The History & Future of The Indian Child Welfare Act (Session 1)

Penn Law/Field Center Session on the Origins and History of the Indian Child Welfare Act (VIDEO)👇

Briefing Completed in Haaland v. Brackeen [ICWA]

Kate Fort |  Oct 4

With the reply briefs filed yesterday, all of the briefing is completed in the Supreme Court case Haaland v. Brackeen. Oral argument will be at the Court on November 9th. There will be a decision before the end of June, 2023, though there's no good way to determine when that will arrive other than that.

Studying history is vital for understanding and transforming the world

 Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools 

by David "Katya" Ketchum | LA Progressive

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

It’s not a secret that I love studying history; I believe it is a vital discipline for understanding and transforming the world. And as shocking and terrifying as human cruelty has been throughout recorded history, it’s also heartening to observe, time and time again, the movements opposing oppression that have always existed. This is also important to remember if you are tempted to excuse the complicity of people in the past by insisting that they were just products of their time. By studying history, we also become more aware of our own responsibilities and possibilities in the present.

A Legacy of Failure, Cruelty, and War

One of these important historical moments in US history, when there were multiple and large movements to either oppose or work for social justice, followed the American Civil War.

Optimism that Reconstruction would bring about true and lasting healing and change in a nation ravaged and traumatized by the horrors of slavery and war, were combined with optimism that there could be a change in the government’s policies regarding Native peoples.

President Ulysses S. Grant and the events that took place in his administration are a good example of these trends. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, for example, were aimed at providing federal support to protect the rights of Black Americans and oppose the Ku Klux Klan. Under the direction of Attorney General Amos Ackerman, hundreds of Klansmen were tried, often by Black juries, and imprisoned. Thousands more received fines or warnings, or even fled to escape prosecution. As a result, the KKK as a formal organization was in wreckage by 1872.

Optimism that Reconstruction would bring about healing were combined with optimism that there could be a change in the government’s policies regarding Native peoples.

At the same time, Grant wanted to find a different approach to US relations with Native peoples. He worked closely with his longtime friend and colleague, Ely S. Parker, and made Parker his Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker, whose Native name was Donehogawa, was a member of the Seneca nation and the first Indigenous person to hold the post of Commissioner. Together, they developed policies that included providing federal troops to protect reservation borders from settlers and that ultimately would have provided a pathway to citizenship for Indigenous people.

These plans were vehemently opposed and undermined, and opponents eventually falsely accused Parker of embezzling money. He was exonerated, but Congress stripped power from the office of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Parker resigned in 1871.

Plans and relationships fell apart, and Grant ended up waging war against the very people he had thought he would protect, including “the Modoc War in 1873, the Red River War in 1874, and the Great Sioux War in 1876.”

By 1885, the year Grant died, Donehogawa, once Grant’s enthusiastic colleague, described the fate of Indigenous peoples in North America. Resisting the racist idea that blamed Indigenous people for their troubles, he wrote:

“The disabilities, disadvantages and wrongs do not result, however, either primarily, consequently or ultimately from their tribal condition and native inheritances, but solely, wholly and absolutely from the unchristian treatment they have always received from Christian white people … . The tenacity with which the remnants of this people have adhered to their tribal organizations and religious traditions is all that has saved them thus far from inevitable extinguishment.”

Grant’s campaign slogan had been “Let us have peace,” and he seemed sincere in his vision to reform federal Indian policies. So how did it happen that, as Alysa Landry pointed out, “some of the worst massacres and grossest injustices in history [occurred] while Ulysses S. Grant was in office”? This is an important question to ask, if we want to avoid the kind of pitfalls that kept others’ from true healing and change.

In Grant’s case, central to his failures was “the development of millions of acres of federal public lands” and “the private acquisition of land by pioneers, spectators and railroad and mining companies,” made possible by Grant’s approval of the Timber Culture, General Mining, and Desert Lands Acts, which all expanded the land available to homesteaders and settlers – at the expense of Native peoples. In the end, Grant’s hopeful slogan, “Let us have peace,” was no match for the reality of expansionism. In Landry’s words,

“Grant realized that his expansionist goals required the removal of Indians from desirable land. His Indian Peace Policy, designed to reform the Indian Bureau and remove corrupt agents, also called for rigorous agricultural training on reservations and established schools and churches that would transform Indians into Christian citizens.”

Cultural Genocide by Another Name

This tension is the US setting for residential schools. Even though some people, like Grant and Donehogawa, wanted to promote and protect the rights of the Original Nations, that hope was always in second place to the relentless westward push of land-grabbing and violent displacement.

A cluster of ideas have especially supported and justified this kind of colonization. First, the dominating power believes in its own superiority. Members of this society, then, are entitled to rule and profit from that superiority, even if it comes at the expense of others.

This is especially the case when the people harmed are categorized as inferior. Moreover, because the dominating power believes in its superiority, it can reframe the harm it causes to others as ultimately in their best interest.

Those that survive will reap the benefits of being assimilated into the superior culture. It’s a tidy system that excused hundreds of years of oppression and continues to do so today.

The residential school emphasis on agricultural training, education, and conversion fits this pattern. But forced assimilation could only be viewed as moral and good from the vantage point of superiority.

Unfortunately, the settlers of North America never lacked that character trait. Captain Richard H. Pratt, who was a founder and superintendent of the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, gave a speech in 1892 that showed how a person could justify even the most cruel actions under the guise of racist and paternalistic generosity and care. He began by stating that:

“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Amazingly and horrifyingly, Pratt would then use the enslavement of Africans as a positive example of how assimilation could work. Rather than recognize the courage, persistence, creativity, and love that marked Black resistance to slavery and its descendants, such as Jim Crow and mass incarceration, Pratt gave all the credit to the White people who enslaved them. In Pratt’s view, “the care and authority of individuals of the higher race” was a blessing in disguise.

“Horrible as were the experiences … of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America … .” (ibid)

In contrast, Pratt saw the wars fought against Native peoples and concluded that forced assimilation was more effective. “We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation,” Pratt wrote, “and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.” Boarding schools were Pratt’s answer:

“It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. … Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.” (ibid)

This is what White supremacy looks like, dressed up in schoolmaster’s robes. The unmistakable goal was to eliminate Indigenous nations, communities, customs, languages, and life.

BIG FLAP: Santorum’s Native History on CNN

Don Lemon Wasn’t Having Any Of Rick Santorum’s Comments About Native History on CNN

“Did he actually think it was a good idea for him to come on television and whitewash the whitewash that he whitewashed?”

By Kavish Harjai | 5/4/2021

CNN anchor Don Lemon discusses his reaction to Rick Santorum's May 3, 2021, appearance on "Cuomo Prime Time." | CNN

CNN anchor Don Lemon apologized to viewers after former Republican lawmaker Rick Santorum discussed his recent controversial comments about the nation’s founding on Chris Cuomo’s show. Lemon called the appearance “horrible and insulting.”

“Europeans did not found this country,” Lemon said after Cuomo interviewed Santorum on Wednesday night. “It was here. The Native Americans had this country before the Europeans came.”

Santorum, a Republican politician and CNN commentator, made historically inaccurate and racist comments during a speech in April to Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth group. During his speech, Santorum said he doesn’t “know of any country in the world that was settled predominantly by people who are coming to practice their faith.”

“They came here mostly from Europe and they set up a country that was based on Judeo-Christian principles,” the former U.S. senator and Republican presidential candidate continued during the speech. He went on to say that European colonizers “birthed a nation from nothing,” and that even though Native Americans already inhabited the land,“there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

On May 3, during “Cuomo Prime Time,” the CNN anchor pressed Santorum about his comments. 

“This seemed like you were trying to erase diversity in the interest of some white Christian right,” Cuomo said. 

Santorum attempted to correct his statements but offered no apology. 

"Just to be clear, what I was not saying is that Native American culture — I misspoke,” Santorum said, stumbling over his words.

Santorum said he was trying to articulate that U.S. founding documents, including the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, were “created anew.” 

“I was not trying to dismiss Native Americans,” Santorum said to Cuomo. “The way we treated Native Americans was horrific. It goes against everything I ever fought for.”

The Native American Journalists Association put out a statement following Rick Santorum’s initial speech, calling on CNN “to immediately dismiss” him. It also urged its members to “avoid working” with CNN and implored advertisers to stop supporting the network. 

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, echoed NAJA’s calls for Santorum’s dismissal and enumerated the reasons that Santorum’s comments were factually incorrect. 

"What European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign Tribal Nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” Sharp wrote in a piece for Native News Online.

The contributions of Native Americans are plenty and consequential, Sharp wrote. They cultivated plants, like cotton, rubber, and tobacco, and developed the concept of environmentalism. 

"No idea is more fundamentally Native American and more explicitly spread by Native American peoples,” Sharp wrote. “There would be no National Park system without Native American influence.”

via

A Bridge of Repair

As Americans tussle with the idea of financial and institutional reparations, insight can be gained from other movements that have sought to redress historic injustices. One such injustice was the removal of more than 200,000 skeletons, millions of grave goods, and thousands of sacred objects—stolen from Native Americans.

GOOD READ: A bridge of repair for Native and Black America

Native Americans Weren't Guaranteed the Right to Vote in Every State Until 1962

Native people won citizenship in 1924, but the struggle for voting rights stretched on much longer.

Becky Little

Calvin Coolidge and Native American group at White House a year after they were given the right to vote in the Indian Citizenship Act.  The Library of Congress

Do U.S. citizenship and voting rights go hand and hand? For most of the country’s history, the answer has been no—just look at the example of Native voting rights, which weren’t secured in all states until the 1960s.
Native Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens when the country ratified its Constitution in 1788, and wouldn’t win the right to be for 136 years. When black Americans won citizenship with the 14th Amendment in 1868, the government specifically interpreted the law so it didn’t apply to Native people.

Keep Reading

Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’

The Gnadenhutten Massacre, 1782. (Credit: Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Updated: Aug 16, 2019

Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension.

By Donald L. Fixico

On a cool May day in 1758, a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor’s children in rural western Pennsylvania. In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. She became the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life.
While Mary was ultimately returned to her white family—and some evidence points to her having lived happily with her adopted Indian tribe—stories such as hers became a cautionary tale among white settlers, stoking fear of “savage” Indians and creating a paranoia that escalated into all-out Indian hating.

A group of Native Americans look at a sailing ship in the bay below them. (Credit: Corbis/Getty Images)

From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.

Keep Reading 

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Battle of White Bird Canyon: For the historian in you..there are many interesting narratives about this “first fight of the Nez Perce”; here is one of them.

Sand Creek Massacre: 04 Causes and Consequences - Henrietta Mann

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children

In the late 1800s, the world was a lot deadlier. Almost one in five babies in the United States died before childhood — which was an improvement from the previous decades. At the turn of the century, 19 out of 20 births were still happening at home.

Incubator baby show? Who was Dr. Couney?

Some carnival showmen bought knock-off incubator machines based on Lion’s design and started charging entry to their own premature baby shows. But raising a baby is not easy, and most of them got out of the business quickly. One showman, however, was hooked on this idea. In 1897, Dr. Martin Couney put on his first incubator baby show in London. Unlike the other showmen, Couney’s show had more of a refined air. He hired nurses to hold the babies and feed them breastmilk. The show was a hit so Dr. Couney decided to give it a try in the United States at the Omaha World’s Fair.

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?!

In the spring of 1905, Couney traveled to Chicago, Denver, and Minneapolis to set up new exhibits. While the new exhibits made Dr. Couney rich, he also made a lot of decisions not driven by profit. Saving babies became Dr. Couney’s mission, as he would tell many colleagues. In his travels, Couney would often wine and dine other doctors, and give them demonstrations of the incubators. On multiple occasions, Dr. Couney tried to donate his incubators to local health departments after the local fair was over, but no one would take them.
Doctors had all sorts of reasons for rejecting the technology. One reason was the disgraceful influence of the Eugenics Movement. In 1901, an anonymous editorial made the rounds in medical journals, disparaging the incubators. The author wrote that the human race suffered by keeping alive babies who the medical community literally referred to as “weaklings”.  The author lamented Couney’s babies would “transmit their deficiencies, deformities and vices” to the next generation. Eugenics was hateful pseudoscience. And it was not a fringe movement. A lot of the fairs where Couney showed his babies also featured eugenics exhibits. 

Dreamland at Coney Island after fire in 1911

There were lots of other concerns about Couney’s approach. Many were concerned that amusement parks weren’t safe. One time in 1911, a Coney Island park with one of Couney’s shows went up in flames. The staff of doctors and nurses were able to save all the babies, but the incident only solidified the fear that these parks were too hazardous. Many of the parks were built quickly and were pretty shoddy. Four years earlier, a different park at Coney Island also burned down, and it burned down again in 1936 and again in 1939. Luna Park burned down in 1944. Around this time, amusement parks all over the country were going up in flames. 
 
Beyond the safety concerns, there’s something deeply unsettling to modern eyes about the whole concept of incubator sideshows. 

Today, it’s clear that putting babies on display and profiting off of them is exploitative. In many ways, Couney’s exhibits were in line with some of the worst parts of amusement parks and World’s Fairs. In addition to the rides, many fairs and parks had “ethnological villages”, where Native Americans or people from faraway nations would live on-site in stereotyped caricatures of their homes. Some were literally caged and incarcerated on the grounds, with no record of payment. On a lot of midways, there was a despicable willingness to exploit human life for the entertainment of others. Charging money to see tiny infants was a small part of that.

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States Move to Add Native American History to Curriculum

A recent report shows that 87% of state history standards include no mention of Native American history after 1900.

MINNEAPOLIS—On the heels of the National Indian Education Association's conference held in Minneapolis earlier this fall and just in time for Native American Heritage Month (in November), the nearby Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community announced a $5 million philanthropic campaign to fund resources, curriculum, and training on Native American heritage for teachers and administrators across Minnesota, according to the Star Tribune. "We're hoping we can move the needle in the narrative in Minnesota and be a model," Rebecca Crooks-Stratton, the secretary-treasurer for SMSC, told the newspaper.
A recent report by the National Congress of American Indians highlights the need for initiatives like SMSC's. Summarizing states' efforts to bring content about indigenous peoples and communities into K-12 classrooms across the country, the report found that 87% of state history standards include no mention of Native American history after 1900, and 27 states don't mention Native Americans in their K-12 curriculum.
However, 90% of states surveyed reported that they are working to improve the quality of and access to Native American education curriculum, and a majority of states indicated that Native American education is already included in their content standards, although far fewer require it be taught in public schools. Despite a dearth of requirements, educators don't have to wait for a state mandate to begin integrating Native American studies into their coursework, no matter their subject.

READ: States Move to Add Native American History to Education Curriculum | Best States | US News

The removal of Indian children continues to be a national crisis #ICWA

We've said it before and we'll say it again. Children raised by their families and tribal communities is in the best interest of Native children. #ICWA #NativeChildrenhttps://t.co/HeEzlOApX5

— NICWA (@NativeChildren) October 12, 2018

The Nation’s First Family Separation Policy 

Forty years ago, three in 10 Indian children were taken from their families.
October 9, 2018 | Christie Renick

The United States’ first family separation policy removed one-third of all American Indian children from their families and tribes. 

In the late 1960s, while employed by the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), a New York-based attorney named Bertram Hirsch was sent to North Dakota to assist with a kinship dispute case on behalf of the Spirit Lake Tribe. Child welfare workers were forcibly removing children from family members and placing them in white homes, sometimes out of state. One grandmother had even been jailed after refusing to give up her grandchildren.
At the time, Hirsch says, he had no idea that an alarming number of American Indian children were being taken from their families and permanently placed in homes with white parents. But as he worked on the Spirit Lake case, he began to understand the scope of the problem. And by the time 1969 rolled around, he and the AAIA were deeply engaged in a nationwide data collection project that had him contacting every foster care or adoption agency and institution he could find. He surveyed the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had the authority to place children at that time, and state social services departments as well as juvenile probation facilities.
Hirsch’s research found that somewhere between 25 and 35 percent of all American Indian children had been placed in adoptive homes, foster homes or institutions. 

Around 90 percent of those children were being raised by non-Indians. 

Many would never see their biological families again.

By the end of 1978, Hirsch had conducted his audit twice. Congressional commissions had convened in Washington numerous times, gathering hundreds of hours of testimony on the government’s egregious treatment of American Indian communities.

In its report to Congress, a task force said,
 “The removal of Indian children from their natural homes and tribal setting has been and continues to be a national crisis.”

The government-sanctioned removals were a wound for Native families and tribes that would be torn raw with each new generation.
Hirsch, along with two Congressional staffers, wrote and rewrote a bill to shield American Indian youth from being removed from their families and tribes. A culmination of what Hirsch describes as a huge grassroots effort spanning 11 years and involving thousands of people across the country, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed at the 11th hour, just before the 95th Congress would come to a close, on October 24, 1978.
“If we didn’t get it passed in the 95th,” Hirsch said, “I’m not sure it ever would have passed.” ICWA defined the political relationship between two sovereigns – tribes and states. It designated that tribes can and must act as parents for their children, just as states do with non-Native children, when biological parents cannot. And it required that preference be given to tribal communities when children must be removed from their homes.

But 40 years later, states still don’t fully understand ICWA. One judge described ICWA as the most ignored federal law in the history of this country. The federal government has no ICWA data reporting requirements in place.Caseworkers and attorneys have been reported as viewing ICWA compliance as optional. Notice to tribes that an Indian child has entered foster care has been delayed by as many as four years, tribes have said.

And just last week, a federal district court judge ruled that the law was unconstitutional, rendering the fate of ICWA uncertain. 

KEEP READING

What came after the Indian Adoption Projects? Adoption Resource Exchange of North America

Beginning in 1916, the U.S. Children's Bureau brought its baby-week campaign to thousands of cities, towns, and rural communities across the United States. The photograph above was taken during a baby-week celebration on an Indian reservation.

1958	Child Welfare League of America published Standards of Adoption Service (revised in 1968, 1973, 1978, 1988, 2000); Indian Adoption Project began.

The Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), founded in 1966, was the immediate successor to the Indian Adoption Project. ARENA was the first national adoption resource exchange devoted to finding homes for hard-to-place children. It continued the practice of placing Native American children with white adoptive parents for a number of years in the early 1970s. (It's estimated some 20,000 children were removed from their First Nations families and sent to non-Native parents in the US.)

1966	The National Adoption Resource Exchange, later renamed the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), was established as an outgrowth of the Indian Adoption Project.

Quote: ARNOLD LYSLO, DIRECTOR, INDIAN ADOPTION PROJECT 12/1962

Indian children have certain rights which are theirs by birthright. That is, they have rights of tribal enrollment if they meet the requirements for enrollment set up by the tribe. As tribal members they have the right to share in all the assets of the tribe which are distributed on a per capita basis. The actual as well as anticipated benefits of an Indian child adopted through our Project are furnished by the Secretary of Interior. The Secretary of Interior, through the superintendent of the Indian agency where the child is enrolled, has the right to approve or disapprove of any plan made for the distribution of funds belonging to an Indian child.

Editor Note:  Even though Lyslo said we have rights, we are still taken from our tribes and placed in non-Indian families - which is part and parcel of a genocide program. And maybe those non-Indian parents adopted us for the money we could earn as tribal members...Poverty was often cited as the reason for removal - so who caused the poverty?? - we know the answer...

This post is about the government sanctioned Indian Adoption Project when adoptive parents were questioned over a period of years. It was a study. Who did they ask? Not the adoptee. But there were many projects and many churches who ran adoption programs... More than just this Indian Adoption Project... Trace

History: Britain’s Futile Attempt to Keep American Colonists From Taking Tribal Land

A Unique Moment in American Mapmaking

In a futile attempt to keep American colonists from taking tribal land, British surveyors and Native American leaders drew a border along the Appalachian Mountains. Then the Revolutionary War happened.

***

In the 1760s, the government in Britain was taking a new approach to its vast colonial holdings, and in 1763, colonial governors and tribal leaders met in Fort Augusta, Georgia, for the first of 10 congresses at which they negotiated a geographic separation. The king had ordered that there should be a limit to colonial expansion—if a tribe claimed a stretch of land, a colonial governor was not supposed to grant it to settlers. The Fort Augusta meeting began with the tribal representatives describing what they believed to be the extent of their territory. Over the course of several congresses, the diplomats agreed on a boundary between tribal lands and the seaboard colonies. This negotiated line was supposed to limit conflict for the foreseeable future.

LINK 

***

Royal Proclamation of 1763 (wiki)

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued October 7, 1763, by King George III following Great Britain's acquisition of French territory in North America after the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War, which forbade all settlement past a line drawn along the Appalachian 

US Tribes Call for Testimonies on Missing American Indian & Alaska Native Boarding School Children

Published June 30, 2017

WASHINGTON – On June 15, 2017, at its Mid‐Year Conference in Connecticut, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) adopted a resolution, sponsored by the Chickasaw Nation, encouraging American Indian and Alaska Native Tribal Nations, families, and descendants to provide information on children who never returned home from Indian Boarding Schools.

Source: US Tribes Call for Testimonies on Missing American Indian & Alaska Native Boarding School Children - Native News Online

Indian Child Welfare Act 101

Indian Child Welfare Act 101

Dehumanizing myths and misconceptions hurt Native students

The Miseducation of Native American Students

Commentary By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Autumn, the beginning of the school year, is the cruelest season for Native American students in the United States. Between sports games where entire crowds chant about "redskins" and other school mascots and the federal holiday of the Indian-killing mercenary Christopher Columbus, there is the misguided national celebration of "Thanksgiving" to mark the arrival of the religious Europeans, who set the stage for Native American genocide.

These rituals dominate the first months of school, putting Native children in their place, holding up the traditions of white children, and championing the ideals of white supremacy and imperialism. As November's recognition of Native American Heritage Month ends, educators should resist the urge to regurgitate the usual narrative and instead discuss the reality of life, historical and current, for the more than 600,000 Native American students in our nation's K-12 public schools.

In researching and writing "All the Real Indians Died Off," our book about Native American myths and misconceptions, my co-author Dina Gilio-Whitaker and I were aware of how these Native American stereotypes affect all children in schools today. Internalizing harmful images most acutely damages Native children, but absorbing racist and dehumanizing ideas about fellow classmates also diminishes the understanding and compassion of non-Native children, warping their conception of a history that often erases Native Americans altogether.

Sadly, the education system lies at the heart of maintaining the erasure of Native Americans. Native children have been miseducated for generations under deliberately repressive federal policy, and all children in public schools are miseducated in U.S. and Native history. Education scholar Timothy Lintner wrote that U.S. history classrooms "are not neutral; they are contested arenas where legitimacy and hegemony battle for historical supremacy."

While distortions and myths of Native American culture plague many schools, textbooks often fail to mention Native history after the 19th century. In a 2015 study, scholars Antonio Castro, Ryan Knowles, Sarah Shear, and Gregory Soden examined the state standards for teaching Native American history and culture in all 50 states and found that 87 percent of references to American Indians are in a pre-1900s context. (Washington is the only state in the union that uses the word "genocide" in its 5th grade U.S. history standards and teaching of Native peoples' history.) In short, existing Native nations and land bases aren't identified, and Native people are dealt with as historical figures, implying their extinction.

"Indigenous students are vital and active participants in our society —not a vanished population."

No student can have a full understanding of U.S. history and contemporary society, nor can educators understand the inherited trauma Indigenous students still experience, as a result of this denial. From the colonial period to the nation's founding to the 20th century, Indigenous people have endured torture, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals from their ancestral territories, and forced attendance at military-style boarding schools. Both the U.S. Army and the federal government experimented with residential schools during the 19th century. In 1879, Richard H. Pratt established and became the superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania—the prototype for the many militaristic federal schools that would soon crop up across the continent. And dozens of Christian missionary boarding schools augmented this landscape.

The stated goal of the boarding schools was assimilation into the dominant culture, but the intent was cultural genocide. Indigenous children were prohibited from and beaten for speaking their mother tongues or practicing their religions, among other infractions that expressed their humanity. This while being indoctrinated in the beliefs of Christianity. Generations of Native students, stripped of the languages and skills of their communities, were traumatized—an effect that has contributed significantly to the family and social dysfunction still found in Native communities.

By the mid-1960s, educators developed multiculturalism in response to Native peoples' demands for decolonization. But in order to affirm the U.S. origin story of democracy and progress, Indigenous nations and histories were excluded. Treaty- and territorially based Native people in North America were transformed by multicultural education into an inchoate oppressed racial group.

.

Multiculturalism emphasizes the "contributions" of oppressed groups to the United States' presumed greatness. Indigenous people were credited with contributing corn and maple syrup, buckskin and parkas, log cabins and canoes, and even the concept of democracy. This idea of the gift-giving Native who enriched the development of the United States, still perpetuated in schools today, is an insidious smoke screen. It obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of looting an entire continent and displacing Indigenous people.

It is essential that U.S. schools finally come to terms both with the profound miseducation of Indigenous students and with an inaccurate K-12 curriculum of Indigenous history. Indigenous students are vital and active participants in our society—not a vanished population. Though schools have not done right by Native students in the past, it is now, more than ever, the responsibility of educators to admit education's stereotypes and flaws; accurately teach Native students about the past; honor their history; and prepare them for their future. If schools begin to address the injustices of the past, they can start work toward a more just and equal future for Native students.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of eight books, including "All the Real Indians Died Off" and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans with co-author Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Beacon Press, 2016) and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Originally from rural Oklahoma, she is the daughter of a tenant farmer and a mother of American Indian descent.

Vol. 36, Issue 14, Pages 22-23

Published in Print: November 30, 2016, as On Not Erasing the Native American

Not getting better, Native kids in foster care

NCJFCJ Disproportionality Report of Children in Foster Care for FY 2012

  SOURCE

Page 9 of the report has Native American Disproportionality Rates by State.  21 states have over-representation of Native kids in care, including Michigan (1.3, and 1.9 in entries to care), Wisconsin (4.1), Minnesota (13.9) and Iowa (4.5).  Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have worse numbers than 10 years ago (page 3).

Report Disproportionality Rates for Children of Color in Foster Care for Fiscal Year 2012 (pdf). Website here.

[Note: There were 16 states who grabbed Native kids (85%) at an alarming rate pre-ICWA. Who were they? Those with the largest Native tribal populations like Michigan, South Dakota,Wisconsin and Minnesota. Things must change so Native foster families are now being recruited but the states are not cooperating - Is this racist?  Trace]

Thanksgiving? The deprivations and atrocities that followed

By Stephen L. Pevar
Every schoolchild is taught that the holiday of Thanksgiving commemorates the feast the Pilgrims arranged to thank the Indians for their friendship, for sharing their land, and for showing them how to grow, harvest, and store food. Accounts say that the generosity of the Indians saved the colonists from starvation during the harsh New England winter of 1620.

Very few schoolchildren are also taught, however, about the deprivations and atrocities that occurred to the Indians afterwards, first at the hands of the colonists and then by the United States government. Ironically, if the United States believes today that it has a poor immigration policy, imagine how self-destructive the Indians’ immigration policy was by welcoming the very people who would soon seek to destroy them.

Within 100 years after the United States gained its independence from Great Britain, tens of thousands of Indians were killed in wars defending their homelands. The United States entered into nearly 400 treaties with Indian tribes between 1783 and 1871 (when Congress ended treaty-making with the Indians), during a time when tribes were very powerful. In exchange for Indians relinquishing most of their territories and ending their defense of them, the US set aside smaller portions of land that were forever guaranteed to the treaty tribe.

When the federal government became stronger, however, it broke virtually all of these treaties and confiscated most of the land guaranteed in them. During the 1830s, for instance, Indians living in the Southeast were marched at bayonet point nearly 2000 miles to “Indian Country,” now the state of Oklahoma, during which thousands died.

These land grabs and treaty abrogations were even approved by US Supreme Court. The case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, decided in 1903, involved an 1867 treaty in which Congress guaranteed the Kiowa and Comanche Tribes that no additional land would be taken from their reservation unless the tribes gave their express consent. Several years later, the federal government took additional land despite opposition from the tribes. The Supreme Court held that Congress has “plenary power” (full and complete authority) over the Indians and can break a treaty essentially whenever it wishes.

Lone Wolf the Younger, Kiowa. Photo by De Lancey W. Gill. Public domain via Wikipedia Commons.

In addition to taking Indian land, the federal government, during the latter part of the 1800s, encouraged social reformers and missionaries to remove Indian children from their reservation homes and place them in boarding schools (sometimes thousands of miles away), where their Indian culture was literally beaten out of them. The government also prevented the Indians from leaving their reservations to obtain food, and many Indians starved to death. When some Plains tribes continued to resist placement on reservations, the government began slaughtering the bison on which they depended. Millions of bison were killed and left to rot, until by 1900, there were less than a thousand bison left. With their food gone, Indians were forced to surrender. Hatred for the Indians was so profound that General Sheridan, when told by one Indian that he was a “good Indian,” reportedly smirked and said, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Sheridan was one of the generals who ordered the slaughtering of the bison.

During the past 50 years, conditions have improved for most tribes as a result of a shift in public attitude towards Indians and a change in congressional policies. A few tribes have even become wealthy as a result of casinos. But conditions on most reservations remain substandard and impoverished. As President Barack Obama noted in November 2009, the unemployment rate on some Indian reservations is 80%, nearly a quarter of all Indians live in poverty, 14% of all reservation homes don’t have electricity, and 12% don’t have access to a safe water supply.

Non-Indians often wonder why more Indians haven’t left the reservation to seek a “better” life. But this underestimates and misunderstands the importance to many Indians of their tradition, culture, and religion, much of which is tied to the land. Whereas millions of immigrants came to the United States to join the “melting pot,” many Indians have resisted assimilation and remain deeply rooted in their ancestral homelands.

For those non-Indians who wish to commemorate the origins of Thanksgiving, there are many ways to do so. One would be to urge public schools to tell the whole story about the Indian experience. Another would be to lobby Congress to enact more helpful Indian policies and programs. A third would be to donate to organizations that give assistance to Indians in their efforts to rejuvenate their governments and restore their economic, political, and social structures, such as the Native American Rights Fund, the Association of American Indian Affairs, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, and the National Congress of American Indians, among many.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday. Hopefully, this year and in years to come we will spend part of the holiday reflecting on its origins and dedicating ourselves to fostering the values of the Indians who selflessly assisted their new neighbors.

Stephen L. Pevar is the author of The Rights of Indians and Tribes, Fourth Edition. He is a senior staff counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Pevar worked for Legal Services on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation from 1971-1974, and taught Federal Indian Law at the University of Denver School of Law from 1983-1999. He has litigated numerous Indian rights cases and has lectured extensively on the subject.

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