Boarding School Abuse: “To Heal We Must Know the Truth”

"They always go for our babies." -Emily Edenshaw, President & CEO at Alaska Native Heritage Center

Chief Bill Erasmus, Emily Edenshaw, at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Gunn-Britt Retter at the Saami Council and Benjamin Jacuk at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. (Photo: Trine Jonassen)

 

Anchorage Alaska (High North News): 

He admitted that this was genocide. -Chief Bill Erasmus

 

Most Arctic nations have been affected by assimilating and oppressive boarding school policies. Now indigenous community leaders are looking for healing as they brace for the dark truth of a government-led genocide.

Ground zero

The boarding school practice started in Alaska in 1879, 12 years after the USA purchased the Arctic state from Russia without consulting the indigenous population.

Maybe that is also where the healing has to start.

"Alaska may be ground zero for all of this.  But ground zero can also be the place of healing for indigenous peoples from all over the world," Jacuk concludes.

In 2015 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded what happened was "cultural genocide". It identified more than 3,000 children who died from disease due to overcrowding, malnutrition, and poor sanitation or died after being abused or trying to run away.

Most schools had their own cemeteries, and sometimes when children died, their parents were never informed.

 

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Part Two: What if We Lost ICWA? CULTURAL GENOCIDE

By Trace L. Hentz, Blog Editor and Adoptee (video editor from 2014)

I have been rereading TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects. It's first person accounts of adoptions by non-Native parents and our history.

What was life like pre-ICWA?

Can we please look at the impact of closed adoptions through the eyes of the adoptee-adult?  We are called the Stolen Generation, remember that.

The word often used about being adopted is “cultural genocide and culture loss.”

If we lose ICWA, we go back to that earlier form of genocide: Less Indians on the rolls, less people on the rez, and the adoptee will lose years of ancestral knowledge and history and language we would have received from our relatives. (There are very few adoptees back on their rez.)

This cultural knowledge is not found in books. It’s learned at a kitchen table, in the kitchen cooking, hunting or gathering with your parents, at a beading circle, at a memorial/funeral, or at a social gathering like a powwow, on in ceremony.  It’s learned walking the land. It’s learned hearing your grandparents tell stories. It’s learned over years of contact, contact with your people, your clan, your cousins, your tribal nations.

That knowledge is your inherent sovereign right as a sovereign citizen of your TRIBAL NATION, that lies within the boundaries of America or Canada.

Babies and children adopted by non-Natives, this ancient ancestral knowledge and language is gone, erased. Your tribal history is gone.

YOU ARE GONE.

Do you think the Supreme Court knows anything about this cultural genocide?  Do you think they know about 1,000 Indian Wars? No treaty went unbroken. Do you think it matters to them what happened 100 years ago, or since ICWA was passed in 1978 to stop the adoption industry and the united states funding child trafficking?

Do adoptive parents know about cultural loss? What do they plan to do when the child asks about their tribe, or their parents, or their history, or their language?

“What is my language,” a child might ask. “Where are my people?”

If We Lost ICWA?

Think about Arnold Lyslo who ran the Indian Adoption Projects in America. He was busy selling his story ideas to magazines so white readers would feel sympathy and want to help. He counted his successes in how many Indian children were placed with white families. (Success? Erased: off the rez, off the rolls.)

It was the perfect storm. The adopters were not told there was a massive inter-country genocidal project going on. They just thought: “Hey, were doing a good thing (adopting a Native kid.)”

How many of these adoptions failed? (I wanted to know that. I asked adoptees to write their stories in the anthologies Two Worlds, Called Home and Stolen Generations.) I sent a bunch of questions to each adoptee.

How many adoptees committed suicide? We don’t know.

How many adoptees acted out and were sent to prison?  Too many actually, quite a few I heard about.

Nobody wants Indians to have anything – especially good-sized populations – that would not work for the people who make sure “Indians stay poor.”

What happens if ICWA fails, and adoption goes widespread again and there is some new method of closed adoptions, like the earlier INDIAN ADOPTION PROJECT(s), or ARENA?  What if they open new boarding schools and force Indian children to attend?   The governments of Canada and America funded them, gave the churches money to take Indian kids, some literally abducted off the rez at gunpoint?

To be continued 

If you cannot afford to buy the book Two Worlds, please email Trace (tracelara@pm.me)

The ‘60s Scoop stole so much from my family. Here’s how I’m reclaiming what’s lost.

HIDE CAMP: Unlike past generations, I was raised not to feel ashamed of being Anishinaabe. Now, I’m learning what my mother and grandmother couldn’t.

By Alessia Passafiume | Dec. 11, 2022

I asked my dad to skin me a deer.

For as long as I can remember, my father, uncles and grandfather — who immigrated to Canada from Italy 55 years ago — have spent weeks away hunting moose, deer, turkey, rabbits, and if you consider fishing hunting, they do that, too.

I’ve thought about joining them on hunts for years — heading to Bass Pro to deck myself out in hunting gear, sitting with them in tree stands in the bush and scoping out a deer or moose to bring back to my grandfather’s house to process after a week or so of outdoor living in their trailer. Usually, the hides would be chopped into bits and discarded in the compost while they masterfully sliced the meat into different cuts.

But as someone who is not keen on sharing close quarters with men in the trailer, and whose understanding of Italian is dismal, I’m starting another tradition this year: I asked them to save me the skins to transform into usable leather — something long practised by generations of my mother’s side of the family who are Anishinaabe.

I gave them specific instructions to remove as much of the flesh as they could, and to save me the brain and legs — the brain to soften the hide, the legs to make tools with if my experience permits.

In May, I spent a week at Niizh Manidook Hide Camp — a Two Spirit hide-tanning camp in aptly-named ‘Bucktown,’ or Delaware Nation at Moraviantown in southwestern Ontario. The goal was to learn and reclaim traditional hide-tanning techniques lost in my family through the ‘60s Scoop and residential schools.

I grew up and continue to live two hours from my community of Chippewas of the Thames First Nation, and as the first generation in my immediate family not to be raised to feel ashamed of being Anishinaabe, the importance of reclaiming these practices is not lost on me.

---

I wouldn’t have known about the camp had it not been for my friend Kierstin Williams, an Anishinaabekwe herself from Garden River First Nation and Batchewana First Nation, up north in Sault Ste. Marie — “Moose Country,” as a mug in her apartment refers to it.

“Want to go to a camp to tan hides?” she asked me earlier this spring. “I’m in,” I replied, still unsure of what a hide camp actually entailed, but I was excited to learn once we got there.

I packed camping gear, drawing inspiration from my dad’s pre-hunt shops, picking up a fisherman’s hat from Canadian Tire just in case. And while I didn’t make that trip to Bass Pro, I did make one to Walmart’s men’s section to stockpile T-shirts I wouldn’t mind ruining.

As I prepared for the trip, I was filled with self-doubt. I feared I wouldn’t belong amongst the group and questioned why the hosts, Beze Gray and Hunter Cassag, both experienced hide-tanners, artists and advocates — with Gray being one of a group suing the provincial government over climate change — approved my application.

“Surely they didn’t mean to accept me,” I thought.

Really, it was a projection of me not always accepting myself.

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Native Lawyering

Fletcher and Singel on Lawyering and the Indian Child Welfare Act

Matthew L.M. Fletcher Aug 15

Fletcher and Singel’s paper, “Lawyering the Indian Child Welfare Act,” has been published in the Michigan Law Review. We’re honored to be part of a symposium on civil rights lawyering!

Our abstract:

This Article describes how the statutory structure of child welfare laws enables lawyers and courts to exploit deep-seated stereotypes about American Indian people rooted in systemic racism to undermine the enforcement of the rights of Indian families and tribes. Even when Indian custodians and tribes are able to protect their rights in court, their adversaries use those same advantages on appeal to attack the constitutional validity of the law. The primary goal of this Article is to help expose those structural issues and the ethically troublesome practices of adoption attorneys as the most important Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) case in history, Brackeen v. Haaland, reaches the Supreme Court.

 

Cultural Genocide indeed

 SOURCE

“I feel shame and pain. I ask forgiveness of God,” Pope Francis said on Friday as he apologized for the “deplorable” abuses of Canada’s First Nations children.

Between the 1880s and the 1990s, the government ran a system of compulsory boarding schools which a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recently dubbed ‘cultural genocide’,” The New York Times reported. The Catholic church operated about 70 percent of those schools, where about 150,000 children were placed and “where abuse, both physical and sexual, was widespread, along with neglect and disease,” The Times said. A former judge, Murray Sinclair, who headed the commission, estimated that at least 6,000 children went missing.

The TRC, established as part of a government apology and settlement over the schools, concluded that at least 4,100 students died from mistreatment, neglect, disease or accident. The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia, using ground penetrating radar, discovered the remains of 215 of them buried near the Kamloops Indian Residential School which opened in 1890 and closed in the late 1970s, The Times reported. “It’s a harsh reality and it’s our truth, it’s our history,” Chief Rosanne Casimir told a news conference.

Children were also placed with non-Native families, a policy which Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba denounced as he ruled in a class action lawsuit, The Guardian reported. “There is … no dispute that great harm was done,” Belobaba wrote. “The ‘scooped’ children lost contact with their families. They lost their aboriginal language, culture and identity. Neither the children nor their foster or adoptive parents were given information about the children’s aboriginal heritage or about the various educational and other benefits that they were entitled to receive. The removed children vanished ‘scarcely without a trace’.”

In Australia, Kevin Rudd, as prime minister, apologized in 2008 for this "great stain on our nation’s soul." He was referring to more than 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children being placed in institutions or foster homes or adopted by nonIndigenous families between 1900 and 1970.

New Zealand tried to “civilize” Māori children, starting in 1840. “Boarding schools initially taught in the Māori language but soon qualified for subsidies only if lessons were in English. By 1960, only 26 percent of children could still speak their native language,” the Toronto Globe and Mail reported.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen apologized for the treatment of 22 Inuit children from Greenland, then a Danish colony, more than 70 years ago, Agence France Press reported. Frederiksen told the six survivors at a ceremony in the Danish capital Copenhagen, “What you were subjected to was terrible. It was inhumane. It was unfair. And it was heartless.”

Norway, Sweden and Finland are supporting initiatives to protect the culture of the Sami people living in Sápmi — formerly Lapland — following efforts to force them to culturally assimilate, The Guardian reported.

In the United States, the Trump administration’s seizing of 2,300 refugee children from their parents recalled a history of African and Indigenous family separation. The Washington Post recalled this tweet from the African American Research Collaborative: “Official US policy. Until 1865, rip African American children from their parents. From 1870s to 1970s, rip Native American children from their parents. Now, rip children of immigrants and refugees from their parents.” The Post drew attention to “The Weeping Time” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture documenting the story of children sold away from their enslaved families.

The government sent thousands of Indigenous children to government or government-funded, church-run “Indian schools” between the 1800s and the 1970s. Richard Pratt, who founded the first one, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania on Nov. 1, 1879, described his philosophy as: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

“While the government believed a white youth’s ‘moral character and habits are already formed and welldefined, when he leaves for school, a Indigenous youth was thought to be ‘born a savage and raised in an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance’,” The Equal Justice Initiative reported. “The government believed that ‘if [an Indigenous child] is to rise from his low estate the germs of a nobler existence must be implanted in him and cultivated.’”

As the boarding schools began closing, the government launched the Indian Adoption Project to promote European American adoption of Indigenous children, Vox reported. “The data showed that 25 to 35 percent of Native children around the country were being taken from their homes, and that 85 to 95 percent of those kids ended up in non-Native homes or institutions,” Vox stated.

Elizabeth Williams, who had been sold twice since she last saw her children, placed an ad in the Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia in 1866 to try to locate them, The Post said. And Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota adoptee from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, founded the First Nations Repatriation Institute to help adoptees reunite with their tribes and families.

WGBH noted in a 2015 documentary that Maine had set up its own TRC – an approach which South Africa started in 1995 to try to forge unity after apartheid ended. The commission heard Indigenous testimony such as this: “All we did was beg for our foster mothers to hug us and say they loved us. My baby sister and I sat in a tub of bleach one time trying to convince each other that we’re getting white.”

The struggle continues with a federal lawsuit challenging as racially discriminatory the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which deals with child separation, filed by a European American couple in Texas, joined by their state, Indiana and Louisiana. The National Indian Child Welfare Association says the law addresses a crisis affecting Indigenous children, families and tribes. Invalidating the ICWA, its supporters say, would have far-reaching consequences for Indigenous peoples, including the issue of tribal sovereignty.

Pratt’s racism and White Hawk’s lament notwithstanding, it is hard to miss the defiance in the song “Drums” written by Peter LaFarge which Johhny Cash sang 58 years ago:

“And when they think that they’d changed me

Cut my hair to meet their needs

Will they think I’m white or Indian

Quarter blood or just half breed

Let me tell you Mr. teacher

When you say you’ll make me right

In five hundred years of fighting

Not one Indian turned white.”

Canada indigenous demand Church admit role in ‘genocide,’ rescind colonization edicts

In this 1910s photo provided by the United Church of Canada Archives, students write on a chalkboard at the Red Deer Indian Industrial School in Alberta. In Canada, where more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools over more than a century, a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified 3,201 deaths amid poor conditions. (Credit: United Church of Canada Archives via AP.)

 

ROME – A group of Canadian indigenous persons traveling to Rome to meet the pope this month said they will ask for an apology and an admission of guilt for the Catholic Church’s role in the “genocide” of their people, and that they’ll demand papal edicts endorsing colonization be rescinded.

A joint delegation of Canadian bishops and three different indigenous communities in Canada will travel to Rome March 28 – April 1, where they will hold both individual and group meetings with Pope Francis.

Among the indigenous communities are the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), the Métis National Council, and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. Delegates include elders, “knowledge keepers,” residential school survivors, and youth.

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Studying history is vital for understanding and transforming the world

 Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools 

by David "Katya" Ketchum | LA Progressive

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

It’s not a secret that I love studying history; I believe it is a vital discipline for understanding and transforming the world. And as shocking and terrifying as human cruelty has been throughout recorded history, it’s also heartening to observe, time and time again, the movements opposing oppression that have always existed. This is also important to remember if you are tempted to excuse the complicity of people in the past by insisting that they were just products of their time. By studying history, we also become more aware of our own responsibilities and possibilities in the present.

A Legacy of Failure, Cruelty, and War

One of these important historical moments in US history, when there were multiple and large movements to either oppose or work for social justice, followed the American Civil War.

Optimism that Reconstruction would bring about true and lasting healing and change in a nation ravaged and traumatized by the horrors of slavery and war, were combined with optimism that there could be a change in the government’s policies regarding Native peoples.

President Ulysses S. Grant and the events that took place in his administration are a good example of these trends. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, for example, were aimed at providing federal support to protect the rights of Black Americans and oppose the Ku Klux Klan. Under the direction of Attorney General Amos Ackerman, hundreds of Klansmen were tried, often by Black juries, and imprisoned. Thousands more received fines or warnings, or even fled to escape prosecution. As a result, the KKK as a formal organization was in wreckage by 1872.

Optimism that Reconstruction would bring about healing were combined with optimism that there could be a change in the government’s policies regarding Native peoples.

At the same time, Grant wanted to find a different approach to US relations with Native peoples. He worked closely with his longtime friend and colleague, Ely S. Parker, and made Parker his Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker, whose Native name was Donehogawa, was a member of the Seneca nation and the first Indigenous person to hold the post of Commissioner. Together, they developed policies that included providing federal troops to protect reservation borders from settlers and that ultimately would have provided a pathway to citizenship for Indigenous people.

These plans were vehemently opposed and undermined, and opponents eventually falsely accused Parker of embezzling money. He was exonerated, but Congress stripped power from the office of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Parker resigned in 1871.

Plans and relationships fell apart, and Grant ended up waging war against the very people he had thought he would protect, including “the Modoc War in 1873, the Red River War in 1874, and the Great Sioux War in 1876.”

By 1885, the year Grant died, Donehogawa, once Grant’s enthusiastic colleague, described the fate of Indigenous peoples in North America. Resisting the racist idea that blamed Indigenous people for their troubles, he wrote:

“The disabilities, disadvantages and wrongs do not result, however, either primarily, consequently or ultimately from their tribal condition and native inheritances, but solely, wholly and absolutely from the unchristian treatment they have always received from Christian white people … . The tenacity with which the remnants of this people have adhered to their tribal organizations and religious traditions is all that has saved them thus far from inevitable extinguishment.”

Grant’s campaign slogan had been “Let us have peace,” and he seemed sincere in his vision to reform federal Indian policies. So how did it happen that, as Alysa Landry pointed out, “some of the worst massacres and grossest injustices in history [occurred] while Ulysses S. Grant was in office”? This is an important question to ask, if we want to avoid the kind of pitfalls that kept others’ from true healing and change.

In Grant’s case, central to his failures was “the development of millions of acres of federal public lands” and “the private acquisition of land by pioneers, spectators and railroad and mining companies,” made possible by Grant’s approval of the Timber Culture, General Mining, and Desert Lands Acts, which all expanded the land available to homesteaders and settlers – at the expense of Native peoples. In the end, Grant’s hopeful slogan, “Let us have peace,” was no match for the reality of expansionism. In Landry’s words,

“Grant realized that his expansionist goals required the removal of Indians from desirable land. His Indian Peace Policy, designed to reform the Indian Bureau and remove corrupt agents, also called for rigorous agricultural training on reservations and established schools and churches that would transform Indians into Christian citizens.”

Cultural Genocide by Another Name

This tension is the US setting for residential schools. Even though some people, like Grant and Donehogawa, wanted to promote and protect the rights of the Original Nations, that hope was always in second place to the relentless westward push of land-grabbing and violent displacement.

A cluster of ideas have especially supported and justified this kind of colonization. First, the dominating power believes in its own superiority. Members of this society, then, are entitled to rule and profit from that superiority, even if it comes at the expense of others.

This is especially the case when the people harmed are categorized as inferior. Moreover, because the dominating power believes in its superiority, it can reframe the harm it causes to others as ultimately in their best interest.

Those that survive will reap the benefits of being assimilated into the superior culture. It’s a tidy system that excused hundreds of years of oppression and continues to do so today.

The residential school emphasis on agricultural training, education, and conversion fits this pattern. But forced assimilation could only be viewed as moral and good from the vantage point of superiority.

Unfortunately, the settlers of North America never lacked that character trait. Captain Richard H. Pratt, who was a founder and superintendent of the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, gave a speech in 1892 that showed how a person could justify even the most cruel actions under the guise of racist and paternalistic generosity and care. He began by stating that:

“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Amazingly and horrifyingly, Pratt would then use the enslavement of Africans as a positive example of how assimilation could work. Rather than recognize the courage, persistence, creativity, and love that marked Black resistance to slavery and its descendants, such as Jim Crow and mass incarceration, Pratt gave all the credit to the White people who enslaved them. In Pratt’s view, “the care and authority of individuals of the higher race” was a blessing in disguise.

“Horrible as were the experiences … of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America … .” (ibid)

In contrast, Pratt saw the wars fought against Native peoples and concluded that forced assimilation was more effective. “We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation,” Pratt wrote, “and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.” Boarding schools were Pratt’s answer:

“It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. … Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.” (ibid)

This is what White supremacy looks like, dressed up in schoolmaster’s robes. The unmistakable goal was to eliminate Indigenous nations, communities, customs, languages, and life.

Researchers identify 102 students who died at Native American school in Nebraska

School was operated by the federal government between 1884 and 1934 and was known for brutal punishments and hard labour

A fifth-grade class is seen at the Genoa US Indian Industrial School in Nebraska in 1910. Photograph: National Archives and Records Administration

Richard Luscombe | @richlusc 15 Nov 2021

Researchers say they have identified more than 100 students who died at a harsh residential school for Native Americans in Genoa, Nebraska. The search for the cemetery where many are believed to be buried continues.

The Genoa US Indian School was operated by the federal government between 1884 and 1934. Brutal punishments and hard labour were commonplace for students, large numbers of whom were removed from their families and homelands against their will, prohibited from speaking tribal languages and forced to convert to Christianity in an effort to subdue or eliminate Indian culture.

The announcement from the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, a collaboration between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), the Genoa US Indian School Foundation and descendants and representatives from five Nebraska tribes, is among the most significant developments since the project began in 2017.

The names of 102 deceased students were gathered from sources including newspaper archives and school newsletters, according to the researchers who say official records were destroyed or scattered when the school closed.

While some names are likely to be duplicates, the death toll from the school which enrolled thousands from more than 40 tribal nations in its 50-year history is probably far higher, said Margaret Jacobs, professor of history at UNL and project co-director.

She said the names would be released after consultation with tribal leaders and after efforts to trace living relatives of the deceased were exhausted.

“These children died at the school,” Jacobs told the Omaha World-Herald. “They didn’t get a chance to go home. I think that the descendants deserve to know what happened to their ancestors.”

Some of the students, aged four to 22, died in accidents, by drowning or by shooting and in one case reportedly after being hit by a freight train. But most died from disease. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were rife in the federal Indian school system set up in the 1860s with the intention of educating tribal youth in the English language.

The system took a dark turn in 1879 when a US army brigadier general, Richard Henry Pratt, founded Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans, with the motto: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

In a harsh era, thousands of children were forced to leave their families and travel to schools in other states, to “remove them from tribal influences”. Many teachers forced students to speak only English, and many schools imposed military style rules. Braids were cut off and students given “white” names.

Some graduates said they benefited from the experience and educational opportunities they would not otherwise have received, but numerous other accounts record harsh discipline, abuse and exploitation, the Genoa project says.

One descendant claimed his great-grandmother was blinded while a student at Genoa, likely by having lye soap rubbed into her eyes as a punishment.

The search for the school’s cemetery is continuing in partnership with the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs and the state archaeology office. Maps from the 1920s marked a plot of the 640-acre campus where it was believed to exist but ground-penetrating radar has failed to find any graves, project leaders said.

“If we’re not able to find them, I think we need to do something to recognize that they lost their lives there,” Judi gaiashkibos, a citizen of the Ponca Tribe and the commission’s executive director, told the World-Herald.

The troubled legacy of Native American boarding schools became a focus of Joe Biden’s administration in June when the interior secretary, Deb Haaland, announced an investigation into “horrific assimilation policies”.

It followed the discovery of the graves of more than 200 children at an Indigenous residential school in Canada in May. In the US, Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo tribe member, said her maternal grandparents were among those forcibly removed, her grandfather to the Carlisle school.

“Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” Haaland wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post.

“It is a history that we must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.”

The Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative will investigate allegations of abuse and assist efforts to locate burial sites.

“I’m looking to see something good come out of this,” gaiashkibos said. “Perhaps we will find some way to restore language, to restore some of the culture that was stripped from us.

“Everyone needs to learn the stories and say, ‘America did this and we can do better’.” SOURCE

 

US to investigate ‘unspoken traumas’ of Native American boarding schools

Read more

 

We are not supposed to know

Editor Note: I have said this before in a non-fiction book I wrote in 2018. We are not supposed to know or care about Native People. It's obvious we have a century of bad history to rewrite and write right...

Why Do Native People Disappear From Textbooks After the 1890s?

edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-why-do-native-people-disappear-from-textbooks-after-the-1890s/2021/08

August 16, 2021

Joshua Ward Jeffery, who is not Native, is an assistant professor of history and Diné studies at Navajo Technical University, a public, tribally-controlled university of the Navajo Nation in Chinle, Ariz., and the editor of H-High-S, a national online network of high school social studies educators, historians, social scientists, and K-12 teacher educators. He also is the academic coordinator for the Navajo Nation Police Academy.

OPINION

The current manufactured controversy over critical race theory in American schools that has been roiling parts of the nation this summer has exposed two truths: Most K-12 teachers do not teach CRT, but they absolutely should. And while anti-education conservatives claim that CRT teaches things like “race essentialism” and that all white people are racist, the academic framework does nothing of the sort.

What it does is demand that we compare our ideals about law, justice, and the way government works with the lived experience of racial and ethnic minorities within those systems.

CRT, then, examines how America actually is in comparison with how we think it ought to be. When applied to history, critical race theory demands that we examine the American reality instead of the American mythology that has often masqueraded as history in classrooms.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s recent visit to the former site of the government-run Carlisle Indian School highlights some of that destructive American mythology. Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo of New Mexico, is the first Native Cabinet secretary in U.S. history. Last month, Haaland visited the graveyard on the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania during a ceremony to repatriate the disinterred remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children who died over a century ago at the school.

Historically, the United States committed itself to a policy of cultural genocide in the early part of the 19^th century, and it created an education program for which Native children were removed from their parents—sometimes violently. The schools then compelled the children to give up their culture in favor of American norms, including by forcibly cutting students’ hair, replacing their names, prohibiting them from speaking their own language, and restricting their visits home. This boarding school period of Indian education continued until the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, a law aimed at preventing the forced removal of Native children from their families and tribes. Understandably, many Native people remain skeptical of educational systems designed and run by the federal government.

Problems with Native education continue today. Because the land making up a reservation is generally owned by the United States and held in trust for the tribes, there is no tribal property-tax base to fund tribally-run schools. That means Native nations rely upon the Bureau of Indian Education to manage or fund the vast majority of their schools. However, for years, the BIE has ignored accountability and transparency mandates in the Every Student Succeeds Act that require schools to report the educational progress of students.

Further, because of the lack of funding, only a small percentage of Native students have access to important early-learning programs, meaning that Native students are already struggling to “play catch up” when they arrive in kindergarten. This early disadvantage could be ameliorated if Congress were to fund Head Start and similar programs on reservations at the same rate it does elsewhere.

In fact, many students are actually surprised to learn that Native peoples still exist."

In addition to present-day educational disparities, Native American history is neglected in most K-12 classrooms. In fact, many students are actually surprised to learn that Native peoples still exist. It is almost as if Gen. Richard H. Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle School, was successful in his attempt to “Kill the Indian, and save the man.” Many non-Native students assume Native people must have died off since they largely disappear from textbook narratives after the 1890s. (They also make up about 1 percent of the national student population, so it’s possible that many non-Native students might not have been exposed to their Native peers.)

Students do not learn that many Native people don’t have access to running water or electricity. They do not learn that the U.S. Supreme Court has limited how tribes can exercise their governmental power—such as police power—to serve and protect their citizens. They certainly do not learn about the inequalities in the educational system between predominantly white schools and those serving Native students. If they did, then they might question how we treat our Native neighbors.

Where I live on the Navajo Nation—which straddles Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico and is about the size of West Virginia—about a third of the population lives without running water or electricity. In 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration, the program only offered electrification loans to states and counties, not to tribal governments. The result was that while most rural Americans quickly gained electricity in the next decade or so, many living on reservations did not.

Even before the pandemic, my college students told me stories about charging their laptops in their cars overnight and then traveling to the closest town for Wi-Fi to turn in their homework. These same students travel 20 miles to the closest gas station to get ice to keep food cold, which they cook on gas-powered camping stoves. They use outhouses. They drive several miles to windmill-powered water tanks. They drive 30 miles to the closest truck stop about once a week to take a shower. While this is difficult under normal circumstances, it is nearly impossible to overstate the burden that a lack of electricity and running water has created during the ongoing spread of COVID-19 on the reservation.

Like much of America, my neighbors also have urgent, albeit different, complaints about the police. The Navajo Police Department does not employ a single white officer, so racism in law enforcement on the reservation manifests itself in different ways from how it does in the rest of the country. Instead, Navajo people complain about a lack of police because of funding and the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the effect of tribal criminal jurisdiction on non-Native Americans. So, when someone on the Navajo Nation dials 911, there is a high probability that police will be unavailable for help. And, if officers are available, in most cases, they are limited in their ability to arrest and charge non-Native suspects for violations of tribal law.

Policymakers have good reason to protect the mythological narrative of America that their political power is rooted in. If American K-12 teachers used critical race theory to inform their social studies curriculum, students might learn the real truth about the country’s failures to live up to its own ideals.

US churches and traumatic legacy of Native American schools

 (excerpt)

U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Some U.S. churches have been reckoning with this activity for years through ceremonies, apologies and archival investigations, while others are just getting started. Some advocates say churches have more work to do in opening their archives, educating the public about what was done in the name of their faith and helping former students and their relatives tell their stories of family trauma.

“We all need to work together on this,” said the Rev. Bradley Hauff, a Minnesota-based Episcopal priest and missioner for Indigenous Ministries with the Episcopal Church. “What’s happening in Canada, that’s a wakeup call to us,” said Hauff, who is enrolled with the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

KEEP READING

This photo made available by the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia shows students at a Presbyterian boarding school in Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1883. U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Native American and Alaskan Native children were regularly severed from their tribal families, customs, language and religion and brought to the schools in a push to assimilate and Christianize them. (AP)

Guelph residents gather to honour 215 Indigenous children found at B.C. residential school

 Why Canada is mourning the deaths of 215 children...

Guelph residents gathered on Tuesday night to honour victims and survivors of residential schools.

WATCH: Guelph residents gather to honour 215 Indigenous children found at B.C. residential school

Why Canada is mourning the deaths of 215 children

BBC News

The landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report, released in 2015, described the government-led policy as cultural genocide.

Concerted national action overdue for all the children who never came home from residential schools - UBC News

Opinion: The racist legacy of Canada's residential schools is still reflected in current policies - Washington Post

MORE NEWS

American Indian Children Still Removed From Homes at High Rates

 repost from 11/9/2015

By LEX TALAMO
 

Almost 40 years after the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) passed, American Indian children are still being removed from their homes in highly disproportionate numbers– at a rate almost three times higher than any other ethnicity, excepting African American children.

Minnesota leads the list of states with the worst rates of disproportionate removal– where American Indian children are overly represented in the foster care system– according to a June 2015 report from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.  Other states with high numbers of disproportionate removal include Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Wisconsin, Washington, South Dakota and Oregon.

Even in states without dramatic removal rates– like Arizona and New Mexico– many American Indian children find themselves removed from their families and placed in group homes, treatment centers or foster care.

In McKinley County, New Mexico,  American Indian children make up 73 percent of all children in foster care, according to a 2015  third quarter report from the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD).  And in Arizona, over 1,300 American Indian children were in the foster care system as of March 31, 2015, according to a Department of Child Safety Child Welfare Report.

The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 applies to any child of American Indian descent who is an enrolled member or eligible for enrollment in any federally recognized tribe. When an American Indian child enters state custody, the state must contact the child’s tribe, and the tribe has the right to transfer the case to tribal court or to participate in court proceedings.

In order to help American Indian children stay connected to their tribal cultures and identities, ICWA also established a placement preference that starts with the child’s extended family and clan relatives and then progresses to enrolled members of the child’s tribe and enrolled members from any tribe– with placement of the child in a non-Indian family as a last resort.

“Any child who might be Native American, they have a [cultural] identity,” said Regina Yazzie, Program Director of the Navajo Nation Division of Social Services.  “It’s a benefit.”

Yazzie added that across the country, state agencies struggle to find American Indian foster families for children.  Finding placement families on reservation land can prove equally challenging.

Data from the Children, Youth and Families Department of New Mexico shows there are currently 43 American Indian foster care providers who have 79 placements available– nowhere near enough for the 262 American Indian children in New Mexico’s foster care system.  Melissa Otero from AdoptUsKids.org also said through an email correspondence that less than 1 percent of all AdoptUsKids placement families identify as American Indian.

When speaking with the Navajo Post, several tribal members mentioned hardships on reservations that negatively impacted families’ ability to foster– including poverty, poor housing, poor mental health care, suicide, and addiction.

“Part of what’s going on [is] drug and alcohol numbers are sky high,” said one tribal member, who wished to remain anonymous in order to be able to speak freely. “There are not a lot of healthy families. There are tons of families that care, but it takes structure, it takes money [to foster], and so many families are overwhelmed with the day to day living, how could they bring another child into their home?”

For the San Carlos Apache Tribe, methamphetamine poses a particular devastating problem.   Social services Director Terry Ross said that the reservation currently has an “epidemic of mothers with meth-exposed babies.”

“We try to work with the family, but when mothers are addicted to meth… it’s hard,” Ross said. “We can’t make people do anything. They have to want to change for their child.”

Many tribes offer social services like counseling, parenting classes, detox centers and emergency supplies to American Indian families in need. But representatives from several tribes mentioned that funding is limited and resources are stretched thin, so that American Indian children continue to find themselves in foster care– where many undergo significant trauma and loss of identity when growing up separated from their tribes, communities, and cultures.

A Sense of Belonging

Sandra White Hawk, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe,  was adopted into a white missionary family when she was 18 months old in the days before ICWA. The only Indian girl in her community, she grew up with a sense of being “different.”

“My adoptive mother constantly reminded me that no matter what I did, I came from a pagan race whose only hope for redemption was to assimilate to white culture,” wrote White Hawk, now executive director of the First Nations Repatriation Institute, on her website.

White Hawk added that people in her community were ignorant of her culture when she was growing up; they would ask her to do rain dances or give war whoops.  Susan Devan Harness, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, was also adopted into a non-Indian family at 18 months. Harness said she was called “Squaw Girl” growing up and that she had trouble finding dates in high school because her male classmates’ mothers believed stereotypes that American Indian women were promiscuous– and that dating one would get their sons in trouble.

“I have had privileges,” said Harness of her adoption. “Living in a nice neighborhood, going to college, I have a Master’s Degree…a place at the table. But I have paid a huge price for those privileges."

As part of that price, Harness said she was always fighting for a place of belonging, and that many adoptees exist in an “in between place” between their tribal communities and their adoptive families. White Hawk’s website states that many adult adoptees also show traits of survivors of trauma: anxiety, impulsivity, nightmares, guilt, and unresolved guilt– and that much healing of these issues takes place for adoptees when they reconnect with their tribal identities or “come home.”

“In the beginning I didn’t see the importance of why anyone would want to know my story as an adoptee because I didn’t understand the prevalence,” said White Hawk. “I get it now.”

White Hawk added that reconnecting with her biological family and tribe later in life allowed a “whole new part” of herself to awaken.  She sees similar transformations in the adoptees she works with – as does Karen Vigneault, a librarian who uses her research skills to search genealogy records and connect adoptees with their families.

Vigneault said that adoptees face many obstacles back-peddling through their pasts: opening sealed court documents, misspellings in their ancestors’ names or lack of names which makes tracing families difficult, and apprehension at returning to their communities and families decades later. Despite the challenges, Vigneault provides her help to adoptees free from charge.

“If Creator has people asking me for help, I can’t charge them for that,” Vigneault said. “To help them come home… it should be a free ride.”

A 2009 report published by the Annie E Casey Foundation found that resilience– the ability to bounce back after a traumatic or difficult experience– increases dramatically for American Indian individuals who have seven protective factors in their lives, including: 

a sense of belonging to a culture, spirituality, connections to the tribal language and extended family, a sense of humor, a mindset of forward thinking or “moving forward to the seventh generation,” and what authors Charlotte Goodluck and Angela Willeto describe as “responses from the culture”– which could include beadwork, drumming, sweat lodge, talking circles, smudging, pow wows and other ceremonies.

The association between resilience and strong rootedness in tribal culture have significant implications for American Indian children within the foster care and adoption systems today.

Tania Valdez, associate director of the voluntary treatment foster care program La Familia-Namaste, Inc in New Mexico, described the change she saw occur in a young woman in care when an ICWA worker sent her music and books from her Oklahoma tribe.

“I think it plays a tremendous role in her cultural identity. It’s part of who she is,” Valdez said. “She’s removed from her community, but it gave her a piece of her culture, and she embraced that.”

Nikki Kull, executive vice president of The Ranches in New Mexico, said that children in care struggle to transition from one culture to another, regardless of their race.

“We had some siblings from the Yuni tribe who were very connected to their culture… and it was hard for them to be separated from their culture. It’s heart-breaking to see,” Kull said. “I desperately understand the need for kids to stay within their culture, but the fact remains there aren’t enough homes.”

The Indian Child Welfare Act Today
Several judges who spoke with the Navajo Post said that ICWA was meant to be a gold standard for family law cases– that active efforts to work with families before removing children from their homes would be in the best interest of all children regardless of their race.

But lawsuits in several states– Minnesota, Arizona, Oklahoma and Virginia– challenge the constitutionality of ICWA. Common arguments include that the Act’s language discriminates against American Indian children on race alone and that the Act violates due process and privacy rights guaranteed by the Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Judge Tim Connors, who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School and helps train new judges in handling ICWA cases, said that family law is mainly an issue for state courts, so that applying  ICWA– a federal law– to American Indian family cases is a “foreign concept” for many judges.  But he added that American Indian children are particularly harmed when removed from their families.

“Data shows the trauma when we separate children from their communities and their culture and their lineages,” Connors said. “And it is particularly harmful for Native American children.”

Judge William Thorne, vice-president of the National Indian Justice Center and a former member of the Board of Trustees for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, said that while some judges and lawyers see ICWA as a violation of their code of ethics regarding fairness, ICWA was created with American Indian children’s best interest in mind.

“In tribal communities, if you cut a child off from their family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, that really is almost active abuse against that child, because in Indian communities things happen based on relationships,” Thorne said in a video produced by the Mississippi Administrative Office of Courts.

Judge Leonard Edwards, a retired judge who served for 26 years as a Superior Court Judge and six years as Judge-in-Residence at the Center for Families, Children & the Courts, stated that the adversarial processes prevalent in courts– where two or more sides argue their cases and then a “winner” is declared– go against traditional American Indian practices of resolving conflict.  Edwards said that the intention behind ICWA was to help make sure that all of an American Indian child’s resources were being considered.

“Social workers can be creative,” Edwards said. “It’s not mum and dad, it’s the extended family and community. It’s different [in tribal communities] and that can be difficult for our judges to understand.”

While ICWA has been acknowledged by many judges as a difficult law to understand and implement, tribes across the country insist keeping American Indian children connected to their tribes is of utmost importance.

“[If not] They lose the language, the culture, the integrity of what it is to be Native American and the values system,” said Doris Bailon, director of Social Services of the Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Sandra White Hawk and Susan Devan Harness had a suggestion to reduce the number of American Indian children entering the foster care system: providing “front end services.”

“Instead of the money going to clothe and feed kids in foster care, have that money going to strengthen Native families and communities,” Harness said.

SOURCE (broken)

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.

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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