At one former Native American school in Oklahoma, honoring the dead now falls to alumni #Racist

 

 

A new federal investigation into the unmarked graves of Indigenous students unearths a complicated history and patchy records at dozens of Oklahoma boarding school sites.

Chilocco alumni only knew of 10 graves at the school when they began taking care of the site more than 20 years ago, but they’ve since uncovered 57 additional burials that occurred between 1884 to 1937 — all unmarked. 

GOOD READ: At one former Native American school in Oklahoma, honoring the dead now falls to alumni

 

 

When Native Americans make a big deal out of mascots and racist depictions in movies, it’s because it matters. These shape the public perception of Natives and it’s all wrong. Often times, it devalues Native life—like this video of Bugs Bunny killing Natives and keeping score pic.twitter.com/ZmZT9So7gl

— Brett Chapman (@brettachapman) July 21, 2021

 

https://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/new-red-order

 

How the ‘only family’ argument is used against Indigenous families

Fletcher: “How the ‘only family’ argument is used against Indigenous families” by Matthew L.M. Fletcher

In High Country News, here.

Excerpt:

There’s a powerful dog whistle attacking American Indian families and tribes who assert their rights to keep Native children with Native families under the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Increasingly, foster and adoptive parents are fighting those families and tribes who seek to reunite with their children by claiming to be “the only family the child has ever known.” It was the racism in the child welfare system against Indian families that initially compelled Congress to establish ICWA in 1978. Now, as America continues to grapple with its racist history and systems of white supremacy, it’s time for courts to see through racist dog whistles and prioritize families of color.

Aboriginal Health in the Aftermath of Genocide

Academic Paper: “Aboriginal Health in the Aftermath of Genocide: Healing and Reconciliation after the Indian Residential Schools Experience in Canada” in Global Perspectives on Indigenous Health (eds Robert Henry, Robert Innes, and Nancy Van Styvendale)

Genocide and the intergenerational trauma that it produces have had a demonstrable effect on the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal peoples.

Excerpt:

The federal government worked closely with mainline Canadian churches, who were together responsible for running most schools until the 1950s. The Catholic Church ran approximately 60 percent, the Anglicans about 30 percent, with the Presbyterian, Methodist, and United Churches running most of the remainder. From 1920 until the 1950s, attendance for children aged five to sixteen was compulsory (Milloy, 1999; Miller, 2004, p. 84; MacDonald, 2007). At least 150,000 children passed through 125 institutions, the last of which closed only in 1996. There are approximately 75,000 Survivors alive today, and many face a myriad of social, economic, and other problems as a result of their experiences, on which this chapter later focuses.

A number of recent studies allege that genocide occurred within the IRS system, claims which this chapter supports (Chrisjohn and Young, 1997; Grant, 1996; Neu and Therrien, 2003; Woolford, 2009; Powell, 2011). The term genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, who described it as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (1944, pp. 27-28). 

The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which flowed from Lemkin’s efforts, defines genocide as follows:

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

   (a) Killing members of the group:

   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 

READ HERE 

If you can't access this paper, I can send it to you. Email me: larahentz@yahoo.com

Death by Boarding School

New Scholarship by Ann Piccard

Posted on January 23, 2014 by TURTLE TALK

 

Ann Piccard has published Death by Boarding School: “The Last Acceptable Racism” and the United States’ Genocide of Native Americans, 49 Gonz. L. Rev. 137 (2014).

A summary:

There is a special kind of racism in this country against Native Americans, and it is the “last acceptable racism.” The author of that poignantly accurate description of most Americans’ attitudes towards Native Americans, who is both a Native American and a Jew, noted,

Not that long ago, white administrators of Indian boarding schools told our children that the “Indian in you shall die.” This kind of treatment and forced thinking has a lasting generational effect. It can be difficult to break through that type of programming.  Many of our people, however, have shaken off these forced ideological shackles to speak the truth and demand long overdue respect. Our voice is getting louder.

Our words are being said with more frequency and emphasis. But people need to hear us. Societal racism should no longer be an ad hoc affair, which is routinely accepted when directed against a certain group. It should be universally condemned. Perpetuating past wrongs and dehumanizing concepts hurts everyone.

This last acceptable racism is rarely mentioned in the U.S. However, one day in a very small town in northern Minnesota, in an area that has been economically depressed ever since the decline of the taconite and iron ore mining industry several decades ago, I watched two Native American men park a pickup truck in front of the local pawn shop.
I could tell the young men were Native Americans only because of the Bois Forte Band license plate on their truck; other than that, they looked, sounded, and acted like most of the other men in that rural north woods town. Upon reflection, of course, I realized that their skin was slightly darker than most residents of the town; I also began to notice that I did not see dark-skinned people working or shopping in any of the town’s stores. My eye was untrained, a fact that I attribute to my upbringing in the Deep South,6 where I was in a small minority of white children who were raised by our parents to see and to protest (and refuse to accept) the prevailing racism toward African-Americans. The subtle differences in appearances between the Native Americans and the “whites” in Minnesota had gone unnoticed by my Southern eyes. But as we watched the young men take their chain saws into the pawnshop that day, my husband remarked that men in northern Minnesota who hock their chain saws must be in pretty bad shape, because how could they survive, let alone make a living, without such tools?

Archive photo