You're listening to Code Switch, I'm Shrine Marisol Maraji.

And I'm Jean Demby.

And Shrine, neither of us are parents just yet.

But I feel like we've been talking a lot about parenthood lately on the podcast.

We have.

This episode, this week, gets at one of those deep, like parental anxieties

that a lot of people who are parents wrestle with all the time.

How do I make sure I don't pass my baggage?

It might be us, onto my kids.

Right.

And some of that baggage could be due to real trauma.

Trauma that's been passed down to us from our parents or our grandparents

or our great, great grandparents, you know what I'm getting out of here.

How do we make sure we stop the cycle, stop the madness

before it affects another generation?

And today's episode is the story of one family trying to do just that,

trying to fix the toxic aftermath of forced assimilation on their community,

a tiny Alaskan village in the Bearing Street.

And we're tagging an NPR science reporter Rebecca Hirscher to tell their story.

When Renee Shimmel was 24 years old, she had a son,

an energetic, curious little boy named Sam.

In home videos, he's always screaming and laughing.

...