From left, Jeremy Braithwaite, Lizzie Lycett, Cori Biggs, Art Martinez,
Karan Thorne and Judge Bill Thorne during a training session with Indian
Health Council staff. Provided photo.
Twenty years ago, a group of Indigenous tribes in Southern California
had nearly 500 of their children in local foster care systems. Today,
according to Indian Health Council data, the number is closer to 30.
A main driver in recent years is My Two Aunties, a program that draws on
family legacies and kinship traditions to wrap support and guidance
around vulnerable parents and children living in a consortium of nine
tribes.
Key to the approach is a pair of home-visiting workers, known as
aunties, who are as steeped in tribal customs as they are in mandated
reporting and making active efforts to reunify families after a foster
care separation.
“Instead of ‘What’s wrong with you?’, they ask ‘What’s strong with
you?’” said Karan Thorne, a member of the Rincon Band of Luiseño
Indians who developed the program.
KUED (now PBS Utah) takes a moving and insightful look into the dark chapter of American history, the federal Indian boarding school system. The goal was total assimilation into Anglo civilization at the cost of Native American culture, tradition, and language. The film story starts with pre-history and comes full circle to modern day. Much of the film is told in first person Native American voice by the people who continue to live it.
👇Based on David Grann’s broadly lauded best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon is set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror.
Directed by Martin Scorsese and Screenplay by Eric Roth and Scorsese, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion.
Hailing from Apple Studios, Killers of the Flower Moon was produced alongside Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions and Appian Way. Producers are Scorsese, Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas and Daniel Lupi, with DiCaprio, Rick Yorn, Adam Somner, Marianne Bower, Lisa Frechette, John Atwood, Shea Kammer and Niels Juul serving as executive producers.
"...I’ve been thinking about this concept for a long time. Adopters,
when it comes right down to it, count on Stockholm Syndrome. Children
who don’t succumb are labelled RAD.
Whenever I encounter an
infertile woman so desperate to be a mother that she’ll bring home a
stranger’s baby and force it to live in her fantasy, I always secretly
wonder what she would do if she were single and desperate to be
married. Would she drag some strange man home and force him to
watch the Notebook and cuddle? And if she did, would society think it
was beautiful and precious? Or would they think she was delusional and
dangerous? Rhetorical question, of course. But why? Why is what is
clearly a crime between adults viewed in such an overwhelmingly positive
way when one of the parties is a child?..." - Renee Musgrove
This comment by Renee has been in my head for over a year and I finally did research on Stockholm Syndrome! KEEP READING
Compiled
by a group of archivists, historians, and concerned Catholics, the List
of Catholic-operated Native Boarding Schools in the United States,
pre-1978, represents the first and most comprehensive source for
information on Native boarding schools that were overseen or staffed by
the Catholic Church before 1978. Our motivation for assembling this data
was to provide a resource to help boarding school survivors, their
descendants, Tribal Nations, and the Church itself navigate the history
of Catholic involvement with Native boarding schools.
The
list has two primary objectives: first, to identify all
Catholic-operated boarding schools designated specifically to educate
Native American and Alaska Native children in the United States, and
second, to identify all Catholic entities that were involved in the
operation of each school. We are under no pretense that our list is
complete. We have done our best to offer the most accurate information
possible, but we also anticipate future revisions as additional
information is obtained.
By
bringing together basic information about Catholic-run Native boarding
schools and the various Catholic institutions involved in their
operation, the list responds to the clear request from Tribal Nations
for access to archival records in Catholic repositories. Families and
communities of boarding school survivors and their descendants deserve
prioritized access to information regarding their own histories. The
Catholic Church also has an obligation to understand the scope of its
own role in this history. Making basic facts about the history of
Catholic institutional involvement in the boarding schools more
transparent aids in that understanding and facilitates identification of
possible sources of archival records as one preliminary step to support
information access.
Our
goal is for Tribal Nations, families, and individuals to be able to use
the list to locate records for schools that members of their
communities attended. Our hope is that Catholic institutional archives
and Tribal Nations will build relationships to increase understanding
about records for Catholic-operated Native boarding schools and further
develop the historical record.
👉 The Brutal Past and Uncertain Future of Native Adoptions.
“It is our right as Indian nations to raise our children,” said Sandy
White Hawk, founder of the Minnesota-based First Nations Repatriation
Institute, which serves Native people affected by adoption and foster
care.
In 1958, the Indian Adoption Project(s) were created “to stimulate
adoption of American Indian children by Caucasian families on a
nationwide basis.”
See a 1967 portrait of a Long Island family,
the Zuckermans, who took part in the project. The program was immensely popular in New York, which was already
the center of a robust and lucrative adoption marketplace.
Such
treatment of Native parents and caretakers by white social workers
was not uncommon, but the Devils Lake Sioux were among the first to
fight back publicly. Members of the tribe, which is now called the
Spirit Lake Tribe, traveled to New York for a news
conference at the Indian Affairs office arranged that summer. CLICK: [https://turtletalk.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/proquestdocuments-2018-11-09.pdf.]
The
entire argument for eradicating the Indian Child Welfare Act was
expressed in a white supremacist poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that I
expect Samuel Alito to quote in the opinion, with zero sense of irony:
Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don't you wish that you were me?
You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.
Such a life is very fine,
But it's not so nice as mine:
You must often as you trod,
Have wearied NOT to be abroad.
You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Not Feeling “American Enough”: The Mental Impact of Cross-Cultural Adoption.
“For adoptees in the adoptee community, to move forward is to have
allies,” she explains. “The narrative [around cross-cultural adoption
tends to] lie with adoptive parents, and so we need them to elevate our
stories, to elevate us in order for people to know that there is another
narrative out there. It's not this fairy tale.”
👀Let's celebrate - over TWO MILLION VIEWS on our little website! THANK YOU! -TLH
A report released Monday by a northern California
civil grand jury finds that the local child welfare system routinely
misses court deadlines, creating “an unnecessary amount of stress” for
children and families — particularly members of tribal communities who
are overrepresented in the foster care system.
By Leland P Morrill (Navajo adoptee and contributor to the book series Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects) posted in 2013
"Today's Child" started in June 1964 when Helen Allen - a veteran reporter for the Toronto Telegram - was questioned at the time by a skeptical Children's Aid Societies, but supported by Ontario's provincial government.
During its first few years, about 80% of the children featured in the column were adopted.
Helen Allen in this National Television show states that she personally adopted 10,000 to 11,000 children. Who knows how many native and aboriginal children were adopted through her in Ontario, Canada?
Featured on this video are seven Ojibwe children, my adopted brothers and sisters, to a Mormon family who adopted 10 children.
I was a Navajo "undocumented adoptee" before we moved to Ontario, Canada.
Note on the video how many of my brothers and sisters are not white like our adopted parents.
What is Genocide? What constitutes Human Trafficking?
Native Children who are deemed adoptable because of the 3rd world conditions forced on them through the Reservation system (Concentration Camps) may be labelled under "neglect", by Departments of Social Services that blur the lines between neglect and impoverishment; thus creating the definition of "abused or neglected" to encompass those "whose environment is injurious to the child's welfare."
Genocide is the worst crime possible, undoubtedly the most serious crime that can be
committed under international law.
The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
(hereinafter the Statute) testifies to the fact that this is the most serious of the crimes
within its jurisdiction.
It places Genocide first, followed by Crimes against Humanity,
War Crimes and the Crime of Aggression.
The crime of genocide is defined in Article 6
of the Statute in the following terms:
[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
United Nations defined genocide as the intentional "destruction of racial,
national, linguistic, religious or political groups," "with the purpose of destroying it in
whole or in part or of preventing its preservation or development,"either "causing the
death of members of a group or injuring their health or physical integrity" or interfering
with their biological reproduction or also "destroying the specific characteristics of the
group" through the "transfer of children."
This video is evidence. This is why ICWA and history matters. - Trace
WASHINGTON — In preparation for a fast-approaching U.S. Supreme Court decision on the fate of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Democratic minority members are holding a roundtable discussion this morning regarding the longstanding law that affirms tribal sovereignty in Indian child adoption cases.
“House
Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.)
will host a virtual roundtable to discuss the history and significance
of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA),” according to a statement from
his office.
“ICWA
is a more than 40-year-old law that protects the well-being and best
interests of Native children and families in state child welfare
systems. In the past several years, ICWA has faced a series of legal
challenges, the most prominent being the Brackeen v. Haaland Supreme Court case.
“The
virtual roundtable will feature expert panelists to discuss the history
of ICWA and the role Congress can play to strengthen ICWA and protect
Native children and families.”
Of
note, according to Grijalva: “This is the first congressional convening
to examine ICWA since the onset of recent litigation efforts.”
It not only upholds Oneida’s vision of protecting families and
preserving our core values and traditional beliefs – it has promoted the
best interest of Oneida children for more than 40 years.
Followers of the case say it’s unclear how the court will rule, or on which grounds the court might decide to overturn the law. Some states are making backup plans.
