A Gift No School Wants to Receive

It has been driven across the country in a snowstorm, prayed over and presented in ceremony after ceremony from Columbine, Colo., to Newtown, Conn., and, most recently, Townville, S.C.

It is the gift no school wants to receive. It is a 19-year-old dreamcatcher in a poster-size frame, a talisman that has been passed among communities bound together in tragedy, handed to schools that have endured fatal shootings.

Among Native American cultures that make them, a dreamcatcher is a hoop of wood strung with a net or mesh. Often adorned with beads and feathers, the object is believed to filter dreams, allowing in only good ones and keeping out the bad.



Next month, the memorial dreamcatcher will be brought to Parkland, Fla., and to the list on its back will be added the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a former student killed 17 people on Valentine’s Day. It will be delivered by hand by its most-recent custodian.

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The tradition started in 1999, when a group of students in a program for Native Americans at a school in Muskegon, Mich., wanted to send something meaningful to Columbine High School, where 12 students and a teacher had been killed in April of that year by two gunmen, who also died at the scene.

They asked their teacher, medicine woman Debra Gutowski, to make the dreamcatcher because of its supposed protective powers. She said she fashioned the hoop out of red willow because she believes it has healing properties. A Muskegon school administrator took it to Colorado.

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The dreamcatcher was one of tens of thousands of mementos at Columbine, many placed at a makeshift memorial in a nearby park or left in the school parking lot beside the cars of students who had died. The dreamcatcher was one memento that the school system kept. Until 2005, when a former student killed a security guard, a teacher and five students at Red Lake Senior High School in Red Lake, Minn.

Some former Columbine students, then in their 20s, drove to Minnesota to comfort their younger peers. The school system presented the dreamcatcher to the Red Lake tribe, of which many of the victims were members. “In the spirit of healing, we pass on this dreamcatcher,” reads an inscription on the back. “May it never travel again!”

In 2012, when 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a delegation from Minnesota drove through the night to Newtown, Conn., where the school was located. Some of the Red Lake survivors attended funerals of children who died at Sandy Hook.

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The dreamcatcher traveled from Newtown to Marysville, Wash., in 2014 after a student killed four other students at Marysville-Pilchuck High School. The school was closed for 10 days. When it reopened, a group from Red Lake performed tribal music and a Newtown representative presented the dreamcatcher. Ray Hauser, then an assistant superintendent with the Marysville School District, said there is no substitute for direct contact with others who have endured what seems unendurable.

He called Joanne Avery, a superintendent in a rural South Carolina school district, after a former student fatally shot a 6-year-old in the playground at Townville Elementary in the fall of 2016.

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She considered bringing the dreamcatcher to California in April, when a teacher and an 8-year-old boy were shot and killed in San Bernardino. She also thought of taking it to Kentucky last month when two students were killed at Marshall County High School in Benton. After the Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people on Valentine’s Day, she says she will take it to Florida. She hopes that Parkland will be its last stop.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-no-school-wants-to-receive-1519578001