One recommendation from the Alaska Dept. of Education & Early Development’s framework for helping students deal with trauma, released in Jan. 2019, suggests transforming the physical space of a classroom to “promote a sense of emotional and physical safety.” (Illustration by Kristin Link, used with permission)
In January, the state put out a new resource designed to help schools support students who have experienced trauma. “Transforming Schools” recommends practices such as embracing culture in the classroom and teaching students how to calm themselves down when they get upset.
Educators are hoping the resource can help schools can do a better job meeting the needs of Alaskan students.
“A student can’t walk through the door and forget everything that happened to him before he walked through that door, whether he didn’t have breakfast, mom and dad were fighting, different things like that,” said Sharon Fishel, education specialist at the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development.
Fishel said thinking about trauma in schools is not new in Alaska: “Everybody wanted to do trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive, trauma-engaged schools, but they were all recreating the wheel.”
So, with the Association of Alaska School Boards and half a dozen other partners, Fishel’s department set out to create the wheel: a way that schools can help children who have experienced major life stressors or traumatic events. That includes what students experience firsthand, as well as the ongoing impacts of historic events, like the way colonialism worked through the educational system in Alaska. Damage is still unfolding from practices that include the forced removal of Alaska Native children from their homes, the boarding school system and oppression of Alaska Native languages and culture.
Today, Fishel said engaging with trauma in schools is about shifting the mindset from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what’s happened to you?”
Teaching students respect for the land as a cultural value is one suggestion in the Alaska Dept. of Education & Early Development’s framework for addressing trauma in schools, released in Jan. 2019. (Illustration by Kristin Link, used with permission)
The new resource contains eleven chapters full of stories and best practices, created with input from over 200 teachers, counselors, and community members across the state. Fishel said schools can pick and choose and use them in any order — but there is a logic to starting at the beginning: The first chapter explores the brain science of trauma, drawing on research that shows extreme stress can actually disrupt healthy brain development.
Catherine Mendenhall said she can see that in her classroom. She’s been a teacher in Alaska for 18 years, both on and off the road system.
Mendenhall said schools set lofty goals for their students — and face pressure to meet them — but emotional needs have to come first.
“If we’re wanting students to learn math and science and how to read, and they are stuck in fight-or-flight mode, they’re not going to be able to use all of their mind to learn, because so much of it is tied up in wondering whether they’re safe,” Mendenhall said.
The new state resource emphasizes a team approach to helping students deal with trauma.
Mendenhall said this is already working at her school. Parents, teachers, specialists — even the school principal is involved.
But for a lot of schools, building teams to address students’ emotional needs will mean hiring more people or asking staff to do more with less. And without a major priority shift, Mendenhall is not optimistic about the future of school funding in Alaska. She said we’ll get what we pay for.
“Unless we have more mental health help, more counselors, more people who are experienced in helping these students through their trauma, schools are not going to succeed, because the students aren’t gonna be able to do the tasks we expect them to do,” Mendenhall said.
Last week, Gov. Michael Dunleavy’s administration proposed doing away with $20 million of public school funding that the Alaska Legislature had agreed to in the last budget. His plan for the state’s next budget — and any future changes to education spending — will be released Feb. 13.
The framework for addressing trauma in schools released by the Alaska Dept. of Education & Early Development in Jan. 2019 emphasizes positive relationship-building as a way to counter the negative impacts of childhood trauma. (Illustration by Kristin Link, used with permission)
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski speaks with reporters at a press availability following her annual address to the Alaska Legislature on Feb. 22, 2017. (Photo by Skip Gray/360 North)
On Monday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and a Democratic colleague, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, reintroduced a bill aimed at preventing violence against Indigenous women and girls.
Named for a North Dakota woman killed in 2017, Savanna’s Act would improve data collection on missing and murdered Native women.
“And this is where it gets so frustrating,” she said. “We don’t even know what we don’t know with this. We don’t know if our statistics are right. We know that they’re bad, but we don’t know how bad.”
The bill would also increase tribal access to federal crime databases and require federal agencies to consult with tribes on reporting guidelines and other measures to protect Indigenous women and girls.
This is the second go-around for Savanna’s Act, originally introduced in October 2017 by former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and co-sponsored by Murkowski.
In December 2018, the bill passed the Senate unanimously. But it was blocked in the House by a single lawmaker: Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia. As a result, the bill expired at the end of the year.
This time around, Murkowski is expecting a smoother road:
“To my knowledge, there is nobody that has a dug-in opposition. But you never can tell. You don’t want to assume anything,” she said.
Murkowski said she’s prepared to do the work to see the bill become law.
Alaska Public Media’s Liz Ruskin contributed to this report.
Situated on Gonzaga’s campus, between the university’s business school and the St. Aloysius Rectory, Cardinal Bea House played host to at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
Two priests in high-level positions at Gonzaga University resigned Friday. Both previously held leadership roles in the Jesuits’ Oregon Province while it sent Jesuits accused of sexual abuse to live in a home on campus.
President Thayne McCulloh announced the resignations of Father Frank Case, university vice president and men’s basketball chaplain, and Father Pat Lee, vice president for mission and ministry, in a brief statement emailed to the Gonzaga community. Both men served on the University President’s cabinet.
Case was named in an investigation by the Northwest News Network and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting about sexually abusive Jesuits whose victims were predominantly Native girls, boys and women in Alaska and the Northwest. A Jesuit home on Gonzaga’s campus, Cardinal Bea House, became a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of such sexual misconduct dating back as far as 1986.
In 1989, while serving as head of the Jesuit order’s Oregon Province, Case wrote a letter to the Catholic chaplains association backing Father James Poole’s application to become a chaplain at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington.
“(Poole) is a Jesuit priest in very good standing, and it is my strong expectation that he will serve in such a ministry in a manner that is both generous and effective,” Case wrote. Poole got the job, working at the hospital until 2003 when he was removed from ministry and sent to live at Gonzaga.
Poole was a serial sexual predator. The Catholic Diocese of Fairbanks has received at least 19 reports of abuse by Poole. In 1988, Poole had been removed from his position at a radio station in Alaska after young women who had volunteered at the station wrote letters to the bishop in which they accused Poole of sexual misconduct.
In a 2008 deposition, Case said he did not review Poole’s personnel file before writing the letter because he had no indication of misconduct. In a statement through Gonzaga University’s public relations office last week, Case said he did not have access to Poole’s personnel file.
Father Patrick Lee led the former Oregon Province through bankruptcy proceedings brought on by abuse claims between 2009 and 2011. The Oregon Province merged with the Jesuits’ California Province to become Jesuits West in 2017.
“It is the only way we believe that all claimants can be offered a fair financial settlement within the limited resources of the province,” Lee reportedly said in statement at the time.
Cardinal Bea House is located in the middle of Gonzaga’s campus, but is owned by the Jesuit order and Gonzaga does not make decisions about who was assigned there. Priests living in the house who had been accused of abuse were given “safety plans” to restrict their interactions with students. Our investigation found they were not rigorously enforced.
Priests accused of sexual abuse were assigned to the house as far back as the 1980s. The last known Jesuit on a safety plan was moved off of Gonzaga’s campus in 2016.
Earlier this week, McCulloh issued a written statement to faculty, staff and students saying that he knew Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse were living in a Jesuit residence on campus, but he had not been aware that any of them might be a threat to students.
McCulloh said he relied on Jesuit leadership “to inform us of any Jesuit whose history might pose a threat to our students or campus community. I deeply regret that I was not informed of the presence of (Father James) Poole, nor any other Jesuits who might pose such a danger.”
It’s unclear exactly when McCulloh learned about the accused priests living on campus. His statement provides what appears to be contradictory information.
“It is important for me to share with you, that in the years following the 2011 Oregon Province bankruptcy, I learned that there had been priests under supervised ‘safety plans’ living at the Jesuit retirement community (Bea House),” he wrote.
But in the next sentence, he says, “It was not until 2016, when the Province chose to begin relocating a number of retired men to the Sacred Heart Community in Los Gatos, that I learned that among them were Jesuits who had been on safety plans (and were moved).”
News organizations also reported on some of the accusations against Poole and his presence at Gonzaga as far back as 2005. McCulloh has worked at Gonzaga since 1990 and was appointed as interim president in 2009.
McCulloh would not make himself available to clarify his statement. He also had declined to be interviewed for the original investigation. McCulloch, Case and Lee could not immediately be reached for comment.
The revelations from the investigation are expected to be mentioned during Mass this weekend at St. Aloysius Church, a Jesuit-owned parish on Gonzaga’s campus. The church’s parish priest, Father Tom Lamanna, also a Jesuit, told us we should not attend the service and are not allowed to record the proceedings.
Former Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District Superintendent Robert Boyle speaks during a Greater Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce lunch. (Photo by KRBD)
Following a contentious year, Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District Superintendent Robert Boyle has resigned effective Monday.
The announcement was made early Monday morning.
Ketchikan School Board President Matt Eisenhower said the board is grateful for Boyle’s service to the district over the past 11 years.
“As many people know, there have been a lot of things that have happened,” he said. “With this resignation, the school board is looking forward to a new leader and CEO of our school district.”
Boyle, too, said on Monday that it’s time for a change.
“There’s a lot of things that have been happening, going on,” he said. “There’s resolution on some of those. We’re moving forward on others.”
Two issues in particular have loomed over the school district.
Teachers had been working on an expired contract and negotiations were not progressing. Shortly after the October local elections, though, a largely new school board was seated and a new contract was successfully negotiated.
The second issue is not yet resolved. That involves a former high school teacher who was charged in the spring with sexual abuse of a minor. Longtime culinary arts teacher Doug Edwards had just retired this spring when he was arrested for alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl at the high school, in his home and in the church where he was a pastor.
A jury trial for Edwards is scheduled for spring of 2019.
Soon after Edwards’ arrest, a personnel complaint was filed with the school board against Boyle, related to the charges against Edwards. Details of the complaint were not made public, but the board hired an independent investigator to look into how the district handled reports about Edwards. That investigation concluded, and a full report was provided to the board in early December.
Last week, the board met in executive session to discuss the report, and came back into open session to announce a plan for improving the district’s response to reports of sexual harassment.
Then on Monday, Boyle’s resignation was announced.
Boyle said the decision to submit his resignation was his alone. He said it was prompted by the various controversies.
“A number of things have happened in the district that have been troubling in the last year and a half,” Boyle said. “Those things percolate up to the top, and I’m at the top. And so I’ve got to say, ‘There it is,’ and address that issue and offer the road for new beginnings and changes.”
Eisenhower declined to say whether the board asked Boyle to resign. Eisenhower did say that the board was committed to moving the district in the right direction.
“Particularly concerning performance and school safety and creating an environment for well-rounded people,” he said. “We know that with the teachers and staff in place, there’s a great foundation for that. Although we’ve had some bumps recently, we know there are clearer skies ahead.”
Beth Lougee, the district’s curriculum director, will step in as acting superintendent. Eisenhower said Lougee has a lot of experience, and the board has faith in her ability to lead the district while the board decides what steps to take next.
Eisenhower said during its Jan. 9 meeting, the board will vote on whether to accept Boyle’s resignation.
“And then I’ll take direction from the board as to next steps,” he said. “It’s possible that we could find a permanent person within a short period of time, but most likely we’ll look at putting an interim person in place until we can find a permanent person. That will be my recommendation.”
In 2017, the board voted unanimously to extend Boyle’s contract through 2020. That contract had been drafted in 2014 and already had been extended twice previously. His salary for the 2019-2020 fiscal year was to be just shy of $140,000.
Boyle said he will consider other education employment opportunities in Alaska and perhaps Washington state.
On the surface, Father James Poole seemed like the cool priest in Nome, Alaska. He founded a Catholic mission radio station that broadcast his Jesuit sermons alongside contemporary pop hits. A 1978 story in People magazine called Poole “Western Alaska’s Hippest DJ … Comin’ at Ya with Rock’n’Roll ’n’ Religion.”
Behind the radio station’s closed doors, Poole was a serial sexual predator. He abused at least 20 women and girls, according to court documents. At least one was 6 years old. One Alaska Native woman says he impregnated her when she was 16, then forced her to get an abortion and blame her father for raping her. Her father went to prison.
Like so many other Catholic priests around the country, Poole’s inappropriate conduct with young girls was well-known to his superiors. A Jesuit supervisor once warned a church official that Poole “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere.”
But the last chapter in his story reveals a new twist in the Catholic abuse scandal: Poole was sent to live out his retirement years on Gonzaga University’s campus in Spokane, Washington.
For more than three decades, Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus served as a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual misconduct that predominantly took place in small, isolated Alaska Native villages and on Indian reservations across the Northwest, an investigation by the Northwest News Network and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
A trove of internal Jesuit correspondence shows a longstanding pattern of Jesuit officials in the Oregon Province—an administrative area that included Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Alaska—privately acknowledging issues of inappropriate sexual behavior, but not releasing that information to the public, which avoided scandal and protected the perpetrators from prosecution.
When abuse was discovered, the priests would be reassigned, sometimes to another Native community.
Once the abusive priests reached retirement age, the Jesuits moved them to Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus or another Jesuit residence, to comfortably spend the rest of their lives in relative peace and safety. The university administration did not respond to requests for an interview to answer whether the administration or student body were aware of the presence of known sexual offenders on campus.
Situated on Gonzaga’s campus, between the university’s business school and the St. Aloysius Rectory, Cardinal Bea House played host to at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
The last known abusive priest was moved out of Cardinal Bea House in 2016, Jesuit records show.
Father John Whitney, the former leader of the Oregon Province who ordered Poole to move into Cardinal Bea House, said the Jesuit order is obligated to provide for priests in retirement. He said it was the only facility in the province where past offenders like Poole, then in his 80s, could be contained effectively while also receiving necessary medical care.
Poole resided at Cardinal Bea House from 2003 to 2015. If he had been allowed to live independently, without church oversight, he surely would have abused more people, even at his advanced age, Whitney said in an interview.
The house, Whitney said, was “a retirement community where he could be monitored.”
In a pair of depositions in 2005, Whitney said he did not inform Gonzaga administrators or police in Spokane about Poole’s history after moving him into Cardinal Bea House. A Spokane Police Department spokesperson said they had not received any reports, either from Gonzaga or the Jesuit order, about allegations against any residents of Cardinal Bea House.
Non-abusing Jesuits also lived at Cardinal Bea House, but there were specific “safety plans” for abusers that banned sexually abusive priests from commingling with students. The Oregon Province would not release copies of the plans. While we learned of no reports of residents abusing Gonzaga students, the restrictions were not rigorously enforced.
In a deposition in one of the several lawsuits filed against him, Poole said he regularly went to the school library and basketball games. Poole said he met with a female student alone in the living room of Cardinal Bea House when she came to interview him for a report on Alaska. Student journalists and filmmakers in 2010 and 2011 were also permitted to interview residents, including Joseph Obersinner, who worked in Native communities in Montana, Washington and Idaho. He was accused of sexual misconduct against a minor.
“We love being right in the middle of campus,” Obersinner told the school’s student newspaper. “It’s a blessing to see the active energy and happiness of youth every day.”
A view of the Gonzaga University campus from Cardinal Bea House. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
Cardinal Bea House is a modest low-rise brick building, with large windows in front and a small carport behind. It resembles an unremarkable office building, save for the white statue of an angel-winged saint standing guard over the front entrance. On a recent crisp autumn day, a prankster had slipped a hand-rolled cigarette between the statue’s fingers.
While the building appears on campus maps and is listed in the campus directory, it’s not officially part of the private Jesuit university. Cardinal Bea House is owned by the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church.
Poole was joined at Cardinal Bea House by other priests whose abuse was known, often for years, by the Jesuit order.
Father James Jacobson, sent there in the mid-2000s, was accused of sexual abuse by members of the Alaska Native community of Nelson Island. He claimed he never forced anyone to have sex, saying in a deposition that he had consensual sex with seven Native women. He admitted to fathering four children and using church funds to hire prostitutes in Anchorage and Fairbanks when he was principal of a Jesuit boarding school in Glennallen.
Another priest, Henry Hargreaves, accused of sexually assaulting young boys, was sent to Cardinal Bea House by 2003, and subsequently allowed to lead prayer services in at least four Native American communities on two reservations in Washington state.
While Cardinal Bea House appears on Gonzaga campus maps and is listed in the campus directory, it’s not officially part of the private Jesuit university. (Graphic by Gabriel Hongsdusit/Reveal)
The abusive Jesuits at Cardinal Bea House were part of the Oregon Province’s outsized problem with sexual misconduct. The province had 92 Jesuits accused of sexual abuse, by far the most of any province in the country, according to data we compiled from church records, a database maintained by advocates for sex abuse victims, and information released earlier this month by the Jesuits. In addition, about 80 percent of accused abusers worked in Native communities in the Oregon Province.
Poole has been described as charismatic, outgoing and narcissistic, so he was perfectly suited for his role as the voice of KNOM, the radio station he founded in 1971. Elsie Boudreau, an Alaska Native, was a station volunteer and one of Poole’s victims. From the time she was 10 until she was 16, she volunteered at KNOM.
Boudreau said in an interview that when she was 11 or 12, during a Saturday music request show in which they were alone in the studio, Poole would kiss her on the lips and fondle her, something she didn’t realize was wrong until she was much older. He also made her sit on his lap and lie on top of his body.
For Boudreau, it was a slap in the face that Poole lived out his retirement comfortably until he died early this year. “To me, what that says is they are taken care of,” Boudreau said. “They are protected by the Catholic Church, when the victims were never protected.”
The Catholic Church was deeply embedded in the Native communities of Alaska and Indian reservations in the Northwest. In the early 1900s, the Jesuits had established a school and an orphanage in Elsie Boudreau’s hometown, the predominantly Alaska Native community of St. Mary’s in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Jesuits, officially called the Society of Jesus, are a Catholic religious order founded in the 1500s. While Jesuits can work in various roles from parish priests to teachers, the order is known for its academic and socially conscious bent. There are more than 100 Jesuit high schools, colleges and universities in North America.
Jesuit priests were formidable figures in small Native villages, presiding over daily life from Mass to marriages, baptisms to burials; even teaching catechism lessons, where some of the abuse of the youngest victims took place. Boudreau said she viewed her Catholicism as more central to her identity than being Yup’ik. That religious identity was shattered by her abuse.
“The whole premise behind the Catholic Church and their mission with the Native people, with indigenous people, was to strip them of their identity,” Boudreau said. “And so sexual abuse was one way. I think it’s intentional when you have an institution that is aware of problem priests, perpetrator priests, and moves them to places where they believe that people are ‘less than,’ where they believed the people there would not speak out.”
In 2002, two other abuse victims in Boudreau’s community filed a lawsuit against the church. Learning of the suit from a news story, Boudreau, then in her early 30s, had a shock of recognition. She, too, had suffered abuse, and no longer wanted to remain silent.
After going public with her story of abuse, Elsie Boudreau (center) became an advocate for other survivors in Alaska Native communities through her nonprofit Arctic Winds Healing Winds. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
Boudreau reported her abuse and was deeply unsatisfied with the response. The region’s presiding bishop eventually invited her to a meeting, but Boudreau said he didn’t seem to understand how the abuse had affected her life.
“It was very clear he didn’t care about what happened to me,” Boudreau said. “He didn’t acknowledge that little girl who was hurt and say, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you, what can I do?’ Instead, I became a liability.”
Yet, Jesuit leadership had known about James Poole’s behavior for longer than Boudreau had been alive. In a 1960 letter to a Jesuit official, local Jesuit leader Segundo Llorente fretted over Poole’s conduct. Poole regularly had long, one-on-one conversations with young girls about sex, Llorente wrote. Llorente’s letter speculated that Poole, “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere. Some think that may be (sic) he is projecting outwardly what is eating him inwardly … he is deliberately placing himself at all times in dangerous situations.”
There might have been some personal insight in those words. The names of both Llorente and the Alaska church official with whom he was corresponding, Father Paul O’Connor, appeared on a list released by the Fairbanks Diocese in 2009 of priests accused of sexual misconduct.
Despite Llorente’s warning, Poole’s abuse of minors and young women in Alaska went on for decades, according to attorneys who represented clients, as well as letters from church officials and other court documents. At least one victim accused him of rape.
In another letter from 1986, which has not previously been made public, Bishop Michael Kaniecki of Fairbanks wrote to Archbishop Francis Thomas Hurley of Anchorage: “Hopefully, my letter will nip this mess in the bud. Tried to cover all bases, and yet not admit anything.”
In 1988, Poole was removed from his position at KNOM after young women who had volunteered at the station wrote letters to the bishop in which they accused Poole of sexual misconduct.
The following year, Father Frank Case, the head of the Oregon Province, endorsed Poole for a new position. Case is currently vice president at Gonzaga, an adviser to the school’s president, and chaplain for the school’s nationally ranked men’s basketball team, the Bulldogs.
He wrote a letter to the Catholic chaplains association backing Poole’s application to become a chaplain at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington.
“(Poole) is a Jesuit priest in very good standing, and it is my strong expectation that he will serve in such a ministry in a manner that is both generous and effective,” Case wrote. Poole got the job, working at the hospital until 2003.
In a 2008 deposition, Case said he did not review Poole’s personnel file before writing the letter because he had no indication of misconduct. In a statement through Gonzaga University’s public relations office, Case said he did not have access to Poole’s personnel file.
It wasn’t until 1997, 37 years after Llorente’s letter of caution, that church officials finally came to see their Poole problem as critical. That December, the bishop of Fairbanks sent a letter to the head of the Oregon Province, at least the third provincial to deal with Poole’s sexual misconduct. “Unfortunately, more skeletons keep falling out of the closet … if we do not make a clean cut with Poole, it could jump up and bite us,” he wrote, noting a potential whistleblower was threatening to publicly expose the extent of Poole’s wrongdoings.
The following year, the bishop sent another letter to the province head urging Poole’s old sermons and ministerial messages be removed from the KNOM’s airwaves entirely. “(We could) end up with a public scandal and a possible law suit (sic),” the letter reads. “It is my fear … that if the wrong person hears Jim’s voice anywhere, it might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
Those fears were prescient. In 2003, the same year Poole was forced to retire to Cardinal Bea House, Boudreau became the first person to sue Poole and the church and not withhold her name from the public.
It was Boudreau’s only avenue of redress since the statute of limitations had run out on prosecuting her claim in criminal court. At the time, Alaska had a five-year time frame for prosecuting sexual abuse of minors. She’s one of over 300 Alaska Native victims of child sex abuse by clergy.
In a deposition for the lawsuit, Poole admitted abusing Boudreau. He denied ever raping anyone. He justified his actions with Boudreau and other victims because they fell short of sexual intercourse. “I thought I was bringing love into the life of other persons,” he said.
Gravestones at the Mount St. Michael cemetery in Spokane, Washington, where James Poole is buried amid 54 other Jesuits also accused of sexual abuse. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
Boudreau’s suit was settled in 2005 for $1 million. It was followedbyat least fiveotherlawsuits specifically naming Poole and accusing him of widespread abuse.
Hundreds of other suits followed, naming dozens of other sexually abusive priests active in the Oregon Province. The Jesuits settled all of this litigation for a reported $166 million, the costs of which forced the province to declare bankruptcy in 2009. It was the third-largest settlementin Catholic Church history.
Stories like Poole’s echo across Alaska Native communities. St. Mary’s has just 500 residents, but at least 15 priests accused of sexual abuse were stationed there between 1927 and 1998. It was so pervasive that Boudreau says at least two of her seven siblings and two of her cousins were also sexually assaulted by Jesuit clergy.
The names of religious and lay people accused of abuse who lived in Alaska at some point in their tenure with the church must be listed and published every year by the Fairbanks Diocese as part of the 2010 bankruptcy settlement. As of late October, the diocese listed 46 people.
One man on the list is the aforementioned Father James Jacobson, accused of abuse in 1967 by members of the Alaska Native community of Nelson Island. In a letter at the time, the Jesuit superior in Alaska, Jules Convert, said he wasn’t sure of the veracity of the allegations against Jacobson because the people of Nelson Island “are not yet advanced enough to give impartial and true testimony.”
Jacobson was sent into retirement at Cardinal Bea House by 2005. Convert was also accused of sexually abusing over a dozen young boys in Alaska.
In 2002, John Whitney was installed as the leader of the Oregon Province. He had to deal with a flood of accusations against priests in the province, starting days after taking the position. It was a situation, he said, for which his prior training had not adequately prepared him.
A year later, Elsie Boudreau filed her lawsuit, and Whitney took action against James Poole. He immediately ordered Poole to stop celebrating Mass and sent him directly to Cardinal Bea House. “You are not to have any unsupervised contact with any minors nor are you to meet alone with any women,” Whitney wrote.
Whitney said Cardinal Bea House was the only place where Poole could be monitored, but Poole moved freely throughout campus and, at least on one occasion, met alone with a female student.
Whitney told us in a recent interview that the order didn’t contact the local police department because Poole, and other priests with accusations against them, had not been criminally charged.
Gonzaga University wouldn’t answer questions about whether top officials knew about abusive priests at Cardinal Bea House. University officials declined multiple requests for interviews over a six-week period. Several top university officials, however, held leadership roles in the Jesuits’ Oregon Province as the sex abuse scandal unfolded.
Now a self-described “simple parish priest” in Seattle, Whitney is still processing his role in the crisis.
“I think some of the people deserved to be in jail,” Whitney said. “We knew we couldn’t put them in jail. I felt we had a responsibility to watch over them and that’s what we tried to do. Now, were sometimes the jailers overly beneficent, overly kind? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s hard to be a jailer.”
Whitney was candid about what he owed to survivors and their families. “I have to take responsibility for this, personally. It can’t be something that is delegated to someone else,” he said. “They deserved to confront me.”
The marker for where James Poole’s remains are inurned at Mount St. Michael in Spokane, Washington. Over the course of his life, Poole was accused of sexually abusing at least 20 women. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
Asked if he thinks Poole is in hell, Whitney said he believes Poole is in a sort of purgatory. “What I believe purgatory to be is that we all have to be purged of the things we hold onto,” Whitney said. “In being purged of those things, we have to experience what we put others through.”
Whitney said the church needs to come to a public reckoning, an opening up of the archives to show it is serious about stamping out abuse. The recent grand jury report out of Pennsylvania, which showed decades of abuse kept hidden from public view by the church, is work that should have been done by the church itself, he said.
Earlier this month, Jesuits West, the new province created with the 2017 merger of the Oregon and California provinces, voluntarily released the names of priests accused of sexual misconduct with minors or “vulnerable adults.” But the new list omits at least 13 priests previously accused publicly in lawsuits and bankruptcy documents.
Tracey Primrose, a spokeswoman for Jesuits West, said more names could be added in the future after an external review due to be completed by spring, but did not explain the omissions.
There are no longer any known abusive priests at Cardinal Bea House. In the past couple of years, they have been relocated south to the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, California.
Sacred Heart is a former training school, where some of the abusive priests began their preparation for Jesuit life decades ago. The facility is hidden behind a hilltop winery, which also used to be owned by the Jesuits and was used to produce Communion wine. The order stopped its wine production in 1986 and the winery is now operated by a secular company.
The goal of the reshuffling, John Whitney said, was to place the priests in a more secure and isolated location. Since many of the offending Jesuits are older and declining in health, Sacred Heart was also a place where they could receive better medical care.
But Sacred Heart has problems of its own. By moving admitted sexual offenders into a facility that also services vulnerable people, it created an environment where predators had space to commit abuse.
In 2002, two mentally disabled men working as dishwashers at the facility received a combined $7.5 million settlement from the order for decades of sexual abuse by Jesuit priest Edward Thomas Burke and Brother Charles Leonard Connor. After a friend of one of the victims went to police, both men were convicted and required to register as sex offenders.
The abusive priests of Cardinal Bea House have been sent to Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, California. But Sacred Heart has been the site of sexual misconduct. (Photo by Emily Schwing for Reveal)
The Jesuits also settled a separate lawsuit for $1.6 million after an abused priest, James Chevedden, killed himself.
He, too, was sexually abused by Connor when he was sent to Sacred Heart after suffering a mental breakdown. When Chevedden learned Connor was returning to Sacred Heart, and that other abusive clergy were going to be sent there, he asked to be moved. When his request was denied, he killed himself, according to the lawsuit filed by Chevedden’s father.
California’s database of sex offenders only lists one person residing at Sacred Heart, Gary Uhlenkott, a Jesuit priest and former Gonzaga University music professor who was sentenced to six months in jail in May after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography. However, the list released earlier this month of priests accused of sexually abusing minors shows at least seven currently living at Sacred Heart.
James Poole died in March at Sacred Heart. His remains were sent back to Spokane, where they were inurned at the Jesuits’ grassy cemetery on the outskirts of town.
While he was stationed at Cardinal Bea House, Poole’s sole responsibility was to maintain the cemetery grounds.
There, Poole’s remains rest amid 54 other Jesuits who were also accused of sexual abuse. They’re outside the gate of a K-12 school.
The carefree voices of children the same age as Elsie Boudreau when she was abused float over the grounds during recess.
This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Narda Zacchino and copy edited by Stephanie Rice.
Front Street in Nome, January 2018. (Photo by Zachariah Hughes/Alaska Public Media)
For months in Nome, long-simmering frustrations over how the police department handles sexual assault allegations and investigations have been airing publicly, commanding attention and prompting a local reckoning.
Now major reforms are taking place. The city government is even joining a call for federal officials to investigate the conduct of its own police department.
Advocates spent years laying the groundwork for changes that are now starting to materialize. And they say they’re not done.
In 2015, Clarice “Bun” Hardy started working as a dispatcher with the Nome Police Department.
“I loved it,” she explained. Sociable and well-connected, Hardy took a certain professional delight in handling missing person calls. “I’d have that person tracked down in like 10, 15 minutes. It’s just something I loved to do.”
“But I don’t think I could ever go back there,” she added.
In March of 2017, Hardy said she was drugged and sexually assaulted. She was at a bar, halfway through a second drink before she blacked out. The next day she woke up in just a T-shirt, no idea how she got home or why she was in pain. Eventually, she found her phone under the couch, the battery dead.
“I got it charged, and that’s when my Snapchat just started blowing up,” Hardy said. In messages and voicemails, people kept asking if she was OK, and whether she had seen the video.
Hardy was confused. “I’m like, ‘What video?’”
Hardy believes that her assailant’s girlfriend broke into her apartment and took a video of the assault, putting it on social media soon after. She said it circulated for a few hours before being taken down. Hardy was horrified. She reported what happened to a colleague at work, Lt. Nick Harvey, who told her he’d investigate.
Over the next few months, Hardy would ask Harvey about the status of the case, always getting a response of, “I’m working it,” from Harvey, she recalled.
But Hardy grew increasingly frustrated by what seemed like a total lack of progress.
Eventually, she said, she started asking people she knew had seen the original video clip whether police investigators had followed up with them. Nobody had.
“There was no report. He never talked to anyone,” Hardy said.
Even though Hardy was a member of Nome’s small police department at the time, her case languished for more than a year. (Hardy is no longer a Nome city employee.)
Harvey did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Earlier this year he was demoted from a lieutenant to a sergeant at NPD.
Hardy’s story isn’t unique.
For years, a group of mostly Alaska Native women in Nome had been meeting. It started informally over dinners, sharing stories about sexual assaults they had lived through or heard about from friends and family.
“Nobody would get calls back from the police department, nobody would get any follow-up,” Nome resident Lisa Navruk Ellanna said. “Nothing. Not one darn thing.”
Ellanna hosted those first meals around her kitchen table, and eventually the group solicited more stories from women around town, as well as from cab drivers and bartenders. To them, it seemed like NPD didn’t treat assault allegations seriously if a woman said she was drinking or in a bar beforehand.
“We started to hear this pattern of how the police department was not responding, was not investigating, was not following through, was not seeking justice on behalf of the victims,” Ellanna said.
“This is years in the making,” said Darlene Paqpaluk Trigg, Ellanna’s friend and co-organizer. Though ongoing national conversations around sexual harassment and assault have affected discussions in Nome, Trigg cautioned against placing too much emphasis on them as catalysts for what’s played out around town.
“This is something that existed here prior to any of it being called out on the national scale,” Trigg added.
An important chapter in Nome’s reckoning started in May, when Trigg and Ellanna were part of a group of about 20 women that showed up at a city meeting with a document. It outlined more than a dozen changes they wanted the city and police department to make in their handling of sexual assaults. One was more training for officers who do interviews in assault cases. Another was better trauma response, and a third was cultural orientation for police new to the Bering Strait region.
As the summer wore on, the typically sleepy council meetings were packed, and the conversation grew heated.
In the women’s estimation, nothing changed. So this fall, advocates started running for local offices.
Trigg, a first-time candidate, ran for a seat on the local school board on a platform of improving racial equity. A 28-year-old lawyer, Meghan Sigvanna Topkok, landed a seat on the city council.
“I wanted to see more Native voices,” Topkok said. “I was particularly concerned about domestic violence and sexual assault and how it’s handled in our city. So I wanted to be part of how we’re going to move forward with that.”
Topkok knows firsthand what it means to mistrust the police department. She said that’s part of what kept her from reporting her own sexual assault after it happened in 2013, the same year she moved back to town after college.
“It was easier to just keep that to myself and not talk about it,” she said. “I still don’t talk about it very often.”
Though Nome is about half Alaska Native, for years the six members of the city council have been almost exclusively white and male. This fall, Topkok is one of the council’s two women.
From her vantage point as an attorney and a council member, Topkok said the police department’s problems stem from its budget.
“Some of it just comes back to the fact that we’re very understaffed,” Topkok said. “I also think that our police officers are underpaid for the amount of work that they have to do.”
This is a point almost everyone agrees on. Nome is a regional hub with the only bars and liquor stores for hundreds of miles in almost every direction. The volume of calls to emergency responders for help is staggering, with a huge share of them related to alcohol. The police force is small, often only able to field a single officer on each patrol shift, leaving little or no time for follow-ups, investigations or community policing. One officer recently made nine arrests in a single shift, according to the department’s current head.
There is disagreement, however, about the performance of the previous police chief, John Papasodora.
Community advocates critical of Papasodora say he repeatedly turned away resources and offers for more training and personnel, like grant money from third-party groups. Papasodora declined a request for an interview, but he wrote in an email, “The performance of the department has been scrutinized, and changes were implemented to address the issues.”
Ellanna and Hardy, among others, say that racism is a problem within the department’s upper ranks. Those claims have revived memories of the 2003 case of Matthew Owens, a white Nome police officer convicted of abducting and killing 19-year-old Sonya Ivanoff.
The tragedy remains a “stain on the community,” according to Melanie Bahnke, president of the regional nonprofit Kawerak.
“That memory doesn’t go away,” Bahnke said in her office. “A young Alaska Native woman was murdered at the hands of the Nome Police Department. It’s like pulling off a scab.”
In November, Kawerak asked the Justice Department to independently investigate whether there was a pattern of NPD ignoring sexual assault claims. In a new step, the city of Nome signed onto the same letter, agreeing to let federal officials look into local policing practices.
Anchorage FBI spokeswoman Staci Feger-Pellessier said the bureau has received the request from Nome, but would not comment on whether an investigation is open.
Now, Nome has a few new leaders in key positions. One of main targets of activists’ frustration this summer was the city manager, Tom Moran, who they felt was not doing enough to hold the police department accountable. Moran was pushed out of his job a few days before the end of his contract in October.
Moran said that what might have seemed like inaction was in fact a difficult balancing act between transparency and respecting confidentiality in sensitive investigations and personnel matters. But he also acknowledged lapses.
“There were a lot of open cases that probably should have been tied up and packaged and sent off to the district attorney, and they hadn’t been,” Moran said during a November interview. “The main question was why this was being allowed to transpire.”
He pointed to gaps in training and staffing at NPD as a prime reason, as well as an insufficient budget for expanding public safety services.
Leaders in Nome say the city is responding to those and other problems. The new police chief, Bob Estes, said he is committed to rebuilding the department, in part by incorporating more community input and hiring more officers. The new interim city manager, John Handeland, has deep ties in Nome and supports the request for a federal investigation.
“I’ve heard personal stories from folks of cases and incidents where they feel that their claims were not taken seriously,” Handeland said. “I tend to agree with some of them.”
For their part, activists worry that a few early reforms will allow deeper problems to go unresolved. City meetings have cooled off, with much sparser attendance. An early demand to set up a community advisory board to oversee the police department sounded at first like it was a sure thing. Now, according to Ellanna, the city council seems less committed. She worries that with less pressure on elected leaders, momentum will slow.
For Trigg, the fundamental problem remains firmly in place: Women in Nome are still not safe.
“When you have an investigation that comes back with conclusions and recommendations, that’s when you’re able to say ‘progress.’ Implementation of those recommendations: That’s progress,” Trigg listed off.
“Taking the bad characters out of the equation: That’s just doing what’s right,” she added.
One important change that has already taken root: The last few months of organizing have brought more personal stories of sexual assault out into public. Trigg and others say that is diminishing some of the long-standing stigma and isolation that used to come with keeping silent.
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