ICT: Indigenous people flock to DC for ICWA hearing

 ‘If you take our children, you take our identity’

Approximately 60 stood in line waiting to sit inside the court to witness the oral arguments. Many sat between the Capitol and court listening to three hours of oral arguments on their headphones, and others listened to the line of speakers and songs all morning and into midday.

Haaland v. Brackeen challenges the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law that has been referred to as the “gold standard” for child welfare by many child welfare organizations. It was enacted in 1978 to “halt the unnecessary forced removal of Native kids from their families,” said Sarah Kastelic, an enrolled citizen of the Native Village of Ouzinkie and executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association and an enrolled citizen of the Native Village of Ouzinkie, stands outside the U.S. Supreme Court with a sign in her language in Washington, D.C., on November 9, 2022. (Photo by Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, ICT)

“So in our organization, one of the things that we talk about is the recipe for colonization,” Kastelic said. This recipe is “consistently followed by colonizers to colonize Indigenous people.”

She said there are five ingredients:

1. “Take the land;”
2. “Control the natural resources, especially the water;”
3. “Usurp, replace Indigenous governance to delegitimize Indigenous thought;”
4. “Undermine Native worldview, values, traditions, beliefs;” and

And number five, “the most important ingredient,” she says, is to “sever Native children from their sense of identity, from their culture, from their sense of belonging, from that sense of connectedness to something.”

This would meet the United Nations definition of genocide.

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NATIVE AMERICA CALLING:

The fate of ICWA

November 10, 2022 By Art Hughes 

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:44 — 38.3MB) | Embed

Each side presented their oral arguments Wednesday to the U.S. Supreme Court for the most serious challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act in recent memory. The decision in Haaland v. Brackeen will be a major force in the future of ICWA and the scope of tribal sovereignty. Today on Native America Calling, Shawn Spruce analyzes the legal debate from a Native perspective with Matthew Fletcher (Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians), law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and author of the Turtle Talk blog; independent journalist Suzette Brewer (citizen of the Cherokee Nation); and Dr. Sarah Kastelic (Alutiiq), director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

 

Full Brackeen Indian Child Welfare Act oral arguments  (Indigenous Wire)

Oral arguments in Haaland v. Brackeen, a U.S. Supreme Court case that will decide whether the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 is constitutional and/or will be altered in any way, were heard yesterday. Books will likely be written about this law and the case — and their impact on tribal sovereignty — and we’ll be featuring much more about the issues at stake in days to come.

For those so inclined, take a listen to the 3-hour oral arguments, which are online here. Transcript here.

Of note: Not a single lawyer arguing the case in court yesterday were Indigenous, although Natives with Jenner & Block and the Native American Rights Fund did help prep for the case. A Native has never served on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the high court usually decides several cases each term that impact tribes and Indigenous citizens.

 

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

Now what? Truth and reconciliation | Biden Victory #TRC #NativeLivesMatter #NCAI

news from around Indian Country

As the Biden-Harris administration prepares to take power, Crosscut asked six opinion writers to share early thoughts on what comes next.

• Fawn Sharp & Matthew Randazzo V | November 9, 2020

caption: Healing our past wrongs must begin with a thorough accounting of transgressions committed by the Trump administration, write Fawn Sharp and Mathew Randazzo V. (Evan Vucci/AP)

 

It is an existential necessity that America finally face its darkest truths and reconcile ourselves to our core values. 

As Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic amply proved, we cannot treat a disease we refuse to acknowledge. Through a reckless disregard for the truth, we become complicit in its spread.

The 574 Tribal Nations that have experienced four centuries of trauma, genocide, rape and pillage will no longer accept lip service. Likewise, we must relieve Black Americans of the trauma of living in a hostile civic society defined by arbitrary state violence, mass imprisonment, systematic voter disenfranchisement and the multigenerational deprivation of resources from their communities.

America must draw the line with this generation to finally confront and remediate past and present wrongs — starting with a thorough and honest accounting of the Trump administration’s transgressions. 

We can’t let this essential work be sabotaged or shortchanged by the Washington D.C. establishment’s self-immunization from accountability. We either establish a precedent for accountability that was lacking after Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Iraq War and the 2008 economic crisis, or risk inviting a more authoritarian and lawless counter-attack.

The Biden-Harris administration must take a full-court press approach and utilize every investigatory and disciplinary tool available to the federal government to reveal the truth, devise effective solutions, bring the corrupt to justice and restore the constitutional balance between the three branches of government.

We need presidential truth and reconciliation commissions on the systemic abuses that Native Americans, African Americans and Latin American migrants all face; congressional select committees to provide a comprehensive overhaul of the laws restraining executive overreach, police violence and carbon pollution; and gloves-off inspector general and criminal investigations into the flagrant abuses of the Trump administration and its corporate accomplices.

Truth and reconciliation is not simply a racial matter. Working-class white families are also economically and politically disenfranchised by the inhuman corporate machinery that controls our institutions and toxifies our lands and food, preventing vastly popular reforms like Medicare for All, drug decriminalization, law enforcement violence de-escalation strategies and action on climate change from gaining national momentum.

The Biden-Harris administration offers hope that the executive branch will at least consider bold reforms. But passing the type of drastic legislation necessary to put this republic on a sustainable path will require the mass organization and activation of the public at large. 

Our society and governments can no longer serve the Dow Jones Industrial Average instead of the life, liberty and happiness of its citizens or the indispensable health of our ecosystems.

We are the ancestors of future generations.

We cannot leave them a sick, fatally flawed society.

To heal our country we must be courageous, and boldly confront generations of injustice and exploitation.

Fawn Sharp

Fawn Sharp is President of the Quinault Indian Nation and the President of the National Congress of American Indians.

Matthew Randazzo V

Matthew Randazzo V is a former government executive who advises Tribal Nations.

 

READ MORE: 

Indian Country reacts to Biden victory 

 

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Dear Trump Voter: As a theatre prof, I want you to know that the WH’s “outrage” over election results is pure theatre. Trump KNOWS he has lost, but he’s in the bargaining stage of his grief. He’s bargaining that you’ll help him pay his campaign debts. (There. I reached out.)

— Michael Greyeyes (@MichaelGreyeyes) November 9, 2020

 

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"I don't like hope. Hope was the last thing to come out of Pandora's box. It's a sedative word. If we want something to happen, it's better to pray; that way we're activating our intelligence."- John Trudell (Santee Sioux)