The Dream Catcher
The dream catcher travels no longer.
It has travelled too far.
Too often.
It has captured too much pain.
As “a gift from our hearts,” Debra Gutowski, a member of the Little River Band of Ottawa Native Americans in Muskegon, Michigan, created the dream catcher.
“We were sorrowed and saddened” by the news that two Columbine (Colorado) teens had killed a dozen students and a teacher in 1999, explained Gutowski, who runs an Indian education program in Muskegon schools. “So, we gifted the dream catcher to heal the people, as we do with our children. We gift them to our babies so that they heal, have good dreams, [and] wake up to do good things,” explained the teacher who was asked by students she works with to make one for Columbine.
Resembling a spider web of string inside a hoop made from willow and decorated with feathers and beads, a dream catcher is a protective charm originally used by Ojibwe and Lakota native Americans. It is believed to capture nightmares and evil spirits in its web, allowing good dreams and spirits to pass through.
“We wanted to do something from our program for the other kids, just to let them know we were thinking about them, explained Gutowski. “We just sent good spirits to them.” The frame of the Little River Band gift includes two Odawa phrases: “Ba ma pee – Let us see each other again” and “Gda dwendaagnananik – all our relations (or ‘We are all family’).”
The dream catcher was never intended to travel beyond Columbine. However, after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed seven people and wounded five others at his former Red Lake (Minnesota) High School on March 21, 2005, members of the Columbine High School community gifted the dream catcher to the Red Lake Indian Reservation as a symbol of solidarity.
After a gunman murdered twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the dream catcher was delivered to the Newtown, Connecticut community as a symbol of solidarity and an expression of hope for healing.
To Marysville-Pilchuch (Washington) High School where four students were shot and killed in 2014.
To Townville, South Carolina, where a six-year-old boy died in 2016 after being shot on an elementary school playground.
To Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the dream catcher was received with a moment of silence in honor of the fourteen students and three staff members who were killed and seventeen others injured on February 14, 2018.
In each case, the dream catcher was personally delivered to the grieving community by members of the “dream catcher family.” “Whether it’s holding hands or just hugging, the message [is] clear: that we’ve been where you are, we are all struggling through this, we will continue to struggle through our entire lifetimes, and the message is you’re not alone,” explained former Sandy Hook Assistant Principal Anthony Salvatore.
At the request of Parkland students and on the recommendation of Salvatore, the dream catcher now has a permanent home.
In the National Teachers Hall of Fame in Emporia, Kansas, where it honors teachers and school employees killed on the job, including eight students and two teachers fatally shot and thirteen others wounded on May 18, 2018 in Santa Fe, Texas.
It is painful for us – Fathers Roger and Skip - to begin this way and, while Truth may be hard to swallow, we ask your pardon.
Sometimes, despite the best intentions, scientists and researchers – especially in the diverse branches of psychology – get it wrong.
That was especially true of a now dead (so we will not name him or besmirch his reputation) and once-famed suicidologist, who once estimated that every American suicide dramatically affected six other people
Until recently, despite a glaring lack of empirical evidence, that number was held as gospel.
However, in 2018, Julie Cerel, Ph.D. of the University of Kentucky and colleagues f published a series of research-based articles indicating that for every U.S. suicide death 135 people – and not merely those who witnessed the death - are exposed to suicide.
One-hundred-and-thirty-five!
135!
In a separate report based on the nationally administered 2016 General Social Survey, Cerel and colleagues found that close to half – 51% - of respondents reported having been exposed to suicide during their lifetimes. And, simply summarized, the closer the relationship of the respondent and the deceased, the poorer the psychiatric outcome among those exposed to suicide.
Nearly two-thirds of the 4,368 U.S. children one year old and older who were killed by guns in 2020 were victims of homicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Each year, more than 5,500 children and teens – infants through age 19 – are shot and killed in the U.S., and another 15,000 are wounded in shootings, according to an Everytown analysis of CDC data from 2016 to 2020. Most of those deaths – 2,100 - are homicides – the result of either domestic violence or street violence. On average, 2,100 children a year die by suicide and 130 children and teens die each year from unintentional shootings.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for kids one-year-old and older for the first time in 2020
By June 6, 2020 – before the halfway mark of the year, the Gun Violence Archive had recorded 18,829 gun-violence deaths. The Archives – which is updated daily and reflects data “collected/validated from 7,500 sources daily” - reported 155 children eleven years old and younger killed and 323 injured; 562 teens ages 12 to 17 killed and 1,466 injured. The Archive also reported 247 mass shootings and twelve mass murders.
[Reporting and news agencies have a number of different definitions of mass shootings. The GVA casualty threshold is “four people fatally or nonfatally injured (excluding shooter)”]
Barely a year before a newly-turned-eighteen-year-old massacred nineteen mostly ten-year-old students and two teachers and injured seventeen other children in Uvalde, Texas, Washington Post enterprise reporter John Woodrow Cox published Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.
Although it’s too easy to blithely note that in the past decade more than 15,000 American children have been killed by gunfire, Cox puts the real social cost of some Americans’ blind allegiance to the Second Amendment and penchant for guns into perspective by introducing the world to two children: seven-year-old Ava of South Carolina, who lost her best friend in a campus shooting, and her eight-year-old pen pal Tyshaun of Washington, D.C., whose father was shot to death outside his elementary school.
It is impossible to overstate the value of Mr. Cox’s work.
It should be required reading for every politician and every gun advocate who echoes the words “mental illness” as an explanation for not taking action on the issue of reasonable gun legislation.
In unraveling the stories of Ava and Tyshaun, Cox makes clear the depth of trauma and mental health crises experienced by survivors – especially the youngest survivors – of gun-related violence and deaths.
We share with you just a few of his insights:
“The thing that people tend to not appreciate is that when there’s a single intense, overwhelming event, particularly if it involves unexpected traumatic death, that’s not really one event,” explained Bruce D. Perry, the nationally renowned psychiatrist who worked with families from Columbine and Sandy Hook after those shootings. “What happens is your brain revisits that thousands of times, and so it becomes thousands of little events, all of which are able to activate your stress response… For many people, the deceiving thing is that when you look at an event and you go, in a really concrete way, ‘This was a five-minute-long experience,’ and they think, ‘How in the world can a five-minute experience twenty years later or five years later result in paranoia, explosive behaviors, inattention, and so forth? . . . The systems in your brain and body that are involved with dealing with stress are able to influence every aspect of your thinking, feeling, perceiving, your motor movements, the physiology of your heart, the physiology of your pancreas. Literally, those systems control every aspect of your existence. And so, when those systems become abnormally sensitive, when they become oversensitive and overly reactive, you’ll have a cascade of physical health risks, mental health risks, that can persist for a very, very long time.”
Children who come from safe, loving homes, [Holly French, Ava’s counselor] said, may be more at risk of extreme reactions because they haven’t built the same foundation of resilience as children from difficult upbringings. While prolonged childhood adversity will almost certainly have a more profound effect over time, kids in those situations may initially view a single bad experience, even as severe as a school shooting, as just “another scary thing.” In Ava’s case, her therapist told me, the girl’s symptoms persisted for months because something deep inside continued to signal to her mind that she remained in jeopardy. “That normal, natural response to a trauma is the body’s fight-or-flight response. It is the signal ‘I’m unsafe.’ And if it doesn’t get the message back that it is safe again, that danger is no longer present, that’s what causes it to carry on,” French said. “The longer we avoid putting those pieces back together, or the longer it takes to train the brain that it’s safe again, the worse the symptoms can get.”
In The Washington Post days after the massacre in Uvalde, Cox reported:
“The children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention. Body counts become synonymous with each event, dictating where they rank in the catalogue of these singularly American horrors: 10 at Santa Fe High, 13 at Columbine High, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary. And now, added to the list is 21 at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex.
“Those tallies, however, do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings. There are the more than 360 kids and adults, including Noah [wounded and still hospitalized after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde], who have been injured on K-12 campuses since 1999, according to a Washington Post database. And then there are the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.”
The dream catcher was not carried to Uvalde by the wounded souls of Parkland.
Forever emotionally scarred children and their parents and teachers did not carry it to any of the twenty-seven American schools where children and teenagers have been injured or killed by guns since January 1, 2022.
The dream catcher will remain in Emporia, Kansas in the National Teachers Hall of Fame.
And tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow and for all of the tomorrows for years to come, thousands and thousands of American children will live with nightmares.