Going Home: How the land back movement is reclaiming ancestral lands.
The Land Back movement reflects the global efforts of Indigenous people
to reclaim ancestral territories and sovereignty over public lands.
Through a combination of military force, broken treaties, and
discriminatory policies, Native communities have been stripped of 99% of
their historical land base in the U.S., reduced from nearly 2.3 billion
acres to just 56 million acres today. Here are some ways this has been
codified in state and federal policy:
The Indian Removal Act of 1830
led to the forced relocation of southeastern tribes like the Cherokee,
Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations along the
brutal Trail of Tears, where thousands died during the journey westward.
In the Great Plains, the U.S. government repeatedly violated treaties like the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, seizing the Black Hills from the Great Sioux Nation after gold was discovered.
The Dawes Act of 1887
dispossessed tribes by breaking up communally held reservation lands
into individual allotments, many of which were then sold to non-Native
settlers.
Military campaigns and massacres, like the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864
where U.S. troops killed hundreds of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho
people, were used to terrorize Indigenous communities and drive them
onto increasingly smaller reservations.
The California Gold Rush led to state-sponsored genocide
of Native peoples, with the state paying bounties for Indian scalps and
heads in the 1850s and forcing survivors onto small rancherias.
Unlike what some might assume, the movement doesn't seek to displace
current residents from their homes. Instead, it focuses on returning
decision-making power to Indigenous communities and addressing the
historical injustices of colonization that led to their dispossession.
Here are four examples of what land back work looks like in action:
In 2020, the Esselen Tribe regained 1,200 acres
of their ancestral homeland in Big Sur, California, after 250 years of
displacement. Through a $4.5 million grant and partnership with Western
Rivers Conservancy, the land, which includes sacred sites and endangered
species, is now being used for traditional ceremonies and ecological
conservation.
The Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, in partnership
with The Conservation Fund, the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and the
Indian Land Capital Company, purchased 28,089 acres of ancestral land
within the Nett Lake and Deer Creek sections of the Bois Forte
Reservation.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) regained control
of the National Bison Range in Montana in 2020. This 18,800-acre
wildlife refuge, which was taken from them in 1908, is being used for
bison conservation efforts while expanding public education about their
cultural connections to the land.
In Maine, the Penobscot Nation has worked with conservation groups to reclaim over 100,000 acres
of their ancestral territory along the Penobscot River since 2000,
helping restore both tribal sovereignty and the river's ecological
health, including critical salmon habitats.
In South Dakota, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe reacquired 28,000 acres of land
in 2020. This prairie land is now being used for buffalo conservation,
food sovereignty initiatives, and teaching traditional land management
practices to tribal youth.
Indigenous communities’ approach to land stewardship goes beyond simple
ownership, emphasizing a deep, complex relationship with the
environment. As tribes reclaim more of their ancestral lands, they're
leading innovative climate adaptation efforts and restoration projects,
demonstrating how traditional Indigenous knowledge can help create a
more sustainable future.
Support the work of NDN Collective,
an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power
through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking,
capacity-building and narrative change. You can make a donation or follow the action items for their specific initiatives.
Learn whose ancestral land you live onand
pay real estate taxes to those Indigenous nations. Many tribes and
Indigenous organizations have established voluntary land tax programs
where residents can contribute a portion of their income or property
value to support Indigenous land reclamation efforts, like the Shuumi Land Trust in the East Bay of Northern California.
Support Indigenous-led land conservation efforts
and organizations working to protect sacred sites and expand tribal
land holdings. This could mean donating to Indigenous land trusts,
advocating for the return of public lands to tribal management, or
backing specific land return campaigns.
Call on your local, state and federal representatives to honor treaties, expand tribal sovereignty, and return public lands to tribal nations.
The latest on the Land Back movement, in which Native American tribes reclaim land. Two reporters take a look at where it’s worked and where it hasn’t at reservations in Minnesota. NPR >
The Land Back movement is also about foodways.
When Native peoples' land was stolen, they lost important hunting and
fishing grounds and myriad places to gather and prepare food. Civil Eats >
Tribal lands were stolen. What happens when those ancestral territories are returned? The Land Back movement is long-overdue justice. It’s also a climate solution. Vox >
The Land Back Movement Unravels Manifest Destiny. Across Indian Country, tribal nations are buying back their land one parcel at a time. Sierra Club >
On Vancouver Island, Land Back Looks Like Going Home.
Indigenous-led land back efforts are underway on Canada’s Vancouver
Island while the land’s original stewards protect forests from logging. Atmos >
Land
Rematriation: A Conversation with Cyndi Suarez, Donald Soctomah, Darren
Ranco, Mali Obomsawin, Gabriela Alcalde, and Kate Dempsey. Kate
Dempsey, state director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine, discuss the
future of Tribal sovereignty, Land Back, and rematriation of the planet.
NPQ >
"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.
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)
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 themspecific
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 wasto 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.
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.
“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:
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.
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.
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
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
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
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?
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 19th
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.
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.
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