Minnesota foster care system perpetuates legacy of racist boarding schools, Native mothers say

Department of Human Services says reforms are starting to work and newer state program shows promise.  

 

By Jessica Washington, Fuller Project/Special to the Star Tribune | January 24, 2022

Photo: Jessica Washington/The Fuller Project. Caption: Teresa Nord works as a parent mentor at the ICWA Law Center. Nord, who is a Navajo and Hopi Indian descendant, says she had her daughter removed by child protective services.

Teresa Nord regained custody of her eldest daughter several years ago, but the experience still haunts her.

"I live with this constant fear," says Nord, 42, a Navajo and Hopi Indian descendant who lives in Glencoe, Minn. "I call it child protection PTSD, that they're just gonna one day knock on my door."

In 2015, Nord's then 6-year-old daughter told her she had been abused by one of her mom's close friends. Nord reached out to a social worker for help — only to have her daughter immediately removed by child protective services.

Nord spent three years fighting to regain custody, but her daughter's time in foster care left her with deep abandonment fears and exacerbated other mental health challenges. "The foster provider told her, 'Your mom is a bad mom. You're never going to see her again [and] you might as well get used to that,'" Nord says.

Recent discoveries of mass graves on former indigenous boarding school sites have led to an international reckoning over the atrocities committed by the U.S. and Canadian governments in the name of assimilation. And political leaders like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have acknowledged the deep trauma the schools inflicted upon generations of Native families.

However, Native parents and experts in Native child welfare in Minnesota say that many of the underlying beliefs about Native families that fueled the boarding school systems are perpetuated by the state's modern child welfare system, with devastating effects.

Many Native mothers like Nord can't shake the fear of having their children ripped away from them or the ripple effects of generations of Native removals.

"There's a really explicit connection in the indigenous community's mind between boarding schools and the child welfare system," says Nicole Martin Rogers, a White Earth Ojibwe descendant and senior research manager at Wilder Research, a research organization that works with nonprofits and governments. That's because boarding schools are "how the system first started taking kids away from their families," she said.

The boarding schools legacy

In the 1800s, the federal government established mandatory boarding schools for Native American children, with the mission of assimilating Native children. The first boarding school in Minnesota opened in 1871. Children in these schools often were starved, beaten and forced to sever their connection to their Native heritage and language.

Although these schools mostly were discontinued by the 1950s, Native children continued to be removed from their homes at staggering rates through adoption.

Native children were removed from their families in Minnesota and other states at such high rates that outrage from Native communities led to the creation of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).

ICWA mandates that child welfare agencies give special consideration to cases involving enrollable tribal members in the form of consultation with tribes.

But for Native women like Nord, who is a tribal descendant but not an enrollable member, these protections don't apply.

Social workers and courts often fail to give Native parents adequate and culturally appropriate guidance on how to reunite with their children, a core tenet of ICWA, says Sadie Hart, an ICWA compliance court monitor in Ramsey County. And they often mandate parents to follow impossibly strict deadlines to resolve issues related to poverty or addiction to regain custody, without providing adequate support to do so, she says.

Looking back on the boarding school and adoption eras, it's easy to say they were wrong, says Shannon Smith, executive director of the ICWA Law Center. But she says the underlying mentality persists, as does the impact, often due to factors like cultural ignorance or mistaken beliefs about Native parents.

"I think a lot of times removals [are] society … equating removal with safety. And that is an equation that is just automatic. And I think that's fundamentally flawed," Smith says.

Indeed, some experts say, poverty can often look like neglect to social workers, especially in families of color. Even when poverty is causing instability that puts kids at risk, removal may not be the best option and can exacerbate rather than fix the root issues.

In Hennepin County, where the ICWA Law Center is located, Native Americans account for roughly 26% of those living in poverty, although they make up just 1% of the population, according to the county's 2018 report "Child Protective Services: Reform and Child Well-Being."

"There are so many indigenous families living in poverty," says MartinRogers. "It's hard not to consider it neglect … if the caseworker walks into the house and there's no food in the refrigerator or the kids don't have a bed to sleep on or other things that can result from someone just being really poor."

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High levels of perceived Poverty justifies removal of American Indian children (again?) #PovertyPorn

ARCHIVE PHOTO

How does measuring poverty and welfare affect American Indian children? (aka #povertyporn)

Randall Akee | March 12, 2019

• LINK with photos and graphics

For one group of children in particular, American Indians and Alaska Natives, exceedingly high poverty rates have had profound impacts on community wellbeing and long-term cohesiveness. Given the best available data, from the U.S. Census data, child poverty rates among American Indians and Alaska Natives have consistently exceeded 40% for almost the past 30 years.*

However, a recent National Academics of Sciences (NAS) report affirms what many in these communities have long known—that the data on poverty are sparse and not as reliable for this group as it is for other groups or communities in the U.S.:

“Small sample sizes in population surveys have made it particularly difficult to reliably measure poverty rates among American Indian and Alaska Native children. Moreover, we know little about the effectiveness of a number of important programs and policies – whether provided by the tribes, by the states, or by the federal government – that affect this population.”

As a result, it is quite difficult to accurately track the impact that various programs have had on child poverty over time or how applicable standard assessments of what poverty looks like actually are to American Indian communities.
Are conditions as bad as indicated by the official poverty rates shown above? (see website)

Historically, high levels of perceived poverty have been used to justify the removal of American Indian children from their households by state foster care systems. As recently as the 1970s, state welfare agents were removing almost one third of all American Indian children from their households and placing them in state foster or adoptive care systems. (Mannes, 1995)

One of the aims of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 was to stop the removal of American Indian children from their households due to poverty. A number of studies had confirmed that social workers were removing American Indian children from households not due to maltreatment or being orphaned but simply due to the perceived poverty status of the household (see MacEachron, Ann E., and Nora Gustavsson, 2005). The ICWA legislation was intended to improve tribal control over the determination and placement of American Indian children within the foster care system.

Congress reaffirmed tribal government authority and oversight of the placement of its own citizens – its children. Tribal courts were delegated the authority and jurisdiction over the placement of its own citizens (and those eligible for tribal citizenship enrollment) in foster or adoptive homes.

For instance, Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy; Director of Education; Akomawt Educational Initiative) describes a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of family and neglect in his Passamaquoddy community in Maine:

“In Maine, parents would often leave their children with their grandparents or other extended family members when they would leave for seasonal work elsewhere. To the state, however, this constitutes neglect and could qualify a child for removal. In reality, our children’s needs were commonly met by extended family and community beyond the nuclear family.”

Mr. Newell served as a senior advisor on a recent documentary film called “Dawnland,” which exposes the impact of such practices on American Indian children and their parents decades later in the state of Maine. The film depicts the long-term trauma and damage that resulted from the removal of children from their families; it also shows the damage to the children caused by their removal from their kinship network and cultural connections.

Individuals with little exposure to or experience with American Indian communities would have little to no knowledge of these forms of social safety nets.

Assessing economic conditions may also be quite difficult for individuals who are unfamiliar with American Indian communities and practices. There are important culturally-specific safety nets that exist in many American Indian communities; most of which would be unknown to outsiders. Individuals with little exposure to or experience with American Indian communities would have little to no knowledge of these forms of social safety nets.

The recent NAS report indicates that even standard measures of poverty are difficult to measure for the American Indian population. However, neither the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) nor the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which includes taxes and federal government in-kind transfers, account for community or kinship in-kind transfers or from tribal governments. In certain American Indian communities, for instance, hunting, trapping, fishing and other subsistence activities are important parts of the economic and social interactions of community members. These activities do not show up directly as cash income nor are they identified as federal government in-kind transfers. As a result, the OPM and SPM measures may not accurately depict the general welfare of American Indian families or children. In fact, they may understate the resources in some families and whole communities.

While this does not dismiss the fact that child poverty is probably still too high in many American Indian reservations, it does indicate that there may be other activities or practices that exist in non-market (even non-governmental) forms to assist families. Subsistence activities and the sharing of resources is difficult to document with administrative records or tax returns; nevertheless, these safety nets have played an important role in these communities for hundreds if not thousands of years. Individuals with little exposure to or experience with American Indian communities would have little to no knowledge of these forms of social safety nets.

Challenges to ICWA often focus on an erroneous assumption that these policies are race-based.
However, providing tribal government jurisdiction and authority over its own citizens’ welfare is based on American Indian tribal sovereignty- not race. Tribal citizenship enrollment and eligibility is based on tribal government rules which are often specific to a particular tribe and may require showing direct lineal descent from certain enrolled ancestors; there may be other additional conditions for tribal citizenship such as a minimum blood quantum, residency requirement or demonstrated relationship with the community. In the current court case, Brackeen v. Zinke, where oral arguments are scheduled to begin in the Fifth Circuit court this week, the same arguments have been made. ICWA has played an important role in stopping the seizure of American Indian children from their communities. Misunderstanding of how American Indian communities care for their own children and the inability to assess non-monetary well-being of American Indian communities should not play a role in the removal of children from their homes. ICWA plays a critical role in safeguarding these children and maintaining the local and tribal authority for placing American Indian children in foster or adoptive care. Let’s not go backwards.

Sources:
^{“7 Other Policy and Program Approaches to Child Poverty Reduction.” National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Page XXX. doi: 10.17226/25246}
Mannes, M. (1995). Factors and events leading to the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Child Welfare, 74(1), 264–282.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. “7 Other Policy and Program Approaches to Child Poverty Reduction.” Page 203. doi: 10.17226/25246.
MacEachron, A. E., Gustavsson, N. S., Cross, S., & Lewis, A. (1996). The effectiveness of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. The Social Service Review, 70(3), 451–463.

Author

Randall Akee

David M. Rubenstein Fellow - Economic Studies, Center on Children and Families, Future of the Middle Class Initiative

 

Related

Up Front

40 years ago we stopped the practice of separating American Indian families. Let’s not reverse course.

*
Editor Note: The government takes the land AND causes the poverty, then they want more LAND and take the children to achieve this goal. The genocide cycle never ends...  That is the sport of colonization and empire. Trace

Return to Tradition on White Earth

Return to tradition on White Earth Reservation in fight against poverty, hunger

MN Public Radio: Photos by Caroline Yang             

Poverty in Minnesota is on the rise. But census numbers released in September show poverty hits some groups harder than others -- including American Indians. On the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, tribal officials estimate up to 50 percent of American Indians live below the poverty line. See more photos and story here: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/10/04/poverty-hunger-white-earth/#10

Pine Point, Minn. — Waasamoan Neeland, 5, of Round Lake, Minn., showed off her corn husk doll in Pine Point, Minn., on Sept 23, 2011. Neeland was attending Family Fun Day at Pine Point School, where her mother Ashley Martin, 23, was teaching a class on corn braiding to students and parents. The class is part of an effort to teach young people traditional ways of growing, harvesting, and preserving food. Corn braiding involves braiding together the husks of several ears of corn in order to dry and preserve them through the winter. The class was sponsored by the White Earth Land Recovery Project. (MPR Photo/Caroline Yang)     

NOTE: White Earth Elders were the first tribe to "call home" their adoptees in 2007... Trace         

Federal Policy & Forced Sterilizations (1972-1976)

U.S. federal policy toward the Indian tribes was made without knowledge or consideration of the values of the Native people themselves. In addition, educational curricula (school books and lesson plans) and teaching came from a Eurocentric-White perspective and completely neglected any mention of tribal ways of life.

American Indians, especially those who live on reservations, are among the poorest groups in the country. In 1999, 26 percent of the American Indian/Alaska Native population lived below the official poverty level, compared with 12 percent of the total population. Factors such as geographic isolation, limited opportunities for upward mobility in rural areas and on reservations, and low labor force participation rates contribute to a continuous poverty cycle among American Indians. This poverty is often accompanied by a range of social problems —injuries and violence, depression, substance abuse, inadequate health care and prenatal health care, unhealthy or insufficient diets, and high rates of diabetes — that can greatly affect the ability and desire to pursue education. 
[Path of Many Journeys, www.aihec.org/resources/documents/ThePathOfManyJourneys.pdf]

Here is an excerpt from a report
A History of Governmentally Coerced Sterilization: The Plight of the Native American Woman, published on May 1, 1997 by Michael Sullivan DeFine, University of Maine School of Law:


The United States General Accounting Office Investigation of the Indian Health Service (IHS) Procedures and the Meaning behind Statistics of Population Growth:

Complaints of these unethical sterilization practices continued, but little was done until the matter was brought to the attention of Senator James Abourezk (D-SD). Finally, affirmative steps were taken - specifically the commissioning of the General Accounting Office - to investigate the affair and to determine if the complaints of Indian women were true - that they were undergoing sterilization as a means of birth control, without consent. The problem with the investigation was that it was initially limited to only four area Indian Health Service hospitals (later twelve); therefore, the total number of Indian women sterilized remains unknown.

The General Accounting Office came up with a figure of 3,400 women who had been sterilized; but others speculate that at least that many had been sterilized each year from 1972 through 1976.

The General Accounting Office confined its investigation to Indian Health Service records and failed to probe case histories, to observe patient-doctor relationships, or to interview women who had been sterilized. This deplorable lack of thorough investigation only served as an attempt to placate the concerns of Indian people.

The General Accounting Office investigators concluded that Indian Health Service consent procedures lacked the basic elements of informed consent, particularly in informing a patient orally of the advantages and disadvantages of sterilization. Furthermore, the consent form had only a summary of the oral presentation, and the form lacked the information usually located at the top of the page notifying the patient that no federal benefits would be taken away if she did not accept sterilization. The General Accounting Office notified the Indian Health Service that it should implement better consent procedures. Some Indian Health Service Area Directors were pressured by local Indians and by Indian physicians and staff to suspend certain nurses and to move the hospital administrators to another post. Other than that, however, there was little else done by government officials.

Outraged by the level of governmental inaction, Indian people accused the Indian Health Service of making genocide a part of its policy. For the Indian Health Service, this was a serious accusation, as the purpose of this agency was to somehow alleviate the terrible health conditions in Indian communities. The Indian Health Service defended itself by relying on the inaccurate sterilization figures provided by the General Accounting Office. In reality, however, the accusation of genocide was not far off base.

As Thomas Littlewood stated in his book on the politics of population control, “non-white Americans are not unaware of how the American Indian came to be called the vanishing American . . . [t]his country’s starkest example of genocide in practice.”

From a statistical point of view, the reality of the devastation of Native American women victimized by sterilization can be observed through the comments of Senator Abourezk himself: “given the small American Indian population, the 3,400 Indian sterilization figure [out of 55,000 Indian women of childbearing age] would be compared to sterilizing 452,000 non-Indian women.”

Conclusion: Science has provided a means of categorizing and victimizing those in society deemed unworthy of continued existence. Its influence in academic and political circles has created a pervasive social bigotry that rewards extermination over reform. The failure to embrace the racial and cultural diversity of this country has left a wake of destruction and oppression in minority populations. It is time for the pundits of social change to rearrange their thinking and give back to the people the power to choose what is right for themselves.

[from my archives and research...Trace]

Poverty on Reservations

(This information was found at the Abbe Museum website in Bar Harbor, Maine. This story happened across New England. President Obama and family recently vacationed at Bar Harbor. Hope Obama went to the Abbe.)

When Maine separated from Massachusetts and became a state in 1821, it took over Massachusetts’s treaty obligations and responsibility for the Indian communities. The state of Maine controlled the tribes’s money and resources—they held them in “trust.” “Indian agents” were assigned by the state to oversee the Native communities and to manage tribal money. The State of Maine did not allow Native people to manage their own money and resources. For instance, whenever money needed to be spent on the reservation the Indian Agent had to approve the project and give permission for their money to be spent.

Each week, the Indian agent gave each family a stipend to buy food, clothing, firewood and other necessities. This money belonged to the Native people, not to the State or to the Indian agent, but they were not allowed to have control over it! Many times the money given for a family’s necessities was far less than the necessities cost. For instance, in 1910, a cord of wood cost between $4 and $9, but only $3 was given to widows for their winter supply of wood.

Over the next 150 years, the State of Maine illegally and without permission from the tribes sold off, leased and transferred thousands of acres of Native land. The State also illegally authorized the harvesting and sale of Native timber and hay—and sold the timber and firewood back to the Native communities. In some cases, the State added money to the trust funds for the illegal sale of land and resources. In other cases, no payments were made. Interest on the deposits to these funds was supposed to be paid at six percent per year. From 1859 until 1969 no interest was ever paid to the tribes. Instead, it went to the Indian agents.

Without control over their own money and tribal resources, Native people suffered. Reservations were places of extreme poverty. Native language was outlawed through an act of the State Legislature. Sicknesses such as tuberculosis, measles and whooping cough swept through the communities. Native people were forced to learn farming and raise crops. Native children attended convent schools run by nuns and taught in English. In most cases, the only buildings recommended by the Indian agents for repair were the churches, schoolhouses and homes for nuns and priests. Indian agents remained in control of tribal resources and money until the mid-1970s.

Photo: Whalebone point at the Abbe Museum

Visit the ABBE MUSEUM, PO Box 286, Bar Harbor, Maine 04609 (where President Obama and family had a mini-vacation recently)