All Choked Up

In a remote corner of Eastern Washington’s Colville Indian Reservation, up a road that winds through sharp-edged, scrub-covered mountains to a plateau, sits a cluster of long, rectangular buildings. The site, once a thriving boarding school for Native Americans called St. Mary’s, is mostly empty now, except for a white, steepled church that holds occasional services. Yet Kate Sanchez, a member of the Colville tribe, still feels revulsion when she comes here, remembering the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse she says she experienced at the hands of Jesuit priests at the school four decades ago.

Sanchez and 15 other former St. Mary’s students recently sued the Jesuits and came away with a $4.8 million payout. But the settlement has done little to lessen her disgust. Nor has it softened her anger at the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province, which oversees Jesuit activities in five Northwestern states. The Province filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago in the face of hundreds of additional abuse claims from Native Americans like her.

“They raped us when we were small, and now they’re doing it all over again with this bankruptcy,” says Sanchez, 54, a social worker on the Colville reservation who says she gave away her settlement money. She periodically breaks down in tears when she talks about the case. She believes that with access to “the Pope and the Vatican and the dioceses,” the Province can hardly claim to be out of cash.

But that’s exactly what the Jesuits are asserting. Their bankruptcy has set off a complicated, high-stakes fight over how much money the Province actually has, and who else’s pockets the plaintiffs’ attorneys can dig into.

As abuse claims against the Catholic Church have exploded in the past decade, attorneys have become ever more aggressive and adept at recruiting clients while raising their financial demands. In the case of the Oregon Province bankruptcy, attorneys have assembled roughly 600 alleged victims—most of them Native Americans—who lay claim to a share of the Jesuits’ assets. One Seattle lawyer working on the case, Timothy Kosnoff, has set his sights on winning in excess of $1 million per person—or more than three times the amount paid out to Sanchez’s group just two years ago.

This time, plaintiffs’ attorneys are hoping to tap into the assets of two local Jesuit institutions—Seattle University on First Hill and Gonzaga University in Spokane—as well as the Jesuits’ headquarters in Rome.

Litigation against the Catholic Church is “big business,” observes Gonzaga’s in-house counsel, Mike Casey. “In their perfect world, [trial lawyers] would take the keys from the Pope to the Vatican treasury and go in and help themselves.”

In bankruptcies, most of the financial wrangling happens before the merit of the claims is even assessed. Later, after the press has moved on, a number of claims will likely be dismissed as invalid.

Still, the cases have revealed extensive abuse nationwide, unchecked by the governing structures of the Catholic Church. And the case against the Oregon Province—the first in the long-running church-abuse scandal to center around Native Americans—has cast light on a little-known chapter in the painful story of white/Indian relations.

On reservations like the Colville tribe’s, former students still wrestle with the legacy of boarding schools and the religious institutions that ran them. Many, like Sanchez, view the schools as a crime against the Indian people—institutions that stole their culture and literally raped them to boot. They want that story finally to be told. Others say the schools were refuges from a host of social ills prevalent on reservations, providing basic necessities and the skills needed to succeed in mainstream America.

The town of Omak in north-central Washington is divided in two by the Okanogan River. One side resembles a small mountain town like any other, with a bookstore, a Best Western, and a Wal-Mart. The other side—with just a few scattered businesses bearing names like Buckshot Espresso and Beads and Things—marks the western edge of the sprawling Colville Indian Reservation.

Some 5,000 tribal members live on these 1.3 million rural acres. It is an impoverished place, especially so since the recent closure of two nearby logging mills, which put a dent in tribal employment. And while the tribe runs three casinos, the area’s sparse population has made gambling less of a windfall here than it’s been elsewhere.

The reservation’s spare, undulating terrain is stunning in a stark, otherworldly way. It’s exactly the sort of place you would expect a Jesuit missionary, in this case one Father Etienne deRougé, to set up an outpost in the 1880s.

Catholic, Protestant, and Quaker missionaries established some of the first boarding schools for Native Americans in the U.S. The idea was simple: “The schools were designed to civilize the Indians,” says Jon Reyhner, a Northern Arizona University professor who co-authored the 2004 book A History of Indian Education.

The best way to do that, it was thought at the time, was to isolate children from their parents and their culture. The U.S. government, which provided early funding for religious boarding schools while also establishing its own schools, concurred with this plan. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the government forcibly removed Native American children from their parents and sent them to these schools.

Colville tribal member Agatha Bart says that her late husband, living as a child on the Flathead Reservation in Montana during the early 1930s, was snapped up along with his siblings by government officials one day while his parents were out, and taken to the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius boarding school. “[His] mother tried to get them back, but they threatened her with jail,” Bart says.

Other parents proved more willing. Sousan Abadian, who looked at the history of these schools for a doctoral dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, notes that the population and culture of Native Americans had been decimated. The thinking was, she says: “Well, let’s send our kids to learn the new white man’s way.” Plus, she adds, most of the parents were desperately poor and were told something irresistible by school officials: “Their kids would be fed.”

The schools became a magnet for children from some of the poorest, most dysfunctional families, Reyhner says. And as one generation raised in boarding schools sent the next generation to do the same, it became a normal practice on reservations—until a self-sufficiency movement in the 1960s and ’70s prompted tribes to take over or close most of the schools.

Conditions at the schools could be harsh, that much is clear—and not just at those run by Catholics. “I was really surprised to see Quaker schools were equally violent in their punishment,” says Reyhner’s co-author, Jeanne Eder, a University of Alaska history professor.

“But you’ve got to look at white schools of the era,” Reyhner cautions. Corporal punishment was the norm. He adds that “you get these contrasting pictures” from former students. “I’ve talked to some Indian people who say that boarding schools were the best years of their lives.” Others say their school experiences scarred them for life.

Among the latter is Kate Sanchez.

She was in first grade when she arrived at St. Mary’s. She and her siblings had previously spent time in foster care, after her mother, a migrant fruit-picker, had gone out of town and her father, as she puts it, “took off on a drunk.” Her mother later reclaimed the children, but then brought them to the school because she couldn’t afford to care for them.

As Sanchez remembers it, her first day at St. Mary’s set the tone. At dinner time, the children lined up in the strict formation demanded by the priests and nuns. Sanchez, excited to be reunited with siblings who had been placed with a different foster family, tried to get the attention of an older sister. But talking was forbidden.

A priest disciplined her by making her kneel in the dining room with her arms straight out—”like you were on a cross,” she recalls. “The minute your arms would drop, they would slap you.” Unable to eat, she went to bed hungry.

Sanchez also remembers receiving a beating for telling a priest, during this strange new proceeding called a confession, that she didn’t have any sins. “You’re nothing but savages,” she says the Jesuits would tell her and her peers. “God’s never going to forgive you.”

“I grew up hating God,” says Sanchez, who now practices a form of Native American spirituality that encompasses sweat-house rituals and winter dances.

And then there were the spankings by a priest named John Morse. She says she would have to pull her dress up and panties down. Morse would then straddle her on his knee, hold her tight, and slip his fingers inside her.

Sanchez says that over the years there was an unspoken agreement among her classmates not to discuss the abuse they suffered. But then a Spokane attorney named John Allison paid a visit to the Colville reservation to talk to them about their experiences. He had been contacted by a woman who had attended St. Mary’s around the same time as Sanchez, and who also recalled Morse fondling girls while spanking them. Others eventually accused a Brother Jim Gates of abuse as well.

At first, Sanchez had no interest in discussing the subject. “One of the girls I grew up with at the school said they were having a meeting at this house to talk about the St. Mary’s issue,” she recalls. “I was angry. I went down to tell them, ‘No, you can’t talk about this.'”

But as she heard her former classmates say that it was time to speak up, she found herself agreeing. Eventually she joined a group of plaintiffs from the reservation that included 15 women and one man.

Some on the reservation still don’t want to hear the subject discussed. Reached by phone, tribal chair Mike Finely declined to talk about St. Mary’s. And Spirit Peoples, editor of the Tribal Tribune, says the reservation newspaper has never run an article on the scandal. “There are certain issues we try to stay away from, that will affect both sides of the community,” he says, declining to elaborate.

Some tribal members are skeptical of the claims. Debbie Simpson now serves as Superintendent of the Paschal Sherman Indian School—the institution that St. Mary’s became after the Jesuits turned the school over to the Colville tribe in 1974. The tribe built a soaring new home for the school, with a circular, glass-enclosed foyer designed to look like a tepee.

Sitting in her office, Simpson, a peppy 52-year-old with long black hair and coral jewelry around her neck and wrist, says that she too was a student at St. Mary’s. She attended at the same time as Sanchez, but recalls years of hikes, violin lessons, and inspiring classes rather than abuse. “They pushed us; they made us learn,” she says, crediting her position today to the academic instruction and sense of structure she gained there.

She says she also received more basic things—clothes and shoes, for instance. “They had an attic and would keep clothes people gave them,” she says. Before St. Mary’s, she sometimes had to go barefoot.

As she started to see former classmates come forward to talk about abuse she never heard about at the time, she says she wondered: “Why now?”

“I didn’t know if I could believe it or not.” She says of the accusers: “I think some of them are doing it for the money.”

Simpson and her school maintain a connection to the Jesuits today. Three Jesuit volunteers currently work at Paschal Sherman, and their duties include teaching Catholic theology. The school, however, calls such teachings “reflection” rather than “religion,” so as not to jeopardize the federal funding that continues to provide students with free tuition as well as room and board, according to Simpson. Also, a Jesuit priest, Father Jake Morton, lives in a trailer on the reservation side of Omak. He caters to a population that retains many Catholic believers.

In spite of the ambivalence on the reservation, the Jesuits themselves have not contested the abuse claims. Indeed, when Allison’s group of 16 held a mediation session with the Oregon Province in late 2007, the Very Rev. John Whitney, then head of the Oregon Province, showed up in contrite form. “He acknowledged that a few priests had caused great harm, and that people in his position previously could have done more to stop it,” Allison says.

Whitney did not specifically confirm the allegations against Morse and Gates. But the Province placed Morse, who lives at a Jesuit retirement house on the Gonzaga campus, under a “24-hour supervised safety plan,” according to Province spokesperson Pat Walsh. Walsh declined to provide details, except to say that someone is with Morse at all times. Morse has denied the allegations against him, but did not return a message from Seattle Weekly seeking further comment. Gates is also abiding by the terms of an unspecified “safety plan,” according to the Detroit Province, where he now lives in a Jesuit retirement house. A man who answered the phone at his room hung up when a Weekly reporter called.

Ultimately, the Oregon Province agreed to settle the suit by paying $4.8 million to the 16 former St. Mary’s students. According to Kosnoff, the group split the money evenly—some $300,000 per person (minus attorneys’ fees).

Sanchez says she gave her share away—to “people who needed their cars fixed, people who needed homes, people who were hurting.”

“That money didn’t mean nothing,” she says, although she acknowledges that others saw it differently, in part because of their quest for retribution. “This is the only way we can make them pay,” was the view she says others expressed.

Sanchez did not achieve the ultimate resolution she sought: seeing her abuser jailed. That isn’t possible due to the statute of limitations in criminal prosecutions.

Even so, she says, “I’m glad I did it.” She says the biggest payoff for her was telling her story at a deposition that Morse attended. “I was able to look right at my perpetrator and watch his reaction.” He said nothing, she says. Even so, “It was my way of telling him ‘You know what, you can’t hurt me.'”

The settlement did not put an end to the claims from St. Mary’s, however. Quite the contrary. Allison then heard from another dozen or so former students and approached the Oregon Province about mediation. At the same time, a Yakima law firm filed suit on behalf of another 21 pupils.

While they all might have wanted to tell their story too, they were also making financial demands that were adding up. The Oregon Province was already reeling from a series of lawsuits up in Alaska, where hundreds of Native Americans claimed abuse at the hands of parish priests who’d been sent to remote Indian villages. The plaintiffs included women who said they had become pregnant as a result. The Jesuits paid $50 million to settle those claims in 2007 and the Fairbanks diocese—which, atypically, staffed its parishes with Jesuit priests—declared bankruptcy the following year as more claims arose.

In February 2009, the Oregon Province also declared bankruptcy. In an open letter to followers, the recently installed head of the Oregon Province, the Very Rev. Patrick Lee, said, “The rest of our money is gone.” He called it the Oregon Province’s “darkest hour.”

Lee and others at the Province, through a spokesperson, declined multiple requests to discuss the case with Seattle Weekly.

In the world of civil litigation, filing for bankruptcy is only the beginning, not the end. It simply shifts the battle from one over the merits of the case (all the lawsuits are immediately stayed) to one over how much money the defendant has left, where else money might be found, and who all might have a claim to it.

Seven Catholic dioceses have filed bankruptcy in the face of abuse claims. Dioceses are generally tied to a city and serve everyday Catholics through a system of parishes. The multistate Oregon Province belongs to a religious order, the Jesuits, driven by a specific mission: education and serving the poor. The Jesuits are known as the most intellectual and therefore most prestigious of all Catholic orders. Sometimes they dispatch priests to serve in parishes, but they otherwise operate under a separate structure.

Bankruptcy first emerged as a coping mechanism in abuse cases in 2004, when the Portland, Tucson, and Spokane dioceses filed for bankruptcy after being hit, time and again, with multiparty lawsuits. Bankruptcy was the only way to put a stop to the litigation, says Shaun Cross, who served as lead counsel for the Spokane diocese for four years. But he adds that “it was such a risky strategy.” The diocese was opening itself to the possibility, however remote, of complete liquidation—meaning that it would lose not only its headquarters but also, conceivably, all its churches and Catholic schools. Cross says he and the diocese thus faced a lot of criticism in Catholic and legal communities.

In the end, the Spokane diocese—like others around the country that filed for bankruptcy—worked out a settlement that allowed it to continue operating, but in humbled form. “We sold everything we had,” says Deacon Mike Miller, the diocese’s secretary for business affairs. That included the headquarters, or chancery, and the bishop’s spacious house—he moved into a small suite in the rectory—although not churches and schools, which narrowly escaped being considered part of the diocese’s assets. The diocese also cut programs, Miller says.

One of the requirements of bankruptcy is that the bankrupt organization advertise for possible claimants. After it filed, the Oregon Province spent over a half-million dollars on ads in various media, including USA Today, according to court documents. The ads spelled out a process whereby anyone claiming “sexual, mental, or physical misconduct or abuse” would have to fill out a three-page form describing what happened and when. The deadline, set by the bankruptcy court, for all claims to be submitted was November 30 of last year.

But several of the lawyers pressing claims against the Jesuits sought more victims—and therefore more clients—on their own. One of them was Timothy Kosnoff.

For more than a decade, Kosnoff has been Seattle’s go-to plaintiffs’ lawyer for sexual-abuse claims. He estimates he and his newly acquired partner Mike Pfau have handled some 500 such cases between them, including the lion’s share of the victim claims in the Spokane bankruptcy, a lawsuit against the Mormon church that resulted in a then-record $3 million settlement in 2001, and many of the claims from the Colville reservation, which Kosnoff worked on with Allison.

Even so, Kosnoff has a relaxed, almost laid-back manner. Talking over coffee on the last day of 2009, while preparing for trial in yet another abuse case—against the Catholic-run Morning Star Boys’ Ranch in Spokane—he’s trim and leisurely, as if he had all the time in the world. He recounts his journey from a burnt-out criminal defense attorney to—by virtue of a 17-year-old Mormon boy who came to him in 1996 with a story of molestation by a church elder—a champion of the abused.

By his own account, he’s also a shrewd businessman. “I’m a cash-and-carry kind of guy,” he says. “I like to make each case a profit center.”

In the case of the Oregon Province, he looked at filings that were then mostly about Alaskans and said to himself, “What’s so special about Alaska?” In other words, why were there hundreds of claims from there and only a few dozen from Washington, never mind Idaho, Montana, or Oregon?

He came up with a plan to smoke out the victims that he knew must be there. “I did this spreadsheet of all the reservations that the Jesuits had staffed,” he remembers. He then joined forces with three other law firms, including Allison’s, who came together under the name “Northwest Attorneys for Justice.” Together they bought their own ads in publications across the Northwest. He carefully thought about the placement and language. Indians on remote reservations don’t read USA Today, he says, so he also took out ads in Native American newspapers like Colville’s Tribal Tribune, among other publications.

He also stayed away from official-sounding legalese, which he says Indians distrust. Instead, the ads used powerful rhetoric about victimization. “The Jesuits dumped their worst child molesters on the reservations, where Jesuit officials allowed these men to molest and brutalize native children,” read one ad that ran last fall in Seattle Weekly. “Now the Jesuits are seeking to permanently cut off abuse victims’ right to justice, healing and compensation,” the ad continued, referring to the November 30 deadline.

The ads listed the names of eight alleged perpetrators in Washington and Montana and included pictures of five of them. It also included a toll-free number to one attorney’s office.

The calls poured in. Dividing up the terrain, the lawyers went out to meet their potential clients. Kosnoff took Montana, venturing to the Blackfeet and Flathead Reservations, where he found people in desolate locales, grappling with alcoholism, homelessness, and other problems. “I’ve never encountered a population like that before,” he says. “The sexual abuse—while awful—was just one layer of many layers of destruction, and maybe not the worst.”

It was, however, the one that could translate into a financial claim. By November, the Northwest Attorneys for Justice had 220 clients, and the case had shifted from one primarily arising from Alaska to one largely revolving around reservation boarding schools in the Northwest. Fifty-seven priests and brothers have been implicated. More than 100 people say they were abused at St. Mary’s alone.

Bankruptcy court is a “let’s make a deal” kind of place, says Kosnoff. No kidding. In court filings, the Oregon Province has declared assets of $4.8 million, but the claimants’ attorneys have set their sights exponentially higher: Kosnoff suggests $750 million.

He discounts the Oregon Province’s financial declarations. The typical pattern, Kosnoff says, is for church entities to say “We’re poor, we’re poor.” In the Spokane bankruptcy, for instance, he says the diocese originally claimed it had only $9 million. “Then we said we’re going to start knocking down cathedrals and churches.” The diocese eventually came up with $48 million, $10 million of which was contributed by local parishes. The parishes were not legally on the hook, but put up the money anyway so that the diocese could reach a settlement and keep itself afloat.

Gonzaga University attorney Mike Casey says that scenario is part of the “playbook” of Kosnoff and his crowd—to reach into the pockets of any entities they can, whether those entities are responsible for the abuse or not.

Jerome Shulkin, a veteran bankruptcy attorney on Mercer Island, says something similar could happen with the current case, except that the institutions having to deliver the money would be, among others, Seattle and Gonzaga Universities. In fact, if the Oregon Province really is as poor as it says, then the schools might have to cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gonzaga’s Casey insists that won’t happen. He asserts that Gonzaga was separately incorporated in 1894 and operates independently (although virtually all its presidents and a number of board members have been Jesuit priests). Seattle University, which declined interview requests and provided a written statement, says it was also separately incorporated in the 1890s.

But that’s not necessarily relevant, says Jim Stang, a Los Angeles attorney and bankruptcy specialist who has been appointed by the court to represent the financial interests of all the claimants—a role he’s held in six prior bankruptcies involving the Catholic Church. (Kosnoff, Allison, and their peers represent clients individually.) Stang says the crucial question is whether the Oregon Province controls those institutions—say, by dictating appointments.

The plaintiffs could also potentially go after the assets of the international body of Jesuits if they can show that Rome controls the Oregon Province. Says Stang: “We certainly have evidence in the documents…that the father general had control of funds that were used [by the Province].” The bankruptcy court has given Stang subpoena power, allowing him to take depositions and obtain documents from all these institutions in order to investigate the relationship among them.

The bankruptcy proceeding represents more than a potential financial drain on Gonzaga and Seattle U. “It’s a threat to our reputation,” Casey concedes. “We certainly don’t want to be associated with those bad acts.”

Claimants’ attorneys are indeed trying to link the universities to the abuse that happened. For instance, they assert that a number of alleged abusers, in addition to Morse, live at a Jesuit facility on the Gonzaga campus. Seattle University President Stephen Sundborg has also drawn attention because of his role as the head of the Oregon Province in the early ’90s. One multi-plaintiff suit from Alaska, now stayed, accused Sundborg of covering up for abusers. He has denied doing so.

Casey additionally gripes that while claimants’ lawyers are fishing for information, “they’re being paid princely hourly rates by the Oregon Province.” What he’s referring to is an ironic provision in bankruptcy law that compels the broke organization to pay for lawyers on both sides—some of them, anyway. For instance, the Oregon Province must pay Stang, and his billing rate is $640 an hour, according to court documents.

The Province does not bankroll Kosnoff and Allison; they get paid through contingency fees, which typically are up to a third of clients’ awards.

Only once the pot of money has been agreed upon will anyone actually take a good look at the claims to determine whether they’re valid.

In the Spokane case, the bankruptcy court immediately ruled that 11 of the 200 cases were invalid, according to Greg Arpin, another diocese lawyer. Then a court-appointed reviewer, former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington Kate Pflaumer, examined most of the remaining cases. She interviewed the claimants, as well as friends or relatives who could corroborate their stories.

She denied 10 of these claims, according to Aprin.

It was up to Pflaumer to recommend a monetary amount for each person she determined was a victim. She used a complicated matrix based on factors such as the severity of the abuse and the age of the child at the time. In the end, there wasn’t enough money to pay out the awards she recommended, and everyone got less.

The Province bankruptcy is probably still years away from such a settlement. Kosnoff and Allison both suggest that what’s really needed to close these cases is a Canada-style “mea culpa,” as Allison puts it, for what the two lawyers have come to see as an epic wrong done to the Indian people. The Canadian government not only authorized $1.9 billion for payments to victims of abuse by religious authorities, but also set up a South Africa–style Truth and Reconciliation Committee to hear survivors’ stories (currently getting underway). Until recently, scholars considered boarding schools in Canada far more abusive than those in this country. With the Oregon Province case, hundreds of Native Americans are suggesting that the schools here were just as bad.

“I was thinking about writing Steven Spielberg and asking him, ‘How about an Indian Shoah?'” says Kosnoff. (Shortly after he made Schindler’s List, Spielberg established the Shoah Foundation to record testimonies by Holocaust survivors.)

In the meantime, Kosnoff is already talking about what he calls “the next shoe to drop”—litigation over abuse that happened at the many Indian boarding schools across the country run by the federal government.

At this point, the details of any such lawsuit are sketchy, but he seems to think he would have no problem finding people wanting to press a claim.

He says, “I always start with the axiom: The victims are out there.”

nshapiro@seattleweekly.com