the tribe’s land. In her Exeter home, Jennings keeps a copy of the poster that announced the first offering.
Sale of the Indian Reservation, it begins. There will be sold at public auction, in the town of Charlestown, commencing on Tuesday, July 11, 1882, at 10 o’clock a.m., at or near the Indian Meeting House … first parcel embraces the Indian Cedar Swamp, including ‘School House Island’…
The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought the federal policy of “forced assimilation” of members of the Narragansett and other tribes across the United States. Government officials intended to essentially remake Indians into whites by forcibly remanding them to specialized boarding schools where their Native American culture was stripped away.
One of the most notorious was the United States Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 by Army Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, who wrote that a Native American “is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of a civilization and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.” His motto was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Records at Exeter’s Tomaquag Museum, which preserves the culture and history of Rhode Island’s indigenous people, chronicle the fate of the Narragansett men who were sent to Carlisle.
“The entire purpose,” says museum head Lorén Spears, who is Jennings’ niece, “was to take you far away from home, keep you there for years on end and strip of you everything you know — your language, your culture, your community, your family. Change your clothes, change your hair, change your religion — literally strip you of everything you know as being Narragansett or any Native American nation group.”
In 1978, after a land-claim lawsuit, ownership of about 1,800 acres, a pittance, was returned to the Narragansett. In 1983, the federal government recognized the tribe as a sovereign nation. The State of Rhode Island, however, remained antagonistic.
As the 20th century wound down, the Narragansett sought to build a casino that might improve their economic circumstances, much as casinos across the border in Connecticut have for the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot peoples. But a 1996 budget-bill rider authored by the late Sen. John Chafee required the Narragansett to receive statewide voter approval. Voters have not granted it. None of America’s other 565 federally recognized tribes must get voter approval.
In 2003, another economic-development effort was crushed when the state police, acting on orders of then-Gov. Donald Carcieri, shut down the Narragansett’s tax-free smoke shop on July 14, the day after it opened. Police stormed the shop on tribal lands on South County Trail in Charlestown. Seven unarmed adult Narragansett were arrested, and several women and men, including Jennings’ son Adam, were injured.
“It looked like a war,” says Jennings. “We were all stunned.”
Carcieri called the raid “truly regrettable, but truly necessary,” and prompted by Narragansett’s “flagrant violation of state law.” Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas, one of those arrested, said the state ignored “the federal status of the tribe,” which allowed it to operate the store. “Governor Carcieri should be ashamed of himself,” Thomas said.
“Not once have the Town of Charlestown, the state police, or the State of Rhode Island come and apologized,” Jennings says. “And they need to.”
The immediate effect on the Narragansett community was demoralizing, says Spears, and not only because once again, an economic opportunity was denied: the violent arrests and injuries, recorded by many media outlets, brought viscerally to the surface earlier injustices dating to the Great Swamp Massacre.
“As a mother, my heart bled,” says Spears. “I thought my kids weren’t going to have to deal with this.”
In the wake of the smoke shop raid, Spears says, many Narragansett, including her and her aunt, were regularly followed and stopped by police without cause — and occasionally still are.
“We’re tailed because we are brown in an area of Rhode Island that is very white,” says Spears, whose husband, Robin Spears Jr., is a tribal environmental police officer. “I know there are good police officers, but the fact is that our family members get harassed. My mother was stopped not too long ago. Somebody didn’t believe it was her car because she drives a Volvo.”
The Rhode Island Indian Council website has a page on historical trauma, defining it as “the collective emotional and psychological injury both over the life span and across generations, resulting from a shattering history of genocide.”
The theory, embraced by many Native Americans but controversial in some quarters, seeks to help explain the significant rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse and domestic violence found in some Native American communities with long histories of suffering injustice and atrocity.
The autumn rain continues during Jennings’ visit to the monument marking Dec. 19, 1675.
Paulla Dove Jennings, left, and Lorén Spears.As she stands with her aunt, Spears describes the effect in metaphorical terms she heard from Elizabeth Hoover, a Brown University professor of American studies who is the daughter of a Micmac and Mohawk family. Passed down by an elder, the metaphor is of the succession of heavy bags of sand that Native Americans have carried, beginning with the 17th-century introduction of disease and loss of their homelands. “Each generation is trying to let one bag off, Spears says, “but it’s hard because we’re carrying all the pain of all those bags, and when the next generation after that is trying to pull their families back together, they’ve been so victimized and beaten down that they’re carrying the social woes — alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness — just despondency.
“And you’ve got to try to start healing from that in order to take a bag off. I think our community has come a long way, but we’re still carrying the weight of a lot of those bags on our shoulders.”
At the monument, Jennings concludes her retelling of the Great Swamp Massacre by describing the connection she feels to the grandmother and child in her story.
“I always pictured that child as my grandmother Dove’s great-great-great-grandmother,” she says. “Without her surviving, my grandmother wouldn’t have been here. If my grandmother wasn’t here, my father wouldn’t have been here. And if my father wouldn’t have been here, I wouldn’t have been here. My children wouldn’t be here. My beautiful niece wouldn’t be here.
“But the inner strength that the Creator gave us — Cautantowwit gave us — to help us survive and nurture one another in any way that we can is why we come here and pay homage to those that were slaughtered.”
Says Spears: “It’s really a blessing and a powerful feeling to know that our ancestors truly are not only watching over us but their spirits are washing over us. They’re giving us what we need today to survive this period in time to bring our community forward.”
********
Publication Date: October 25, 2015 Page: 1 Section: A
EXETER – On this fine autumn morning, Paulla Dove Jennings welcomes a visitor into her house at the edge of woods with a handshake and a warm smile. She pours tea, sits at her kitchen table, and begins relating some of her life’s story, which in its essential elements mirrors that of her relatives and ancestors, Rhode Island’s Narragansett and Niantic people.
A tribal elder now at age 75, Jennings has been a waitress, chef, clerk, author, historian, educator, museum curator, state Indian Affairs Commissioner, Narragansett leader, and more. Gifted with words and possessing a keen memory, she today is a celebrated storyteller -- a woman who laughs easily, and who also can feel anger and pain at how some whites have treated her people since the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 that nearly obliterated them. The Narragansett and Niantic are among the state’s original inhabitants, here for thousands of years.
“Oppression” is one word Jennings sometimes uses to describe that treatment.
“Racism” is another.
“Rhode Island has close to the same racism as in Mississippi and I’ve lived in both places,” says Jennings, a direct descendant of the great 17th-century Niantic sachem Ninigret.
“Rhode Island has close to the same racism as in Mississippi, and I’ve lived in both places,” says Jennings, a direct descendant of the great 17th-century Niantic sachem Ninigret.
Growing up in Rhode Island, Jennings says, she was called “dumb Indian” and “redskin” and the N-word. When she was a young married woman, landlords wouldn’t rent apartments to her family because she was brown-skinned. She watched her father, husband and other Native relatives and friends endure employment discrimination, a practice that continues today, she says.
“I couldn’t understand where this was coming from,” she says. “My family has always said that even though there are houses, there are roads, there are buildings, ‘this is your land, this is your home. Mother Earth is there underneath all this other stuff.’”
In the wake of the July 14, 2003, Smoke Shop Raid, in which state police arrested seven Narragansett, including her son, injuring several, she and other Natives were followed around — racially profiled — and that practice continues, she says. And there are many other ways, she says, in which historical injustices against her people continue to have impact in 2015.
“It just hurts my heart,” says Jennings. “I’ve reached the stage where I want good things to happen, uplifting things. I want the next generation to feel good about themselves and want to stay here and not leave Rhode Island, but that’s what’s happening. They’re leaving — those that get the education, that get the opportunity.”
The numbers
Of Rhode Island’s just over a million people in the 2010 U.S. Census, 803,685 were white, and only 14,394 were Native American: 6,058 residents who identified themselves as being only Native American, and another 8,336 who identified themselves as of mixed Native and other race. Of the total, nearly half live in Providence, Pawtucket and Warwick; East Providence, Cranston and South Kingstown round out the top six.
With nearly 3,000 people on the Federal Recognition rolls, the Narragansett constitute the largest tribal group. Pequot, Wampanoag, Nipmuc and others make up the rest.
None of these numbers bring power in a white-dominated state.
“It’s such a small segment of the population,” says Darrell Waldron, a man of Narragansett and Wampanoag descent who heads the Providence-based Rhode Island Indian Council. “When you have a very, very small ... community by numbers, you’re ignored. The only time we are visually seen or we are visually respected is when we dress up in clothing that’s 500 years old and perform for somebody. And that is sad.”
More numbers reveal other disparities. Less than a third of Indian households own their homes, compared with nearly two-thirds of whites, according to the 2010 Census. Native household median income is $28,750; whites’ is $62,188, according to the Bureau’s 2013 five-year estimates. Thirty-three percent of the state’s Native people live in poverty; 9 percent of whites do.
Nearly 30 percent of Native Americans ages 18 to 64 reported having no health insurance, compared with 11 percent of whites in that age group, according to the Bureau’s 2013 five-year estimates. Almost a quarter of all Native American adults reported being unable to afford a doctor’s care when needed at least once a year, compared with 11.5 percent of whites, according to the state and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Health Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2011-2013.
Given the small size of the samples and some people’s distrust of government, which discourages them from sharing information, the true numbers could be somewhat different. But no one disputes that in Rhode Island, Natives are on an unequal footing with whites.
Heartache
As she waits for her 97-year-old mother, Eleanor Dove, to come downstairs, Jennings shows a visitor the many photographs of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and other relatives and friends that fill her kitchen. She has been blessed, she says. And she has experienced heartache, personally and in the larger, tribal sense.
One of the four children of Ferris and Eleanor (Spears) Dove, Jennings grew up in Charlestown. The late Ferris, known as Roaring Bull, was the last traditional Narragansett war chief; a graduate of Bacone College, in Oklahoma, he became a supervisor at Electric Boat and was a postmaster in Rockville, and Exeter town moderator and tax assessor. He and Eleanor founded and for many years ran Dovecrest, a popular restaurant and trading post, now closed. They succeeded against odds, unlike some of their people.
Jennings attended public schools, deciding in her senior year to leave North Kingstown High School, where she was the only Native in her class, after wearying of racial mistreatment, she says. When she expressed an interest in medicine, perhaps dentistry, a guidance counselor suggested a dental assistant would be more appropriate for someone of her background.
“I dropped out because of racism,” she says. “I had one friend. That was because of the color of my skin.” Decades later, she earned her GED and attended the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island, where she began to develop her talent for storytelling.
In 1960, she married John Jennings, a carpenter of Cherokee, Natchez, white and black descent and moved with him and their young daughter to Mississippi, home of Natchez Indians. One day in 1962, Jennings says, white supremacists sprayed 18 bullets into his car, nearly killing him. Ambulance drivers refused to bring him to a hospital, so a cousin who ran a funeral parlor brought him in a hearse. Released from the hospital, he was fined $75 for disturbing the peace.
A couple of years later, they returned to Rhode Island with daughter Heidi and baby son Shawn. The family then moved briefly to Detroit, where John was stabbed during the city’s 1967 race riot. In 1972, Shawn died in a mechanical accident. He was 10.
In the 1990s, with the family back in Rhode Island, Jennings became involved in the Narragansett campaign to build a casino that might replicate the success of Foxwoods, which had helped alleviate tribal poverty among Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot people. But a 1996 budget-bill rider authored by the late Sen. John Chafee impeded the cause. Because of Chafee, the Narragansett, unique among America’s 566 federally recognized tribes, would need statewide voter approval. That approval has never come.
Desperate for economic development, the Narragansett, like other tribes in America, opened a tax-free tobacco shop 12 years ago. The state stepped in to halt the untaxed sale of cigarettes. Jennings was on duty at the smoke shop on July 14, 2003, when Rhode Island State Police stormed the compound, arresting seven unarmed adult Narragansett; several women and men were injured, including Jennings’ other son, Adam, who suffered a broken ankle and, in the aftermath, posttraumatic stress disorder.
“It looked like a war,” says Jennings. “I said, ‘This is happening in my country, in my state?’ The pain will never go away.”
The man who ordered the raid, then-Gov. Donald Carcieri, was unapologetic. “Today’s actions were precipitated by the Narragansett Indians and their flagrant violation of state law,” Carcieri said at a news conference during which then-state police Col. Steven Paré and then-Attorney General Patrick Lynch stood with him.
Enduring myths
The morning is advancing when Eleanor Dove descends the stairs. She greets Jennings’ guest and retires with the morning paper to her chair by the massive stone fireplace that relatives built. Like her daughter, Dove is a faithful follower of the news.
Jennings has clipped two outside columns recently published on the op-ed pages of The Providence Journal: one on white privilege and another on King Philip’s War and the Great Swamp Massacre. Both contain derogatory stereotypes and historical inaccuracies, Jennings says, that offended her and many of her people and prompted them to write letters to the editor. Such perspectives still anger her, even though she has read and heard them for a lifetime.
“Outrageous. Filled with myths and falsehoods and sanctimonious lies,” she says.
These perspectives, she asserts, derive from paternalization that dates to the time of Roger Williams.
“‘Great White Father’ always thinks they have to support us, and tell us what to do, and how to do it — that we don’t know our heritage, our culture, how to take care of ourselves,” Jennings says. “It’s all about power. And I get frustrated and angry. I’m 75 now. And maybe I’ll get over the frustration or things will begin to change before I go to the Sky World, but until that time, I’m going to say what the truth is.”
Like Jennings, Thawn Harris, 37, a Narragansett who lives in Charlestown and teaches physical education at the Met School, has been subjected to insults. He, too, has been stereotyped.
“Being a Native person, you get asked some crazy things and people look at you in crazy ways, like they expect you to be able to talk to animals or ‘can I make the rain stop, can I do a sun dance?’” he says. “Absolutely ridiculous questions like that.”
Questions like, “Are you full-blooded?” which has been put to Jennings many times.
She says: “Who else gets asked those questions: ‘Are you all white? Are you all black? Are you all Asian, Chinese, Korean, whatever?’ It’s unfair, it’s dehumanizing, and it’s hurtful.”
Confining image
Among the stereotypes is what Harris calls “this Hollywood, mystical feeling of how Native Americans should be, how they should look.”
Except for occasional ceremonial events honoring their traditions, most dress in contemporary fashion, of course. Paradoxically, that fosters what Harris, Jennings and other Natives describe as “invisibility” — and not only visually.
“If we’re not walking around in leather skins with feathers hanging off us, if we don’t have that stereotypical look, if we don’t have long hair — if we’re not living a life that is not like out in the middle of nowhere, not living in a teepee, which we never lived in — they don’t even see us,” says Harris, who wears his hair short.
“We are very much invisible, not recognized at all; in a lot of things, we’re overlooked and forgotten. When people do think of us, it is, whether pro or con, in the light of ‘oh, the Indians want a casino.’”
Stereotyping is at the heart of the controversies embroiling the Indian names and mascots of some sports teams, notably the National Football League’s Washington Redskins, whose owner has refused demands to be more sensitive to the many Native Americans across the country who hold the word “redskin” to be offensive.
Jennings puts it this way:
“OK, let’s change the Yankees name to ‘The Honkies.’ Or ‘The White Trash’ or something else that’s negative and nasty and shouldn’t be said out loud.”
‘A beginning step’
Progress will require a better understanding of disparities and a commitment by officials and others to address them, says Waldron.
“Until we can begin to sit at the table and really discuss poverty disparities with families and equal access for all of our people regardless of what color they are, these problems are going to continue to be there,” he says.
Progress also will require education, say Jennings and niece Lorén Spears, 49, a former teacher who now directs Exeter’s Tomaquag Museum, dedicated to the culture and history of Narragansett, Niantic and other indigenous peoples. Most Rhode Island schoolchildren are taught little about the history and contemporary circumstances of the state’s original inhabitants.
Tomaquag’s exhibits and programs tell that story. So does Spears in her one-on-one encounters with museum visitors, many of whom are white.
“I’m not blaming them for any of this history,” Spears says. “And if they apologize, I say ‘You don’t have to apologize. You didn’t do this, but I do want you to understand it so we don’t repeat it and that you can help other people understand.’”
“What I would like to see happen is actual Native culture taught in the Rhode Island schools, as a beginning step,” says Jennings. “To do away with some of the myths that are on the history books, the social-studies books, and give what actually went on. Our true history, not made-up history.”
With reports from staff writer Paul Edward Parker.
September 28, 2016
TOY WARS coming to Amazon TV!
I am thrilled to announce that Amazon Originals is developing a limited series based on my book
Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the Companies That Make Them
, an inside look at the toy industry and the battle between Hasbro and Mattel in the 1980s and ‘90s. I will be an executive producer on the show.
The creative team includes actor/writer
Follow ToyWarsTV on Twitter!
The whole thing came together thanks to the long efforts of my longtime screen agent and friend, Michael Prevett, whose Rain Management Group/StoryBy will executive-produce. Michael has kep[t the faith and my gratitude to him!
The trade announcement was in Deadline Hollywood/Variety, which wrote: "Actor-writer Josh Gad (Angry Birds) is set to star and co-write, Josh Schwartz is attached to co-write and showrun and Seth Gordon is expected to direct Toy Wars, a limited drama series in development at Amazon, which follows the real-life battle between American toy giants Hasbro, the company behind GI Joe, Transformer and My Little Pony toys, and Barbie maker Mattel in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Gad, Schwartz and Ryan Dixon will co-write the project based on the non-fiction book by G. Wayne Miller Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies that Make Them. Schwartz will serve as showrunner, with Gordon attached to direct the pilot, subject to availability."
Read the full Deadline Hollywood story.
The creative team includes actor/writer
Follow ToyWarsTV on Twitter!
The whole thing came together thanks to the long efforts of my longtime screen agent and friend, Michael Prevett, whose Rain Management Group/StoryBy will executive-produce. Michael has kep[t the faith and my gratitude to him!
The trade announcement was in Deadline Hollywood/Variety, which wrote: "Actor-writer Josh Gad (Angry Birds) is set to star and co-write, Josh Schwartz is attached to co-write and showrun and Seth Gordon is expected to direct Toy Wars, a limited drama series in development at Amazon, which follows the real-life battle between American toy giants Hasbro, the company behind GI Joe, Transformer and My Little Pony toys, and Barbie maker Mattel in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Gad, Schwartz and Ryan Dixon will co-write the project based on the non-fiction book by G. Wayne Miller Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies that Make Them. Schwartz will serve as showrunner, with Gordon attached to direct the pilot, subject to availability."
Read the full Deadline Hollywood story.
August 16, 2016
Some recent book reviews
I periodically review books for The Providence Journal. Here are two recent ones:
Hood’s latest explores loss and redemption
‘The Book That Matters Most,’ by Ann Hood. Norton. 360 pages. $25.95.
G. Wayne Miller
Publication Date: August 14, 2016 Page: 1 Section: F
In “The Book That Matters Most,” Ann Hood has given us a remarkable musing on memory, loss, regret and, to an extent, redemption and salvation. She does so with elegant prose and gentle but appropriate tugs on the heartstrings. The sentiments of the characters ring true. We know these people. You or I may be one of them.
Hood’s latest is told primarily through the alternating perspectives of middle-age Ava; her daughter Maggie, a college student spending a year abroad; the (now) retired police detective Hank; and, toward the end,
Ava’s aunt Beatrice. A ghostly presence throughout is Beatrice’s sister, Charlotte, Ava’s mother. Deeply depressed but creative, a bookstore owner and pseudonymous author, Charlotte found her world destroyed, seemingly forever, by a long-ago tragedy that fragmented an already fragile personal and family existence.
Set partly in Providence, where Hood lives, the novel opens as longtime husband Jim has just announced his surprise intention to divorce Ava (falling, pathetically, for a hippy-dippy yarn-bomber). Reeling, doubting herself, uncertain how or if she will survive emotionally, Ava joins a book club which has decided that members will announce their most important book, each of which will be discussed in meetings over the year. The list is revered, if predictable: “Catcher in the Rye,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Great Gatsby” and other classics. Ava chooses “From Clare To Here,” a long-out-of-print book by an obscure writer whose name does not get even a single Google hit. Not until the final pages do we learn why.
Hood interweaves her many plotlines flawlessly, and is most masterful when she takes the point of view of Ava and wayward Maggie, whose overseas adventures spiral into anonymous sex and opioid addiction in Paris and elsewhere. It is disturbing to read, particularly if you are a parent — but spot-on. Having written about addiction for The Journal, I can tell you that Hood has captured its destructive tyranny in a way that nonfiction often adequately cannot.
“The Book That Matters Most” suffers slightly from a few novelistic contrivances, notably the one that closes the novel (although a romantic would surely root for just such an ending, and if a movie results, as it should, Hood made the right choice). But these are minor objections, which do little to diminish the heft of this depiction of vividly rendered people.
So what book really matters most? Not the one with Holden Caulfield or Jay Gatsby, of course, as Hood’s tale confirms. It’s your own: your story, the one by and about you, the one that is being written every day you draw breath, and for years after.
“The burden, the weight, of memories,” as one of this book’s minor characters puts it, are inescapable. And as Ava and her cohorts know painfully, they endure. But while we are here, they need not define or control, which is the welcome truth of “The Book That Matters Most.”
—Staff writer G. Wayne Miller is the author of 16 nonfiction and fiction books, most recently “Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age.”
******
Remarkable voice for victims of injustice | ‘The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,’ by Dan Barry. Harper. 352 pages. $26.99.
G. Wayne Miller
Publication Date: May 15, 2016 Page: 5 Section: F
In “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,” New York Times staff writer Dan Barry has achieved the remarkable. He has written an unforgettable story of degradation, suffering, and eventual triumph rendered in a velvet style that blends poetry with colloquialism.
He has given powerful voice to intellectually disabled people — and, by extension, all people with vulnerabilities. He has told us something vitally important about us, all of us, regardless of label or life station.
The bunkhouse is a former school building in the small Iowa town of Atalissa where 32 formerly institutionalized developmentally disabled men — the “boys” — lived as virtual slaves behind plywooded windows in squalid conditions during the decades they worked at a nearby turkey processing plant. Their jobs punished body and soul. Their wages, such as they were, were essentially stolen by their boss. They were physically and emotionally abused and neglected, their lives stolen.
When their situation finally was brought to full public light by a crusading newspaper reporter, even the veteran social workers and others who took action were horrified. The bunkhouse was closed, in 2009, and the men transitioned into new circumstances, where they could be people, not slaves. Triumph, finally.
Yet, there was more to the story: for example, the brotherly fraternity and the touches of affection, if not love, amid the squalor and abuse that another writer might have ignored in building a justifiably damning case. Also, the feel of the quiet Plains community and its proud history. And the townspeople who welcomed the boys not knowing what really went on when they retreated to their house of horrors. And the house itself, which opened its doors annually for a Christmas party that was the antithesis of existence the other 364 days. Barry found and presents these and other nuances, in which can be found larger commentary about our shared humanity.
Barry set aside the ordinary rules of nonfiction narrative in deciding to bring us inside the heads of his many characters, developmentally disabled and not. Attempting such a high-wire act is a dangerous proposition for even an accomplished writer, but Barry needed no net.
With his command of inner voice, we come to know Levi, the “boy” who had a knack for quieting birds before slaughter; Raymond Vaughn, who has no memory of his parents though a dim one of abandonment before he wound up in an institution; Texan T.H. Johnson, the seemingly heartless boss who actually did have heart, of a sort; Ed George, the social worker who sounded an alarm in 1974 that tragically was ignored. And many more.
The net result is an extraordinary contribution to the literature of social injustice. In his years at The New York Times, Barry, twice a finalist there for the Pulitzer Prize and once a member of a Providence Journal team that won one, has written extensively of social issues, of servitude and salvation of many kinds.
Barry has written three other books: “City Lights,” essays about New York; “Lift Me Up,” a memoir; and “Bottom of the 33rd,” about baseball’s longest game, won by the Pawtucket Red Sox. All fine books, but his latest overshadows them all. We still have months to go in 2016, but “The Boys in the Bunkhouse” surely will emerge as one of the landmark books of the year.
To hear Barry discuss “The Boys in the Bunkhouse” and his other writing, watch an episode of “Story in the Public Square TV,” a monthly feature of the national PBS show White House Chronicle: whchronicle.com/?p=3265
—Journal staff writer and “Story in the Public Square” director G. Wayne Miller is the author, most recently, of “Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age.”
Hood’s latest explores loss and redemption
‘The Book That Matters Most,’ by Ann Hood. Norton. 360 pages. $25.95.
G. Wayne Miller
Publication Date: August 14, 2016 Page: 1 Section: F
In “The Book That Matters Most,” Ann Hood has given us a remarkable musing on memory, loss, regret and, to an extent, redemption and salvation. She does so with elegant prose and gentle but appropriate tugs on the heartstrings. The sentiments of the characters ring true. We know these people. You or I may be one of them.Hood’s latest is told primarily through the alternating perspectives of middle-age Ava; her daughter Maggie, a college student spending a year abroad; the (now) retired police detective Hank; and, toward the end,
Ava’s aunt Beatrice. A ghostly presence throughout is Beatrice’s sister, Charlotte, Ava’s mother. Deeply depressed but creative, a bookstore owner and pseudonymous author, Charlotte found her world destroyed, seemingly forever, by a long-ago tragedy that fragmented an already fragile personal and family existence.
Set partly in Providence, where Hood lives, the novel opens as longtime husband Jim has just announced his surprise intention to divorce Ava (falling, pathetically, for a hippy-dippy yarn-bomber). Reeling, doubting herself, uncertain how or if she will survive emotionally, Ava joins a book club which has decided that members will announce their most important book, each of which will be discussed in meetings over the year. The list is revered, if predictable: “Catcher in the Rye,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Great Gatsby” and other classics. Ava chooses “From Clare To Here,” a long-out-of-print book by an obscure writer whose name does not get even a single Google hit. Not until the final pages do we learn why.
Hood interweaves her many plotlines flawlessly, and is most masterful when she takes the point of view of Ava and wayward Maggie, whose overseas adventures spiral into anonymous sex and opioid addiction in Paris and elsewhere. It is disturbing to read, particularly if you are a parent — but spot-on. Having written about addiction for The Journal, I can tell you that Hood has captured its destructive tyranny in a way that nonfiction often adequately cannot.
“The Book That Matters Most” suffers slightly from a few novelistic contrivances, notably the one that closes the novel (although a romantic would surely root for just such an ending, and if a movie results, as it should, Hood made the right choice). But these are minor objections, which do little to diminish the heft of this depiction of vividly rendered people.
So what book really matters most? Not the one with Holden Caulfield or Jay Gatsby, of course, as Hood’s tale confirms. It’s your own: your story, the one by and about you, the one that is being written every day you draw breath, and for years after.
“The burden, the weight, of memories,” as one of this book’s minor characters puts it, are inescapable. And as Ava and her cohorts know painfully, they endure. But while we are here, they need not define or control, which is the welcome truth of “The Book That Matters Most.”
—Staff writer G. Wayne Miller is the author of 16 nonfiction and fiction books, most recently “Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age.”
******
Remarkable voice for victims of injustice | ‘The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,’ by Dan Barry. Harper. 352 pages. $26.99.
G. Wayne Miller
Publication Date: May 15, 2016 Page: 5 Section: F
In “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,” New York Times staff writer Dan Barry has achieved the remarkable. He has written an unforgettable story of degradation, suffering, and eventual triumph rendered in a velvet style that blends poetry with colloquialism.He has given powerful voice to intellectually disabled people — and, by extension, all people with vulnerabilities. He has told us something vitally important about us, all of us, regardless of label or life station.
The bunkhouse is a former school building in the small Iowa town of Atalissa where 32 formerly institutionalized developmentally disabled men — the “boys” — lived as virtual slaves behind plywooded windows in squalid conditions during the decades they worked at a nearby turkey processing plant. Their jobs punished body and soul. Their wages, such as they were, were essentially stolen by their boss. They were physically and emotionally abused and neglected, their lives stolen.
When their situation finally was brought to full public light by a crusading newspaper reporter, even the veteran social workers and others who took action were horrified. The bunkhouse was closed, in 2009, and the men transitioned into new circumstances, where they could be people, not slaves. Triumph, finally.
Yet, there was more to the story: for example, the brotherly fraternity and the touches of affection, if not love, amid the squalor and abuse that another writer might have ignored in building a justifiably damning case. Also, the feel of the quiet Plains community and its proud history. And the townspeople who welcomed the boys not knowing what really went on when they retreated to their house of horrors. And the house itself, which opened its doors annually for a Christmas party that was the antithesis of existence the other 364 days. Barry found and presents these and other nuances, in which can be found larger commentary about our shared humanity.
Barry set aside the ordinary rules of nonfiction narrative in deciding to bring us inside the heads of his many characters, developmentally disabled and not. Attempting such a high-wire act is a dangerous proposition for even an accomplished writer, but Barry needed no net.
With his command of inner voice, we come to know Levi, the “boy” who had a knack for quieting birds before slaughter; Raymond Vaughn, who has no memory of his parents though a dim one of abandonment before he wound up in an institution; Texan T.H. Johnson, the seemingly heartless boss who actually did have heart, of a sort; Ed George, the social worker who sounded an alarm in 1974 that tragically was ignored. And many more.
The net result is an extraordinary contribution to the literature of social injustice. In his years at The New York Times, Barry, twice a finalist there for the Pulitzer Prize and once a member of a Providence Journal team that won one, has written extensively of social issues, of servitude and salvation of many kinds.
Barry has written three other books: “City Lights,” essays about New York; “Lift Me Up,” a memoir; and “Bottom of the 33rd,” about baseball’s longest game, won by the Pawtucket Red Sox. All fine books, but his latest overshadows them all. We still have months to go in 2016, but “The Boys in the Bunkhouse” surely will emerge as one of the landmark books of the year.
To hear Barry discuss “The Boys in the Bunkhouse” and his other writing, watch an episode of “Story in the Public Square TV,” a monthly feature of the national PBS show White House Chronicle: whchronicle.com/?p=3265
—Journal staff writer and “Story in the Public Square” director G. Wayne Miller is the author, most recently, of “Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age.”
June 9, 2016
Another failed promise
I have spent much of my career in journalism writing about social-justice issues, highlighting programs and people who have done good, and exposing systems that have failed those needy and vulnerable members of society they were intended to serve.
My continuing series "Mental Health in Rhode Island" examines the current status of the treatment and care of children and adults living with mental illness -- many of them poor and lacking the means themselves to better their lives. A total system failure. Total disgrace.
This year, I turned my attention to the system that is supposed to serve intellectually and developmentally disabled people. That system was once a national model -- but, like the parallel system that serves people living with mental illness, is now in shambles.
Here is my exposé, published in The Providence Journal online on May 20, 2016, and on the front page of the Sunday Journal on May 22, 2016.
Care in crisis for R.I.'s intellectually and developmentally disabled
The way R.I. cares for people with developmental disabilities was once a model for the nation. Today it's a system in crisis.
Caregivers Rachel Morgan, supervisor for a Perspectives group home, and Carrie Manne, a direct support professional, interact with group home resident Danielle DeGregorio, right, by playing the drums. Providence Journal/Bob Breidenbach
By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer Posted May. 20, 2016 at 6:22 pmUpdated May 20, 2016 at 6:23 PM
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Years of budget cuts and failed government leadership have diminished Rhode Island's system of care for intellectually and developmentally disabled people from a national model two decades ago into a deeply troubled system today where financial considerations, not quality of life, often are the deciding factor.
And many individuals and families largely without voice, wealth or political power – some of them among Rhode Island's most vulnerable residents – have been imperiled.
That is the conclusion of a Providence Journal investigation that began following the February death, allegedly from staff abuse, of Barbara A. Annis, 70. She was a resident of a group home run by the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH), which funds and regulates the state's developmental disabilities system.
Among The Journal's findings:
— From 2008 through today, funding for services to the intellectually and developmentally disabled dropped from $260.2 million to $230.9 million even as the statewide numbers of those people remained roughly the same. That is an inflation-adjusted decrease of almost $60 million, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
— A $26.1-million cut from 2011 to 2012 — a decrease of nearly 11 percent in that single year – proved particularly punishing to private agencies that rely on funding set by BHDDH. These agencies, which serve about 4,000 people, have never fully recovered.
— Pay for direct-care staff in the private sector of the BHDDH-funded system averages under $12 an hour, or less than $23,000 annually, for a full-time position. The average janitor in America earns more, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
— As a result, hundreds of these direct-care workers — some with life-and-death responsibilities — must work second or third jobs. Many receive government assistance such as from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
— Motivated by the humanitarian "desire to support people with special and unique needs," a majority of these private workers want to stay in the field but more than half say the low pay may give them no choice but to leave, a 2015 Community Providers Network of Rhode Island survey found.
— The state still does not comply with a 2014 federal Department of Justice consent decree in which it agreed to correct gross violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Last week, District Court Judge John J. McConnell Jr. threatened fines of up to $1 million a year if the state does not meet a series of more than 20 compliance benchmarks, most in the next few weeks.
— These factors have combined to place Rhode Island 39th overall of the 50 states and District of Columbia, according to United Cerebral Palsy's 2015 Case for Inclusion study, which measures quality of life. The state ranked 36th in the critical Reaching Those in Need metric.
One of the nation's leading experts on developmental disability, A. Anthony Antosh, professor of special education at Rhode Island College and director of the school's Paul V. Sherlock Center on Disabilities, summarizes the situation this way:
"We went from a decently functioning system that was community-based, that was humane, that encouraged individual choice and that was considered to be one of the best in the country to a system that is underfunded, has poorly paid staff and a significant number of staff shortages, mostly because of budget cuts over several years and a set of regulations and policies that limited options, decreased supports for many people, and made it really hard to run a quality system."
For much of the 20th century, the Ladd Center, in Exeter, was the primary provider of care to many of the state's developmentally disabled residents. Founded in 1907 as a compassionate alternative to prisons and poorhouses, Ladd degenerated into an institution where indignity, neglect and abuse were rife. At its height, more than 1,000 people were warehoused there.
In 1956, The Providence Journal began publishing investigative stories. A new Journal series started in 1977 revealed that the institution remained underfunded and understaffed, fire protection was dangerously deficient, residents’ teeth were routinely extracted without anesthetic and doctors failed to diagnose infections, diabetes and broken limbs. Several deaths had resulted.
Relatives filed a federal class-action lawsuit, advocates pressured, legislators and governors responded, and the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals (MHRH), BHDDH's predecessor, built a model community system which statewide voters endorsed – not only philosophically, but with tens of millions of bond dollars. On March 25, 1994, Ladd closed.
"The beast is dead," Robert L. Carl Jr., who headed MHRH's Division of Developmental Disabilities, said on that final day. "Nazi Germany killed these people. Rhode Island made a commitment to treat them with dignity and respect."
For years, the community system remained a national leader as shocking headlines receded into the past. Then, as the economy soured, "fiscal responsibility" became a mantra.
Developmental disability services received $260.2 million in 2008 for a caseload of 4,381 individuals. During the next four years, funding declined annually, dropping to $216.5 million in 2012 – a decrease of $43.7 million, or nearly 20 percent. The caseload was relatively stable.
Meanwhile, several senior developmental disabilities officials – people who carried institutional wisdom from Ladd's dark days – left BHDDH, lost to retirement or objection to what was happening. A similar scenario was unfolding in the state's once-proud community mental-health system, which today also is troubled.
And legislative champions had all but disappeared from the General Assembly. The last tireless one, Rep. Paul Sherlock, considered the father of special education in Rhode Island, died in 2004 after serving for a quarter of a century.
After that, says Antosh, whose workplace bears the late representative's name, "there essentially were no more legislative advocates, at least not with the oomph that Sherlock had."
The director of BHDDH during much of this period was Craig S. Stenning, who became director in 2008 after joining the department in 2000. Previously, he was founder and CEO of CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, which specializes in substance-abuse treatment, and a politician: Cranston School Committee chairman from 1978 to 1982, a member of the Cranston City Council from 1982 to 1992.
Lincoln D. Chafee had not yet begun his term as governor when he announced, in December 2010, that he was retaining Stenning.
"BHDDH is one of the state's most important departments, providing care and support for some of our most vulnerable citizens," Chafee said. "With our state facing fiscal uncertainty, we must seek out reduced costs and savings — but not at the expense of the services disadvantaged Rhode Islanders depend on. I feel confident that Craig can accomplish that difficult but necessary task."
Stenning, left, and Chafee, center.
On Chafee's and Stenning's watch, funding for BHDDH's Developmental Disabilities Program declined from $242.6 million in the 2011 fiscal year to $239.5 million in 2015, while the caseload dropped from 4,381 to 4,018. The 2012 year, however, told the critical story.
That's when the $26.1-million cut forced private providers to lay off staff, cut wages, reduce training and eliminate or reduce services including speech and physical therapy. In his proposed 2012 budget, Chafee had recommended a less severe cut: of $18.2 million, or 7.5 percent. But under the leadership of former Speaker Gordon Fox, now serving time in prison on federal corruption charges, the House approved the larger decrease. The BHDDH budget climbed incrementally in each of the next three years.
Stenning, now an executive with New York-based Fedcap, a social-services organization, declined a request for an interview but said he would consider questions submitted in writing. When he received seven questions by email, he declined to answer any.
Chafee, however, was willing to comment.
In an interview last week, he said that the 2012 budget year was an unusually "tough" one, and his priority was reversing certain policies adopted by his predecessor, Donald Carcieri. "Higher education and the cities and towns had just taken massive cuts.”
The Department of Justice's involvement in Rhode Island's system of care to intellectually and developmentally disabled people began in January 2013, when its Civil Rights Division initiated an investigation. A year later, the division concluded the state was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act — which had passed in 1990 with the enthusiastic support of the late Sen. John H. Chafee, Lincoln's father.
"Over twenty years ago," the Department wrote in a 32-page report, "Rhode Island was a national leader in shifting its state service system away from segregated residential care. The State closed its state institution for individuals with developmental disabilities, the Ladd School, ‘through strong collaboration with multiple stakeholders, including self-advocates, family members … providers, and community leaders.'"
That was then.
Citing the "the state's failure to develop a sufficient quantity of integrated transition, employment, vocational and day services and supports for individuals with I/DD," the department on Jan. 6, 2014, threatened to sue if the state did not move toward ADA compliance.
Three months later, Rhode Island signed a 36-page consent decree outlining a 10-year-plan of correction. Today, it still does not comply with the decree, and that prompted Judge McConnell to issue last week’s stern warning.
"The violation of the ADA is essentially caused by the failure of the state to provide resources," says Antosh. Had there not been this chronic "absence," he asserts, "I do not believe the Department of Justice would have ever come to the state."
Budget cuts have been especially harsh on Rhode Island's roughly 30 state-funded private providers, which serve the vast majority of the state's intellectually and developmentally disabled population.
The largest provider, North Kingstown-based Perspectives Corporation, saw revenues for its 24-hour programs decline from $14 million in 2006 to $10.5 million last year. During the period, the residential population actually rose – from 139 to 149 – while staff declined, from 439 to 326.
More staff reductions, Perspectives founder and CEO David C. Ruppell believed, would have jeopardized safety. Even though it prides itself on the quality of its staff training, Perspectives was forced to reduce it, while also eliminating or cutting back on occupational, physical and speech therapies.
Perspectives group home resident Robert Rendine, right, with Ruppell.
"You can't get rid of all your direct-care staff and all your administrators," says Ruppell. "You can't get rid of your financial people because they have to do the crazy billing. So a lot of training was cut."
And wages stagnated. Starting pay for direct-care staff at Perspectives is $11 an hour, one of the more generous rates among private providers.
"We're competing with McDonalds," Ruppell says. "That's who is helping and taking care of our most disabled people in the state."
Among them is Danielle DeGregorio, 33, who lives in a Perspectives group home in East Greenwich. Danielle has a severe developmental disability, along with anxiety and mood disorders. She has lived at the home since she was a teenager. She enjoys drumming and animals, visits with her father, and is known for her sense of humor.
Some consumers, advocates and relatives have protested the cuts, but fear of retribution has silenced others, Ruppell says. "Under the last administration, parents found if they complained too much the funding to their child was suddenly cut. They didn't have to do it very many times to scare the bejesus out of these moms and dads."
Approximately 4,000 people are employed in the private system, according to the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island; they serve about 3,800 people.
A much smaller number of employees, approximately 370, work in BHDDH's Rhode Island Community Living and Supports (RICLAS) division, which ran the group home, since closed, where Barbara Annis lived. They serve an even smaller number of people: 152, according to BHDDH.
These unionized state workers are paid more than private staff: a community living aide, for example, earns from $35,668 to $38,744 a year (not including overtime), compared with less than $23,000 annually for the a direct-care worker in the non-unionized private sector.
According to House Finance Committee data, BHDDH currently spends $51,257 per person for services provided by community-based programs. The cost per person for programs operated directly by the state – including the 152 individuals in RICLAS homes – was more than triple, $175,383 per person. The substantial medical needs of some of these people in RICLAS homes account for some of the greater costs.
Nonetheless, this disparity has been a factor in the state's improper use of the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS) assessment tool, endorsed by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, a professional organization headquartered in Washington. Designed to determine an individual's needs, not the cost of services required to meet them, the state has used the scale to move some people to a lower-need tier only to save dollars.
In its January 2014 report, the Department of Justice chastised the state for this misuse of SIS, noting that BHDDH both administers the SIS system and determines funding: "This is a seeming conflict of interest because the need to keep consumers' resource allocations within budget may influence staff to administer the SIS in a way that reaches the pre-determined budgetary result."
Providers and many families assert that BHDHH continues to do just that by arbitrarily recategorizing. And while appeals are possible and sometimes granted, the appeal process, they say, is frustratingly complex and can take weeks or months – during which needed services may be withheld.
Governor Raimondo was in office just hours in January 2015 when she announced she would not reappoint Stenning. His successor, Maria Montanaro — former CEO of Thundermist Health Center and then CEO of Magellan Healthcare of Iowa — was similarly disturbed by what she found inside the department, even before she officially started work.
"It's a challenging environment, made all the more challenging by some of the crises that greeted me when I came in the door," Montanaro said on Feb. 26, 2015, when the Senate Health and Human Services Committee unanimously recommended her confirmation.
The reality was worse than she imagined, Montanaro says she discovered after a few weeks on the job.
"I didn't realize the state of affairs that I was inheriting in DD, which was a system that had been chronically underfunded for the better part of a decade," she said last week. "Some of those cuts were so devastating to the private-sector system that the capacity for us to actually care for individuals as we are required under the Medicaid rules was really in serious jeopardy."
Today, she says, "we have a lot of challenges in the DD department to take the existing resources that are budgeted to us and really meet the mandates of service. That has been noted by the court monitor for the DOJ consent decree as well as the judge as well as all of us within the department. And that is: we really need investments made in the DD system."
The Developmental Disabilities Program enacted budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30 was $230.9 million, a decrease of $8.6 million, or 3.5 percent, from the year before. Funding rises $4.3 million, or almost 2 percent, in the governor's proposed 2017 budget, now before the General Assembly; the increase would support a 45-cent hourly raise in the private sector. Reductions in residential programs would free almost $16.2 million for other private-provider programs.
"We have an administration now that recognizes the problems resulting from chronic reductions in funding and is taking steps to correct the current trajectory," Donna Martin, executive director of the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island, tells The Journal. "Unfortunately, it will take some time to rebound from so many years of fiscal deprivation and the lack of a clear vision for integrated, community-based services."
———
By the numbers:
$260.2 million: R.I. spending in 2008 on developmental disabilities
$230.9 million: What state will spend in fiscal 2016
$58.2 million: Inflation-adjusted decrease
$1 million: Potential annual federal fine
— gwmiller@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7380
On Twitter: @GWayneMiller
And this ran as a sidebar:
Abused former Ladd resident loves current group home, upset by cut
By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer Posted May. 20, 2016 @ 6:22 pm
NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Richard Rendine's alcoholic mother treated him cruelly when he was a young child.
"She smacked me, hit me. She vacuum-broomed me," he says. "That's why my godfather put me in Ladd School. Because I kind of hurt."
Along with his brother, Rendine, 66, was sent to the Ladd Center, Rhode Island's now-closed institution for intellectually and developmentally disabled people, in 1958. He stayed two decades, coming of age during a period when Ladd residents were routinely abused and neglected. Some died as a result.
Rendine was not spared.
"They were doing bad things to me down there when I was a kid," he says. "I was child-abused by my mother. And I was child-abused by them down there."
In 1978, Rendine moved from Ladd to a group home. He lives in one now, in Wakefield, operated by Perspectives Corporation.
He has a girlfriend. He enjoys hiking, walking on the beach, listening to his albums.
Favorite groups?
"The Beach Boys. The Monkees. The Four Tops. The Beatles. Elvis Presley. And Michael Jackson. And Steve Wonder. And the one who died in the last month: Prince."
Life is good. But it used to be better.
"When the budget cuts came, we had less staff," says Perspectives CEO David Ruppell. "Richard would come to me and say, 'I feel like I'd like to get out in the community a little bit more. What can you do about the staffing?' And I didn't have a good answer for him because we had gotten rid of extra hours. We had to maintain safety at the house."
Gone, too, was another hope.
"I don't have much money," Rendine says. "I need a job. I don't have one."
"He would need a lot of support" in the workplace, says Ruppell. "And those supports aren't really there."
"We need more staff at my house," Rendine says. "We have six clients. Before, we had a big room.
Now they cut my room in half. I used to have a big room, now they made it half and half."
His reaction to the millions in statewide budget reductions that have led him here?
"It's just the state throwing these cuts. I don't know why. It's about money, I guess. Money, yup."
— gwmiller@providencejournal.com
(4010 277-7380
On Twitter: @GWayneMiller
My continuing series "Mental Health in Rhode Island" examines the current status of the treatment and care of children and adults living with mental illness -- many of them poor and lacking the means themselves to better their lives. A total system failure. Total disgrace.
This year, I turned my attention to the system that is supposed to serve intellectually and developmentally disabled people. That system was once a national model -- but, like the parallel system that serves people living with mental illness, is now in shambles.
Here is my exposé, published in The Providence Journal online on May 20, 2016, and on the front page of the Sunday Journal on May 22, 2016.
Care in crisis for R.I.'s intellectually and developmentally disabled
The way R.I. cares for people with developmental disabilities was once a model for the nation. Today it's a system in crisis.
Caregivers Rachel Morgan, supervisor for a Perspectives group home, and Carrie Manne, a direct support professional, interact with group home resident Danielle DeGregorio, right, by playing the drums. Providence Journal/Bob BreidenbachBy G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer Posted May. 20, 2016 at 6:22 pmUpdated May 20, 2016 at 6:23 PM
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Years of budget cuts and failed government leadership have diminished Rhode Island's system of care for intellectually and developmentally disabled people from a national model two decades ago into a deeply troubled system today where financial considerations, not quality of life, often are the deciding factor.
And many individuals and families largely without voice, wealth or political power – some of them among Rhode Island's most vulnerable residents – have been imperiled.
That is the conclusion of a Providence Journal investigation that began following the February death, allegedly from staff abuse, of Barbara A. Annis, 70. She was a resident of a group home run by the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH), which funds and regulates the state's developmental disabilities system.
Among The Journal's findings:
— From 2008 through today, funding for services to the intellectually and developmentally disabled dropped from $260.2 million to $230.9 million even as the statewide numbers of those people remained roughly the same. That is an inflation-adjusted decrease of almost $60 million, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
— A $26.1-million cut from 2011 to 2012 — a decrease of nearly 11 percent in that single year – proved particularly punishing to private agencies that rely on funding set by BHDDH. These agencies, which serve about 4,000 people, have never fully recovered.
— Pay for direct-care staff in the private sector of the BHDDH-funded system averages under $12 an hour, or less than $23,000 annually, for a full-time position. The average janitor in America earns more, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
— As a result, hundreds of these direct-care workers — some with life-and-death responsibilities — must work second or third jobs. Many receive government assistance such as from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
— Motivated by the humanitarian "desire to support people with special and unique needs," a majority of these private workers want to stay in the field but more than half say the low pay may give them no choice but to leave, a 2015 Community Providers Network of Rhode Island survey found.
— The state still does not comply with a 2014 federal Department of Justice consent decree in which it agreed to correct gross violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Last week, District Court Judge John J. McConnell Jr. threatened fines of up to $1 million a year if the state does not meet a series of more than 20 compliance benchmarks, most in the next few weeks.
— These factors have combined to place Rhode Island 39th overall of the 50 states and District of Columbia, according to United Cerebral Palsy's 2015 Case for Inclusion study, which measures quality of life. The state ranked 36th in the critical Reaching Those in Need metric.
One of the nation's leading experts on developmental disability, A. Anthony Antosh, professor of special education at Rhode Island College and director of the school's Paul V. Sherlock Center on Disabilities, summarizes the situation this way:
"We went from a decently functioning system that was community-based, that was humane, that encouraged individual choice and that was considered to be one of the best in the country to a system that is underfunded, has poorly paid staff and a significant number of staff shortages, mostly because of budget cuts over several years and a set of regulations and policies that limited options, decreased supports for many people, and made it really hard to run a quality system."
For much of the 20th century, the Ladd Center, in Exeter, was the primary provider of care to many of the state's developmentally disabled residents. Founded in 1907 as a compassionate alternative to prisons and poorhouses, Ladd degenerated into an institution where indignity, neglect and abuse were rife. At its height, more than 1,000 people were warehoused there.
In 1956, The Providence Journal began publishing investigative stories. A new Journal series started in 1977 revealed that the institution remained underfunded and understaffed, fire protection was dangerously deficient, residents’ teeth were routinely extracted without anesthetic and doctors failed to diagnose infections, diabetes and broken limbs. Several deaths had resulted.
Relatives filed a federal class-action lawsuit, advocates pressured, legislators and governors responded, and the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals (MHRH), BHDDH's predecessor, built a model community system which statewide voters endorsed – not only philosophically, but with tens of millions of bond dollars. On March 25, 1994, Ladd closed.
"The beast is dead," Robert L. Carl Jr., who headed MHRH's Division of Developmental Disabilities, said on that final day. "Nazi Germany killed these people. Rhode Island made a commitment to treat them with dignity and respect."
For years, the community system remained a national leader as shocking headlines receded into the past. Then, as the economy soured, "fiscal responsibility" became a mantra.
Developmental disability services received $260.2 million in 2008 for a caseload of 4,381 individuals. During the next four years, funding declined annually, dropping to $216.5 million in 2012 – a decrease of $43.7 million, or nearly 20 percent. The caseload was relatively stable.
Meanwhile, several senior developmental disabilities officials – people who carried institutional wisdom from Ladd's dark days – left BHDDH, lost to retirement or objection to what was happening. A similar scenario was unfolding in the state's once-proud community mental-health system, which today also is troubled.
And legislative champions had all but disappeared from the General Assembly. The last tireless one, Rep. Paul Sherlock, considered the father of special education in Rhode Island, died in 2004 after serving for a quarter of a century.
After that, says Antosh, whose workplace bears the late representative's name, "there essentially were no more legislative advocates, at least not with the oomph that Sherlock had."
The director of BHDDH during much of this period was Craig S. Stenning, who became director in 2008 after joining the department in 2000. Previously, he was founder and CEO of CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, which specializes in substance-abuse treatment, and a politician: Cranston School Committee chairman from 1978 to 1982, a member of the Cranston City Council from 1982 to 1992.
Lincoln D. Chafee had not yet begun his term as governor when he announced, in December 2010, that he was retaining Stenning.
"BHDDH is one of the state's most important departments, providing care and support for some of our most vulnerable citizens," Chafee said. "With our state facing fiscal uncertainty, we must seek out reduced costs and savings — but not at the expense of the services disadvantaged Rhode Islanders depend on. I feel confident that Craig can accomplish that difficult but necessary task."
Stenning, left, and Chafee, center.On Chafee's and Stenning's watch, funding for BHDDH's Developmental Disabilities Program declined from $242.6 million in the 2011 fiscal year to $239.5 million in 2015, while the caseload dropped from 4,381 to 4,018. The 2012 year, however, told the critical story.
That's when the $26.1-million cut forced private providers to lay off staff, cut wages, reduce training and eliminate or reduce services including speech and physical therapy. In his proposed 2012 budget, Chafee had recommended a less severe cut: of $18.2 million, or 7.5 percent. But under the leadership of former Speaker Gordon Fox, now serving time in prison on federal corruption charges, the House approved the larger decrease. The BHDDH budget climbed incrementally in each of the next three years.
Stenning, now an executive with New York-based Fedcap, a social-services organization, declined a request for an interview but said he would consider questions submitted in writing. When he received seven questions by email, he declined to answer any.
Chafee, however, was willing to comment.
In an interview last week, he said that the 2012 budget year was an unusually "tough" one, and his priority was reversing certain policies adopted by his predecessor, Donald Carcieri. "Higher education and the cities and towns had just taken massive cuts.”
The Department of Justice's involvement in Rhode Island's system of care to intellectually and developmentally disabled people began in January 2013, when its Civil Rights Division initiated an investigation. A year later, the division concluded the state was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act — which had passed in 1990 with the enthusiastic support of the late Sen. John H. Chafee, Lincoln's father.
"Over twenty years ago," the Department wrote in a 32-page report, "Rhode Island was a national leader in shifting its state service system away from segregated residential care. The State closed its state institution for individuals with developmental disabilities, the Ladd School, ‘through strong collaboration with multiple stakeholders, including self-advocates, family members … providers, and community leaders.'"
That was then.
Citing the "the state's failure to develop a sufficient quantity of integrated transition, employment, vocational and day services and supports for individuals with I/DD," the department on Jan. 6, 2014, threatened to sue if the state did not move toward ADA compliance.
Three months later, Rhode Island signed a 36-page consent decree outlining a 10-year-plan of correction. Today, it still does not comply with the decree, and that prompted Judge McConnell to issue last week’s stern warning.
"The violation of the ADA is essentially caused by the failure of the state to provide resources," says Antosh. Had there not been this chronic "absence," he asserts, "I do not believe the Department of Justice would have ever come to the state."
Budget cuts have been especially harsh on Rhode Island's roughly 30 state-funded private providers, which serve the vast majority of the state's intellectually and developmentally disabled population.
The largest provider, North Kingstown-based Perspectives Corporation, saw revenues for its 24-hour programs decline from $14 million in 2006 to $10.5 million last year. During the period, the residential population actually rose – from 139 to 149 – while staff declined, from 439 to 326.
More staff reductions, Perspectives founder and CEO David C. Ruppell believed, would have jeopardized safety. Even though it prides itself on the quality of its staff training, Perspectives was forced to reduce it, while also eliminating or cutting back on occupational, physical and speech therapies.
Perspectives group home resident Robert Rendine, right, with Ruppell."You can't get rid of all your direct-care staff and all your administrators," says Ruppell. "You can't get rid of your financial people because they have to do the crazy billing. So a lot of training was cut."
And wages stagnated. Starting pay for direct-care staff at Perspectives is $11 an hour, one of the more generous rates among private providers.
"We're competing with McDonalds," Ruppell says. "That's who is helping and taking care of our most disabled people in the state."
Among them is Danielle DeGregorio, 33, who lives in a Perspectives group home in East Greenwich. Danielle has a severe developmental disability, along with anxiety and mood disorders. She has lived at the home since she was a teenager. She enjoys drumming and animals, visits with her father, and is known for her sense of humor.
Some consumers, advocates and relatives have protested the cuts, but fear of retribution has silenced others, Ruppell says. "Under the last administration, parents found if they complained too much the funding to their child was suddenly cut. They didn't have to do it very many times to scare the bejesus out of these moms and dads."
Approximately 4,000 people are employed in the private system, according to the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island; they serve about 3,800 people.
A much smaller number of employees, approximately 370, work in BHDDH's Rhode Island Community Living and Supports (RICLAS) division, which ran the group home, since closed, where Barbara Annis lived. They serve an even smaller number of people: 152, according to BHDDH.
These unionized state workers are paid more than private staff: a community living aide, for example, earns from $35,668 to $38,744 a year (not including overtime), compared with less than $23,000 annually for the a direct-care worker in the non-unionized private sector.
According to House Finance Committee data, BHDDH currently spends $51,257 per person for services provided by community-based programs. The cost per person for programs operated directly by the state – including the 152 individuals in RICLAS homes – was more than triple, $175,383 per person. The substantial medical needs of some of these people in RICLAS homes account for some of the greater costs.
Nonetheless, this disparity has been a factor in the state's improper use of the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS) assessment tool, endorsed by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, a professional organization headquartered in Washington. Designed to determine an individual's needs, not the cost of services required to meet them, the state has used the scale to move some people to a lower-need tier only to save dollars.
In its January 2014 report, the Department of Justice chastised the state for this misuse of SIS, noting that BHDDH both administers the SIS system and determines funding: "This is a seeming conflict of interest because the need to keep consumers' resource allocations within budget may influence staff to administer the SIS in a way that reaches the pre-determined budgetary result."
Providers and many families assert that BHDHH continues to do just that by arbitrarily recategorizing. And while appeals are possible and sometimes granted, the appeal process, they say, is frustratingly complex and can take weeks or months – during which needed services may be withheld.
Governor Raimondo was in office just hours in January 2015 when she announced she would not reappoint Stenning. His successor, Maria Montanaro — former CEO of Thundermist Health Center and then CEO of Magellan Healthcare of Iowa — was similarly disturbed by what she found inside the department, even before she officially started work.
"It's a challenging environment, made all the more challenging by some of the crises that greeted me when I came in the door," Montanaro said on Feb. 26, 2015, when the Senate Health and Human Services Committee unanimously recommended her confirmation.
The reality was worse than she imagined, Montanaro says she discovered after a few weeks on the job.
"I didn't realize the state of affairs that I was inheriting in DD, which was a system that had been chronically underfunded for the better part of a decade," she said last week. "Some of those cuts were so devastating to the private-sector system that the capacity for us to actually care for individuals as we are required under the Medicaid rules was really in serious jeopardy."
Today, she says, "we have a lot of challenges in the DD department to take the existing resources that are budgeted to us and really meet the mandates of service. That has been noted by the court monitor for the DOJ consent decree as well as the judge as well as all of us within the department. And that is: we really need investments made in the DD system."
The Developmental Disabilities Program enacted budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30 was $230.9 million, a decrease of $8.6 million, or 3.5 percent, from the year before. Funding rises $4.3 million, or almost 2 percent, in the governor's proposed 2017 budget, now before the General Assembly; the increase would support a 45-cent hourly raise in the private sector. Reductions in residential programs would free almost $16.2 million for other private-provider programs.
"We have an administration now that recognizes the problems resulting from chronic reductions in funding and is taking steps to correct the current trajectory," Donna Martin, executive director of the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island, tells The Journal. "Unfortunately, it will take some time to rebound from so many years of fiscal deprivation and the lack of a clear vision for integrated, community-based services."
———
By the numbers:
$260.2 million: R.I. spending in 2008 on developmental disabilities
$230.9 million: What state will spend in fiscal 2016
$58.2 million: Inflation-adjusted decrease
$1 million: Potential annual federal fine
— gwmiller@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7380
On Twitter: @GWayneMiller
And this ran as a sidebar:
Abused former Ladd resident loves current group home, upset by cut
By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer Posted May. 20, 2016 @ 6:22 pm
NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Richard Rendine's alcoholic mother treated him cruelly when he was a young child.
"She smacked me, hit me. She vacuum-broomed me," he says. "That's why my godfather put me in Ladd School. Because I kind of hurt."
Along with his brother, Rendine, 66, was sent to the Ladd Center, Rhode Island's now-closed institution for intellectually and developmentally disabled people, in 1958. He stayed two decades, coming of age during a period when Ladd residents were routinely abused and neglected. Some died as a result.
Rendine was not spared.
"They were doing bad things to me down there when I was a kid," he says. "I was child-abused by my mother. And I was child-abused by them down there."
In 1978, Rendine moved from Ladd to a group home. He lives in one now, in Wakefield, operated by Perspectives Corporation.
He has a girlfriend. He enjoys hiking, walking on the beach, listening to his albums.
Favorite groups?
"The Beach Boys. The Monkees. The Four Tops. The Beatles. Elvis Presley. And Michael Jackson. And Steve Wonder. And the one who died in the last month: Prince."
Life is good. But it used to be better.
"When the budget cuts came, we had less staff," says Perspectives CEO David Ruppell. "Richard would come to me and say, 'I feel like I'd like to get out in the community a little bit more. What can you do about the staffing?' And I didn't have a good answer for him because we had gotten rid of extra hours. We had to maintain safety at the house."
Gone, too, was another hope.
"I don't have much money," Rendine says. "I need a job. I don't have one."
"He would need a lot of support" in the workplace, says Ruppell. "And those supports aren't really there."
"We need more staff at my house," Rendine says. "We have six clients. Before, we had a big room.
Now they cut my room in half. I used to have a big room, now they made it half and half."
His reaction to the millions in statewide budget reductions that have led him here?
"It's just the state throwing these cuts. I don't know why. It's about money, I guess. Money, yup."
— gwmiller@providencejournal.com
(4010 277-7380
On Twitter: @GWayneMiller
May 20, 2016
EgyptAir now, EgyptAir then
The crash this week of EgyptAir Flight 804 brings to mind the 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, in waters off Rhode Island, as fellow journalists and former Projo staffers including Farnaz Fassihi, now with The Wall Street Journal, have reminded me. Herewith two stories -- one by me, another by Farnaz --from that long-ago crash.
And at the end, a few photos from that terrible time...
EgyptAir Flight 990 - Amid the grief, recovery begins - Jetliner's crash sparks outpouring of support
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: November 2, 1999 Page: A-01 Section: News Edition: All
With the world its audience, Rhode Island yesterday became the stage for one of the most heart-wrenching dramas of the modern age: the aftermath of a jetliner crash in which all aboard perished.
Grieving relatives, crowds of officials, and a crush of journalists converged on the state as the last hope of finding any survivors of the 217 people on EgyptAir Flight 990 was officially extinguished.
Efforts now turn to recovering wreckage and human remains, consoling the bereaved, and attempting to solve the mystery of what happened early Halloween morning in the moonlit sky off Massachusetts.
Having just buried a favorite son, Sen. John H. Chafee, Rhode Island now is experiencing a more gruesome and protracted ritual of death. Recovery and identification of victims, in a temporary morgue being opened at the former Navy complex at Quonset Point/Davisville, could take weeks.
Determining what caused the Boeing 767 jet to suddenly plunge more than six miles to destruction south of Nantucket, after leaving New York on a flight to Cairo, almost certainly will take longer. No distress call was received from the doomed jetliner and data recorders have not been recovered, although officials are hopeful they will be.
"I know all of Rhode Island will open its hearts to the victims from wherever they come, and do what it can to make this less painful," Governor Almond said during a late-afternoon news conference at search headquarters at the Navy base in Newport. Apparently, no victims were from Rhode Island.
"After events like this, there are hundreds of people who have suffered the ultimate loss," said James T. Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has charge of the investigation. "Many of these people are coming to the scene."
By nightfall, some two dozen relatives and friends, many carrying medical records and photographs and accompanied by clergy, Red Cross counselors, police officers, and representatives of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani already had arrived by chartered plane from New York and traveled by bus to Newport's Doubletree Islander Hotel, which the NTSB designated a Family Assistance Center. More relatives are expected to arrive in Rhode Island today, including some accompanying the president of EgyptAir, and state officials were busy finding more rooms at other hotels and inns.
Cairo resident Tamer Omar was with the first group to reach Rhode Island; his brother, Hashem Omar, an EgyptAir pilot, was a passenger on Flight 990.
"Did I ever imagine I would come to this foreign place in search of my brother's body?" Omar said as he rode the bus to Newport. "If we ever find a body?"
"A lot of the family members probably haven't slept," said Red Cross spokesman Brett Davey. "They're in disbelief, shock, angry. They probably need someone to talk to."
MEANWHILE, as operations shifted from rescue to recovery, the government mobilized the sophisticated equipment and vessels needed for a long, treacherous mission in waters that are some 250 feet deep. They also prepared a hangar at Quonset to receive pieces of the doomed aircraft what Hall called a "jigsaw puzzle of 50,000 pieces." Another official said that no reconstruction of the aircraft is planned, at least not at this time.
Although weather in the area where the jet went down has been fair since Sunday, seas were expected to pick up today as rain and possible gale-force wind approaches. And winter is coming in an area of the Atlantic notorious for its vicious northeasters and nautical disasters.
Bill Campbell, a veteran diver and undersea photographer who has been to the bottom near the roughly 40-square-mile search area about 50 miles south of Nantucket, said the environment poses the biggest challenge.
"If there's a strong tide or groundswell," said Campbell, "it can be tough out there."
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel Whiting has already arrived in Newport, carrying side scan sonar that will allow it to look for debris on the ocean floor. The Navy vessel Grapple is expected to arrive this morning and load a remote operating vehicle that will allow it to explore possible targets picked by the Whiting, officers said.
Also, the Navy vessel Mohawk is en route - carrying special instruments to allow it to find the "ping" emitted by the jetliner's flight recorder. It, too, is armed with side scan sonar and a submersible vehicle. Searchers have located a signal, most likely from one of the plane's so-called black boxes.
They also recovered one body, its identity so far undisclosed and apparently unknown. The body was taken to Quonset Point yesterday morning by the Coast Guard Cutter Monomoy, an officer said.
Assisted by student sailors from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy who happened to be in the area, crews of Coast Guard ships and aircraft have also recovered debris including what one Coast Guard officer described as a "significant piece" of the aircraft, large enough to require a crane.
They also have found evacuation slides, life preservers and shoes, purses, and teddy bears.
"It basically looked like somebody had emptied their trash Dumpster," said one of the Merchant Academy student sailors, Chris Kincaid.
None of the retrieved debris has any burn marks that might indicate a fire or explosion, said officials, who refused to speculate on the cause.
Authorities stressed there was no evidence of foul play but because terrorism has not been ruled out, the FBI said it is sending bomb experts and other investigators to Newport. Starting early Sunday, FBI agents swarmed over airports in Los Angeles and the New York metropolitan area where the jetliner landed and took off on what was intended to be a long journey from Cairo to the United States and back.
"Nothing has been ruled in, nothing has been ruled out," President Clinton said in Oslo, Norway, where he was attending Middle East peace talks.
Among the passengers on Flight 990 which went down without any indication of trouble from the pilots were about 30 Egyptian military officers who had been training in the United States, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said.
The passengers also included several Egyptians and Canadians, and 106 Americans including 54 people bound for a two-week trip to Egypt and the Nile. None apparently was from Rhode Island, but at least five lived in Connecticut. A couple who split their time between homes in Vermont and Maine also died.
RHODE ISLAND is enveloped in this emerging drama by virtue of its proximity to the crash site, and the existence of large air and sea bases on both sides of deepwater Narragansett Bay capable of supporting such a massive operation. The early search was run from Coast Guard headquarters in Boston and a station on Cape Cod.
Initially, the Coast Guard looked for survivors regardless of how remote that possibility seemed, especially in light of how precipitously the jetliner left the sky. Radar showed that the aircraft dropped more than two miles in just over half a minute a descent one aviation expert described as falling "like a rock."
Any lingering hope that anyone could have lived disappeared early yesterday afternoon when Rear Adm. Richard M. Larrabee, commander of the First Coast Guard District, stepped to the microphones and told reporters in Newport: "We believe at this point it is in everyone's best interest to no longer expect to find survivors."
Larrabee confirmed the recovery of one body, and said Coast Guard searchers "have begun to see evidence of further human remains," but he declined to elaborate.
"Our frustration is we would have liked to find people who survived," said Larrabee. "I can't express our feelings more strongly."
NOT FOUR HOURS after Larrabee spoke, NTSB chief Hall convened a second news conference at the Navy base in Newport.
By then, the media throng was reminiscent of three other air tragedies in recent years in the region: the downing of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, N.Y., in July 1996; the loss of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia in September 1998; and the crash of the small plane carrying John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and her sister off Martha's Vineyard this past July.
Support staff at the Newport base said they've added 140 phone lines for journalists and 39 television cameras greeted speakers at the second news conference. Every major American newspaper and network was represented, along with journalists from Spain, France, Canada and Japan and untold others certain to arrive overnight and today.
In his remarks, Hall introduced some of the 500 to 1,000 NTSB, Navy, NOAA, FBI and Coast Guard personnel who eventually will be in Rhode Island or working with those who are.
"The primary purpose that I came to Rhode Island today was to ask Governor Almond if his state would open their communities to the families of this terrible tragedy," Hall said. "The governor and I discussed the arrival of family members from Egypt and around the world who will appear in Rhode Island tomorrow."
Almond said Hall called him Sunday and told him Rhode Island would be at the center of the investigation.
Barry Mawn, a special agent for the FBI, asked local people to keep their eyes open for possible debris. "If any washed up on shore, citizens are asked to call local police," he said.
A spokesman for Seattle-based Boeing who arrived just before the news conference, John Derr, said Boeing has an air safety investigator here who will work with the NTSB.
Peter Goeltz, a managing director of the NTSB, said the Family Assistance Center at the Newport Islander Doubletree Hotel will be staffed by professionals from EgyptAir, the Red Cross and NTSB, and they will provide family briefings twice a day. Reporters were not permitted inside the Doubletree.
"We'll also work with the Rhode Island medical examiner on the difficult process of identifying victims," Goeltz said.
Hall said he thought it would take 36 to 48 hours to get equipment to the scene that can pinpoint pinging from the jetliner's flight recorder. Noting that the water is twice as deep as that in which the TWA Flight 800 was recovered three years ago, he said: "This will be a long investigation."
Lead NTSB investigator Gregory Phillips said he is prepared for a probe that could stretch out over "the next coming months and maybe even years."
Added Coast Guard Capt. Russell Webster: "It will be our job to safely and compassionately recover human remains and wreckage."
And judging by the response to a solicitation for help, the state's hospitality industry seemingly has decided its job is to house grieving relatives and friends. "A lot of people, good people, are calling for the right reasons," Robert Rosenberg, president of the Newport County Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in an interview.
Touro Synagogue offered the nation's first synagogue as a place for prayer and nondenominational services, while Middletown's Norman Bird Sanctuary offered its nature trails to people needing quiet solitude.
With staff reports from Peter B. Lord, Gerald M. Carbone, Maria Miro Johnson, Farnaz Fassihi, Robert L. Smith, Karen Lee Ziner, Jody McPhillips and Elizabeth Schaefer, and the Associated Press.
EgyptAir Flight 990 - 'We will never know the truth' - In Cairo, suspicion clouds view of crash
FARNAZ FASSIHI
Publication Date: December 5, 1999 Page: A-01 Section: News Edition: All
CAIRO, Egypt - Under the curved archway of a narrow alley, a peddler wearing a long gray Arabic gown pushes a cart of fresh vegetables through the crowd, two young boys chase away a yellow stray cat and a female shopper haggles loudly over a pound of dates.
Inside a traditional teahouse nearby, the aroma of burning incense and tobacco from the glass water pipes, together with the smell of rich Eastern tea and Turkish coffee, create the illusion of timelessness.
Here, shadows of past glories from an ancient civilization meet the present realities of a developing country.
Three men take puffs on the long stem of their water pipes, which emit a ring of smoke into the misty air.
The hypnotic effect of the apple-scented smoke is disrupted when the conversation shifts to the worst tragedy this nation has seen in recent years.
Talk of the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 triggers an eruption of emotional reactions.
"Why is there no news this week?" asks Mahdouh Fahmy, 41, setting aside his water pipe. The phrase "In the name of God" is inscribed in bold pink Arabic letters on the wall behind him.
"They are hiding something and now they will tell us a new lie," he said, wagging a finger in the air as he leaned forward to emphasize his point.
"We all know it's terrorist against Egypt - Khalass (the end)," continues Abdullah Hassan,67, "Why listen to more news? Thirty-three of the best military people trained in the United States were killed at once. Does America think we are stupid and illiterate?" he said, his voice rising with every word.
Hassan points to a copy of an Arabic daily newspaper that is spread atop a cracked metal table nearby to indicate that he is updated with the current events.
The men, on a midday tea and shisheh (water pipe) break from their jobs, engage in a heated debate.
"Suicide? An Egyptian pilot, a Muslim doing suicide? Not in one million years," Hassan says.
At the sandwich stand next door, a mother and three daughters wait in line for a quick lunch of falafels.
"We have reached our conclusion that this is a terrorist act and we will never, ever know the truth," said Wafa Anwar, 40, the mother.
IT'S BEEN MORE than a month since Egyptair Flight 990, en route to Cairo, plunged into the Atlantic 60 miles off the coast of Nantucket killing all 217 aboard.
Among the passengers were 33 Egyptian military officers who were returning from training seminars in the United States.
In the first days after the crash, Rhode Island was at center stage, hosting both the investigation and the families and friends of victims. Since then, news of the crash has slipped off the front pages in the United States.
But in Egypt, it's still a prime topic of conversation, amid theories of international conspiracy.
To most Egyptians, the riddle of Flight 990 has a simple answer: The United States has the technology and experience to investigate mechanical problems. When the National Transportation Safety Board announced the crash was not a result of aircraft failure, especially one that would involve EgyptAir, the news was readily accepted.
On the other hand, when the foreign media started reporting speculation of suicide on the part of the Muslim pilot, the reaction was that Americans lack the understanding required for interpreting Arabic words in their cultural context.
Add to this a history of resentment against the West for stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, the tendency toward creating conspiracy in the absence of facts and the pride that stems from being a part of an ancient civilization.
The result poses one question for the majority of Egyptians: What else could have caused EgyptAir Flight 990 to plunge into the Atlantic but an act of terrorism against their nation?
"We can't look into much rationality. This is the Egyptian's gut reaction that stems from culture, history and psychology," said Barbara Ibrahim, an American resident of Cairo for 30 years who holds a doctorate in sociology.
In this region of the world, intrigue is ingrained in the interactions of daily life. If a guest refuses an offer of a cup of tea, a second and third offering will follow, because the host believes that true intentions are never revealed upon the first account.
In a broader sense, to the eyes of an average Egyptian, nothing is what it appears to be, from the run-down shabby buildings that house marble-floored luxury apartments, furnished with French velvet and gold furniture, to the political scene of the country and the region.
For the masses, the 1952 revolution, which overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk and resulted in the creation of the Republic of Egypt, did not deliver its early promise of economic prosperity and international recognition.
Today, with a population of 62 million and a growth rate of 1.2 million people a year, the unemployment rate is approaching 30 percent, according to the CIA world fact book.
Fifty-five percent of Egyptians are rural residents and 66 percent are illiterate, according to the country's 1996 census data.
"As with every revolution, the middle class has disappeared, the rich got richer and the poor, poorer," said Maher Asal, a 49-year-old American-trained architect, lounging in the exclusive Gezira Country Club.
Economic frustrations and a lack of aspiration for the majority have resulted in what experts call "heightened religiosity" in the country.
"These people are the margins of society. Modernization and development has left them aside," explained Enid Hill, chairwoman of the political science department at the American University of Cairo."You can't live with this kind of alienation and the Islamic movement incorporates them into an alternative form of community. Then their life means something."
THE STRONG FAITH and Islamic values observed by Egyptians was yet another reason to denounce with such rigorous intensity the suggestion that a Muslim Egyptian of the highest clan, a pilot, could commit suicide.
A Muslim is prohibited by the Koran from taking his own life; suicide is considered a sin and, culturally, a disgrace.
In a society where most people invest more heavily in social relations than individual success, any act that would bestow public shame on a person and the honor of the family name is regarded as the worst affront one can suffer.
"There is not anger against humanity and society here that you see in the West, where someone randomly walks into a McDonald's and [shoots] children and then kills himself. These things just do not happen here," said Nadine Boctor, 42, who recently moved back to Cairo from a decade of living in Canada.
Egypt receives $1.2 billion annually - equal to 10 percent of its gross national product - in economic and military aid from the United States, making it the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.
In return, Egypt is considered the number-one ally of the United States in the Arab world and a key player in the Middle East peace process.
The course of politics in the region has led Egyptians of all political persuasions to believe that their country and all Third-World countries are manipulated and exploited for purposes that may be secret at the time but become apparent later.
Among examples Egyptians cite are the Iran-Contra scandal and the Arab-Israel peace process, in which the Arabs feel that the terms of negotiations often favor Israel.
On the flip side of feeling powerless about their political fate, Egyptians place much more emphasis on the importance of Middle East affairs in American foreign policy than is the case in reality. This leads to a public opinion that the West is never without an agenda in its dealings with the region.
"There is no real understanding of their true place in the emerging global world order where the Arabs are mostly marginalized" explained Ibrahim.
These perceptions, whether true or false, are heartfelt and create a foundation for conspiracy theories involving the United States and Israel, in the absence of factual information.
THE STORY of Egyptair has a familiar ring to the ears of Cairo residents. They compare the mystery of the crash to the deaths of princess Diana and her Egyptian boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayad, in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997.
"Everyone was convinced that the British monarchy killed them," said Yasmine El Rashidi, an American-trained journalist for Al Ahram, an English-language weekly newspaper. "We have an obsession with conspiracy. Every disaster they can't find answers for is a result of outside meddling and conspiracy."
Reports in the Western media, based on leaks from officials in Washington suggesting that the copilot of Flight 990, Gamil al-Batouty, had brought down the plane in an act of suicide because he was heard uttering an Arabic prayer, only heightened the paranoia in this country.
"These leaks were an attempt to compromise the whole overall process of the investigation," said Nabil Osman, the chairman of the State Information Service, and the official spokesman for the Egyptian government. "These leaks were erroneous in content and in intent both and this led to a reaction.
"Now as it stands, the idea of suicide is completely out of the window, there is no trace of it whatsoever, this is ridiculous," Osman said emotionally.
"They are looking into mechanics and whether it is mechanical due to bad manufacturing or mechanical due to human fault," said Osman.
IN THE CROWDED streets of Cairo, a city of 18 million people, traffic is at a standstill regularly and the honking of horns sings a background melody in the warm desert climate.
At the corner of every other block on Corniche Road, which stretches along the Nile River and cuts through the buzzing downtown area, a blue and white square sign hangs from metal light poles.
The sign depicts a white falcon on a sky blue background. Above it reads, "Mesr al-Tayaran," or EgyptAir.
In the United States, an airline logo represents a private business, perhaps evoking thoughts of what the best deal of the week may be. In Egypt, where the government owns the airline, the falcon is a reminder of national glory and pride.
The falcon, which was kept in palaces by the sultans of the East, symbolizes power and superiority in this region. It's regarded as a strong bird that can endure the hardships of a desert life.
Naturally, pilots who are entrusted with the country's glorious bird of the modern era, the aircraft, are equally looked upon as men of honor.
"We are the elite in Cairo. To attack one of us is like attacking national pride, we are government employees of the highest rank," said Walid Morad, the chairman of the Egyptian Pilots Association and an EgyptAir pilot, in his luxury apartment in an upscale suburb of Cairo.
Egyptair often recruits its pilots from the air force, said Morad, adding that each candidate's personal, criminal and physical background is thoroughly researched to ensure perfection.
Morad and his wife and two children, who attend private American schools and are chauffeured around, speak flawless English. They have traveled to most countries in the world and comment on art and culture in New York City, which is a favorite spot.
Morad's wife asks the live-in maid to prepare tea and flips through the TV satellite channels for an entertaining show. Their 8-year old son and 11-year-old daughter go off to play computer games. The phone rings and husband and wife both reach for their cellular phones.
A similar scene takes place at the apartment of Walid al-Batouty, the nephew of the accused copilot. Walid, who went to high school in the United States, dismisses the possibility of his uncle being associated with an Islamic extremist group that may have taken the plane down in an act of martyrdom.
"I think my uncle's mission was to break the American stereotyping of Arabs; you think we are still on camels, that we are either terrorists or secularists. That to have a balanced, modern Arab Muslim is not possible," Walid adds.
At one o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday, Walid, who is an Egyptologist, has not left home for work yet. The morning was spent surfing the Internet, defending his uncle on the phone to foreign journalists and taking care of other personal matters. Engulfed in the relaxed pace that governs Egypt when it comes to punctuality, he is in no particular rush either.
Arriving late for appointments, canceling events on the spur of the moment and taking one's time to deliver a task are allcommon.
The Western obsession to find clear and definite reasons for everything in supersonic time by using the latest technology, is absent from the Egyptian mentality.
Here, the answer to every question has only one answer: "Insha-allah," or simply, "God willingly."
"Americans have this illusion that they can conquer and control everything, while the Egyptians believe God has a plan that they don't understand, which often leads to a sense of resignation in the face of a tragedy," said Ibrahim, the American sociologist in Egypt.
IN RETROSPECT, suggestions that in a matter of less than a week, the United States could come up with explanations for such a complicated mystery as a plane crash, especially explanations that blamed an Egyptian, are incomprehensible.
The majority of the victim's families interviewed in Cairo said they have shut off the flow of information regarding the crash to grieve in private with the support of other family members.
The only source of official information comes through a hot line established by Egyptair for the families, but victims' relatives do not aggressively pursue even that channel.
Since victims' families returned from their vigil in Newport, only one conference call has been scheduled that put families in Egypt in direct contact with NTSB officials, according to Shahra Khali, who lost her uncle, Madgy Geish, 50, in the crash.
"My uncle's wife and two children have completely stopped listening to any news about the crash," said Khali.
"What difference does it make," she asked. "At the end they will find some political explanation that won't be the truth. Do we know to this day who killed JFK? This is the same. They seek comfort in God."
* * *
UPDATE
The Smit Pioneer, a civilian salvage ship chartered by the Navy, is expected to arrive at Quonset Point this week from Lisbon to help with the search for human remains and wreckage from EgyptAir Flight 990.
The recovery operation, scheduled to start within the next couple of weeks, will be conducted by the FBI and National Transportation Safety Board.
The FBI and NTSB are working closely in the investigation of the crash. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Louis Freeh said the only practical difference in a change of leadership would be in the release of information.
The NTSB has a statutory mandate to release information that is relevant to safety, whereas in a criminal context, the FBI would keep the information confidential.
A team of American investigators from the FBI, NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration left Egypt on Nov. 26 after a week-long probe into the aircraft records and personnel records of EgyptAir.
* * *
TALK OF THE CITY: In Egypt's cafes, such as this one in downtown Cairo, where a man smokes a water pipe last month, the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 remains a prime topic of conversation. Below, Egyptians wait for transport on the banks of the Nile.
AP photo / ENRIC MARTI
AP photo / AMR NABIL
Journal photo / FARNAZ FASSIHI
STREET SCENE: Fatima Ibrahim and her daughter, Heba Wahid, sell vegetables Thursday in a Cairo street market. Egypt has a population of 62 million people, more than half of whom live in rural areas. The unemployment rate is approaching 30 percent.
OFFICIAL VIEW: Nabil Osman, chairman of the State Information Service, says speculation that the copilot brought down the plane in an act of suicide is ridiculous.
Journal photo / FARNAZ FASSIHI
AP photo / ENRIC MARTI
FAMILY PORTRAITS: A photograph of EgyptAir Flight 990's copilot, Capt. Gamil al-Batouty, is displayed last month at the family house in Cairo. At right, Wafa Anwar, with her daughters, Dina, left, and Rania, in Cairo Thursday, says she believes the plane was downed by a terrorist attack.
Journal photo / FARNAZ FASSIHI
And at the end, a few photos from that terrible time...
EgyptAir Flight 990 - Amid the grief, recovery begins - Jetliner's crash sparks outpouring of support
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: November 2, 1999 Page: A-01 Section: News Edition: All
With the world its audience, Rhode Island yesterday became the stage for one of the most heart-wrenching dramas of the modern age: the aftermath of a jetliner crash in which all aboard perished.
Grieving relatives, crowds of officials, and a crush of journalists converged on the state as the last hope of finding any survivors of the 217 people on EgyptAir Flight 990 was officially extinguished.
Efforts now turn to recovering wreckage and human remains, consoling the bereaved, and attempting to solve the mystery of what happened early Halloween morning in the moonlit sky off Massachusetts.
Having just buried a favorite son, Sen. John H. Chafee, Rhode Island now is experiencing a more gruesome and protracted ritual of death. Recovery and identification of victims, in a temporary morgue being opened at the former Navy complex at Quonset Point/Davisville, could take weeks.
Determining what caused the Boeing 767 jet to suddenly plunge more than six miles to destruction south of Nantucket, after leaving New York on a flight to Cairo, almost certainly will take longer. No distress call was received from the doomed jetliner and data recorders have not been recovered, although officials are hopeful they will be.
"I know all of Rhode Island will open its hearts to the victims from wherever they come, and do what it can to make this less painful," Governor Almond said during a late-afternoon news conference at search headquarters at the Navy base in Newport. Apparently, no victims were from Rhode Island.
"After events like this, there are hundreds of people who have suffered the ultimate loss," said James T. Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has charge of the investigation. "Many of these people are coming to the scene."
By nightfall, some two dozen relatives and friends, many carrying medical records and photographs and accompanied by clergy, Red Cross counselors, police officers, and representatives of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani already had arrived by chartered plane from New York and traveled by bus to Newport's Doubletree Islander Hotel, which the NTSB designated a Family Assistance Center. More relatives are expected to arrive in Rhode Island today, including some accompanying the president of EgyptAir, and state officials were busy finding more rooms at other hotels and inns.
Cairo resident Tamer Omar was with the first group to reach Rhode Island; his brother, Hashem Omar, an EgyptAir pilot, was a passenger on Flight 990.
"Did I ever imagine I would come to this foreign place in search of my brother's body?" Omar said as he rode the bus to Newport. "If we ever find a body?"
"A lot of the family members probably haven't slept," said Red Cross spokesman Brett Davey. "They're in disbelief, shock, angry. They probably need someone to talk to."
MEANWHILE, as operations shifted from rescue to recovery, the government mobilized the sophisticated equipment and vessels needed for a long, treacherous mission in waters that are some 250 feet deep. They also prepared a hangar at Quonset to receive pieces of the doomed aircraft what Hall called a "jigsaw puzzle of 50,000 pieces." Another official said that no reconstruction of the aircraft is planned, at least not at this time.
Although weather in the area where the jet went down has been fair since Sunday, seas were expected to pick up today as rain and possible gale-force wind approaches. And winter is coming in an area of the Atlantic notorious for its vicious northeasters and nautical disasters.
Bill Campbell, a veteran diver and undersea photographer who has been to the bottom near the roughly 40-square-mile search area about 50 miles south of Nantucket, said the environment poses the biggest challenge.
"If there's a strong tide or groundswell," said Campbell, "it can be tough out there."
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel Whiting has already arrived in Newport, carrying side scan sonar that will allow it to look for debris on the ocean floor. The Navy vessel Grapple is expected to arrive this morning and load a remote operating vehicle that will allow it to explore possible targets picked by the Whiting, officers said.
Also, the Navy vessel Mohawk is en route - carrying special instruments to allow it to find the "ping" emitted by the jetliner's flight recorder. It, too, is armed with side scan sonar and a submersible vehicle. Searchers have located a signal, most likely from one of the plane's so-called black boxes.
They also recovered one body, its identity so far undisclosed and apparently unknown. The body was taken to Quonset Point yesterday morning by the Coast Guard Cutter Monomoy, an officer said.
Assisted by student sailors from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy who happened to be in the area, crews of Coast Guard ships and aircraft have also recovered debris including what one Coast Guard officer described as a "significant piece" of the aircraft, large enough to require a crane.
They also have found evacuation slides, life preservers and shoes, purses, and teddy bears.
"It basically looked like somebody had emptied their trash Dumpster," said one of the Merchant Academy student sailors, Chris Kincaid.
None of the retrieved debris has any burn marks that might indicate a fire or explosion, said officials, who refused to speculate on the cause.
Authorities stressed there was no evidence of foul play but because terrorism has not been ruled out, the FBI said it is sending bomb experts and other investigators to Newport. Starting early Sunday, FBI agents swarmed over airports in Los Angeles and the New York metropolitan area where the jetliner landed and took off on what was intended to be a long journey from Cairo to the United States and back.
"Nothing has been ruled in, nothing has been ruled out," President Clinton said in Oslo, Norway, where he was attending Middle East peace talks.
Among the passengers on Flight 990 which went down without any indication of trouble from the pilots were about 30 Egyptian military officers who had been training in the United States, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said.
The passengers also included several Egyptians and Canadians, and 106 Americans including 54 people bound for a two-week trip to Egypt and the Nile. None apparently was from Rhode Island, but at least five lived in Connecticut. A couple who split their time between homes in Vermont and Maine also died.
RHODE ISLAND is enveloped in this emerging drama by virtue of its proximity to the crash site, and the existence of large air and sea bases on both sides of deepwater Narragansett Bay capable of supporting such a massive operation. The early search was run from Coast Guard headquarters in Boston and a station on Cape Cod.
Initially, the Coast Guard looked for survivors regardless of how remote that possibility seemed, especially in light of how precipitously the jetliner left the sky. Radar showed that the aircraft dropped more than two miles in just over half a minute a descent one aviation expert described as falling "like a rock."
Any lingering hope that anyone could have lived disappeared early yesterday afternoon when Rear Adm. Richard M. Larrabee, commander of the First Coast Guard District, stepped to the microphones and told reporters in Newport: "We believe at this point it is in everyone's best interest to no longer expect to find survivors."
Larrabee confirmed the recovery of one body, and said Coast Guard searchers "have begun to see evidence of further human remains," but he declined to elaborate.
"Our frustration is we would have liked to find people who survived," said Larrabee. "I can't express our feelings more strongly."
NOT FOUR HOURS after Larrabee spoke, NTSB chief Hall convened a second news conference at the Navy base in Newport.
By then, the media throng was reminiscent of three other air tragedies in recent years in the region: the downing of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, N.Y., in July 1996; the loss of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia in September 1998; and the crash of the small plane carrying John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and her sister off Martha's Vineyard this past July.
Support staff at the Newport base said they've added 140 phone lines for journalists and 39 television cameras greeted speakers at the second news conference. Every major American newspaper and network was represented, along with journalists from Spain, France, Canada and Japan and untold others certain to arrive overnight and today.
In his remarks, Hall introduced some of the 500 to 1,000 NTSB, Navy, NOAA, FBI and Coast Guard personnel who eventually will be in Rhode Island or working with those who are.
"The primary purpose that I came to Rhode Island today was to ask Governor Almond if his state would open their communities to the families of this terrible tragedy," Hall said. "The governor and I discussed the arrival of family members from Egypt and around the world who will appear in Rhode Island tomorrow."
Almond said Hall called him Sunday and told him Rhode Island would be at the center of the investigation.
Barry Mawn, a special agent for the FBI, asked local people to keep their eyes open for possible debris. "If any washed up on shore, citizens are asked to call local police," he said.
A spokesman for Seattle-based Boeing who arrived just before the news conference, John Derr, said Boeing has an air safety investigator here who will work with the NTSB.
Peter Goeltz, a managing director of the NTSB, said the Family Assistance Center at the Newport Islander Doubletree Hotel will be staffed by professionals from EgyptAir, the Red Cross and NTSB, and they will provide family briefings twice a day. Reporters were not permitted inside the Doubletree.
"We'll also work with the Rhode Island medical examiner on the difficult process of identifying victims," Goeltz said.
Hall said he thought it would take 36 to 48 hours to get equipment to the scene that can pinpoint pinging from the jetliner's flight recorder. Noting that the water is twice as deep as that in which the TWA Flight 800 was recovered three years ago, he said: "This will be a long investigation."
Lead NTSB investigator Gregory Phillips said he is prepared for a probe that could stretch out over "the next coming months and maybe even years."
Added Coast Guard Capt. Russell Webster: "It will be our job to safely and compassionately recover human remains and wreckage."
And judging by the response to a solicitation for help, the state's hospitality industry seemingly has decided its job is to house grieving relatives and friends. "A lot of people, good people, are calling for the right reasons," Robert Rosenberg, president of the Newport County Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in an interview.
Touro Synagogue offered the nation's first synagogue as a place for prayer and nondenominational services, while Middletown's Norman Bird Sanctuary offered its nature trails to people needing quiet solitude.
With staff reports from Peter B. Lord, Gerald M. Carbone, Maria Miro Johnson, Farnaz Fassihi, Robert L. Smith, Karen Lee Ziner, Jody McPhillips and Elizabeth Schaefer, and the Associated Press.
EgyptAir Flight 990 - 'We will never know the truth' - In Cairo, suspicion clouds view of crash
FARNAZ FASSIHI
Publication Date: December 5, 1999 Page: A-01 Section: News Edition: All
CAIRO, Egypt - Under the curved archway of a narrow alley, a peddler wearing a long gray Arabic gown pushes a cart of fresh vegetables through the crowd, two young boys chase away a yellow stray cat and a female shopper haggles loudly over a pound of dates.
Inside a traditional teahouse nearby, the aroma of burning incense and tobacco from the glass water pipes, together with the smell of rich Eastern tea and Turkish coffee, create the illusion of timelessness.
Here, shadows of past glories from an ancient civilization meet the present realities of a developing country.
Three men take puffs on the long stem of their water pipes, which emit a ring of smoke into the misty air.
The hypnotic effect of the apple-scented smoke is disrupted when the conversation shifts to the worst tragedy this nation has seen in recent years.
Talk of the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 triggers an eruption of emotional reactions.
"Why is there no news this week?" asks Mahdouh Fahmy, 41, setting aside his water pipe. The phrase "In the name of God" is inscribed in bold pink Arabic letters on the wall behind him.
"They are hiding something and now they will tell us a new lie," he said, wagging a finger in the air as he leaned forward to emphasize his point.
"We all know it's terrorist against Egypt - Khalass (the end)," continues Abdullah Hassan,67, "Why listen to more news? Thirty-three of the best military people trained in the United States were killed at once. Does America think we are stupid and illiterate?" he said, his voice rising with every word.
Hassan points to a copy of an Arabic daily newspaper that is spread atop a cracked metal table nearby to indicate that he is updated with the current events.
The men, on a midday tea and shisheh (water pipe) break from their jobs, engage in a heated debate.
"Suicide? An Egyptian pilot, a Muslim doing suicide? Not in one million years," Hassan says.
At the sandwich stand next door, a mother and three daughters wait in line for a quick lunch of falafels.
"We have reached our conclusion that this is a terrorist act and we will never, ever know the truth," said Wafa Anwar, 40, the mother.
IT'S BEEN MORE than a month since Egyptair Flight 990, en route to Cairo, plunged into the Atlantic 60 miles off the coast of Nantucket killing all 217 aboard.
Among the passengers were 33 Egyptian military officers who were returning from training seminars in the United States.
In the first days after the crash, Rhode Island was at center stage, hosting both the investigation and the families and friends of victims. Since then, news of the crash has slipped off the front pages in the United States.
But in Egypt, it's still a prime topic of conversation, amid theories of international conspiracy.
To most Egyptians, the riddle of Flight 990 has a simple answer: The United States has the technology and experience to investigate mechanical problems. When the National Transportation Safety Board announced the crash was not a result of aircraft failure, especially one that would involve EgyptAir, the news was readily accepted.
On the other hand, when the foreign media started reporting speculation of suicide on the part of the Muslim pilot, the reaction was that Americans lack the understanding required for interpreting Arabic words in their cultural context.
Add to this a history of resentment against the West for stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, the tendency toward creating conspiracy in the absence of facts and the pride that stems from being a part of an ancient civilization.
The result poses one question for the majority of Egyptians: What else could have caused EgyptAir Flight 990 to plunge into the Atlantic but an act of terrorism against their nation?
"We can't look into much rationality. This is the Egyptian's gut reaction that stems from culture, history and psychology," said Barbara Ibrahim, an American resident of Cairo for 30 years who holds a doctorate in sociology.
In this region of the world, intrigue is ingrained in the interactions of daily life. If a guest refuses an offer of a cup of tea, a second and third offering will follow, because the host believes that true intentions are never revealed upon the first account.
In a broader sense, to the eyes of an average Egyptian, nothing is what it appears to be, from the run-down shabby buildings that house marble-floored luxury apartments, furnished with French velvet and gold furniture, to the political scene of the country and the region.
For the masses, the 1952 revolution, which overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk and resulted in the creation of the Republic of Egypt, did not deliver its early promise of economic prosperity and international recognition.
Today, with a population of 62 million and a growth rate of 1.2 million people a year, the unemployment rate is approaching 30 percent, according to the CIA world fact book.
Fifty-five percent of Egyptians are rural residents and 66 percent are illiterate, according to the country's 1996 census data.
"As with every revolution, the middle class has disappeared, the rich got richer and the poor, poorer," said Maher Asal, a 49-year-old American-trained architect, lounging in the exclusive Gezira Country Club.
Economic frustrations and a lack of aspiration for the majority have resulted in what experts call "heightened religiosity" in the country.
"These people are the margins of society. Modernization and development has left them aside," explained Enid Hill, chairwoman of the political science department at the American University of Cairo."You can't live with this kind of alienation and the Islamic movement incorporates them into an alternative form of community. Then their life means something."
THE STRONG FAITH and Islamic values observed by Egyptians was yet another reason to denounce with such rigorous intensity the suggestion that a Muslim Egyptian of the highest clan, a pilot, could commit suicide.
A Muslim is prohibited by the Koran from taking his own life; suicide is considered a sin and, culturally, a disgrace.
In a society where most people invest more heavily in social relations than individual success, any act that would bestow public shame on a person and the honor of the family name is regarded as the worst affront one can suffer.
"There is not anger against humanity and society here that you see in the West, where someone randomly walks into a McDonald's and [shoots] children and then kills himself. These things just do not happen here," said Nadine Boctor, 42, who recently moved back to Cairo from a decade of living in Canada.
Egypt receives $1.2 billion annually - equal to 10 percent of its gross national product - in economic and military aid from the United States, making it the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.
In return, Egypt is considered the number-one ally of the United States in the Arab world and a key player in the Middle East peace process.
The course of politics in the region has led Egyptians of all political persuasions to believe that their country and all Third-World countries are manipulated and exploited for purposes that may be secret at the time but become apparent later.
Among examples Egyptians cite are the Iran-Contra scandal and the Arab-Israel peace process, in which the Arabs feel that the terms of negotiations often favor Israel.
On the flip side of feeling powerless about their political fate, Egyptians place much more emphasis on the importance of Middle East affairs in American foreign policy than is the case in reality. This leads to a public opinion that the West is never without an agenda in its dealings with the region.
"There is no real understanding of their true place in the emerging global world order where the Arabs are mostly marginalized" explained Ibrahim.
These perceptions, whether true or false, are heartfelt and create a foundation for conspiracy theories involving the United States and Israel, in the absence of factual information.
THE STORY of Egyptair has a familiar ring to the ears of Cairo residents. They compare the mystery of the crash to the deaths of princess Diana and her Egyptian boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayad, in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997.
"Everyone was convinced that the British monarchy killed them," said Yasmine El Rashidi, an American-trained journalist for Al Ahram, an English-language weekly newspaper. "We have an obsession with conspiracy. Every disaster they can't find answers for is a result of outside meddling and conspiracy."
Reports in the Western media, based on leaks from officials in Washington suggesting that the copilot of Flight 990, Gamil al-Batouty, had brought down the plane in an act of suicide because he was heard uttering an Arabic prayer, only heightened the paranoia in this country.
"These leaks were an attempt to compromise the whole overall process of the investigation," said Nabil Osman, the chairman of the State Information Service, and the official spokesman for the Egyptian government. "These leaks were erroneous in content and in intent both and this led to a reaction.
"Now as it stands, the idea of suicide is completely out of the window, there is no trace of it whatsoever, this is ridiculous," Osman said emotionally.
"They are looking into mechanics and whether it is mechanical due to bad manufacturing or mechanical due to human fault," said Osman.
IN THE CROWDED streets of Cairo, a city of 18 million people, traffic is at a standstill regularly and the honking of horns sings a background melody in the warm desert climate.
At the corner of every other block on Corniche Road, which stretches along the Nile River and cuts through the buzzing downtown area, a blue and white square sign hangs from metal light poles.
The sign depicts a white falcon on a sky blue background. Above it reads, "Mesr al-Tayaran," or EgyptAir.
In the United States, an airline logo represents a private business, perhaps evoking thoughts of what the best deal of the week may be. In Egypt, where the government owns the airline, the falcon is a reminder of national glory and pride.
The falcon, which was kept in palaces by the sultans of the East, symbolizes power and superiority in this region. It's regarded as a strong bird that can endure the hardships of a desert life.
Naturally, pilots who are entrusted with the country's glorious bird of the modern era, the aircraft, are equally looked upon as men of honor.
"We are the elite in Cairo. To attack one of us is like attacking national pride, we are government employees of the highest rank," said Walid Morad, the chairman of the Egyptian Pilots Association and an EgyptAir pilot, in his luxury apartment in an upscale suburb of Cairo.
Egyptair often recruits its pilots from the air force, said Morad, adding that each candidate's personal, criminal and physical background is thoroughly researched to ensure perfection.
Morad and his wife and two children, who attend private American schools and are chauffeured around, speak flawless English. They have traveled to most countries in the world and comment on art and culture in New York City, which is a favorite spot.
Morad's wife asks the live-in maid to prepare tea and flips through the TV satellite channels for an entertaining show. Their 8-year old son and 11-year-old daughter go off to play computer games. The phone rings and husband and wife both reach for their cellular phones.
A similar scene takes place at the apartment of Walid al-Batouty, the nephew of the accused copilot. Walid, who went to high school in the United States, dismisses the possibility of his uncle being associated with an Islamic extremist group that may have taken the plane down in an act of martyrdom.
"I think my uncle's mission was to break the American stereotyping of Arabs; you think we are still on camels, that we are either terrorists or secularists. That to have a balanced, modern Arab Muslim is not possible," Walid adds.
At one o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday, Walid, who is an Egyptologist, has not left home for work yet. The morning was spent surfing the Internet, defending his uncle on the phone to foreign journalists and taking care of other personal matters. Engulfed in the relaxed pace that governs Egypt when it comes to punctuality, he is in no particular rush either.
Arriving late for appointments, canceling events on the spur of the moment and taking one's time to deliver a task are allcommon.
The Western obsession to find clear and definite reasons for everything in supersonic time by using the latest technology, is absent from the Egyptian mentality.
Here, the answer to every question has only one answer: "Insha-allah," or simply, "God willingly."
"Americans have this illusion that they can conquer and control everything, while the Egyptians believe God has a plan that they don't understand, which often leads to a sense of resignation in the face of a tragedy," said Ibrahim, the American sociologist in Egypt.
IN RETROSPECT, suggestions that in a matter of less than a week, the United States could come up with explanations for such a complicated mystery as a plane crash, especially explanations that blamed an Egyptian, are incomprehensible.
The majority of the victim's families interviewed in Cairo said they have shut off the flow of information regarding the crash to grieve in private with the support of other family members.
The only source of official information comes through a hot line established by Egyptair for the families, but victims' relatives do not aggressively pursue even that channel.
Since victims' families returned from their vigil in Newport, only one conference call has been scheduled that put families in Egypt in direct contact with NTSB officials, according to Shahra Khali, who lost her uncle, Madgy Geish, 50, in the crash.
"My uncle's wife and two children have completely stopped listening to any news about the crash," said Khali.
"What difference does it make," she asked. "At the end they will find some political explanation that won't be the truth. Do we know to this day who killed JFK? This is the same. They seek comfort in God."
* * *
UPDATE
The Smit Pioneer, a civilian salvage ship chartered by the Navy, is expected to arrive at Quonset Point this week from Lisbon to help with the search for human remains and wreckage from EgyptAir Flight 990.
The recovery operation, scheduled to start within the next couple of weeks, will be conducted by the FBI and National Transportation Safety Board.
The FBI and NTSB are working closely in the investigation of the crash. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Louis Freeh said the only practical difference in a change of leadership would be in the release of information.
The NTSB has a statutory mandate to release information that is relevant to safety, whereas in a criminal context, the FBI would keep the information confidential.
A team of American investigators from the FBI, NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration left Egypt on Nov. 26 after a week-long probe into the aircraft records and personnel records of EgyptAir.
* * *
TALK OF THE CITY: In Egypt's cafes, such as this one in downtown Cairo, where a man smokes a water pipe last month, the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 remains a prime topic of conversation. Below, Egyptians wait for transport on the banks of the Nile.
AP photo / ENRIC MARTI
AP photo / AMR NABIL
Journal photo / FARNAZ FASSIHI
STREET SCENE: Fatima Ibrahim and her daughter, Heba Wahid, sell vegetables Thursday in a Cairo street market. Egypt has a population of 62 million people, more than half of whom live in rural areas. The unemployment rate is approaching 30 percent.
OFFICIAL VIEW: Nabil Osman, chairman of the State Information Service, says speculation that the copilot brought down the plane in an act of suicide is ridiculous.
Journal photo / FARNAZ FASSIHI
AP photo / ENRIC MARTI
FAMILY PORTRAITS: A photograph of EgyptAir Flight 990's copilot, Capt. Gamil al-Batouty, is displayed last month at the family house in Cairo. At right, Wafa Anwar, with her daughters, Dina, left, and Rania, in Cairo Thursday, says she believes the plane was downed by a terrorist attack.
Journal photo / FARNAZ FASSIHI
April 17, 2016
Potter's Fields and the Forgotten Mentally Ill
Potter's field, Spring 2016: State Institution Cemetery No. 2, Cranston, Rhode Island.
Early in my career as a staff writer at The Providence Journal , I covered two of Rhode Island's public institutions where many of the state's most vulnerable people lived: The Ladd Center, in Exeter, for the developmentally and intellectually disabled; and the Institute of Mental Health, in Cranston, for people living with mental illness. By the mid-20th century, both had become degrading and dehumanizing warehouses rife with cruelty and abuse. Following years of lawsuits, Providence Journal exposés, and tireless advocacy by heroic people, they closed in the 1990s after some latter-year improvements. A model community system, since deteriorated, had been built.
'The inertia of despair.' Providence Journal exposé, 1950s.With the death of the developmentally disabled 70-year-old Barbara A. Annis in February 2016, allegedly following staff abuse in the state-run group home in Providence where she lived, Ladd recently has been much in my thoughts. I penned some of them, along with the story I wrote on Ladd's final day -- the day the declaration "the beast is dead" was made -- in an earlier post.
Thoughts of Ladd have prompted reflection on the Institute of Mental Health, or IMH, previously known as the State Hospital For Mental Diseases, and before that, the State Hospital for the Insane (the State Asylum for the Incurable Insane was proposed even earlier).
State Hospital for the Insane, early 1900s. Overcrowded, hundreds of patients slept on the floors. 
IMH, 1950s.As with Ladd, thousands of people disappeared virtually without trace behind the brick and granite walls of that institution; I told the story of one of them, Hope Lincoln, in an extensively researched story for The Journal. And during those closing days of the IMH, I spent many hours at the institution, including living there for a week to chronicle in print what were then-improving conditions and even marching on several occasions with patients and staff in the annual Field Day, a vestige of the 19th century, when "inmates" were let outside (under close guard) for a parade and festive food. Below you will find three of my stories about three such Field Days.
For many of these people, particularly in the 1800s and the first six or seven decades of the 20th century, Field Day was the only time they ever got out -- until they died. Those few who still had connections to relatives might be sent for dignified burial in a church or community cemetery. But the majority, like Hope Lincoln, had no relatives that cared or even knew of them and got no such respect. Shame and stigma ruled -- and, sadly, still do today, albeit to a lessening extent.
They were buried in potter's fields, under concrete markers with sequential numbers but no names, the final -- and in most cases, only -- evidence these human beings had ever existed. I visited one of the IMH potter's fields early in my coverage of the institution, and it haunted me -- and has, on some level, ever since. The potter's field similarly affected my friend Dan Barry, New York Times staff writer, who last year wrote so eloquently of another potter's field and the man who buried the dead there in one of his This Land columns:
A few days ago, I revisited Rhode Island's State Institution Cemetery No. 2, as the old IMH potter's field is now called (even today, numbers, not names, attach to the forgotten dead). It was a pristine spring morning: trees budding, birds singing, temperatures rising, the sun sparkling on the Pawtuxet River, which winds toward Narragansett Bay. Over the years, an adjacent landfill has further encroached, providing another sad irony: people who in life were considered little better than trash in death now lie next to the real thing. Still, the field, tended by state-prison inmates, was trimmed and green. And except for the birds, it was quiet.
As I walked the field, I found that time has been unkind: some markers have worn away; others are toppled or gone altogether, the work of vandals. I wondered who had left the sole decoration, a plastic floral arrangement next to marker 1,142. Did they know who was buried there? What was their relationship? Or was this a random act of respect? Like the identities of the dead, I will never know.
Marker No. 1,142.
I counted 632 numbered markers: 632 people who died just from 1933 to 1940 alone at "the state institutions": the IMH and other facilities at the Howard complex, home also to the state prison, the state training school, and the state infirmary, predecessor to today's Eleanor Slater Hospital. Untold thousands of residents of those institutions and the long-closed State Farm for the poor from earlier and later years are buried in other potter's fields. In an ultimate form of indignity, the state simply paved over one of them -- the State Farm Cemetery, which had an estimated 3,000 graves dug from about 1873 to 1918 -- when it was building Route 37. I suspect few people driving on that busy thoroughfare have no idea what lies beneath them as they travel.
Heavy rains in 2006 washed out the remains of 71 of those State Farm residents near Route 37, and archaeologists were able to at least minimally identify most of them, including Infant Donnelly, the stillborn child of State Infirmary resident Ann Donnelly, about whom nothing else is known, either. Infant Donnelly died on Valentine's Day, 1918. More on the Route 37 story at the end of this post.
Infant Donnelly.Like Infant Donnelly, the 70 other individuals are remembered with flat stones. A handful of remains are unidentified; some of those, having thwarted the archaeologists, are labeled "co-mingled." But there is Elizabeth "Lizzie" Anderton, daughter of James Gregson and Lucy Sielding, circa 1840 - Oct. 20, 1916; and Dinah "Maria" Cleary, wife of Patrick Cleary, daughter of Thomas and Margaret Finnegan, circa 1845 - Sept. 7, 1887; and John Gurney, a.k.a. Gierney, husband of Bridget Myers, circa 1841 - Dec. 21, 1873; and Manoog Shegdian, husband of Saonik Shekoian, circa 1868 - Oct. 21, 1916; and more, an apparent mix of working-class ethnicities and races. The wealthy had their private hospitals, and their respectful final rites of passage and resting places.
Elizabeth "Lizzie" Anderton, et. al.Standing there, I imagined their lives: their days, interminably long; their nights, surely restless; the weeks stretching to months and then years and then decades, memories of the outside world fading, except, perhaps, the faint one of childhood joy, before the onset of their illnesses... a reminder of what might have been, and what was for lucky others who remained mentally healthy. The dream of ever leaving, except the final trip to the potters field, receding... or did some keep that dream alive? I thought of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: the extraordinary final scene, one of the best movie endings ever, when Chief Bromden hurls the hydrotherapy console through the window and escapes.
The final scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.The drudgery and isolation were but part of it. Unquestionably, there were good and caring staff who sought to ameliorate suffering and practiced a degree of sound medicine, but there were also abusive workers and barbaric treatments.
For example, the lobotomy: the surgical separation of the lobes of the brain, the debilitating and personality-erasing operation that prompted Chief Bromden in Cuckoo's Nest to smother Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, after he was lobotomized. Astonishingly from today's perspective, at least, the inventor of the lobotomy, Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
There was the even more horrifying hempispherectomy, in which one half of the brain was entirely removed.
There was hydrotherapy: captive immersion in warm (or cold) baths for hours or even days, and the "shower" treatment, in which patients, strapped into chairs, were sprayed with jets of water. Picture waterboarding.
And shackles and restraints, and isolation chambers.
Isolation. IMH, 1950s.And the administration of the toxic substances chloroform and potassium bromide, and the forced use of morphine and alcohol -- alcohol!
Some patients were injected with malaria-infected blood to produce fever, which supposedly had curative power.
Others were subjected to various forms of shock therapy. One form, to treat schizophrenia, involved the injection of insulin to induce coma and seizure. The quack Dr. Manfred Sakel , who introduced insulin shock therapy in 1933, wrote that "the convulsions and comas of the deep shock brought about dramatic psychological changes in the patient. . .the indications were rather that the physiological shock restored the homeostasis in the nerve cell by forcing it to mobilizing its defence reactions, thus causing a restoration of the balance in the automatic nervous system."
IMH, 1970s.And on the crazy belief that "damaged" or "displaced" parts of the female reproductive anatomy were related to insanity, some mentally ill women were forced to undergo "female surgeries." One practitioner, London's Dr. R. Maurice Bucke, wrote of 106 operations between 1895 and 1898. He claimed that 71 of the women "either recovered their mental health or this was improved." Among the specific operations, according to the "Restoring Perspective: Life and Treatment at the London Asylum" project : "Sixteen hysterectomies, 12 removals of diseased ovaries and tubes, 22 operations involving the replacing and retaining of the uterus in the normal position, 30 operations on the cervix, 21 minor uterine diseases, and 8 operations for vaginal lesions."
A virtual tour through all of these now mostly long-discontinued treatments can be found at the "Restoring Perspective" project.
In fairness, treatment for severe mental illness before the advent of psychopharmaceuticals (which are not without side effect, and which hardly constitute a cure-all) was vexsome; intractable diseases, like severe schizophrenia, defied any treatment. Still, well-intentioned efforts competed with the broader mandate of control and containment. Like Hope Lincoln, many who were committed for life had only experienced non-debilitating anxiety, depression or other conditions; or were homeless or impoverished; or acted only "oddly," in the eyes of a judgmental world; or crossed the police or a judge or another authority; or were sexually promiscuous; or otherwise deemed a "nuisance" to the community.
With records lost or gone, identities rendered anonymous, and buildings closed or razed, about all that is left of these countless untold stories -- each, the story of a unique human life -- are sequentially numbered markers in potter's fields and bones beneath.
We must never forget the forgotten, nor the larger story that is told through them: man's inhumanity to man, a never-ending tale that, we can only hope, one day will cease to be written.
Another view of the IMH potter's field, aka State Institution Cemetery No. 2.
State Institution Cemetery No. 2 stone. Note SIC No. 3, nearby, re-burial site for 577 others.FIELD DAY STORIES:
Troubles and cares are forgotten as patients at state institutions enjoy their glorious Field Day
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: May 24, 1985 Page: C-09 Section: NEWS Edition: ALL
Field Day, 1985, for the state-run General Hospital and the Institute of Mental Health, and the institutional grounds have become a sprawling carnival.
It is one of Rhode Island's older and most colorful traditions, this annual production known as Field Day, and yesterday's version had what they've all had going back over the years - a parade, music, good food, games, prizes, a feeling that for one day, at least, the world can be something more than a ward.
The parade included fire engines of three different colors, a marching band, high school cheerleaders, clowns, floats, a motor scooter, a bicycle, Santa Claus on roller skates, Fred Flintstone on a truck, a gaggle of bureaucrats from the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which runs both institutions.
THE PATIENTS included those with physical or mental handicaps, some of them in wheelchairs or on crutches, some of them residents of institutions for for only days, others for most of their lives.
These were their friends:
Volunteers, firemen, ex-patients, doctors, psychologists, attendants, therapists, technicians, custodians, kitchen workers, secretaries, ministers and priests, including the Most Rev. Louis E. Gelineau, Catholic bishop of Providence.
This is what they did:
Munched popcorn, relaxed on the grass, danced to a Dixie beat, posed for photographs, swapped stories, listened to a few speecehs, admired Field Day's King and Queen, tossed rings at a game booth, let staff paint their faces, had steamship round of beef and barbecued chicken for dinner.
And this is what a few of them said:
"It sure is a beautiful day." - a patient at the General Hospital who, suffering from muscular dystrophy, is confined to a motorized wheelchair.
"I've been here 20 years. This is all right." - a resident of MHRH's special program for people who are both retarded and mentally ill.
"Beautiful. Best day ever." - a short-term IMH patient who has been to the hospital on several occasions.
"Next year, I hope they have more booths." - a patient at the IMH for many years.
So it was a carnival.
And, like any carnival, it brought smiles to faces and sprinkled laughter throughout conversations.
There are those that complain that Field Day is an anachronism - a gaudy display more suited to 19th-Century notions of treating patients - and perhaps there is merit to their argument. But most patients yesterday wouldn't have agreed. Neither would Thomas D. Romeo, MHRH director, or many on his staff.
Said Romeo: "The rationale for doing this is having patients and employees enjoy a day outside the environment of hospitals in an atmosphere of mutual appreciation. This is nice."
*****
Field Day still a treat at hospital and IMH
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: June 20, 1986 Page: A-20 Section: NEWS Edition: ALL
No one really knows how long it's been around, this tradition known as Field Day, only that it happens every year - even as the participants continue to dwindle, and what was once a pageant involving thousands now involves only hundreds.
Yesterday, another Field Day was staged for patients at the state-run General Hospital and the Institute of Mental Health, located on the grounds of the Howard complex.
And while the 1986 edition was a scaled-down version of earlier Field Days, it nonetheless had a lot of what every Field Day has had.
It had a parade - a long, homespun parade that followed a route past hospital buildings, offices and one unit of the Adult Correctional Institutions. It had clowns. A couple of fire engines. Games. Prizes. Free Coke and popcorn. Music.
And it had food. Not the steamship round of beef that other celebrations have featured, but hot dogs and hamburgs and salad and soda and chips, and ice cream for dessert.
Naturally, a few bureaucrats spoke.
"Governor DiPrete sends his best to everyone," said Danna Mauch, head of mental health services for the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which runs both the IMH and General Hospital. "I want everyone to have a good time."
Added Peter Megrdichian, administrator of General Hospital: "I just wanted to wish those here today a good time."
Still a great day
For the patients and staff who turned out, there was enough left of a very old tradition to still bring smiles to faces.
Having fun? one patient was asked. "I'm trying," she answered. "I'm bearing up."
Once, 20 and 30 and 40 years ago, nearly 5,000 patients lived at Howard. The Field Day parade packed them six and seven deep. For many, it was the only chance to get off the ward.
Today, the combined population of the IMH and General Hospital is about 700, and those patients who are able spend a good deal of their time in the community.
But that doesn't mean Field Day yesterday wasn't special.
"A wonderful day," one patient for more than 40 years offered - smiling, of course. "Just a wonderful day.
*****
Sun shines on hospital residents
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: May 25, 1990 Page: A-03 Section: NEWS Edition: ALL
Blessed by the return of the May sun, and seemingly oblivious of a strong breeze, hundreds were at the state General Hospital yesterday to join in the festivities of Field Day, a tradition at the Howard state institutional complex since time forgotten.
"It's a chance to get some of the patients outside," said James Benedict, the hospital administrator.
"An opportunity to celebrate," said Robert L. Carl Jr., who runs retardation programs for the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals.
"I like the sun," said the hospital's most famous resident, Hope Lincoln, 100. Hope, covered with an afghan, was one of an estimated 150 patients who - bundled in sweaters and jackets and wearing the traditional Field Day straw hat - walked outside or were brought there in wheelchairs.
For a moment, at least, patients, staff and administrators were able to put aside some of the controversy that accompanied ward closings this year.
"Getting out - it does boost your spirits," said Connie Prior, a patient who led the unsuccessful fight to prevent the closings.
There were clowns.
"It's nice to see a smile. They've got enough problems, these people," said Gene Little of Coventry, a member of the Masons' Tall Cedar Clowns.
There were cheerleaders, a marching band and a song-and-dance troupe, all from Cranston's Western Hills Junior High School.
"I think it's great because we, like, make them happy," said eighth-grader Barbara McFadden, a singer.
There was Del's lemonade. There were hamburgers, ice cream and soda. Radio station WICE was broadcasting live.
There were old friends of MHRH.
"When they get all the patients out of the buildings - that's good," said Cheryl Morin, who has been in various programs and lives on her own now.
There was a new resident of General Hospital.
"It feels funny. I love it," said Angela Petice, a respirator-dependent patient who has not been outside in four years. A patient at Rhode Island Hospital for four years, she came to Howard this week when MHRH relaxed its admission freeze to allow two new patients on General Hospital's respiratory ward.
There were four floats. The Snoopy float took the $100 first-place prize.
"Please think before you drink]" proclaimed the float put together by the staff of Benjamin Rush, the state's detoxification center. That entry featured a coffin on the back of a pickup truck.
Only a few residents from the Institute of Mental Health were on hand this year, in part because administrators have decided that patients carrying balloons and mingling with clowns sends the wrong message about mental illness. At one time, when the IMH had some 3,500 residents - more than 17 times the number it has today - Field Day was the highlight of spring and summer.
*****
At rest at last - Uprooted remains of forgotten souls finally get a proper burial
Barbara Polichetti
Publication Date: April 16, 2009 Page: B-01 Section: News Edition: All
Nameless no longer.
Under the watchful eyes of archaeologists, state Department of Transportation crews this week worked at an old state cemetery on the Cranston-Warwick line, carefully placing more than 60 granite stones that will mark the graves of the forgotten souls whose remains washed out from beneath nearby Route 37 nearly two years ago.
Since the first bones were discovered on the fringe of the former Davol Building parking lot on Sockanosset Cross Road after unusually heavy rains in June 2006, DOT archaeologist Michael Hebert has worked diligently with consultants to piece together the story of the forgotten graves and try to find as much information as possible about each individual.
The skeletal remains, some still in the shredded remnants of plain wooden coffins, were determined to be those of the sick, poor and often forgotten people who lived and died at the former State Farm, on Pontiac Avenue, around the turn of the 20th century.
As the DOT examined the erosion area near the base of the southern embankment of Route 37, it was determined that additional graves would have to be emptied to protect remains from being disturbed in the future.
Because of brass coffin plates that were often still intact, officials were able to identify the remains in 60 of the graves, but a few remained a mystery.
Perhaps most disturbing, Hebert has said, is the fact that the unearthing of the remains led to the discovery that they were only a small part of a large, forgotten potter’s field that served as a final resting place for State Farm residents from about 1873 to 1918.
He estimated that more than 3,000 graves will have to remain beneath Route 37, which was built squarely atop the graveyard.
Both the DOT and the Cranston City Council - which has jurisdiction over cemeteries within its borders - made it clear early on during the project that the people whose remains were disturbed would be treated with the respect they were apparently not accorded after their burial.
"This has been the most thought-provoking and emotional project in my 30-year career," Hebert said Wednesday. He helped pick the speckled Vermont granite for the markers and worked with the stone carvers for Scioto & Sons to include as much information as possible about each individual.
When they were first buried, their graves were marked only with plain wooden crosses that rotted away, Hebert said. Now they are identified by name, birth date, death date, assignment at the State Farm and more. Hebert and Public Archaeology Laboratory, in Pawtucket, spent months combing through census records, admission ledgers from the State Farm and other documents to determine what relatives the state wards had.
On the granite markers, they are now sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Some of the stones are heartbreaking, Hebert said, pointing out that there are a couple of infants, never named, who died at birth in the state infirmary. There was also a couple, John and Mary Shepard, who died at the almshouse within months of each other.
After the remains and coffin shards were exhumed they were stored at PAL, where every item was photographed and studied. Hebert and the PAL staff said the meager personal possessions found - glass buttons, a hair comb and only a couple of wedding rings - spoke to the bleak existence of the people who found themselves remanded to the State Farm with its poor house, work house, prison and insane asylum.
The remains were kept at PAL for more than two years while the state searched for descendants and a proper place of reburial. The remains were reinterred last summer at an old state cemetery where Pontiac Avenue in Cranston becomes Knight Street in Warwick.
On Wednesday, PAL archaeologist Jay Waller turned his collar up against a cold April wind and carefully eyed the engraved granite markers being placed flush in the earth.
"Now there’s a sense of closure –– this is what is right," he said.
"In researching this, you can’t help but get attached to some of the personal stories you discover," Waller said. "Now their graves will be marked forever and they are finally getting what they deserve."
bpoliche@projo.com / (401) 277-8065
Potter's fields and the forgotten mentally ill
Potter's field in spring: State Institution Cemetery No. 2, Cranston, Rhode Island.
Early in my career as a staff writer at The Providence Journal, I covered two of Rhode Island's public institutions where many of the state's most vulnerable people lived: The Ladd Center, in Exeter, for the developmentally and intellectually disabled; and the Institute of Mental Health, in Cranston, for people living with mental illness. By the mid-20th century, both had become degrading and dehumanizing warehouses rife with abuse. Following years of lawsuits, Providence Journal exposés, and tireless advocacy by heroic people, they closed in the 1990s.
With the death of the developmentally disabled 70-year-old Barbara A. Annis in February 2016, allegedly following staff abuse in the state-run group home in Providence where she lived, Ladd recently has been much in my thoughts. I penned some of them, along with the story I wrote on Ladd's final day -- the day the declaration "the beast is dead" was made -- in an earlier post.
Thoughts of Ladd have prompted reflection on the Institute of Mental Health, or IMH, previously known as the State Hospital For Mental Diseases, and before that, the State Asylum for the Insane (the State Asylum for the Incurable Insane was proposed even earlier).
As with Ladd, thousands of people disappeared virtually without trace behind the brick and granite walls of that institution; I told the story of one of them, Hope Lincoln, in an extensively researched story for The Journal. And during those closing days of the IMH, I spent many hours at the institution, including living there for a week to chronicle in print what were then-improving conditions and even marching on several occasions with patients and staff in the annual Field Day, a vestige of the 19th century, when "inmates" were let outside (under close guard) for a parade and festive food. Below you will find three of my stories about three such Field Days.
For many of these people, particularly in the 1800s and the first six or seven decades of the 20th century, Field Day was the only time they ever got out -- until they died. Those few who still had connections to relatives might be sent for dignified burial in a church or community cemetery. Those like Hope Lincoln, who had no relatives that cared or even knew of them, got no such respect. Shame and stigma ruled -- and, sadly, still do today, albeit to a lessening extent.
They were buried in potter's fields, under concrete markers with sequential numbers but no names, the final -- and in most cases, only -- evidence these human beings had ever existed. I visited one of the IMH potter's fields early in my coverage of the institution, and it haunted me -- and has, on some level, ever since. The potter's field similarly affected my good friend Dan Barry, New York Times staff writer, who last year wrote so eloquently of another potter's field and the man who buried the dead there in one of his This Land columns:
This past week, I revisited Rhode Island's State Institution Cemetery No. 2, as the old IMH potter's field is now called (even today, numbers, not names, attach to the forgotten dead). It was a pristine spring morning: trees budding, birds singing, temperatures rising, the sun sparkling on the Pawtuxet River, which winds toward Narragansett Bay. Over the years, an adjacent landfill has further encroached, providing another sad irony: people who in life were considered little better than trash in death now lie next to the real thing. Still, the field, tended by state-prison inmates, was trimmed and green. And except for the birds, it was quiet.
As I walked the field, I found that time has been unkind: some markers have worn away; others are toppled or gone altogether, the work of vandals. I wondered who had left the sole decoration, a plastic floral arrangement next to marker 1,142. Did they know who was buried there? What was their relationship? Or was this a random act of respect?
Marker No. 1,142.
I counted 632 numbered markers: 632 people who died from 1933 to 1940 at "the state institutions," the IMH and other facilities at the Howard complex, home also to the state prison, the state training school, and the state infirmary, predecessor to today's Eleanor Slater Hospital. Untold thousands of residents of those institutions and the long-closed State Farm for the poor from earlier and later years were buried in other potter's fields. In an ultimate form of indignity, the state paved over one of them -- the State Farm Cemetery, which had an estimated 3,000 graves dug from about 1873 to 1918 -- when it was building Route 37. Heavy rains in 2006 washed out the remains of 71 of those State Farm residents, and archaeologists were able to minimally identify most of them, including Infant Donnelly, the stillborn child of State Infirmary resident Ann Donnelly. Infant Donnelly died on Valentine's Day, 1918. Route 37 story at end of this post.
Like Infant Donnelly, the 70 other individuals are remembered with flat stones. A handful are unidentified; some of those, having thwarted the archaeologists, are labeled "co-mingled." But there is Elizabeth "Lizzie" Anderton, daughter of James Gregson and Lucy Sielding, circa 1840 - Oct. 20, 1916; and Dinah "Maria" Cleary, wife of Patrick Cleary, daughter of Thomas and Margaret Finnegan, circa 1845 - Sept. 7, 1887; and John Gurney, a.k.a. Gierney, husband of Bridget Myers, circa 1841 - Dec. 21, 1873; and Manoog Shegdian, husband of Saonik Shekoian, circa 1868 - Oct. 21, 1916; and more, an apparent mix of working-class ethnicities and races. The wealthy had their private hospitals, and their respectful burials.
Elizabeth "Lizzie" Anderton, et. al.Standing there, I imagined their lives: their days, interminably long; their nights, surely restless; the weeks stretching to months and then years and then decades, memories of the outside world fading, except, perhaps, the memory of the joy some experienced when they were children, before the onset of their illnesses, a reminder of what might have been, and what was, for lucky others. The dream of ever leaving, except the final trip to the potters field, receding... or did some keep that dream alive? I thought of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: the extraordinary final scene, one of the best movie endings ever, when Chief Bromden hurls the hydrotherapy console through the window and escapes.
The final scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.With a degree of insight into what went on, I imagined the monotonous drudgeryPHOTO
I imagined , he drudgery monotny... before tv and movies...
TB, surely: OTL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DLMB...
i imagned their lives, and how theior days began and ended, and the interminable hours between in lonleiness and fear... cut off from teh world, knowing they would never get out, despised and scored. theer were of course noble and good staff... overshadowed by cruel taskmakets
Another view of the IMH potter's field, aka State Institution Cemetery No. 2.
Stone on State Institution Cemetery No. 2. NOTE citation for SIC No. 3, nearby, re-burial place for 577 more forgotten.FIELD DAY STORIES:
Troubles and cares are forgotten as patients at state institutions enjoy their glorious Field Day
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: May 24, 1985 Page: C-09 Section: NEWS Edition: ALL
Field Day, 1985, for the state-run General Hospital and the Institute of Mental Health, and the institutional grounds have become a sprawling carnival.
It is one of Rhode Island's older and most colorful traditions, this annual production known as Field Day, and yesterday's version had what they've all had going back over the years - a parade, music, good food, games, prizes, a feeling that for one day, at least, the world can be something more than a ward.
The parade included fire engines of three different colors, a marching band, high school cheerleaders, clowns, floats, a motor scooter, a bicycle, Santa Claus on roller skates, Fred Flintstone on a truck, a gaggle of bureaucrats from the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which runs both institutions.
THE PATIENTS included those with physical or mental handicaps, some of them in wheelchairs or on crutches, some of them residents of institutions for for only days, others for most of their lives.
These were their friends:
Volunteers, firemen, ex-patients, doctors, psychologists, attendants, therapists, technicians, custodians, kitchen workers, secretaries, ministers and priests, including the Most Rev. Louis E. Gelineau, Catholic bishop of Providence.
This is what they did:
Munched popcorn, relaxed on the grass, danced to a Dixie beat, posed for photographs, swapped stories, listened to a few speecehs, admired Field Day's King and Queen, tossed rings at a game booth, let staff paint their faces, had steamship round of beef and barbecued chicken for dinner.
And this is what a few of them said:
"It sure is a beautiful day." - a patient at the General Hospital who, suffering from muscular dystrophy, is confined to a motorized wheelchair.
"I've been here 20 years. This is all right." - a resident of MHRH's special program for people who are both retarded and mentally ill.
"Beautiful. Best day ever." - a short-term IMH patient who has been to the hospital on several occasions.
"Next year, I hope they have more booths." - a patient at the IMH for many years.
So it was a carnival.
And, like any carnival, it brought smiles to faces and sprinkled laughter throughout conversations.
There are those that complain that Field Day is an anachronism - a gaudy display more suited to 19th-Century notions of treating patients - and perhaps there is merit to their argument. But most patients yesterday wouldn't have agreed. Neither would Thomas D. Romeo, MHRH director, or many on his staff.
Said Romeo: "The rationale for doing this is having patients and employees enjoy a day outside the environment of hospitals in an atmosphere of mutual appreciation. This is nice."
*****
Field Day still a treat at hospital and IMH
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: June 20, 1986 Page: A-20 Section: NEWS Edition: ALL
No one really knows how long it's been around, this tradition known as Field Day, only that it happens every year - even as the participants continue to dwindle, and what was once a pageant involving thousands now involves only hundreds.
Yesterday, another Field Day was staged for patients at the state-run General Hospital and the Institute of Mental Health, located on the grounds of the Howard complex.
And while the 1986 edition was a scaled-down version of earlier Field Days, it nonetheless had a lot of what every Field Day has had.
It had a parade - a long, homespun parade that followed a route past hospital buildings, offices and one unit of the Adult Correctional Institutions. It had clowns. A couple of fire engines. Games. Prizes. Free Coke and popcorn. Music.
And it had food. Not the steamship round of beef that other celebrations have featured, but hot dogs and hamburgs and salad and soda and chips, and ice cream for dessert.
Naturally, a few bureaucrats spoke.
"Governor DiPrete sends his best to everyone," said Danna Mauch, head of mental health services for the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which runs both the IMH and General Hospital. "I want everyone to have a good time."
Added Peter Megrdichian, administrator of General Hospital: "I just wanted to wish those here today a good time."
Still a great day
For the patients and staff who turned out, there was enough left of a very old tradition to still bring smiles to faces.
Having fun? one patient was asked. "I'm trying," she answered. "I'm bearing up."
Once, 20 and 30 and 40 years ago, nearly 5,000 patients lived at Howard. The Field Day parade packed them six and seven deep. For many, it was the only chance to get off the ward.
Today, the combined population of the IMH and General Hospital is about 700, and those patients who are able spend a good deal of their time in the community.
But that doesn't mean Field Day yesterday wasn't special.
"A wonderful day," one patient for more than 40 years offered - smiling, of course. "Just a wonderful day.
*****
Sun shines on hospital residents
G. WAYNE MILLER
Publication Date: May 25, 1990 Page: A-03 Section: NEWS Edition: ALL
Blessed by the return of the May sun, and seemingly oblivious of a strong breeze, hundreds were at the state General Hospital yesterday to join in the festivities of Field Day, a tradition at the Howard state institutional complex since time forgotten.
"It's a chance to get some of the patients outside," said James Benedict, the hospital administrator.
"An opportunity to celebrate," said Robert L. Carl Jr., who runs retardation programs for the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals.
"I like the sun," said the hospital's most famous resident, Hope Lincoln, 100. Hope, covered with an afghan, was one of an estimated 150 patients who - bundled in sweaters and jackets and wearing the traditional Field Day straw hat - walked outside or were brought there in wheelchairs.
For a moment, at least, patients, staff and administrators were able to put aside some of the controversy that accompanied ward closings this year.
"Getting out - it does boost your spirits," said Connie Prior, a patient who led the unsuccessful fight to prevent the closings.
There were clowns.
"It's nice to see a smile. They've got enough problems, these people," said Gene Little of Coventry, a member of the Masons' Tall Cedar Clowns.
There were cheerleaders, a marching band and a song-and-dance troupe, all from Cranston's Western Hills Junior High School.
"I think it's great because we, like, make them happy," said eighth-grader Barbara McFadden, a singer.
There was Del's lemonade. There were hamburgers, ice cream and soda. Radio station WICE was broadcasting live.
There were old friends of MHRH.
"When they get all the patients out of the buildings - that's good," said Cheryl Morin, who has been in various programs and lives on her own now.
There was a new resident of General Hospital.
"It feels funny. I love it," said Angela Petice, a respirator-dependent patient who has not been outside in four years. A patient at Rhode Island Hospital for four years, she came to Howard this week when MHRH relaxed its admission freeze to allow two new patients on General Hospital's respiratory ward.
There were four floats. The Snoopy float took the $100 first-place prize.
"Please think before you drink]" proclaimed the float put together by the staff of Benjamin Rush, the state's detoxification center. That entry featured a coffin on the back of a pickup truck.
Only a few residents from the Institute of Mental Health were on hand this year, in part because administrators have decided that patients carrying balloons and mingling with clowns sends the wrong message about mental illness. At one time, when the IMH had some 3,500 residents - more than 17 times the number it has today - Field Day was the highlight of spring and summer.
*****
At rest at last - Uprooted remains of forgotten souls finally get a proper burial
Barbara Polichetti
Publication Date: April 16, 2009 Page: B-01 Section: News Edition: All
Nameless no longer.
Under the watchful eyes of archaeologists, state Department of Transportation crews this week worked at an old state cemetery on the Cranston-Warwick line, carefully placing more than 60 granite stones that will mark the graves of the forgotten souls whose remains washed out from beneath nearby Route 37 nearly two years ago.
Since the first bones were discovered on the fringe of the former Davol Building parking lot on Sockanosset Cross Road after unusually heavy rains in June 2006, DOT archaeologist Michael Hebert has worked diligently with consultants to piece together the story of the forgotten graves and try to find as much information as possible about each individual.
The skeletal remains, some still in the shredded remnants of plain wooden coffins, were determined to be those of the sick, poor and often forgotten people who lived and died at the former State Farm, on Pontiac Avenue, around the turn of the 20th century.
As the DOT examined the erosion area near the base of the southern embankment of Route 37, it was determined that additional graves would have to be emptied to protect remains from being disturbed in the future.
Because of brass coffin plates that were often still intact, officials were able to identify the remains in 60 of the graves, but a few remained a mystery.
Perhaps most disturbing, Hebert has said, is the fact that the unearthing of the remains led to the discovery that they were only a small part of a large, forgotten potter’s field that served as a final resting place for State Farm residents from about 1873 to 1918.
He estimated that more than 3,000 graves will have to remain beneath Route 37, which was built squarely atop the graveyard.
Both the DOT and the Cranston City Council - which has jurisdiction over cemeteries within its borders - made it clear early on during the project that the people whose remains were disturbed would be treated with the respect they were apparently not accorded after their burial.
"This has been the most thought-provoking and emotional project in my 30-year career," Hebert said Wednesday. He helped pick the speckled Vermont granite for the markers and worked with the stone carvers for Scioto & Sons to include as much information as possible about each individual.
When they were first buried, their graves were marked only with plain wooden crosses that rotted away, Hebert said. Now they are identified by name, birth date, death date, assignment at the State Farm and more. Hebert and Public Archaeology Laboratory, in Pawtucket, spent months combing through census records, admission ledgers from the State Farm and other documents to determine what relatives the state wards had.
On the granite markers, they are now sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Some of the stones are heartbreaking, Hebert said, pointing out that there are a couple of infants, never named, who died at birth in the state infirmary. There was also a couple, John and Mary Shepard, who died at the almshouse within months of each other.
After the remains and coffin shards were exhumed they were stored at PAL, where every item was photographed and studied. Hebert and the PAL staff said the meager personal possessions found - glass buttons, a hair comb and only a couple of wedding rings - spoke to the bleak existence of the people who found themselves remanded to the State Farm with its poor house, work house, prison and insane asylum.
The remains were kept at PAL for more than two years while the state searched for descendants and a proper place of reburial. The remains were reinterred last summer at an old state cemetery where Pontiac Avenue in Cranston becomes Knight Street in Warwick.
On Wednesday, PAL archaeologist Jay Waller turned his collar up against a cold April wind and carefully eyed the engraved granite markers being placed flush in the earth.
"Now there’s a sense of closure –– this is what is right," he said.
"In researching this, you can’t help but get attached to some of the personal stories you discover," Waller said. "Now their graves will be marked forever and they are finally getting what they deserve."
bpoliche@projo.com / (401) 277-8065
