Success Stories
From daughter to elder, nurse to ambassador
story by Chris Cunningham
“We are here for a reason, and we are all connected. We need to find ways to help each other.” —Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison’s photo albums reflect the proud and sometimes painful journey of her 81 years: her handsome father from the Mollala tribe and her regal mother of Alaskan Aleut descent, both dead from influenza by the time Harrison was 10; her five siblings — each sent to different foster homes following their parents’ deaths; Harrison, 13 years old, at the Chemawa Indian School near Salem, where she lived after staying for three years with abusive foster parents; her alcoholic husband — and father of her 10 children — whom she left after 28 years of marriage; her two sons who met early and tragic deaths.
“Looking back, when I tell my story, it’s almost as if my parents were preparing us for when they were going to leave,” says Harrison, an elder in the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “They taught us how to pray. My dad told us we had to learn to mix with the mainstream.”
The graduation photo from Lane’s nursing school in 1972 reflects Harrison’s early efforts to find a place for herself in the mainstream as a newly single 46-year-old woman with five school-age children to support. She stands proud in a nursing cap and uniform, along with two dozen other women.
Those two years at Lane were transformational for Harrison. When she first moved from Newport to Eugene with her young children, she didn’t leave a forwarding address for fear her former husband would find her. She recognized that 20 some years of living in an abusive relationship had left her demoralized, and she didn’t want anyone to stifle her dreams now.
Slowly, the encouragement she received from the college’s counselors and instructors and her classmates began to leave a profoundly positive mark on her self-perception.
“The older ladies, we all had kind of a pact that if we got discouraged, we would tell each other not to drop out,” she explains.
Harrison’s confidence began to soar. After earning her LPN degree in 1972, she passed the state nursing exams and found employment at North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City. She had to leave nursing after just six months because accumulating health challenges prevented her from standing on her feet for extended periods. But that job gave her the interpersonal and analytical skills she needed for her next positions as a drug and alcohol counselor for the Siletz Indian Alcohol Program; as a minority outreach worker for the Lane County Nutrition Program; as the liaison for Coos County Council on Alcoholism; and finally, as an ambassador with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde.
