AFN national chief says there has to be truth before reconciliation

Quaker Indian Boarding Schools

October 1, 2016 | By Paula Palmer

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says that for healing to occur, the full truth about the boarding schools and the policy of forced assimilation must come to light in our country, as it has in Canada. The first step in a truth, reconciliation, and healing process, they say, is truth telling. A significant piece of the truth about the boarding schools is held by the Christian churches that collaborated with the federal government’s policy of forced assimilation. 

Quakers were among the strongest promoters of this policy and managed over 30 schools for Indian children, most of them boarding schools, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The coalition is urging the churches to research our roles during the boarding school era, contribute this research to the truth and reconciliation process, and ask ourselves what this history means to us today.

Quaker teachers, families, and students at the Ottawa School, Indian Territory, 1872. Courtesy of the Quaker Collection at Haverford College.

IMPORTANT HISTORY: Quaker Indian Boarding Schools - Friends Journal

I Can't Breathe

 Charles (left) and an actor playing Abe Lincoln.

By Trace L Hentz (taking a break/blog hiatus)
I can't breathe. That is the way I feel.

JUNE 2020: We have multiple pandemics: The 2020 Depression, Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed man, shown on live TV.

Then I find out my cousin has died.  Dr. Charles Bland, a film scholar historian and genealogist, was almost 80 and he and I had been working on a Native history project for the better part of seven years. I have mentioned him many times on my wordpress blog.

For over a year Charles was suffering with Myasthenia Gravis.  The day before he died (on April 25), I texted and said I wanted to kidnap him and bring him here to western MA and break him out of that New York nursing home. (There were Covid-19 cases but he never caught the virus.)

He texted back, calling me Bonnie and my husband Clyde.

Sadly our rescue didn't succeed. Charlie stopped breathing.

I am raw. I can't breathe.

Everything we are seeing globally is seeding a new future. What kind of future? My husband is African-American and he is dealing with the murder of George Floyd in ways I am not. The violence, injustice, racism, what has been happening with the protests, has filled my husband's reality his entire life.  He can't breathe.

The scene in Minneapolis, where I lived for years, is beyond words.  I lived on James Avenue South near Lake Calhoun, or Bde Maka Ska, off West Lake St. I don't think I'd recognize it anymore.

I walked around the lake daily in good weather.  Recently the MN Supreme Court ruled that "Lake Calhoun" in Minneapolis will officially now be known as "Bde Maka Ska." Lake Calhoun was named after John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator who became vice president in 1825. Supporters of the change wanted to distance the lake from Calhoun, a documented supporter of slavery.  In 1837, Calhoun gave a speech on "the positive good" of slavery.   He also authored the Indian Removal Act. 

Bde Maka Ska is pronounced "b-day ma-kha skah" (translates to "White Earth Lake" in Dakota)

Mourning takes time. Protests take time. Changing the world takes time.

Headlines:

Migizi Communication burns in Minneapolis protests

NBC News| 5 days ago

Democrats on Friday slammed President Donald Trump for what they said was inciting violence against protesters who were demonstrating in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd while he was in police custody.

Riots, arson leave Minnesota communities of color devastated

StarTribune|10 hours ago

When the nonprofit's executive director, Kelly Drummer, returned to the scene a few hours later and saw the destruction, she said, "I knelt down and I just cried." The riots and arson that followed protests of George Floyd's death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color.

The anger behind the protests, explained in 4 charts

Ohio Adoptees Lining Up for Records, Truth, Reunions

SHARONVILLE, Ohio —The state of Ohio is unsealing adoption records for the first time in decades, which means that anyone who was adopted between 1964 and 1996 can now have access to their birth records and vital health information.

Half-sisters meet for first time, ready to review Ohio adoption records

Diana Allen, Jennifer McClure believe they share the same birth father : VIDEO

• Hundreds of Ohio adoptees gain access to birth records...
  

  At 5 weeks old, Jennifer was Beverly and Alan Lunsford's pride and joy.
  More

• More Ohio birth, adoption records available to adoptees
  

  Thousands of Ohio adoptees are hoping to learn more about their history, including family medical information, thanks to a law granting them access to their adoption files and birth certificates.
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• As many Ohio adoption records become unsealed, hundreds...
  

  A new law grants Ohio adoptees access to their adoption files and birth certificates. Jennifer Hutt was one of several hundred people who walked in to the Office of Vital Statistics in Columbus on Friday and applied to have her records unsealed.
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Thousands of people are already taking advantage of the new law.
On Friday night, WLWT News 5's Jackie Congedo spoke with two sisters who can't wait to research their collective past.
"There's a puzzle that a lot of pieces fell apart to, and I'm finding them and I'm putting them back together," said Diana Allen, who was adopted at birth.
She's always wondered about her story's beginning.
"I started getting nosy, and managed to sort of circumvent the closed document system and came across some papers that I probably had no business looking at," Allen said.
She managed to find the woman who she thinks is her birth mother, and with that one answer came another missing puzzle piece: news of a sister she never knew she had.
"I always thought I was the only girl," said Jennifer McClure, who got a Facebook message from Allen two years ago.
The two shared pictures and talked on the phone, but never met in person, until Friday afternoon. It was an embrace three decades in the making.
"Just to see her eyes. It's like looking at my own eyes," McClure said. "You want to know who you are, and I think that this is a good stepping stone that Diana took on her journey to learn who she is."
Allen and McClure think they share the same birth father. They're hoping a look at the newly-opened records will confirm that.
For information about how you can find your adoption records, visit the Ohio Department of Vital Statistics website.