What: Native Organizers Alliance is organizing Harvard
students and faculty to participate in a ceremony to commemorate the
return of remains and artifacts stolen from the Wounded Knee massacre
site. In the early 19th century, a traveling shoe salesman stole items
from a gravesite at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. At the event, more
than 131 items including moccasins, weapons, arrows, and clothing, will
be returned to representatives of the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River
Sioux Tribes.
Speakers will include
Kevin Killer, Oglala Lakota Tribe President
Nipmuc Chief Cheryll Toney Holley;
Chair of the Massachusetts Commission On Indian Affairs
Ann Meilus, Barre Museum Association Board President
Jennifer
Quinto marches with various indigenous groups during a parade at
Celebration 2018 on Saturday, June 9, 2018, in downtown Juneau, Alaska.
(Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO)
To Quinto, ICWA helps adoptees like her to stay connected to their identities and communities.
“Who could ever believe that [ICWA]
would be taken away?” she said. “That’s one of the last things keeping
our community together in the way that it has, so imagining a world
where that doesn’t exist is just too, too painful.”
As the Brackeen ICWA case is set to be heard in SCOTUS on November 9, one adoptee’s story https://t.co/tlNuuq8c5k
Rapid City, SD – NDN Collective’s LANDBACK Campaign has officially launched pre-sales of the limited edition LANDBACK Magazine, He Sapa: The Heart of Everything That Is, which pivots on the cornerstone work of the LANDBACK Campaign
to reignite and continue the ongoing struggle to return the He Sapa
(Black Hills) to the Oceti Sakowin (Lakota/ Dakota/Nakota) Nation.
LANDBACK organizing has a powerful lineage. Nellie Red Owl (1907-1992)
is intentionally featured on the cover as an acknowledgment of that
lineage, her courageous actions, and her commitment to reclaiming the He
Sapa.
The LANDBACK Magazine contains over 100 pages of content from
movement elders, youth organizers, the frontlines of LGBTQ2S+ justice,
climate justice, and joint-struggle movements against White Supremacy
and colonialism and is intentionally Indigenous-powered project, created
in partnership with Indígena, Primate, Red Media Press, and Red Planet Books and Comics.
“The LANDBACK Magazine is a culmination of stories and experiences
shared across generations of front line struggles, courageous mass
mobilization, and teachings to guide us into the future,” saidNadya Tannous, LANDBACK Campaign Organizer.
“We’re bringing old school, punk vibes and a loud voice, connecting
local LANDBACK efforts to domestic and international struggles for
justice.”
“What started as just a wild idea shared with a few brilliant minds
is now a work of art that represents the past, present, and future of
LANDBACK as a global movement,” Krystal Two Bulls, LANDBACK Campaign Director.
“We focus locally on the He Sapa: The Heart of Everything That Is. My
hope is that it activates a whole new generation of organizers to step
into the centuries-long mission that our Ancestors sacrificed their
lives for. It has always been about our relationship to the land, and it
always will be.”
“It is a true honor to be able to compile stories, poems, photos, and
interviews with movement elders and young people who call He Sapa
home,” saidDemetrius Johnson, LANDBACK Campaign Organizer.
“The care and love that went into the creation of this magazine can be
felt and seen on every single page. The struggle to reclaim He Sapa is
ongoing, and the hope is that this magazine supplements this long and
powerful history of reclaiming that sacred site.”
The LANDBACK Magazine
will hit the shelves of many Indigenous-owned and Movement bookstores
in the so-called continental US, so-called Canada, and the Hawaiian
Kingdom in November for Native American Heritage Month, including
Goodminds, Libélula Books and Co, Birchbark Books, Red Planet Books and
Comics, and Native Books Hawai’i. It will also be intentionally
distributed to highschools, Tribal Colleges and Universities, University
Libraries and to our incarcerated Relatives.
David
Fineday, middle, in a small circle of people who stopped by Friday for
Smudge On, a program that allows people to engage in the Indigenous
cultural and spiritual practice of smudging. (Dayne Patterson/CBC)
A
Saskatoon man is trying to bring the Indigenous spiritual and cultural
practice of smudging to those in the city, where he says it is lacking.
David
Fineday, 66, said he was taken from his home at about five years old,
then didn't see his mother until he returned home more than a decade
later at 16.
Fineday
said he doesn't see smudging often in the city — so he treks from his
home in Saskatoon to a small, treed area near the corner of 20th Street
West and Avenue K South, and does it there.
Fineday
leads "Smudge On," a program backed by the Pleasant Hill Community
Association that invites people to smudge every Saturday. Last week he
also held a smudge on Friday for those who wanted to participate on the
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
"Smudge On is a spiritual thing that I am trying to bring back to our people," he said.
"When you say your prayers that smoke takes your prayers up and that's how you're heard."
David
Fineday, left, and Dennis Kissling, right, carried a banner on July 1
with names of people they said were taken from their homes during the
Sixties Scoop. On the back it said 'Smudge-On,' a reference to the
practice of smudging, which Fineday said has been a way to heal from the
traumatic past. (Dayne Patterson/CBC)
Smudge
On started in June 2020, but has become more consistent through 2021
and 2022, operating almost every Saturday through the late winter months
into the late fall, Fineday said.
"People can come here if
they're having problems, they can have a smudge and have a prayer and if
they want to talk, they can talk," he said, calling it a no-judgment
zone.
"Everybody deserves a prayer, especially these people on the
street with their mental illnesses and addictions. They're chased out
of every other place."
Fineday said smudging helped him to know he wasn't alone and to heal from the trauma associated with being taken during the Sixties Scoop,
a period from the 1960s to 1980s when Canadian child welfare
authorities took thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and
placed them with non-Indigenous foster parents.
David
Fineday, right, hosts the Smudge On program almost every Saturday to
provide those in search of the traditional Indigenous practice an
opportunity to do it. (Dayne Patterson/CBC)
While
Fineday didn't attend residential schools, he said he moved from foster
home to foster home from November 1961 until June 1973.
Saskatoon
Ward 2 Coun. Hilary Gough stopped by Smudge On's Friday ceremony with
a case of coffee and Timbits for the attendees, who sat on blue tarps
that circled a metal firepit in the grassed area.
She said she stops by occasionally.
"This
is something that is happening today, for [National Day for Truth and
Reconciliation], but it's also something that happens every week," Gough
said.
"It is intended to meet people where they're at."
Gough said she thinks much of the work done on the national day needs to be done year-round, not just on a designated date.
It is a desperate plea from a father seeking information about his missing son.
Morris
Jenis Jr.’s father knew only his son, a Native American student at the
Genoa Indian School in Nebraska 100 years ago, had not been seen in a
year.
Morris ran away from the school in 1921 — “deserted,”
according to the militaristic language school officials used — like
hundreds of other young Indigenous children who resisted the boarding
school policies that forcibly stripped them of language and identity,
often hundreds of miles from home.
“The father…is very anxious to
see where his son has gone,” a school clerk wrote the superintendent on
the father’s behalf. “He recently heard that a student from Genoa was
killed in Montana by a horse and he fears that this may be his son.”
Public
archives do not provide any answers about Morris, nor his age and
tribal affiliation. The school told his father that they could not find “any trace of him,” and reportedly returned the $26 — worth about $450 today — his family previously paid to send him home.
The plea is among thousands of stories made public by the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, one of many efforts
to digitize elusive school, state and federal records, to bring the
stories of Indigenous survivors and those who never made it home back to
their families and tribes.
Last summer, the discovery of more
than 900 child graves at former Canadian residential schools tore
through international media and reignited investigations of U.S.
boarding schools; reports focused on brutal abuse and quantifying death.
I
am an adoptee and journalist who has documented the history and narratives of
Native adoptees in three Lost Children anthologies. If the Brackeens had done
any research prior, they would know the outcomes for Native adoptees are not
good. Adoption gets pretty ugly when it doesn't work. Once kids are out of
diapers, they start noticing and feel the isolation without kin. There are
medical terms for our damage. The adoption industry will not advertise that
most patients in psychiatric care are adoptees. They don’t warn adoptive
parents their new child will suffer from “Severe Narcissistic Injury” or
“Reactive Attachment Disorder.” This news would not be welcome. LINK
Of
course some readers slam me for using the word "kin" ...or ask how do
I know about the damage we suffer... No shock... I get it: they don't get
it and they don't know the history or the Native adoptees I know
personally... (There were 775 comments before they shut it off today and many
are amazingly correct!)
An
earlier comment from Ellen gets it:
This
country has a long brutal history of removing Native children from their
families with the intent of culture genocide. There is nothing different about
this case. I am sure that the Brackeens are lovely (wealthy) people who care
for Zachary, and the new baby they selfishly wrested from her family. Still, it
does not undo the damage done to the Navajo nation, in losing 2 precious
children, not to mention the damage done to the children in growing up apart
from their culture...while being quite different in appearance from the rest of
this family. But skin color is not the issue - the erasure of culture and sense
of self is.
After
reading the NYT story I am not surprised that the Navajo tribe and the
Brackeens will share custody, as Judge Kim declared, but the Brackeens would
have primary possession. Taking Indian children off the rez and
changing their identity to white and ending their sovereignty and treaty rights
and a connection to tribal lands: the old playbook is the new
playbook.
It
is always about possession.
We
have covered this case on this blog for the past few years. (please look at Goldwater Institute (34+ posts) for more insight
on this case.)
Hundreds
of tribal nations vehemently oppose the lawsuit Brackeen v. Bernhardt
that splits Texas, Indiana, Louisiana and a coalition of conservative legal
groups, including the Goldwater Institute, against the federal government,
hundreds of tribal nations, 21 state attorneys general, Native American civil
rights groups and child welfare organizations, including the Annie E. Casey
Foundation and the Children’s Defense Fund.
The
Navajo are appealing Judge Kim’s custody order.
What
about the BRACKEENS:
Potential
Adoptive Parents (PAPS) Chad and Jennifer Brackeen might want to learn Navajo
history during this lengthy court battle in Texas. (Try this one in 2011: Illegal aliens? Deported adoptees?)
The
total population of the Navajo people residing in their land is
approximately 180,462 having a median age of 24 years old. Navajo Nation is situated over a 27,000 square
miles of large land within the vicinity of the state of Arizona, Utah and New
Mexico. It is considered to be the largest land that is primarily covered by
the jurisdiction of the Native American within the territory of the United
States.
What
most people don't know: The Navajo are survivors of a barely-known Mormon
assimilation program from 1947 to the mid-1990s.
Year
after year, missionaries of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints
approached Navajo families and invited children into Mormon foster
homes. As part of the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program,
children would live with Mormon families during the school year to “provide
educational, spiritual, social, and cultural opportunities in non-Indian
community life,” according to the Church.
Typically,
the Mormon foster families were white and financially stable. Native
American children who weren’t already Mormon were baptized. Although the
LDS Church reached out to dozens of Indian tribes, most participants’ families
lived within the Navajo Nation.
Roughly
50,000 children participated in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program,
according to Matthew Garrett, a professor at Bakersfield College.
Rather
than improving conditions on the Navajo reservation, the LDS Church asked that
children assimilate to the way its white members lived.
Some Church leaders interpreted the Book of Mormon literally and expected that
Native American children’s skin would turn lighter as they grew closer to
God.
The Church now admits that not all Native Americans are descendants of the
Israelites, or Lamanites, as described in the Book of Mormon. (Oh
really, thanks)
In
addition to the claims of damage done by sexual abuse, the lawsuits involving
the Indian Student Placement Program assert that the culture of the Navajo
Nation was “irreparably harmed” by the LDS Church’s “continuous and systematic
assimilation efforts.” Although the last student in the Indian Student
Placement Program graduated in 2000, plaintiffs are asking the Church to do all
it can to enhance and restore Navajo culture and create a taskforce for that
purpose.
Participants in the Church-sponsored Indian Student Placement Program have filed at least three sexual-abuse lawsuits. Lilly Fowler
***
Practices
of adopting Native American children directly followed the residential/boarding
schools. Such adoption practices, which came into fruition through forms
such as the forced removal of Native American children during Canada’s 60s
Scoop and its parallel in the United States, the Indian Adoption Projects,
exemplify the adaption of adoption as a settler colonial tool for dispossession
and disenfranchisement.
***
Narragansett
author John C Hopkins wrote about his Navajo mother in law on his blog:
Chilocco Indian School opened in 1884 with 123 students. Its
first graduating class was comprised of six boys and nine girls. The school
finally closed its doors in 1980. The name Chilooco comes from the Choctaw word
“chiluki” and the Cherokee word “tsalagi,” which means “cave people” in both
languages.
A long, hard-used tarred road turns off Route 166 and ends
where the abandoned, ivy-covered stone buildings stand in disrepair haunted by
the ghosts from memories past.
Bernice Austin-Begay, a Navajo, recalled the long ride down
the road when she was a child returning to school after a rare family visit.
“I’d be sad because I knew it would be a long before I would
see them again,” Austin-Begay, Class of 1965, said. “I’d be thinking about my
family, thinking about my sheep.”
Austin-Begay was 10 when she was first taken to Chilocco.
More than 50 years later she still recalls the day the government agents came
to Black Mesa, Ariz. and took her away.
“I was captured,” she said.
Many Indian families resented how the government swooped in
and took the children away from their families and did all they could to thwart
the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Austin-Begay’s family was one of those. Whenever
her mother saw a car coming up the road she would send Bernice running, to hide
in the hills until the “biliganas” left. (Biligana is the Navajo
word for white man)
But one day the car arrived unexpectedly and young Bernice
never reached the woods.
“I was too slow,” Austin-Begay said.
**
'CATASTROPHIC AND UNFORGIVABLE'
Starting in 1958, the Indian Adoption Project placed Native American children
in non-Native homes, in what it said was an effort to assimilate them into
mainstream culture and offer them better lives outside impoverished
reservations.
The project was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal government
agency, and the nonprofit Child Welfare League of America, in partnership with
private agencies.
There was a reason Indian leaders went to the Senate
in the 1970s and demanded an inquiry into the staggering number of children
disappearing in Indian Country. It was not just boarding schools creating this
mass exodus of children. Adoption programs in 16 states removed 85% of
Native children. Programs like the Adoption
Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), established by the Child Welfare
League of America in 1967, funded in part by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, paid
states to remove children and place them with non-Indian adoptive families and
religious groups like the Mormon Church.ARENA expanded to include
all Canadian and United States adoption agencies and offered them financial
assistance.
ICWA (the Indian Child
Welfare Act) prioritizes placing Native children into Native homes or
with kin or with families that are willing to keep them within a certain proximity to their
cultures.
***
Associate Attorney General Tony West
Delivers Remarks at the National Indian Child Welfare Association’s 32nd Annual
Protecting Our Children Conference ~ Monday, April 14, 2014
"...There's more work to do because
every time an Indian child is removed in violation of ICWA, it can mean a loss
of all connection with family, with tribe, with culture. And with that
loss, studies show, comes an increased risk for mental health challenges,
homelessness in later life, and, tragically, suicide."
One night in Hinton, Alta., 16-year-old Shelley-Anne Bacsu decided to walk home along Highway 16 from her boyfriend's house.
She was never heard from again.
But 40 years later, her story is part of a new project aiming to honour
the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have been murdered or
gone missing in Canada: a newspaper of “cover stories,” which organizers
plan to hand deliver to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On
Monday, one day before the National Day of Action for Missing and
Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, those walking by the Ontario
legislature at Queen's Park in Toronto came face to face with these
women.
More than 100 “missing” posters set up in front of the building showcased those whose stories are rarely amplified.
In the middle of the posters is a newsstand carrying the “4,000 Cover
Stories” newspaper compiled by the Native Women's Resource Centre of
Toronto (NWRCT).
“It's really to demonstrate the impact of how
many women have been missing that we know of,” Pamela Hart, NWRCT
executive director, told CTVNews.ca. “So instead of a small section of a
40-page newspaper, you have a 2,000 (page), double-sided newspaper of
cover stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women.”
She
said that the massive size of the newspaper was to show “how large a
newspaper would be if you covered all of these stories with the amount
of attention that they deserve.”
Each one of these women's disappearances could be a cover story, she said.
The project is aiming to spur action to protect Indigenous women and
girls in Canada. A national inquiry that ran between 2015 and 2019 called the issue a “genocide,”
finding that governments and law enforcement have often failed to
collect proper data or follow up on cases of missing Indigenous women.
More than 1,000 Indigenous women and girls were killed or went missing
between 1980 and 2012, according to the RCMP, but experts believe the
true number is closer to 4,000, according to the Native Women's
Association of Canada (NWAC).
And this violence is ongoing —
between 2015 and 2020, the most recent year for this data, Indigenous
women accounted for 24 per cent of all female homicide victims in
Canada, NWAC reports, despite making up just five per cent of the female population nationally.
Advocates say little has been done to tackle this crisis in the three
years since the release of the national inquiry's final report,
something that the NWRCT is hoping this project will challenge.
Each page and story within the newspaper will be accompanied by a QR
code that, when scanned, will draft a letter to the MP of that specific
missing or murdered woman's local riding, calling for action.
“My hope is that folks will learn and that they will follow through with
the letter … so that we are slamming MPs and Trudeau with letters that
force us to remember that this issue has never gone away,” Hart said.
“The other (goal) is that we honour and show that these women existed
and that they deserved a cover page and that they deserve to be spoken
about, and that there should have been outrage, there should have been
more storytelling, there should have been more coverage.”
Following the demonstration in Queen's Park, the newspaper will be part
of activities on Tuesday, which is National Day of Action for Missing
and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG).
It will be
present at the annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil at Allan Gardens in
Toronto, where community members gather to honour those who are no
longer with them and celebrate their lives, Hart explained.
Afterwards, organizers are planning to deliver the newspaper to Trudeau's doorstep in Ottawa.
“So everybody knows that it's been done and that he has one of the largest levels of responsibility to respond,” Hart said.
