Remains belonging to dozens of Native ancestors set to return to tribal nations in four states

Students gather around the eternal flame on UND’s campus. Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald

By Joshua Irvine | September 22, 2024

  

GRAND FORKS, North Dakota — A little over two years after UND officials announced they’d identified the remains of dozens of Native Americans in the university’s possession, the return of the deceased to their descendants can begin.

The first of the human remains identified in the university’s archives became available for repatriation to Native American tribal nations on Thursday.

Now, the remains of dozens of Native ancestors, along with more than 1,000 funerary objects and other artifacts, can be returned to tribal nations across the region.

“It’s finally done,” said Keith Malaterre, director of the Indigenous Student Center and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. “They finally get to go home.”

All told, the remains of some 57 ancestors and associated funerary objects are now available for repatriation, according to the two Federal Register notices published in August.  Tribes have been able to submit written claims for ancestral remains since the notices went out.

Per the Federal Register notices, the remains have a “reasonable connection” to nearly two dozen Native tribes, including all five tribes in North Dakota as well as tribes in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

Many of the remains in question came from excavations of burial mounds across North Dakota.  Ancestral remains were received by the university as early as 1907 and as late as 1982, according to the notices.

The university has also issued notices of intent to repatriate several sacred objects to area tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota.

An unspecified amount of ancestral remains or related objects possessed by UND was also transferred under the legal authority of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August, in order to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The return of ancestral remains comes just over two years after UND first announced it had located what it estimated at the time as around 250 boxes of sacred objects and the remains of what was initially estimated to be 70 Native American ancestors.

Faculty had first identified ancestral remains in the university’s possession in March 2022, beginning months of discussions with area tribal nations.

President Andy Armacost issued an apology to tribal nations across the country and pledged to return the remains and any sacred objects in the university’s possession to their respective tribes.

Since 2022, the university has worked since then with the affected tribes as well as multiple state and federal agencies to inventory the ancestral remains and identify their rightful recipients while remaining in compliance with NAGPRA.

Crystal Alberts, co-chair of UND’s NAGPRA compliance committee, says staff has searched “building to building, floor to floor, door to door” to identify any ancestral remains in the university’s possession.

Even so, she did not rule out the possibility of more ancestral remains being found in the future.

“I can’t definitively say no one else will be found and there is no one else,” Alberts said. “That would be an irresponsible statement.”

Dianne Desrosiers, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe, credited UND for its handling of the reparation process.

“I have to commend UND,” Desrosiers said. “They worked with the tribes and did everything they could within their power to make this process easy and smooth for tribes.”

Our children came home with moccasins

Beaded moccasins confiscated from a Native boy at the Carlisle school more than 100 years ago finally return to their homelands

• Author: Charles Fox

Kelley Bova, right, receives a hug after speaking to a group of elders at the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023. Bova, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, brought home a pair of moccasins that had been confiscated from a Native boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania more than 100 years ago. They were repatriated to the tribe along with the remains of two students who died there in the late 1800s. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)

WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

 

Charles Fox
Special to ICT

LAKE TRAVERSE RESERVATION, S.D. — The moccasins sat for decades in the corner of a glass-enclosed bookcase in Pennsylvania, nestled on a shelf with a Davy Crockett trading card and Canadian Mountie knick-knack.

They had long been separated from the unknown Native boy who had worn them into the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago, where they were taken from him along with his Native connections to family, language and traditions.

By the time they returned quietly home to Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate lands in late September, however, their anonymity had made them universal, a reminder of the forced assimilation that had formed the mission of the Pennsylvania school.

“It's all about those moccasins,” said Tamara St. John, a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate historian and South Dakota state representative. “They are the symbol of everything that happened there.”

Their journey home – accompanying the remains of two Sisseton and Spirit Lake boys repatriated to their tribes and families – brought not only another step toward reconciliation and healing for those involved but also inner peace and a sense of purpose to others along the way.

Moccasin tracks

The skilled craftsmanship of the moccasins’ quill and beadwork apparently caught the attention of seamstress Susan Zeamer, who worked at the Carlisle school from 1895 to 1908.

At some point, she took them home for herself. Whether she slipped the moccasins into her pockets or was given permission to keep them is lost to history.

The moccasins were then passed down through generations until a great-nephew by marriage, John Baker, 72, now of Buckingham Township, Pennsylvania, became their owner in 2011.

A pair of moccasins and a medicine pouch that were confiscated from a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago were repatriated to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate on Sept. 23, 2023. They had been in the possession of a Pennsylvania family for more than a century before Kelley Bova, a tribal citizen, was asked to return them to the tribe. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)

Baker remembers being fascinated by the moccasins in the bookcase in his parent’s home as a boy in the 1950s, when Westerns were popular on television and movie screens. He visualized a young Indigenous boy wearing them on adventures.

Over the past decade, however, despite the sentimental attachment, Baker became uneasy with possessing them. Like many who grew up in the Carlisle area, Baker’s knowledge of the Carlisle school was limited, but being the owner of the moccasins had enlightened him to the reality of the harsh history of the school and the treatment of Indigenous children. He felt a new responsibility. He understood the moccasins were not his to keep, but his quest to find their home of origin was filled with frustrations.

Museums and tribes did not always reply to his queries, but his research convinced him the moccasins were Plains Indian in style.

He finally reached out to Arla Patch, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a founding member of the Coalition of Natives and Allies advocacy, group which has led a fight against Native mascots. He showed her the moccasins on a Zoom call and told her of his desire to see them returned.

"I was getting pretty frustrated,” Baker said. “What’s going to happen to these? … They're more than just an artifact, they're actually part of a lineage that still is alive and well."

Patch introduced him to her close friend, Kelley Bova, a fellow member of the Coalition of Natives and Allies, who is Dakota.

Bova, too, had been removed from her culture and traditions. Born in Sisseton, South Dakota, she was adopted as a 3-month-old infant by a White family and grew up far from her Native relatives.

Independent research with tribal historians and museum experts confirmed the moccasins were Plains Indian in style, though a specific tribe could not be pinpointed. Officials with the Blackfeet, Dakota, and Rosebud Sioux tribes all felt they were characteristic of their style.

Kelley Bova (not shown) shows the moccasins to Helena Little Ghost at the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023. The moccasins were confiscated from a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago. They remained in the possession of a Pennsylvania family for more than a century before being repatriated back to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)

Bova believed her own tribe, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, should take the moccasins, and tribal officials agreed. Bova was tapped as the proper person to deliver them to their symbolic home.

“I find it mystical that Kelley and my path would cross, and that John's and my path would cross,” Patch recalled. “It's just so amazing. You couldn't write a script like this.”

Baker presented the moccasins to Bova in November 2022, at Peace Valley Park in Bucks County. He said he felt both a void and a peace to no longer have them in his home in the antique bookcase that he inherited along with the moccasins.

“It was really strange to not have the moccasins in the bookcase anymore,” he said recently. “They've been there my whole life. I kind of lost this imaginary friend. But I can't tell you how much peace that brought me. There was a real sense of well-being about it. Something definitely was settled.”

A different era

While Baker felt the absence, Bova quickly formed a close bond with the worn, leather shoes. They had been on similar journeys, more than a half-century apart, and Bova felt it was time to take them home.

“I would actually talk to them, tell them that they were safe now,” Bova said, as she waited to take the moccasins to Sisseton. “I have prayed with them, and I treat them like a child. I take care of them and plan to be able to bring them home.”

Finding your way home is something Bova knows about.

Her journey began as Rose Anne Owen, a Dakota infant taken from her family at birth and moved to Rosebud to await adoption. At age 3 months, she was placed into the hands of Salvatore and André Petrilli, a suburban Philadelphia dentist and his wife. The Glenside couple, of Italian and Irish descent, had struggled to have their own biological children and had arranged for the adoption through Catholic Charities.

Rose made her 1,900-mile journey to Glenside, Pennsylvania, and was renamed Kelley Elizabeth Petrilli. A new birth certificate was created to reflect that she was the child of two Caucasian parents. Her American Indian heritage was wiped away on paper. A Montgomery County Orphans Court clerk, ironically with the last name of Custer, gave the final stamp of approval to the adoption.

She had become a child of the Native adoption era, a decades-long forced assimilation of Native children established under the Indian Adoption Project, which started in 1958 and evolved to include 50 private and public placement agencies across the United States and Canada.

By then, boarding schools had proven to be expensive and unsuccessful. Adoption was the new attempt at assimilation, but the expenses would be the responsibility of the adopting parents and not that of the government. Raised in a White home, without the communal support of other students, adoption was viewed as a more successful tool for assimilation.

In the next 20 years, until the Indian Child Welfare Act ended the adoption project, almost 13,000 Native children were adopted. Native children are still four times more likely to be removed from their families and placed in foster care than non-Native children.

Love without identity

Unlike many other adoptees, Bova did not suffer a childhood of abuse. The Petrillis provided a loving, middle-class home and private schools, while never hiding her Native heritage.

Eventually, they would have five biological children on their own, but Bova always knew she was different, a Native island in an ocean of White suburbia.

“You’re an Indian, you’re an Indian,” one of her cousins would taunt.

“No, I’m not,” she would scream back, a denial that still embarrasses her and causes her pain today.

“When I was younger, I wanted to be White; I still feel guilty about that,” Bova told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2021. “I just wanted to fit in and be like my sisters. … I did not like being tall and brown and different.”

For Bova, that feeling of isolation led to what she calls her “dark years” after high school.

“Deep down, when you are adopted, you have a wound inside yourself,” she said. “If your parents gave you up, how lovable can you be?”

Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, knows the feeling. She was adopted at 18 months, and grew up to found the First Nations Repatriations Institute. She currently works at the Indian Child Welfare Act Law Center in Minneapolis.

“Even in loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are,” White Hawk told the Inquirer. “Love doesn’t provide identity.”

Bova, now 60, did not find her way back to her biological mother, Lillian Owen, and siblings, or her Dakota tribe, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, until she was 50. Like students who attended Native boarding schools, she found herself split between two worlds and not fitting completely in either.

“When any child was taken, they were also not able to continue their journey of being Native American. We were robbed of our identity,” said Bova, who is now an enrolled member of the tribe. “I think that's the hardest part for me to sometimes wrap around, that you're robbed of that. And people don't understand that, but I'm … grateful that I found my family and I try to learn as much as I can.”

Patch said the journey continues.

“Kelley does not have her Whiteness, and she does not have her Nativeness,” Patch said of her friend. “The healing power of Kelley’s story is that she is now getting to be Dakota. She’s getting to connect with that Dakota heritage.”

Rose’s story

On Memorial Day weekend in 2021, Kelley made her first visit to the former grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, drawn by a group of Native women and others from the Circle Legacy group who clean and decorate the graves each year.

She stood in the Indian Cemetery on a raw, rainy day with the white gravestones laid out in front of her in perfect rows, like desks in a classroom.

Kelley Bova, of Pennsylvania, pays her first visit to the Indian Cemetery on May 29, 2021, at the site where the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated from 1879-1918. Bova was taken from her family as an infant and adopted out at three months old to a White Pennsylvania family. She later reconnected with her birth family and is now a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. (Photo by Charles Fox, courtesy of The Philadelphia Inquirer)

They marked the remains of the students who had died while attending the school but had not been returned home to their families. Most were victims of diseases such as tuberculosis.

Her eyes became transfixed on one particular grave. The gravestone simply read “Rose, Sioux.” It was the name she had been given by her biological parents.

“Just seeing that grave with her name, my name on it,” Kelley later said, “it just made me cry.”

It was the grave of Rose Long Face, also known as Little Hawk, Rosebud Sioux, who was among the initial group of 84 students to arrive at the school on Oct. 6, 1879. She died 18 months later on April 29, 1881.

Their journeys had been separated by 84 years but were nonetheless similar. Both had made the journey from Rosebud to a Pennsylvania town, to have their Native identities removed and be renamed in the process. Both had been separated from their families and the land that should have been their home by a government assimilation program.

Bova moved a few rows over and found the graves of two other Dakota students, Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright.  She knelt, placing tobacco bundles on their graves, speaking softly to let them know they were not forgotten and one day they would be home again.

Rose Long Face made it home first, however.  In the summer of 2021, she was among nine Rosebud students repatriated from the cemetery to their homeland in South Dakota. She had been away 140 years.

Amos and Edward

Amos and Edward began their journeys home in September 2023, when they were disinterred from the Carlisle cemetery in a private ceremony that included tribal members, ancestors and others.

Their homecoming provided a chance to return the moccasins, as well, to Sisseton.

Amos and Edward were among six Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate/Spirit Lake students, four boys and two girls, who arrived at the Carlisle school on Nov. 6, 1879, along with seven students from other tribes. They arrived exactly one month after the first group of students had walked through the gates.

Chairperson Lonna Street, left, Spirit Lake Tribe, and Tamara St. John, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate historian and a South Dakota state representative, stand in the Indian Cemetery at the former site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School late in the evening of Sept. 17, 2023. Work in the cemetery disinterring the graves of Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright had gone on for approximately 11 hours on a rainy day. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)

In 20 days, Amos was dead — the first student to die at the school. There is no record of the case of death, though a newspaper report at the time suggested he was sick when he arrived at the school.

Edward, son of Chief Waanatan II, was 12 when he arrived at the school, a year younger than Amos. He died on May 5, 1881, of pneumonia as he was recovering from measles.

Amos and Edward were among four students disinterred from Carlisle in September as part of the U.S. Army’s disinterment project at the Carlisle Barracks. The others, Beau Neal, Northern Arapaho, and Launey Shorty, Blackfeet, were also returned to their tribes and families.

Amos and Edward were taken by a caravan of nine passenger vans and vehicles that left Carlisle on the afternoon of Sept. 19 for the 22-hour drive to Sisseton.

Along the way, the caravan stopped in Ohio to pick up two more remains being returned by Oberlin College. Two additional remains, believed to be about 500 years old, were already waiting for burial in South Dakota after being returned by a North Dakota coroner’s office.

Amos and Edward arrived on Sept. 20 at the site of the former Sisseton Agency, where they had last said goodbye to their parents. This time, however, they were greeted by about 100 people gathered in celebration.

They were then taken to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate repatriation grounds to complete the traditional four days of mourning before a private ceremony and burial at the repatriation cemetery. The other four remains were also buried at the repatriation cemetery.

Bova made the same journey with the moccasins tucked inside a shoebox, boarding the caravan at Carlisle for the trip to Sisseton.

For her, the trip was an opportunity to take part in an historic moment for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake people, but also an opportunity to continue her healing process. She had visited Sisseton more than 10 times in the past 10 years for Sundances, powwows, and family events.

“It's like there's this vessel and this wound and every time [I go to Sisseton] it gets filled a little more, then a little more and a little more,” Bova said afterward. “That's why it helped doing this. Because that was able to fill [the void] even more. Fill that wound up and heal it.”

During the final three days of mourning at Sisseton, with ceremonies at sunrise and sunset, gatherings with food, and conversations with elders, Bova experienced events she had missed for 50 years. This was especially true of her time spent with the Buffalo Heart women.

“Those Buffalo Heart women allowed me to help with the remains,” she said. “That was such a gift to me.”

‘These are my people’

On Saturday, Sept. 23, the day of burial for Amos and Edward, about 100 people of all ages stood on the hillside overlooking the open graves.

The remains were taken down from a wooden scaffold and eventually bundled in buffalo robes along with a star quilt, moccasins, and other traditional items brought by relatives. They were then placed in their graves with the love and respect that should have been afforded them as the sons of chiefs.

Kelley Bova, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, speaks to a gathering at the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023, after bringing home a pair of moccasins confiscated from an unknown Native boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago. They had been in the possession of Pennsylvania family for more than a century. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)

“Whenever I am in the teepees, by the fire, and hearing the men drumming and singing, it takes me back to another time,” Bova said. “It’s something that makes me feel so special. …That’s my DNA; that’s my heritage. Not knowing it for 50 years and finally seeing things like that, it has a healing power inside of me that helps a lot. Seeing all of this, I come to the realization that these are my people. This is who I am… The biggest thing I have learned is to let go of how I was raised as opposed to who I really am.”

Then it was Bova’s turn to address the group. She spoke to a gathered group of elders at the front of the crowd where they could see the moccasins she held in her hands.

She told the story of the moccasins and their pathway to her, and then presented them to tribal chairpersons J. Garret Renville of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Lonna Street of Spirit Lake, as well as historian St. John.

“It's a privilege to be able to do this,” she told ICT. “And it's a very spiritual thing. Because I feel like it's my journey home, and now I can help these moccasins go home.  I know they're just a thing.  But to me, there are symbols of every child that was taken, whether it was through adoption or through the residential schools. I think it's just so important that these go home.”

Upon hearing the news of the moccasins' return to the Dakota people, Baker responded from his Pennsylvania home that he felt “ relief, peace, and closure” and “a sense of gratification that comes with complete accomplishment.”  The endeavor had taken over a century but was finally achieved.

St. John has big plans for the moccasins.

“I could build a museum around the moccasins to forever tell the stories of so many — past, present, and future,” she said. “I want them to be representative of our children and their journey home. I want them to represent how the federal assimilation tactics of places like Carlisle did not win.”

The moccasins can tell that story, she said.

“Our boys will be here and laid to rest on the homelands and protected ever on, but those moccasins will sit in their place in our collections with their story,” St. John said.

“To ‘keep one’s moccasins’ is said to mean that a Native person did not give up their traditional way,” she said. “Our children came home with moccasins.”

 

We know their spirits are still here

 'Their spirits are still here': Tribe, state to search for remains at North Dakota boarding school

The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and the State Historical Society of North Dakota recently agreed to partner in a search for the remains of children around the former Fort Totten Indian Industrial School, which lies on the Spirit Lake Reservation in the northeastern part of the state.

Denise Lajimodiere, author of a leading book on Native American boarding schools, uses old photos possibly depicting the graves of soldiers to orient herself in a forested area near the Fort Totten State Historic Site, which formerly served as a boarding school for Native American youth. Lajimodiere believes the bodies of former students may be buried near the former school on the Spirit Lake Reservation in northeast North Dakota.

Dave Samson / The Forum

By Michelle Griffith, Jeremy Turley | July 08, 2022

Editor's note: This is the fifth story in an occasional series on Native American boarding schools and their impact on the region's tribes.

FORT TOTTEN, N.D. — On a cloudy October morning, Denise Lajimodiere walked through brambles and tall grass with her eyes to the ground.

Consulting a photo from the 1980s, the scholar scanned the prairie terrain near the Fort Totten State Historic Site for small, tan boulders that could mark graves long hidden from view.

After stumbling across one, she grabbed a plastic baggie of tobacco from her coat pocket, held a pinch tight in her left fist and said a prayer for the bodies that may have been buried under her feet more than a century ago.

Historic site employees believe the boulders could be the vestiges of a cemetery for U.S. soldiers buried in the mid-1800s. Lajimodiere thinks the gravesite may also contain the remains of Native American children who died while attending a boarding school at the former military post.

“We know their spirits are still here,” Lajimodiere said solemnly while walking the site on the Spirit Lake Reservation in northeast North Dakota.

Lajimodiere, an enrolled Turtle Mountain citizen whose father and grandfather attended Fort Totten, found evidence that at least 13 Native American boarding schools existed in North Dakota.

The reservation’s federal Indian agent, William Forbes, recruited the Grey Nuns, an order of Catholic sisters from Montreal, to run a “manual labor school,” historian James Carroll writes in the book “Fort Totten Military Post and Indian School.”

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RELATED

North Dakota

Army: Boys’ remains won’t return to Dakotas from notorious Native American boarding school this year

Despite successfully turning in the necessary paperwork this spring to have the former boarding school students' remains exhumed, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake tribes will likely have to wait another year before they can bring the boys home.

 

'I had to be prayed home'

Thousands of Native children were adopted in the 1960s as a government plan of forced assimilation. This woman was one of them.

Kelley Bashew was adopted at the age of 3 months and taken from South Dakota to Glenside. She is shown on a hillside near her Meadowbrook home in April 2021.CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer

• Dec 28, 2021

While visiting the Tekakwitha Nursing Home to sing for residents, 13-year-old Denise Owen was led away from the rest of her boarding school group by a nun. A special surprise awaited her.

There, in another room in the Sisseton, S.D., facility, was her newborn sister, Rose Anne. Denise got only a glimpse of the infant, lying in a bassinet in a long-sleeve shirt and a diaper, before another nun ordered her to leave. Denise was not supposed to see her sibling, soon to be adopted.

It would be 50 years before they saw each other again.

Rose Anne, who would be raised by a Glenside dentist and his wife, became a child of the country’s American Indian adoption era, a decades-long forced assimilation of Native children first established under the Indian Adoption Project, which started in 1958 and evolved to include 50 private and public placement agencies across the United States and Canada, where the so-called Sixties Scoop was coined to describe the mass removal of children from Native homes. During the next 20 years, almost 13,000 Native children would be adopted.

Bashew experienced a loving childhood. But she always knew she was different, and felt isolated in white suburbia. Here, a series of photos from those times.CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer

According to a 1969 report by the Association on American Indian Affairs, between 25% and 35% of all Native children were placed in adoptive homes, foster homes, or institutions; and about 90% of those children were being raised by non-Natives.

That was the case for Rose Anne, who, at the age of 3 months, was handed over to Salvatore and André Petrilli. The white couple of Italian and Irish descent had struggled to have their own biological children, and it was André's interest in American history and a phone conversation with a priest from St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, S.D., that led her to seek a Native adoption through Catholic Charities.

Eventually, a new birth certificate reflected the new name of Kelley Elizabeth Petrilli, the child of two Caucasian parents. Her American Indian heritage was wiped away on paper. A Montgomery County Orphans Court clerk with the last name of Custer gave the final stamp of approval to the adoption.

“When I was younger, I wanted to be white. I still feel guilt about that,” said Bashew, who lives in Meadowbrook. “I just wanted to fit in and be like my sisters. … I did not like being tall and brown and different.”

Kelley Bashew was born Rose Anne Owen in Sisseton, S.D., but was adopted by Salvatore and André Petrilli, a suburban Philadelphia dentist and his wife.CHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer

 PLEASE SHARE THIS POST with other American Indian Adoptees... TLH

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BIA to review Sisseton Wahpeton Child Protection Program

argusleader.com/story/news/2020/09/29/tribe-bia-review-sisseton-wahpeton-child-protection-program/3571341001

J.T. Fey  | Watertown Public Opinion

Lorraine Rousseau still has concerns.

Myrna Thompson, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate secretary, said in a news release issued by the tribe Friday that protection of tribal children is a duty that’s taken very seriously.

“We are consistent in our efforts to support the Child Protection Program in their mission to protect children, and to reunify and strengthen families. I can assure you that we have been revising our policies and procedures, and updating Chapter 38 — Juvenile Code, to ensure that it is still relevant and effective to meet our community needs,” she said in the release.

That is on the heels of a late August protest in Sisseton during which Rousseau and others expressed concerns about what they see as inconsistent procedures for cases in which children are removed from parental custody.

Rousseau is one of the leaders of the grassroots citizens group that organized the protest, accused the Child Protection Program of mismanagement and is calling for changes to the staff. She said she directed the program for more than seven years before being fired over a dispute in her job description.

Earlier:Sisseton Wahpeton protestors demand changes to tribe's Child Protection Program

Tribal officials heard the group’s complaints during a council meeting, according to the release, and there have since been more meetings to determine the validity of the concerns, according to the statement.

“I would know the proper protocol. I would know how to correct the problems that are there,” said Rousseau, who added that she recently spoke with Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Attorney Kimberley Craven. “She asked me what my proposed solutions would be, and I said the program manager needs to be terminated. I asked her (Craven), ‘How are you going to shape up the program when the program manager doesn’t have the requisite experience to run this type of program?’”

In the release, Thompson said tribal executives have requested that the Bureau of Indian Affairs conduct an updated review.

“The program review began on September 23 and is currently in progress,” Thompson said. “All components of the CPP will be reviewed, including case files to ensure all documentation is done according to the Code of Federal Regulations and all policies and procedures are complied with.”

Rousseau said if the Bureau of Indian Affairs reviews only case files it won’t understand the problem.

“That isn’t going to tell them anything about the underlying reasons why the complaints have been filed,” she said.

“We feel the workers are putting our children in jeopardy because they (Child Protection Program staff members) don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not social workers. They don’t have the necessary qualifications nor do they have the necessary experience,” Rousseau said.

Tribal officials said they are in the process of hiring an Indian Child Welfare Act attorney to ensure that all ICWA cases are handled “efficiently and effectively,” according to the release.

Rousseau said she doesn’t get involved in political practices but added, “I’m involved in this because of our children and how our Child Protection is not protecting them. As a matter of fact, they’re putting them in situations where they can be harmed.”

Rousseau said her organization will meet later this week and will decide how to respond to the statement from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate executive offices.