Indigenous peoples tell Biden: ‘Sorry is not enough’

Editorial By Editor

President Joe Biden did something that no U.S. president has done. He offered a formal apology for the horrific, racist abuse suffered by Native American and Alaska Native children in so-called American Indian boarding schools. Biden apologized on Oct. 25 outside of Phoenix, Arizona, at the Gila River Indian Community, at a meeting which included tribal leaders, survivors and their families.

The timing and place of this apology raises eyebrows since it comes within two weeks of the Nov. 5 presidential election, and Native Americans make up 5% of the overall population of Arizona, which is a “swing state.” 

Beginning in 1819, thousands of Native American and Alaska Native children were kidnapped from their homes and sent away to schools (in reality, concentration camps), where they were denied the right to their cultures, languages, histories and spiritual beliefs. Their long hair was cut, and many of these children were mentally and physically tortured, scarring them for life. 

At least 973 children died in Indian boarding schools operated or supported by the federal government, often from abuse and disease. (The number is likely much higher.) Their labor was superexploited in the schools and by white adults who adopted them or hired them out. Most large American Indian boarding schools closed in the 1980s and 1990s following years of activism, the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

Many of these schools were maintained by the Catholic Church, other Christian denominations and the Mormon Church. 

This abominable treatment was an instrumental part of a centuries-long genocidal campaign waged against Indigenous peoples that began when the butcher Christopher Columbus seized Caribbean islands in 1492, claiming them for the Spanish monarchy.

While many who attended the Oct. 25 meeting were heartened to hear Biden’s apology, others said that the apology wasn’t nearly enough to reverse the long-lasting physical and psychological harm done to those forced to attend the schools and to the generations that followed. 

Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, a 79-year-old member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, who suffered severe mistreatment at a school in South Dakota that left her with a lifelong, painful limp, said, “Sorry is not enough. Nothing is enough when you damage a human being. A whole generation of people and our future was destroyed for us.” She and others are asking what comes next after the apology. (Associated Press, Oct. 25) 

Indigenous activists and allies protest in Boston.

United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the main organizer of the annual National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, Massachusetts, stated on its Facebook page in anticipation of the president’s Oct. 25 announcement: “Biden to issue apology, without reparations, for U.S. Indian boarding schools. Nothing pledged to help Native children and families now dealing with intergenerational trauma, disproportionate number of children in care and all the other effects of genocidal U.S. anti-family policies.”

UAINE continued: “No increased support for Indigenous language revitalization. Not to mention the necessity of landback. Nor the fact that this is being done for votes by an administration actively committing genocide. And free Leonard Peltier!”

Any formal apology by a U.S. president to an oppressed people, such as one President Bill Clinton made in 1997 to African Americans regarding slavery and Biden made recently to Indigenous peoples, is certainly a concession.  But these apologies for state-sanctioned atrocities are toothless, because their white supremacist legacies remain intact. 

Workers World is in total solidarity with UAINE and other Indigenous peoples in demanding that reparations be put in place to make any kind of apology real for those who are still fighting for their right to basic human rights, sovereignty and self-determination. 

Otherwise, these apologies amount to nothing but grandstanding.

https://www.workers.org/2024/10/81636/

Catholic Church must ‘address deniers’ following apology

WATCH

Catholic Church must ‘address deniers’ following apology says Murray Sinclair

Brett Forester

Sorry is ‘an important milestone’ but more work must be done, according to the retired senator and former judge...

The former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is urging the Catholic Church to tackle residential school denialism following Pope Francis’s apology on Friday morning.

Church leaders who refuse to accept survivors’ truths are, right now, “the biggest source of resistance to reconciliation,” says Murray Sinclair.

“Denialism was allowed to flourish because of the silence that was coming from the Pope,” said the retired senator in an interview. “With this statement, those denying within the church — or denying in public because of the church being able to support denialism — will no longer have that ladder upon which they can stand.”

On the final day of an Indigenous delegation’s Vatican visit, the pontiff uttered a long-awaited and much-anticipated sorry “for the role that a number of Catholics” had in abusing children forced to attend Canada’s residential schools.

“All these things are contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Francis said. “For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church, I ask for God’s forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry.”

The role these Catholics had in wounding Indigenous children and stripping them of their identity, culture and spirituality filled him with feelings of shame, sorrow and indignation, the pontiff added.

His apology comes nearly seven years after the TRC delivered its final report. In it, Call to Action 58 urged the pope to apologize for the “Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children.”

Pope’s apology a powerful gesture, but unlikely to affect court cases in Canada, experts say READ

Francis didn’t outright apologize for the church’s institutional role in perpetrating the abuse but rather the bad behaviour of individual Catholics that, he suggested, had turned their backs on their faith.

Sinclair told APTN the contrition “is a major step” but said Francis still must come to Canada and face survivors to fulfill Call to Action 58.  Sinclair also said the reference to policies of cultural assimilation was a notable insinuation of institutional guilt.

“That’s important,” Sinclair said. “That should be taken together with the apology for the individuals who committed wrongs. The one thing that arguably was missing was an acknowledgement that they put those people in place, in those positions of power where they could get away with that.”

Nevertheless, Sinclair said in a press release it was an important moment and long past time the church took responsibility for “a dark chapter of Canada’s colonialist history, one which the Church was a key co-author.”

The former judge took control of the TRC in 2009 as it began crisscrossing the country seeking out survivors and documenting the horrors of residential schools. He was appointed to the Senate in 2016 and retired in 2021.

KEEP READING 

CANADA leads THE WAY on reconciliation - is AMERICA next? Real reconciliation requires JUSTICE and arrests!  TLH

Pope Francis apologizes for church role in Indigenous residential schools - The Washington Post 

Pope's apology a powerful gesture, but unlikely to affect court cases in Canada, experts say

 

Truth and Reconciliation and Reparations

California paved the way for reparations conversation. Will America ever follow?

About 60 years after mandatory attendance for Canada’s brutal Indian residential school system ended, the country created its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, this school system prioritized the erasure of Indigenous culture in Canada. Earlier this month, Canada’s government agreed to pay $31.5 billion to fix country’s welfare system and to pay reparations to indigenous people harmed by it, a settlement aided by what the country learned from its commission.

Yet the closest thing America has to any of the aforementioned commissions is California’s first-in-the-nation reparations task force, which started in 2021, roughly 400 years after slavery first began and 156 years after Congress abolished it.

 READ MORE

 

$1.3 billion in damages: #60sScoop get their day in court

August 23, 2016

 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Michelle Siu

Thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit across Canada who were ripped from their homes as children are getting their day in court after a years-long struggle in what has become known as the “Sixties Scoop,” a painful, but little-understood chapter of Canadian history.

The so-called scoop happened between the 1960s and the 1980s and saw thousands of aboriginal children taken from their homes by child-welfare service workers and placed with mostly non-aboriginal families. In some cases, children were sent to live with families in other provinces, the United States and the U.K., often without the consent of their parents.

A  legacy of  ‘cultural genocide’

The fallout from the practice has negatively impacted generations of aboriginal Canadians.

The final Truth and Reconciliation Commission report stated “the effects of the residential school experience and the Sixties Scoop have adversely affected parenting skills and the success of many Aboriginal families.”

“By the end of the 1970s, the transfer of children from residential schools was nearly complete in Southern Canada, and the impact of the Sixties Scoop was in evidence across the country,” the TRC said.

“In 1977, Aboriginal children accounted for 44 per cent of the children in care in Alberta, 51 per cent 

of the children in care in Saskatchewan, and 60 per cent of the children in care in Manitoba.”

READ MORE: Indigenous community shares stories of survival decades after the ’60s Scoop

The “Sixties Scoop” has not received the same attention as another dark chapter in Canada’s history: the issue of residential schools. And unlike survivors of the residential school system, adults who went through the Sixties Scoop have never received an apology from the federal government. Last June, the Manitoba government formally apologized to those affected.

Marcia Brown Martel, a member of the Temagami First Nation near Kirkland Lake, Ont., was taken by child welfare officials and adopted by a non-native family as a child.

Martel has described what happened to her and thousands of others as “cultural genocide.”

“I lost everything, including my name. I lost my family. I lost my language. I lost everything about my culture,” Martel told The Canadian Press. “This should never have happened. It was wrong.”

Dozens of supporters rallied outside a Toronto courtroom Tuesday where an Ontario Superior Court judge will hear opening arguments for a summary judgment in a class action lawsuit against the federal government by survivors of the Sixties Scoop.

At the heart of the Ontario lawsuit, is a federal-provincial arrangement in which Ontario child welfare services placed as many as 16,000 aboriginal children with non-native families from December 1965 to December 1984.

WATCH: Indigenous community shares stories of survival decades after the 60’s Scoop

The claim, which has not been proven in court, alleges the children suffered a devastating loss of cultural identity that the federal government should have protected. The suit alleges plaintiffs suffered emotional, psychological and spiritual harm from the lost connection to their aboriginal heritage.  

They are seeking $1.3 billion in damages, or $85,000 for each affected person.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs will argue they have enough evidence to forego a trial and prove that Canada had an obligation in law to ensure that indigenous children removed from their homes retain their cultural identity and heritage.

READ MORE: ’60s Scoop plaintiffs finally to get day in court

Tuesday’s hearing comes after seven years of delays due to appeals by the federal government, which has fought the claim since it was launched in 2009.

“Today I stand with the survivors of the Ontario Sixties Scoop as they fight for justice and acknowledgement after decades of heartache,” said AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde, in a statement. “Survivors of the Sixties Scoop deserve just resolution and restitution without further delay.  The federal government said recently that they would prefer to resolve this issue outside the courtroom.  If they are serious then they should work with survivors of the Sixties Scoop to get a respectful, acceptable process in place.”

Sixties Scoop survivor Dokis Thibault is emotional as she gathers with supporters at a rally in Toronto on Tuesday, August 23, 2016. Scores of aboriginals from across Ontario rallied in Toronto today ahead of a landmark court hearing on the so-called ’60s Scoop.

Calls on Ottawa to recognize an ‘immense wrong’

A number of indigenous leaders called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an open letter to resolve the issue without further delay and to “recognize and right an immense wrong — with both words and deeds.”

“This case is about Canadian values – past, present and future,” the letter says. “This moment is an opportunity for Canada to put an ugly legacy behind us, for the government to take steps to reform its conduct so that the injustice does not continue and build a better future for all. It’s a chance to open the door for future generations to grow up healthy and proud of who they are.”

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett has said she wants to see the lawsuit over the Sixties Scoop taken out of court.

“We, as you know — as a government — would like to get things out of court and to a table where we can make those kinds of agreements together, as a way forward,” Bennett told reporters in Winnipeg in August.

“We want to work together with all of the litigants that are presently in court and try and get to the table.”

*With files from the Canadian Press

REPARATIONS: US should follow Canada’s lead, reckon with its own destructive legacy

Canada confronts ‘cultural genocide’ against aboriginal people

June 16, 2015 |  by Lauren Carasik | Al Jazeera America

On May 31 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released a summary of its report on the history and legacy of the nation’s residential schools. The report concluded that Canada’s aboriginal policy, designed “to eliminate aboriginal governments … and cause aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada,” has caused unspeakable and enduring suffering that amounts to “cultural genocide.”

The U.S. also had a shameful program of residential schools for its Native American children, often operated by churches with government funding. A reckoning for the destructive legacy of forced assimilation is long overdue. It’s time for the U.S. to follow Canada’s lead in establishing a truth and reconciliation commission and acknowledge the havoc its policies have wrought.

Canada’s legacy

Started in the 1880s, the schools were funded by Canadian government but run primarily by churches. An estimated 150,000 aboriginal children attended the residential schools during their century-long tenure. But the goal was never to educate the children. Instead, the schools were designed to destroy aboriginal culture by removing children from reservations and severing ties with parents and communities, in order to inculcate ‘civilized’ and Christian values. The last residential school closed in 1998, but the aftereffects continue to exact a devastating toll today. This is true not only for those haunted by their stay at the schools but for the entire community of aboriginals whose culture and systems of government were targeted for annihilation.

Many of the 80,000 survivors recounted their harrowing tales of forced separation from their communities and brutal physical, sexual and psychological abuse to the Commission. And the TRC found that more than 3,000 aboriginal children perished in the in residential schools from abuse, neglect and illness. Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, estimated that the figure could be far higher, since shoddy record keeping obscured the Commission’s final accounting.

The TRC was formed as part of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, in the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged and apologized for the harm caused by Canada’s residential schools. But he has refused to commit to implementing the Commission’s 94 recommendations, including provisions for health, education, justice and commemoration. Canada cannot simply close this sordid chapter and move on. Instead, it must enact policies and programs that would ensure aboriginal communities have the support, tools and resources to heal and thrive.

The grave injustices of North American residential schools and their aftermath are clear. But seeking and speaking the truth is only the beginning of a long process of reconciliation.

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Richard Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who pioneered the concept of off-reservation boarding schools opined in an oft-quoted 1892 speech. At the time, Pratt’s goal of cultural rather than physical genocide, though despicable, was less extreme for its time than that of others who advocated for the outright extermination of the nation’s native people.

But, as in Canada, the U.S. schools served their intended purpose of demolishing Native American traditions and history. Thousands of children died from abuse, neglect and malnutrition. Others were harshly punished for residual ties to their culture or spirituality. And the schools often pushed boys toward manual labor and girls to domestic service. As a 2009 United Nations report concluded, instead of working toward full integration “the training prepared Native children to be assimilated into the bottom of the socio-economic ladder,” where many continue to struggle.

The historical trauma inflicted on parents can haunt subsequent generations. Researchers found stress hormone adaptations in the children of Holocaust survivors, perhaps caused in utero, that may predispose them to ill health. And the effect is not limited to environmental factors: it may actually be woven into DNA. This trauma may partly explain the social ills that continue to plague Native communities both in the U.S. and Canada, including high rates of addiction, mental illness, domestic and sexual violence, family disintegration and poor physical health. Reservations in the U.S. experience suicide epidemics, and though the reasons are not clear, there is agreement that one of the factors is “the legacy of federally funded boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native American children from their homes,” according to The New York Times.

Need for reparations

The U.S. has made some efforts to end its history of forced assimilation.  For example, in 1978 Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act to keep Native American children with their families or communities. But nearly 40 years later, the law has failed to meet its mark, and Native American children are still being fostered and adopted into communities that fail to reflect their cultural heritage. Last month a commission in Maine found that the state placed five times as many Native American children in foster care as non-native children. Maine is hardly alone: In 2013, advocates in Nebraska linked a spike in the number of the state’s Native American children in foster care to the legacy of boarding schools. And placement of children within their communities for fostering and adoption is hampered in part by lack of appropriate homes.

That shortage, which reflects the damage inflicted by governmental policy, reinforces the need for comprehensive reparations to heal and rebuild damaged communities. The specifics of a reparations package must be crafted and embraced by Native American groups. It would likely include individual and collective restitution, restoration and truth telling.

The grave injustices of North American residential schools and their aftermath are clear. But seeking and speaking the truth is only the beginning of a long process of reconciliation. Both Canada and the U.S. must commit to atoning for the schools’ horrors by expending political capital and economic resources to help Native communities truly recover.

Lauren Carasik is a clinical professor of law and the director of the international human rights clinic at the Western New England University School of Law. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 

READ MORE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/native-american-boarding-schools_n_7513310.html

http://www.amnestyusa.org/node/87342

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/14/1200994/-Native-schools-and-stolen-generations-U-S-and-Canada#

http://www.sagchip.org/ziibiwing/planyourvisit/pdf/aibscurrguide.pdf

http://www.kumeyaay.info/history/History_Indian_Boarding_Schools.pdf