Tell Me About Your Father: Yufna Soldier Wolf

On this episode, Elizabeth talks to Yufna Soldier Wolf, the youngest child of Mark Soldier Wolf, an Arapaho tribal elder, former Marine, and veteran of the Korean War, who died in 2018 at the age of 87. Like hundreds of thousands of Native American children, Yufna’s father Mark, his father, and his uncle, were sent to an Indian Boarding School as kids. Children were beaten, sexually abused, used for slave labor, and died in these schools, which were opened in the late 1800s and were mostly shut down by the 1970s. Yufna’s great uncle, Little Chief, was one of the children who never came home, his body buried with the more than 180 kids who died attending the Carlisle Industrial Boarding School in Pennsylvania. In 2017, before Mark died, Yufna traveled with her dad to Carlisle to finish the work he, his father, and his father’s father, had started: having Little Chief’s remains returned to Wyoming to be properly buried with the rest of his family. Listen as Yufna describes the special healing work she did with her father and other members of the tribe around the trauma they carry from Boarding Schools, the U.S.’s treatment of Native Veterans, and the decolonization work and rejection of a patriarchal worldview they’re using to move forward. She also describes the work she’s doing to preserve her father’s archives that he hoped would continue to educate us all on the history of the Arapaho people. If you'd like to donate to help preserve Mark's archives, visit https://fcmod.org/donate-now/ and note that you'd like your donation to go to the curation of the Mark Soldier Wolf Collection. Get full access to Tell Me About Your Father at tellmeaboutyourfather.substack.com/subscribe