This
podcast, we are exploring the central role that Native peoples have
played in the development of the United States, while facing legal
discrimination that goes all the way back to the country's founding
documents. Professor of Law Matthew L.M. Fletcher gives us the context
around the Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Indian Child Welfare
Act. And Ned Blackhawk discusses his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,
which tells the history of the United States, emphasizing how Native
Americans have been essential to determining that history.
Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala
The poignant saga
of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for
children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous
dispossession.
In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find
her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she
was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up
a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted.
At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop
Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.
Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise
coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made
desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide
against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and
put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the
war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who
made good money matching children to overseas families. Private
adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants
like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government
archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened
briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.
Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market
for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most
extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a
practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic
exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.
“Important, compelling reading. Nolan has
interviewed countless people, obtained access to adoption files, read
the human rights reports, and sorted through the legal history. This
will become a key, authoritative account of the deeply corrupt state of
Guatemalan adoption from the 1970s to the 2000s.”—Laura Briggs, author of Taking Children: A History of American Terror
My takeaway from this excellent podcast: The Supreme Court just makes up rules ... and it has all along...and IT'S CRAZY! And it's been going on since the invention of the DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY. - Trace, Blog Editor
MAPPING THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY: Johnson v. McIntosh and Federal Anti-Indian Law with Peter d’Errico
The
goal of this Podcast is to help identify these systems of domination
that have been sustained by greed and power, through the subjugation of
human beings and the natural world.
Philip P. Arnold and Sandra Bigtree, “S02E03 - Johnson v M’intosh and Federal Anti-Indian Law with Peter d’Errico,” Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery (Podcast), July 13, 2023. https://podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org/season2/episode-03/.
Secretary
of The Interior Deb Haaland listens to testimony from a boarding school
survivor during the first stop on The Road to Healing tour at Riverside
Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma in July 2022. Photo by Nick Oxford.
Indigenous communities in three states this week are mourning the human remains discovered in their area.
Some have been waiting for confirmation that Native children were
buried at the sites of local boarding schools, while other remains were
discovered by sheer accident.
In southern Utah on July 11, twelve children’s bodies were found at a
burial site at Panguitch Boarding School east of Highway 89 — becoming
the only school among at least eight operated in Utah where student
deaths and burials at the school have been verified. The Paiute Indian
Tribe of Utah and its five sovereign bands are “devastated” by what was unearthed by Utah State University using ground-penetrating radar.
“Our hearts go out to the families of these children as we are left
to consider how best to honor and memorialize their suffering,” said Ona
Segundo, chairwoman of Arizona’s Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, in a
statement provided to The Salt Lake Tribune.
In Nebraska, archaeologists began digging at the site of the
long-shuttered Genoa Indian Industrial School 90 miles west of Omaha,
hoping to uncover the location of the school’s cemetery. Though the
school closed in 1931 and most of its buildings were demolished, the dig
is an attempt to locate children who never came home from the school
and whose bodies were never uncovered.
The process is expected to take several days, after months of trial
and error to determine the exact location of the graves, The Washington
Post reported July 11.
Last summer, dogs trained to find decaying remains signaled to
archaeologists that they had found a burial site in a piece of land
bordered by railroad tracks, a canal and an agricultural field.
Then in November, ground-penetrating radar was again used and
detected an area that was consistent with burials, but nothing could be
confirmed until archaeologists broke ground.
Researchers found that 86 children — described in a student’s letter,
newspaper clippings and school records — had perished at the school,
mostly because of disease. At least one death was caused by an
accidental shooting. The researchers have not yet identified 37 of the
children. Some of the bodies had been returned to their families, while
others were buried at the school in a forgotten location.
In Pennsylvania, officials confirmed on July 9 that the human remains discovered during construction work by a gas crew late last month were Indigenous people.
On June 21, workers and contractors excavating on Short Canal Street
in Sharpsburg unearthed human remains four to five feet underground
while attempting to install a piece of equipment. Sharpsburg’s police
and Allegheny County forensics consulted with anthropologists and
archaeologists to confirm the remains belonged to Native Americans.
The anthropologist from the Seneca Iroquois National Museum in
upstate New York said the remains are specifically from an Iroquois
group, according to Melanie Linn Gutowski, chair of the Sharpsburg
Historical Commission.
The ACLU submitted an amicus brief
in the case, and has been following the issue closely because of the
profound threat it poses to Indigenous communities, particularly
federally recognized tribes in the United States. In light of this
victory at the Supreme Court, we are now urging states to take action
and introduce or strengthen existing state-level ICWA protections.
Last May,
investigative journalist Connie Walker came upon a story about her late
father she'd never heard before. One night back in the late 1970s while
he was working as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he
pulled over a suspected drunk driver. He walked up to the vehicle and
came face-to-face with a ghost from his past—a residential school
priest. What happened on the road that night set in motion an
investigation that would send Connie deep into her own past, trying to
uncover the secrets of her family and the legacy of trauma passed down
through the generations.
In Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's,
Connie unearths how her family's story fits into one of Canada's darkest
chapters: the residential school system.
In 2018, a
young Indigenous mother named Jermain Charlo left a bar in Missoula,
Montana, and was never seen again. After two years and thousands of
hours of investigative work, police believe they are close to solving
the mystery of what happened to her. We go inside the investigation,
tracking down leads and joining search parties through the dense
mountains of the Flathead Reservation. As we unravel this mystery, the
show examines what it means to be an Indigenous woman in America.
Katherine Strongwind is raising awareness of the 60s Scoop, and is photographed in Winnipeg on June 24, 2023.Photo by Chris Procaylo /Winnipeg Sun
Survivors
of the Sixties Scoop gathered in Winnipeg on Saturday for the Manitoba
Sixties Scoop Conference and share their stories and experiences of
being taken from their families.
“Since the apology of 2015, there
really hasn’t been a bigger gathering of Sixties Scoop Survivors to talk
about some of the issues that we’re still working our way through,”
said 60s Scoop Legacy of Canada Director and spokesperson Katherine
Strongwind. “We’ve had about 23 smaller healing gatherings, mostly in
Winnipeg and some across western Canada and we thought it was really
important to pull everybody together today to say, ‘You know, we are
still here, we’re still healing ourselves.’ The province really needs to
step up their game in terms of really how they’re going to be helping
us.”
The
“Sixties Scoop” refers to the large-scale forced removal or “scooping”
of Indigenous children from their homes, communities and families of
birth through the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and the subsequent adoption
into predominantly Caucasian, Christian, middle-class families across
Canada, the United States and overseas.
Many
adoptees and Survivors were left with a lack of or poor sense of
cultural identity. The forced physical and emotional separation from
their birth families by the government’s assimilationist policies
continues to affect adult adoptees and Indigenous communities to this
day. Many Survivors had parents, grandparents, and extended families who
were forced to attend Indian Residential Schools.
“The
purpose this afternoon is to pull people together and get some feedback
from them on some of the very specific issues that adoptees and folks
who have been through child welfare have such as name changes, child
welfare records, adoption records, all of those sorts of pieces,” said
Strongwind.
Organizers plan to draft a report for the provincial government but also for Indigenous leaders.
“I’m
not sure (Indigenous leaders) really know what to do with us,” said
Strongwind. “We’re coming home and we’re trying to reconnect our
families and our communities but they don’t always have the best
understanding of how to support us.”
Some 120 Scoop
Survivors attended the one-day gathering. Half of the cost of the
gathering was covered by the provincial government with the remainder
covered by fundraising. City of Winnipeg donated the space at Sergeant
Tommy Prince Place in the North End for the gathering through the
Indigenous Liaison Unit.
“We invited a couple of
speakers to share part of their story this morning and there’s
definitely some similarities among all of us but also we wanted to talk
about inspiring stories and ‘What’s worked best for you on your healing
journey and how can we support each other?’ because so far we don’t have
any kind of healing program specifically for Sixties Scoop Survivors,”
said Strongwind. “So we’re supporting each other.”
Katherine Strongwind.Photo by Chris Procaylo /Winnipeg Sun
In
2015, then-Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger apologized on behalf of the
province. Six years later, the 60s Scoop Legacy of Canada and Manitoba
Senator Murray Sinclair called for a federal inquiry.
“We
still don’t know how many kids were taken, where they were taken to,
where they are now, how many died in care and those kind of pieces,”
said Strongwind on what an inquiry would uncover. “We also know that
people want to share their stories and their testimonies before they
pass away. Over the next year or so, we’ll focus on that but also
gatherings like this are really important to get people together and
learn from each other on how we can support each other on some of these
pieces when we’re not be recognized, we’re not being acknowledged.
“We’re really out here on our own it seems like.”
The
provincial government needs to provide funding for these sorts of
gatherings but also provide a unit or some sort of fund available for
Survivors to be able to access some of the services that they offer such
as the post-adoption registry and child welfare records, Strongwind
said. Even something as seemingly simple as making it easier for
Survivors to legally change back to their traditional names.
“The
province did the dirty work of the Sixties Scoop,” said Strongwind, who
legally changed her name in November. “They were given jurisdiction in
1951 from the federal government and they really took that and ran and
decided they were going to scoop up entire families off reserves and
they thought they were going to make us into upstanding Christian
citizens. In some respects, they were successful but we know that many
of us ending up leaving that lifestyle and our families and ended up
coming home to our biological families and communities. Culture plays a
huge role in our healing.
“There’s all of these sorts of pieces that the province could be helping with but really aren’t.”
City could participate by providing spaces for gatherings and a memorial of some sort.
“All levels of government I feel have a part to play in this,” Strongwind said.
With
some 10,000 Indigenous children in care in Manitoba, Strongwind
believes Sixties Scoop Survivors can have role in preventing a
recurrence of what happened to them.
“We want to use our
experience as best practices to prevent that from happening in the
future,”Strongwind said. “That’s part of the purpose that the 60s Legacy
of Canada works towards every day.”
Guelph poet and ’60s Scoop survivor shares her personal journey through writing
How Cynthia (Wasizo kwe) Missabie became her own hero
By Joy Struthers | Guelph Mercury |
Cynthia Missabie, a ’60s Scoop survivor, looks out at the Speed River in Guelph's Riverside Park. - Joy Struthers/Metroland
Local poet Cynthia Missabie took her name back when she was 40 years old, though she did not know how to pronounce it.
Her adoptive parents had changed her name to Catherine Claire Cross, after their daughter who had died.
It
was in the 1960s when she said she was three or four, when she was
adopted by a “white, middle class” couple she still calls her mother and
father. They were the parents of four boys and owned a Guelph bowling
alley.
“I was part of the ’60s Scoop,” said Missabie.
Her
birth mother and father were married but struggled with alcohol and
illness. They had two little girls, and her birth mother also had four
other children, who were all given up for adoption.
Missabie’s
birth mother was from the Henvey Inlet First Nation located on the
French River. She grew up living in a residential school and later lived
in Toronto. Missabie’s birth father was from Newfoundland.
A very independent child, Missabie said she was happy with her new family at first.
“In the beginning, it
was beautiful,” she said. “Then when I was about nine or 10, I was
molested by my father, and he had it out for me, like he was attracted
to me for years. I had to keep protecting myself.”
Her family had left Guelph, was moving around the United States, and even went to Puerto Rico.
“At
first, it was an adventure, like, oh, I’m going to a new place, I’m
going to meet new people,” Missabie said. “But then I got attached to
those people.”
She
would even change her name when she moved, from Catherine to Cathy, or
Kate to Katie. Some people still call her by different names.
“I
look back on that time and I think, wherever we lived, I tried to make
some kind of friend, so I could escape,” Missabie said.
Finally, she admitted to her mother that she was abused by her father, and it split up the family temporarily.
“My mother moved everybody up to Canada for a year,” Missabie said. “At the end of the year, my parents got back together.”
She said her mother had been drinking for years, and “was a mess” without her father.
The children were all struggling, and Missabie said some of them still do.
“Not every story has a happy ending, and so many people lose themselves,” said Missabie.
For her, she said she loves the peaceful life she has created. She returned to Guelph in 1981 and has been here ever since.
Both
her mother and father are now dead, but Missabie had tried to maintain
relationships with her family, as well as learn about her birth
relatives.
She has
been in recovery for 34 years and runs a weekly meeting which
incorporates both Alcoholics Anonymous and Indigenous teachings.
“Everything
is a teaching, no matter how you go about your life. If this hadn’t
happened to me, I wouldn’t be who I am,” she said. “And then there’s the
idea of what I am leaving behind for other people.”
Missabie sings with the barbershop group, the Over Tones, and dotes on her dog, though she never had children of her own.
“I started writing because I was so depressed and lonely, I just had to do something,” she said.
One
night she read a poem at an event and a man said to her, “You’re kind
of angry, aren’t you?” And she thought, “well, if you had lived my life,
you’d be a bit angry too.”
Truthfully, she said now she approaches things with a healthy sense of humour.
She
is in a different place now emotionally then she was when she
contributed poetry to “River Bundles, an Anthology of Original Peoples
in the Waterloo-Wellington Area,” edited by Plume Writers Circle.
She was one of the
original circle members in Guelph along with friends Hope Engel and
Wendy Stewart. She also read her poetry with them at the Eden Mills
Writers’ Festival.
She plans to contribute to an upcoming compilation, called “Blood Memory, an Indigenous Poets Society Anthology.”
“One
thing I got through my writing, and what I gained over that time, is
that I basically rescued myself. So, I had become my own hero in a way,”
she said.
She shared that her spirit name is Wasizo kwe, or Woman who Glitters.
“I always thought I was kind of different, and it wasn’t always great, but now it’s wonderful,” Missabie said.
Sure everybody struggles. But to be born an Indigenous person, you
are born into struggle. My struggle. Your struggle. Our struggle. The
colonial struggle. There are many layers to this struggle. For the
longest time, I didn’t even know what the true struggle was about yet I
couldn’t escape it. It consumed me. Colonialism, as I have been forced
to discover, is like a cancer. But instead of the cells in your body
betraying itself, the thoughts in your mind work against you and eat you
up from the inside out. You’re like the walking dead and you don’t even
know it because you are so blinded. You can’t see the truth.
Here are some of the perverted ways colonialism infects the mind:
• With a colonized mind, I hate being Indian.
• With a colonized mind, I accept that I am Indian because that’s who the colonizer told me I am.
• With a colonized mind, I don’t understand that I am Anishinaabe.
• With a colonized mind, I believe I am inferior to the white race.
• With a colonized mind, I wish I was white.
• With a colonized mind, I draw pictures of my family with peach
coloured skin, blonde hair and blue eyes because I’ve internalized that
this is the ideal, what looks good and what is beautiful.
• With a colonized mind, I keep my feelings of inferiority to white people a secret from others and even from myself.
• With a colonized mind, I try diligently to mirror white people as closely as I possibly can.
• With a colonized mind, I desperately want to be accepted by white people.
• With a colonized mind, to gain the acceptance of white people, I will
detach myself from all that does not mirror acceptable “white”
standards, whether it is how one dresses, one speaks, or one looks.
• With a colonized mind, I feel as though I am swearing when I say “white people” in front of white people.
• With a colonized mind, I believe there is no racism.
• With a colonized mind, I believe that racism does not impact me.
• With a colonized mind, I deny my heritage and proudly say, “We are all just people.”
• With a colonized mind, when discussing issues pertaining to race, I try desperately not to offend white people.
• With a colonized mind, I do not know who I am.
• With a colonized mind, I believe I know who I am and do not understand
that this isn’t so because I’ve become the distorted image of who the
colonizer wants me to be and remain unaware of this reality.
• With a colonized mind, I could care less about history and think that our history don’t matter.
• With a colonized mind, I do not understand how the history created the present.
• With a colonized mind, I do not see how I have been brainwashed to be
an active participant in my own dehumanization and the dehumanization of
my people.
• With a colonized mind, I do not recognize how others dehumanize me and my people.
• With a colonized mind, I devalue the ways of my people- their ways of
seeing, their ways of knowing, their ways of living, their ways of
being.
• With a colonized mind, I cannot speak the language of my ancestors and do not care that this is so.
• With a colonized mind, I am unaware of how colonization has impacted my ancestors, my community, my family, and myself.
• With a colonized mind, I think that my people are a bunch of lazy, drunk, stupid Indians.
• With a colonized mind, I discredit my own people.
• With a colonized mind, I think that I am better than ‘those Indians’.
• With a colonized mind, I will silently watch my people be victimized.
• With a colonized mind, I will victimize my own people.
• With a colonized mind, I will defend those that perpetrate against my people.
• With a colonized mind, I will hide behind false notions of tradition
entrenched with Euro-western shame and shame my own people re-creating
more barriers amongst us.
• With a colonized mind, I tolerate our women being raped and beaten.
• With a colonized mind, I tolerate our children being raised without their fathers.
• With a colonized mind, I feel threatened when someone else, who is
Anishinaabe, achieves something great because I feel jealous and wish it
was me.
• With a colonized mind, when I see an Anishinaabe person working
towards bettering their life, because my of my own insecurities, I
accuse them of thinking they are ‘so good now’.
• With a colonized mind, I am unaware that I was set up to hate myself.
• With a colonized mind, I do not think critically about the world.
• With a colonized mind, I believe in merit and do not recognize unearned colonial privilege.
• With a colonized mind, I ignorantly believe that my ways of seeing,
living and believing were all decided by me when in reality everything
was and is decided for me.
• With a colonized mind, I am lost.
• With a colonized mind, I do not care about the land.
• With a colonized mind, I believe that freedom is a gift that can be bestowed upon me by the colonizer.
• With a colonized mind, I believe that I am powerless and act accordingly.
• With a colonized mind, I do not have a true, authentic voice.
• With a colonized mind, I live defeat.
• With a colonized mind, I will remain a victim of history.
• With a colonized mind, I will pass self-hatred on to my children.
• With a colonized mind, I do not understand the term “self-responsibility.”
• With a colonized mind, I do not recognize that I have choice and do
not have to fatalistically accept oppressive, colonial realities.
• With a colonized mind, I do not see that I am a person of worth.
• With a colonized mind, I do not know I am powerful.
The colonial struggle, as I said earlier, has many layers. I am no
longer being eaten from the inside. Yet it is no less painful. What is
different today is that I am connected to a true source of power that
was always there. It’s like my friend once said, “I come from a
distinguished people whose legacy shines on me like the sun.” I now
understand this and it is because of this understanding that my mind and
my soul are freer than they have ever been. It is because of that gift-
that awakening which came through struggle- that I will proudly
continue to struggle for freedom.
My freedom. Your freedom. Our freedom.
Jana-Rae Yerxa, is Anishinaabe from Little Eagle and Couchiching
First Nation and belongs to the Sturgeon clan. Activist. Social Worker.
Former professor. Current student. She is committed to furthering her
understanding of Anishinaabe identity and resurgence as well as
deconstructing Indigenous/settler relations in the contexts of
colonization and decolonization. Jana-Rae is currently enrolled in the
Indigenous Governance Program at University of Victoria.
Hear ye! hear ye! The law of the land has changed. Fourteen states have now affirmed or restored an adult adoptee's right to request and obtain a copy of their own original birth certificates. And at least one more next year. pic.twitter.com/jAC0xxtwLz
“‘We had no idea how far this would go, and nobody ever expected boxes,’ said [Marley] Greiner, who tracks with Luce the 19 states currently authorizing the use of the boxes.”https://t.co/VXoCLZQIiS
Ned Blackhawk on How Native People shaped U.S. History 
