The
Cherokee Nation’s Indian Child Welfare office, seen Sept. 17, is
located on South Muskogee Avenue in Tahlequah. To contact ICW, call
918-458-6900 or visit icw.cherokee.org. Photo by Chad Hunter /Cherokee
Phoenix
Cherokee Nation Indian Child Welfare representative investigating program
Sally
Wilson, a supervisor for Indian Child Welfare with the Cherokee Nation,
cites disagreeable examples of Cherokee or Native overrepresentation
and underrepresentation in federal and state programs.
TAHLEQUAH
– Sally Wilson, a supervisor for Indian Child Welfare with the Cherokee
Nation, can cite disagreeable examples of Cherokee or Native
overrepresentation and underrepresentation in federal and state
programs.
She can point to overrepresentation in the foster system.
“Cherokee
Nation is involved in child welfare cases all over the United States,”
Wilson said. “However, most of our cases are in Oklahoma where the
disproportionality rates are astonishing. There are reported to be
around 6,000 children in foster care across the state and according to
our data, approximately 11% of those children are Cherokee. This amount
has been consistent for the past 10 years – the amount of time I have
been heading up recruitment of foster and adoptive families for our
tribe.”
Then there is underrepresentation in some helpful
personnel enhancement programs, such as Minority Professional Leadership
Development, for which Wilson was chosen. It is administered from
within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“They’re
trying to get new leaders in the community to help with youth – minority
leaders specifically,” she said. “The Children’s Bureau oversees it,
and they help do the evaluations and they fund the project. It is
intended to grow minority leaders throughout the country, but there is
limited representation when it comes to Native people. I don’t know if
it’s because they don’t know to apply or maybe they’re just not
applying. I heard it through our director, and it was suggested that I
apply for it. I did and I was fortunate to get it.”
Today, Wilson’s work includes the gathering of data and research through the Action Research Project.
“It
can include a number of things,” she said. “Some people want to look at
reunification of children to their families, or they want to look at
what’s happening or what are we doing – maybe how can we change systems
for children that are aging out. I’m looking at what can be done to help
change systems that will positively impact our families that are
overrepresented in the child welfare system.”
The
MPLD program lasts 12 months and is intended specifically for emerging
leaders within minority child welfare. There is a selection process each
year from candidates across the U.S., many of whom are African American
or Hispanic.
“I believe this year they picked 23 out of all of
the applications,” Wilson said. “You’re exposed to a lot of experts
throughout the country, and you get mentorship opportunities, and then
you start your work on some research. You develop what’s called an
action research project. They really want you to focus on something that
you see needing improvement in your agency, in your tribe, whatever
that may be.”
With a higher chance of being placed in care away
from home, Native children are also four times more likely than other
children to be placed in a household with people of a different race.
“About
11 percent of the children that are placed in out-of-home care are
Cherokee children alone,” Wilson said. “All these rates of disproportion
are out there, and there is some implicit bias that plays into that. It
isn’t something people would say is intentional, but it is definitely
there. We’re still faced with many of the same battles they were facing
when (the Indian Child Welfare Act) was first implemented in 1978.”
The
MPLD is described as open to people from cultural, ethnic and racial
groups with a historically disproportionate number of children in care.
The program requires at least five years of experience working in U.S.
child welfare, and the fellowship is further intended for emerging
leaders. Candidates are expected to have an undergraduate degree.
Information about eligibility and application requirements is available at:
Chip Fox
is an important photographer/reporter for the Inquirerand Indian Country Today and friend of CNA. He covered the
adoption story of our Native American board member Kelley Bova in the Inquirer
who was adopted by a White family in 1963.
In Indian Country Today he covered the story when
Kelley accompanied the remains of two Native Children from the Carlisle
Indian School back to her homelands in South Dakota, among other important
articles for Indian Country.
His latest article in Indian Country Today https://ictnews.org/news/in-the-footsteps-of-our-ancestors is a moving combination of stories from
the Carlisle School and stunning photo collages that he created. He's a
writer and an artist. We wanted to make sure you saw this important
article.
JUST TWO OF THE
IMAGES FROM THE CHIP'S ARTICLE:
Students Nancy Renville, left, and Justine LaFromboise were
among six Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake students, four boys and
two girls, who arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on Nov. 6,
1879. The first group of students had arrived one month earlier. The four
male students died at the school or soon after being returned home while
ill. Amos LaFromboise (not pictured) who died 20 days after arriving at the
school, was the first to die. The remains of Amos LaFromboise and Spirit
Lake student Edward Upright were finally returned to their tribes in 2023,
where a ceremonial fire was lit to burn during the 4 days of mourning. The
background image by Charles Fox shows the fire burning at the repatriation
cemetery on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Historic photos of the students
are courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Institution. (Photo illustration by Charles Fox/Special to ICT)
Native students arriving at Carlisle Indian Industrial
School faced the cutting of their long hair, a disturbing cultural
violation. This barber’s chair was photographed by Charles Fox at the Heard
Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, where it was part of an exhibit, "Away
from Home," on Native boarding schools. The background photo, courtesy
of the Cumberland County Historical Society, shows a group of students in
March 1892. (Photo illustration by Charles Fox/Special to ICT)
Our
work matters because we are bridging the gap between generations,
offering a way for families to stay connected to their culture, their
language, and their stories.
In
the words of Quindrea Yazzie, a Navajo editor of the ICT Newscast, even
though not everyone can live on the reservation, their children still
get to experience their heritage in meaningful ways through ICT. This is
the heart of what we do—ensuring Indigenous stories and voices are
heard, preserved, and shared widely.
By Merrina O’Malley, Special to ICT
Minnesota state senator fights for the rights of missing and murdered Indigenous people by educating the public ... continue reading
Native American Representation in film from 2007-2022 An analysis of the 1,600 top-grossing movies released from 2007-2022 found: 0.25 percent of all speaking characters were Native American 1 percent of films featured female Native American characters with speaking roles 77 percent of Native characters were male and 23 percent were female Data from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
During eclipses Navajo people must stay indoors, with closed windows and
doors, and not look outside, limit consumption of food by fasting, not
drink water, not sleep, not bathe, brush hair or groom themselves, no
intimacy with families or partners, exception between mothers and
children. Arts and crafts during solar eclipses are not allowed. Lightly
cleaning or remote work at home is allowed.
George
Little Wound was gravely ill when he was sent home to Pine Ridge from
the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1889, just three years after
arriving at the notorious boarding school.
Little
Wound, the son of Chief Little Wound, was among a group of three Pine
Ridge students shipped home together with what the school physician
described as “incipient consumption” and “scrofula,” a disfiguring
infection of the skin and lymph nodes caused by the same bacteria as
tuberculosis, according to Carlisle records.
All
three appeared to survive their illness for some time after they
returned to Pine Ridge, though Little Wound was never the same. Forever
weakened by the disease, he struggled to support himself and expressed
disgust with his school experience.
“I
went to [Carlisle] school to get a good education ... but I was greatly
mistaken when I went to school,” he wrote in 1911, in a tersely worded
survey he sent to Carlisle more than 20 years after returning home.
“I
come home with sickness and do not know any thing.... and believe I may
never get well from the sickness which I brought from the school,” he
wrote. “I am in a miserable place and bad condition living in a one-room
log home without floor where I am unable to help myself.”
Native populations across the country decreased by more than 100,000
during the early years of boarding schools, with about one third of the
total Native population dying between 1860 and 1900, mostly from diseases such as tuberculosis.
Born of History: A Tulalip Youth’s Journey to Indigenize Child Welfare
Dear Imprint readers, Today we are pleased to share with you the first in our three-part series, Born of History: A Tulalip Youth’s Journey to Indigenize Child Welfare. The
series was reported and photographed by Indigenous Children and Families
Reporter Nancy Marie Spears, and shares an in-depth account of a rarely
heard voice — a young person who grew up in a tribal child welfare
system. Over three days, Born of History covers the past, present and
future that Andres “Dre” Thornock represents, and the unique role this
23-year-old plays within the Tulalip Tribes. The series is being
co-published with ICT.
Formerly known as Indian Country Today, ICT is the largest news
organization covering the Indigenous world, including American Indians,
Alaska Natives and First Nations. Nancy,
who is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, reported
this story over the past 10 months. Her reporting includes a four-day
trip in March to the Tulalip reservation, and dozens of in-depth
conversations with Thornock by phone and videoconference. For contextual
information and expert opinion, she reviewed thousands of pages of
court files and interviewed members of Tulalip Tribes, Thornock’s kin,
attorneys, tribal officials, judges, social workers and academics. As
always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback after reading Born of
History. We could not do this work without your support, and very much
appreciate the time you devote to The Imprint's pages.
Best, Karen de Sá (She/her)
Executive Editor
The Imprint
Kelley
Bova, right, receives a hug after speaking to a group of elders at the
Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023. Bova,
Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, brought home a pair of moccasins that had been
confiscated from a Native boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
in Pennsylvania more than 100 years ago. They were repatriated to the
tribe along with the remains of two students who died there in the late
1800s. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses
from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in
the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis
Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
LAKE
TRAVERSE RESERVATION, S.D. — The moccasins sat for decades in the
corner of a glass-enclosed bookcase in Pennsylvania, nestled on a shelf
with a Davy Crockett trading card and Canadian Mountie knick-knack.
They
had long been separated from the unknown Native boy who had worn them
into the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years
ago, where they were taken from him along with his Native connections
to family, language and traditions.
By
the time they returned quietly home to Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate lands in
late September, however, their anonymity had made them universal, a
reminder of the forced assimilation that had formed the mission of the
Pennsylvania school.
“It's
all about those moccasins,” said Tamara St. John, a Sisseton Wahpeton
Oyate historian and South Dakota state representative. “They are the
symbol of everything that happened there.”
Their
journey home – accompanying the remains of two Sisseton and Spirit Lake
boys repatriated to their tribes and families – brought not only
another step toward reconciliation and healing for those involved but
also inner peace and a sense of purpose to others along the way.
Moccasin tracks
The
skilled craftsmanship of the moccasins’ quill and beadwork apparently
caught the attention of seamstress Susan Zeamer, who worked at the
Carlisle school from 1895 to 1908.
At
some point, she took them home for herself. Whether she slipped the
moccasins into her pockets or was given permission to keep them is lost
to history.
The
moccasins were then passed down through generations until a
great-nephew by marriage, John Baker, 72, now of Buckingham Township,
Pennsylvania, became their owner in 2011.
A
pair of moccasins and a medicine pouch that were confiscated from a
student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago
were repatriated to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate on Sept. 23, 2023.
They had been in the possession of a Pennsylvania family for more than a
century before Kelley Bova, a tribal citizen, was asked to return them
to the tribe. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
Baker
remembers being fascinated by the moccasins in the bookcase in his
parent’s home as a boy in the 1950s, when Westerns were popular on
television and movie screens. He visualized a young Indigenous boy
wearing them on adventures.
Over
the past decade, however, despite the sentimental attachment, Baker
became uneasy with possessing them. Like many who grew up in the
Carlisle area, Baker’s knowledge of the Carlisle school was limited, but
being the owner of the moccasins had enlightened him to the reality of
the harsh history of the school and the treatment of Indigenous
children. He felt a new responsibility. He understood the moccasins were
not his to keep, but his quest to find their home of origin was filled
with frustrations.
Museums
and tribes did not always reply to his queries, but his research
convinced him the moccasins were Plains Indian in style.
He finally reached out to Arla Patch, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a founding member of the Coalition of Natives and Allies
advocacy, group which has led a fight against Native mascots. He showed
her the moccasins on a Zoom call and told her of his desire to see them
returned.
"I
was getting pretty frustrated,” Baker said. “What’s going to happen to
these? … They're more than just an artifact, they're actually part of a
lineage that still is alive and well."
Patch introduced him to her close friend, Kelley Bova, a fellow member of the Coalition of Natives and Allies, who is Dakota.
Bova,
too, had been removed from her culture and traditions. Born in
Sisseton, South Dakota, she was adopted as a 3-month-old infant by a
White family and grew up far from her Native relatives.
Independent
research with tribal historians and museum experts confirmed the
moccasins were Plains Indian in style, though a specific tribe could not
be pinpointed. Officials with the Blackfeet, Dakota, and Rosebud Sioux
tribes all felt they were characteristic of their style.
Kelley
Bova (not shown) shows the moccasins to Helena Little Ghost at the Lake
Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023. The moccasins
were confiscated from a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
more than 100 years ago. They remained in the possession of a
Pennsylvania family for more than a century before being repatriated
back to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
Bova
believed her own tribe, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, should take the
moccasins, and tribal officials agreed. Bova was tapped as the proper
person to deliver them to their symbolic home.
“I
find it mystical that Kelley and my path would cross, and that John's
and my path would cross,” Patch recalled. “It's just so amazing. You
couldn't write a script like this.”
Baker
presented the moccasins to Bova in November 2022, at Peace Valley Park
in Bucks County. He said he felt both a void and a peace to no longer
have them in his home in the antique bookcase that he inherited along
with the moccasins.
“It
was really strange to not have the moccasins in the bookcase anymore,”
he said recently. “They've been there my whole life. I kind of lost this
imaginary friend. But I can't tell you how much peace that brought me.
There was a real sense of well-being about it. Something definitely was
settled.”
A different era
While
Baker felt the absence, Bova quickly formed a close bond with the worn,
leather shoes. They had been on similar journeys, more than a
half-century apart, and Bova felt it was time to take them home.
“I
would actually talk to them, tell them that they were safe now,” Bova
said, as she waited to take the moccasins to Sisseton. “I have prayed
with them, and I treat them like a child. I take care of them and plan
to be able to bring them home.”
Finding your way home is something Bova knows about.
Her
journey began as Rose Anne Owen, a Dakota infant taken from her family
at birth and moved to Rosebud to await adoption. At age 3 months, she
was placed into the hands of Salvatore and André Petrilli, a suburban
Philadelphia dentist and his wife. The Glenside couple, of Italian and
Irish descent, had struggled to have their own biological children and
had arranged for the adoption through Catholic Charities.
Rose
made her 1,900-mile journey to Glenside, Pennsylvania, and was renamed
Kelley Elizabeth Petrilli. A new birth certificate was created to
reflect that she was the child of two Caucasian parents. Her American
Indian heritage was wiped away on paper. A Montgomery County Orphans
Court clerk, ironically with the last name of Custer, gave the final
stamp of approval to the adoption.
She
had become a child of the Native adoption era, a decades-long forced
assimilation of Native children established under the Indian Adoption
Project, which started in 1958 and evolved to include 50 private and
public placement agencies across the United States and Canada.
By
then, boarding schools had proven to be expensive and unsuccessful.
Adoption was the new attempt at assimilation, but the expenses would be
the responsibility of the adopting parents and not that of the
government. Raised in a White home, without the communal support of
other students, adoption was viewed as a more successful tool for
assimilation.
In
the next 20 years, until the Indian Child Welfare Act ended the
adoption project, almost 13,000 Native children were adopted. Native
children are still four times more likely to be removed from their
families and placed in foster care than non-Native children.
Love without identity
Unlike
many other adoptees, Bova did not suffer a childhood of abuse. The
Petrillis provided a loving, middle-class home and private schools,
while never hiding her Native heritage.
Eventually,
they would have five biological children on their own, but Bova always
knew she was different, a Native island in an ocean of White suburbia.
“You’re an Indian, you’re an Indian,” one of her cousins would taunt.
“No, I’m not,” she would scream back, a denial that still embarrasses her and causes her pain today.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be White; I still feel guilty about that,” Bova told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2021. “I just wanted to fit in and be like my sisters. … I did not like being tall and brown and different.”
For Bova, that feeling of isolation led to what she calls her “dark years” after high school.
“Deep
down, when you are adopted, you have a wound inside yourself,” she
said. “If your parents gave you up, how lovable can you be?”
Sandy
White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, knows the feeling. She was
adopted at 18 months, and grew up to found the First Nations
Repatriations Institute. She currently works at the Indian Child Welfare
Act Law Center in Minneapolis.
“Even in loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are,” White Hawk told the Inquirer. “Love doesn’t provide identity.”
Bova,
now 60, did not find her way back to her biological mother, Lillian
Owen, and siblings, or her Dakota tribe, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate,
until she was 50. Like students who attended Native boarding schools,
she found herself split between two worlds and not fitting completely in
either.
“When
any child was taken, they were also not able to continue their journey
of being Native American. We were robbed of our identity,” said Bova,
who is now an enrolled member of the tribe. “I think that's the hardest
part for me to sometimes wrap around, that you're robbed of that. And
people don't understand that, but I'm … grateful that I found my family
and I try to learn as much as I can.”
Patch said the journey continues.
“Kelley
does not have her Whiteness, and she does not have her Nativeness,”
Patch said of her friend. “The healing power of Kelley’s story is that
she is now getting to be Dakota. She’s getting to connect with that
Dakota heritage.”
Rose’s story
On
Memorial Day weekend in 2021, Kelley made her first visit to the former
grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, drawn by a group of
Native women and others from the Circle Legacy group who clean and
decorate the graves each year.
She
stood in the Indian Cemetery on a raw, rainy day with the white
gravestones laid out in front of her in perfect rows, like desks in a
classroom.
Kelley
Bova, of Pennsylvania, pays her first visit to the Indian Cemetery on
May 29, 2021, at the site where the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
operated from 1879-1918. Bova was taken from her family as an infant
and adopted out at three months old to a White Pennsylvania family. She
later reconnected with her birth family and is now a member of the
Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. (Photo by Charles Fox, courtesy of The
Philadelphia Inquirer)
They
marked the remains of the students who had died while attending the
school but had not been returned home to their families. Most were
victims of diseases such as tuberculosis.
Her
eyes became transfixed on one particular grave. The gravestone simply
read “Rose, Sioux.” It was the name she had been given by her biological
parents.
“Just seeing that grave with her name, my name on it,” Kelley later said, “it just made me cry.”
It
was the grave of Rose Long Face, also known as Little Hawk, Rosebud
Sioux, who was among the initial group of 84 students to arrive at the
school on Oct. 6, 1879. She died 18 months later on April 29, 1881.
Their
journeys had been separated by 84 years but were nonetheless similar.
Both had made the journey from Rosebud to a Pennsylvania town, to have
their Native identities removed and be renamed in the process. Both had
been separated from their families and the land that should have been
their home by a government assimilation program.
Bova
moved a few rows over and found the graves of two other Dakota
students, Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright. She knelt, placing
tobacco bundles on their graves, speaking softly to let them know they
were not forgotten and one day they would be home again.
Rose
Long Face made it home first, however. In the summer of 2021, she was
among nine Rosebud students repatriated from the cemetery to their
homeland in South Dakota. She had been away 140 years.
Amos and Edward
Amos
and Edward began their journeys home in September 2023, when they were
disinterred from the Carlisle cemetery in a private ceremony that
included tribal members, ancestors and others.
Their homecoming provided a chance to return the moccasins, as well, to Sisseton.
Amos
and Edward were among six Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate/Spirit Lake students,
four boys and two girls, who arrived at the Carlisle school on Nov. 6,
1879, along with seven students from other tribes. They arrived exactly
one month after the first group of students had walked through the
gates.
Chairperson
Lonna Street, left, Spirit Lake Tribe, and Tamara St. John, Sisseton
Wahpeton Oyate historian and a South Dakota state representative, stand
in the Indian Cemetery at the former site of the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School late in the evening of Sept. 17, 2023. Work in the
cemetery disinterring the graves of Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright
had gone on for approximately 11 hours on a rainy day. (Photo by Charles
Fox for ICT)
In
20 days, Amos was dead — the first student to die at the school. There
is no record of the case of death, though a newspaper report at the time
suggested he was sick when he arrived at the school.
Edward,
son of Chief Waanatan II, was 12 when he arrived at the school, a year
younger than Amos. He died on May 5, 1881, of pneumonia as he was
recovering from measles.
Amos
and Edward were among four students disinterred from Carlisle in
September as part of the U.S. Army’s disinterment project at the
Carlisle Barracks. The others, Beau Neal, Northern Arapaho, and Launey
Shorty, Blackfeet, were also returned to their tribes and families.
Amos
and Edward were taken by a caravan of nine passenger vans and vehicles
that left Carlisle on the afternoon of Sept. 19 for the 22-hour drive to
Sisseton.
Along
the way, the caravan stopped in Ohio to pick up two more remains being
returned by Oberlin College. Two additional remains, believed to be
about 500 years old, were already waiting for burial in South Dakota
after being returned by a North Dakota coroner’s office.
Amos
and Edward arrived on Sept. 20 at the site of the former Sisseton
Agency, where they had last said goodbye to their parents. This time,
however, they were greeted by about 100 people gathered in celebration.
They
were then taken to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate repatriation grounds to
complete the traditional four days of mourning before a private ceremony
and burial at the repatriation cemetery. The other four remains were
also buried at the repatriation cemetery.
Bova
made the same journey with the moccasins tucked inside a shoebox,
boarding the caravan at Carlisle for the trip to Sisseton.
For
her, the trip was an opportunity to take part in an historic moment for
the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake people, but also an
opportunity to continue her healing process. She had visited Sisseton
more than 10 times in the past 10 years for Sundances, powwows, and
family events.
“It's
like there's this vessel and this wound and every time [I go to
Sisseton] it gets filled a little more, then a little more and a little
more,” Bova said afterward. “That's why it helped doing this. Because
that was able to fill [the void] even more. Fill that wound up and heal
it.”
During
the final three days of mourning at Sisseton, with ceremonies at
sunrise and sunset, gatherings with food, and conversations with elders,
Bova experienced events she had missed for 50 years. This was
especially true of her time spent with the Buffalo Heart women.
“Those Buffalo Heart women allowed me to help with the remains,” she said. “That was such a gift to me.”
‘These are my people’
On
Saturday, Sept. 23, the day of burial for Amos and Edward, about 100
people of all ages stood on the hillside overlooking the open graves.
The
remains were taken down from a wooden scaffold and eventually bundled
in buffalo robes along with a star quilt, moccasins, and other
traditional items brought by relatives. They were then placed in their
graves with the love and respect that should have been afforded them as
the sons of chiefs.
Kelley
Bova, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, speaks to a gathering at the Lake
Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023, after bringing
home a pair of moccasins confiscated from an unknown Native boy at the
Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago. They had been
in the possession of Pennsylvania family for more than a century.
(Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
“Whenever
I am in the teepees, by the fire, and hearing the men drumming and
singing, it takes me back to another time,” Bova said. “It’s something
that makes me feel so special. …That’s my DNA; that’s my heritage. Not
knowing it for 50 years and finally seeing things like that, it has a
healing power inside of me that helps a lot. Seeing all of this, I come
to the realization that these are my people. This is who I am… The
biggest thing I have learned is to let go of how I was raised as opposed
to who I really am.”
Then
it was Bova’s turn to address the group. She spoke to a gathered group
of elders at the front of the crowd where they could see the moccasins
she held in her hands.
She
told the story of the moccasins and their pathway to her, and then
presented them to tribal chairpersons J. Garret Renville of the Sisseton
Wahpeton Oyate and Lonna Street of Spirit Lake, as well as historian
St. John.
“It's a privilege to be able to do this,” she told ICT.
“And it's a very spiritual thing. Because I feel like it's my journey
home, and now I can help these moccasins go home. I know they're just a
thing. But to me, there are symbols of every child that was taken,
whether it was through adoption or through the residential schools. I
think it's just so important that these go home.”
Upon
hearing the news of the moccasins' return to the Dakota people, Baker
responded from his Pennsylvania home that he felt “ relief, peace, and
closure” and “a sense of gratification that comes with complete
accomplishment.” The endeavor had taken over a century but was finally
achieved.
St. John has big plans for the moccasins.
“I
could build a museum around the moccasins to forever tell the stories
of so many — past, present, and future,” she said. “I want them to be
representative of our children and their journey home. I want them to
represent how the federal assimilation tactics of places like Carlisle
did not win.”
The moccasins can tell that story, she said.
“Our
boys will be here and laid to rest on the homelands and protected ever
on, but those moccasins will sit in their place in our collections with
their story,” St. John said.
“To
‘keep one’s moccasins’ is said to mean that a Native person did not
give up their traditional way,” she said. “Our children came home with
moccasins.”
