First Contact participants reunite to speak about their 28 day journey | Non-Indians Going to A Rez?

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SEASON 2:

America's Original Sin Continues: The Fight Over Native Children #ICWA

The Indian Child Welfare Act pushes for Native children to be adopted by Native families. With its constitutionality challenged, tribal sovereignty hangs in the balance.

By

Se-ah-dom Edmo, Guest Writer | Jul 1, 2022

Three Navajo children, dressed in traditional clothing, stand barefoot in the grass against the rugged landscape of an unspecified Navajo reservation, United States, circa 1935.

Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: FPG via Getty Images

In order to keep us from building power to be free and liberated, the strategy is simple: Keep us poor, keep us ignorant, keep us divided and keep us sick.

This game plan likely sounds familiar to many of you, because it is the living legacy of the white supremacy and oppression baked into the social, economic and political systems of the United States. The same strategy used on Native people has been used on Black, brown, Asian and Pacific Islander communities, immigrants, refugees and undocumented folks, and other intersectional identities who, like us, remain targets.

There have been many state-sanctioned forms of violence against Native people. The list includes educational institutions that killed a still-unknown number of our children, soldiers who targeted and slaughtered our ancestors at religious ceremonies, and, more recently, state agencies and nonprofits that practiced enforced sterilization. These have all been part of policy murder against Native people, elements in a centuries-old, calculated and proven political strategy.

In the highest court of the land, the Indian Child Welfare Act is expected to be debated later this year in Brackeen v. Haaland, in what many in the field of federal Indian law are describing as the largest threat to Indian Country and sovereignty in centuries.

When it was passed in 1978, ICWA was landmark legislation, setting unprecedented protections to address the assimilationist policies that led to state child welfare and private adoption agencies systematically removing almost a third of all American Indian and Alaska Native children from their homes. (Yes, almost a third; you read that correctly.) Eighty-five percent of those children were placed in non-Indian homes. ICWA’s constitutionality is now being challenged in a lawsuit brought by Texas, Indiana, Louisiana and various individual plaintiffs. It is the first time a state has sued the federal government over ICWA’s constitutionality.

If ICWA is overturned, a “slew of laws that rest on a centuries-long precedent of tribal sovereignty could be in jeopardy,” as a recent Politico piece put it. Those who support the attack on ICWA would love for all of us to believe that the debate in the Supreme Court over Indian identity is about the protection of Native children. They’d like us to believe that they have the best interests of Indian children at heart. Just like boarding schools were a tactic to demolish the foundation of tribes, assimilate us and destroy any obligation the federal government had to us, the push to overturn ICWA has the same aim ― except this time, the mission is much more insidious.

Scholars and journalists investigating the issues have made it clear that this is part of a plan to build and reclaim conservative power across the United States. All of our futures are at stake, because at the heart of this case are Gibson Dunn, the Goldwater Institute and the Bradley Foundation ― the same set of political players and funders that have brought forward policies that attack our democracy, LGBTQ rights, and the teaching of Juneteenth, Black history and critical race theory, and are among those who defended the Keystone XL pipeline.

But, you might be wondering, how could a child welfare case threaten to topple tribal sovereignty? And what’s behind it? In short, it’s the same thing that threatens us all: a small group of people hoarding resources and power to ensure they keep their unearned privilege ― aka white supremacy.

 KEEP READING

Letter to the Editor

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to further strip us of our rights — this absolutely must stop.

One of the acts on their chopping block is the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978). This act protects indigenous children from being taken away, such as they were during the Sixties Scoop, and helps maintain tribal sovereignty (which is the law of the land and codified in the Constitution).

According to the Genocide Convention, the forced removal of children from one group to another group is an act of genocide. The Sixties Scoop was genocide.

To not protect the ICWA would be a continuation of the genocide it was (at least) intended to stop.

Maggie Dimock, North Mankato

Ask yourself: “how many schools do you know that have graveyards next to them?”

 

As a Diné child, I relished the time spent traveling to lectures that my dad delivered to museums and universities about his work as a photographer. The old Kodak projector slides dropped into focus with the rhythm of his lessons: Navajo people are the land, Navajo culture is Navajo survival. Native culture is Native survival.

His talks would share what it meant to be Navajo. As he shared about his work he would illustrate the legacy of Federal Indian Policy and its treatment of Native people. I still couldn’t imagine at that age what the U.S. government boarding schools had done to attack the very essence of my identity and pride in my culture I held so dear. Each time he delivered a talk, he asked a simple question that rings in my head to this day: “how many schools do you know that have graveyards next to them?”

That question rings in my head again today, and the past several weeks as multiple First Nations and Indigenous communities have uncovered mass graveyards of people— many of them children— at the sites of former residential schools in Canada.

Here at the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, we’ve long stated the importance of providing a land acknowledgement before events, gatherings and meetings. Whether in-person or online, the purpose of a land acknowledgement is meant to restore and name the ancestral and continuing bond between Indigenous peoples and the land, air, minerals, water, vision that we’ve stewarded since time immemorial. We see this as a small first step toward being in right relationship, toward true Native sovereignty. Today, we ask you to join us in recommitting to acknowledging not only the proper stewards of our land, but the specific violence that keeps that space in settler occupation. We ask you to commit to naming and contextualizing the violence that undergirds the places we call home.

For most Americans, the idea of a boarding school might invoke images of affluent college prep schools, or repositories for disobedient students. For Indigenous people in the US and Canada, the term brings forth terror. Indigenous boarding schools were a tactical experiment, supported by the US War Department and the Department of Interior. After hundreds of years of attempted ethnic genocide, Indigenous people maintained their hard-fought connection to land and culture. The U.S. government made the strategic decision to wage a new kind of war. Alongside the implementation of the Dawes Act of 1887, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a targeted effort to obliterate the ties children had between their culture and land before they were fully developed.

The continuing slogan of the first boarding school, Carlisle Indian School was “kill the Indian, save the man.” A phrase illustrative of the genocidal agenda at the center of these institutions. The school opened in 1879 and swiftly became a “success” by white supremacist standards as the children were taught Euro-centric education and were severely punished for practicing any part of their culture, language or Indigenous way of knowings.

According to the National Boarding School Healing Coalition, “between 1869 and the 1960s, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled.”

In Canada, from the 1800s to 1996 over 150,000 children were removed from their families and communities. Regardless of which side of the colonial border, Indigenous children were sent away from everything they knew and forced to assimilate into the settler culture. For countless Indigenous children, this meant pervasive abuse, psychological torment, cultural erasure and, as the recent headlines illustrate, murder.

In times like these I think of my dad, the photographer, how do you photograph the invisible? How do you document the erased? The Indian Boarding School Project created ghost generations. I have never wanted to become accepting of this horrific legacy in the U.S. education system. Children “graduated” from these hellish places to find a country that regarded them as subhuman, no matter how hard they’d had the culture beaten out of them. Many tried to return home and found they could no longer communicate with their own families, or practice their most sacred rites. Many lay in graveyards next to these schools, waiting to be found. We see now that the ghosts of this trauma want to be seen.

So how can we begin to be in right relationship? Here are some first steps:

• Push for action to fund the U.S. efforts to investigate what happened to the thousands of children who didn’t return home: a call that Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland declared. Contact your representatives and let them know you support this call to action.

• Incorporate and specifically name the violence of boarding schools into the land acknowledgements you are already giving. Be explicit about the history necessary for truth-telling. (Check out the USDAC Native Land page if you don’t know how to get started)

• Research the location of boarding schools near you. Since Carlisle proved to be “successful,” the U.S. and Canadian governments funded the opening of these schools across both countries, many times partnering with churches like the Catholic Church to operate these schools. For these reasons there are hundreds of schools that were opened across the U.S. and Canada.

• You can access the curriculum of the National Indian Boarding School Healing Coalition to learn more about the history of the boarding school here.

• You can teach the children in your life about the boarding school experience. There is a very poignant, child-appropriate episode of Molly of Denali here from PBS. You can read and access questions to help have a generative conversation with the children in your life here.

• You can participate in Orange Shirt Day, a legacy project meant to build awareness of the residential school project and its harmful events.

Indigenous Nations and communities have long carried the living history and trauma of the boarding school era. It is time for allies to help in fighting for justice and truth. Without truth we will never reach the hope of reconciliation.

Yours in solidarity,

Jaclyn Roessel, Director of Decolonized Futures & Radical Dreams

U.S. Department of Arts and Culture

 

PHOTO: Ben Nelms/CBC: Memorial at the Kamloops Indian Residential School

Source: National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

Genocide: Canada’s Residential Schools Were a Horror

LINK  By Ian Mosby, Erin Millions

Flowers, shoes and moccasins placed on the steps of the Mohawk Institute, a former residential school for Indigenous children, to honor the 215 children whose remains were recently discovered on the site. Credit: Cole Burston Getty Images

The recent discoveries of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites of four former residential schools in western Canada have shocked and horrified Canadians. Indigenous peoples, whose families and lives have been haunted by the legacy of Canada’s Indian residential school system, have long expected such revelations. But the news has still reopened painful wounds.

Residential school survivor testimony has long been filled with stories of students digging graves for their classmates, of unmarked burials on school grounds, and of children who disappeared in suspicious circumstances. Many of these stories were heard by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which was formed in 2008 and collected testimonies from over 6,750 survivors. The TRC’s 2015 Final Report made it quite clear that further recoveries of unmarked graves at the schools were inevitable.

The goal of Canada’s Indian residential school system, after all, shared that of its U.S. Indian boarding school counterpart: “Kill the Indian, and save the man.” More than 150,000 children were taken from their homes between 1883 and 1997, often forcibly, and placed in distant boarding schools where the focus was on manual labour, religious instruction and cultural assimilation. The TRC Final Report concluded that the Indian Residential School system was an attempted “cultural genocide,” but the escalating number of recovered unmarked graves points to something even darker. Given that more than 1,300 graves have been identified using ground-penetrating radar at only four of the 139 federally run residential schools, the current official number of 4,120 students known to have died in the schools will end up being only a fraction of the actual total. 

A Present Reality with a History

 OPINION: White violence not a historical truth: it’s a reality with a history

Although slavery was abolished and much progress has been made for the First Nations and all minority groups in these countries, the ideology of white supremacy and the danger of white violence are still very much with us today

 News Service | June 11, 2021 SOURCE

Just a few days ago, a white man killed a Muslim family in Ontario Canada. Though widely reported as a singular incident not connected to any other recent or historical acts of violence, it was in fact the latest in a long series of ideologically-driven white supremacist violence. The most immediate connection that springs to mind, also from Canada, is the horrifying discovery of an unmarked mass grave in which are buried at least 215 indigenous children who had perished at the hands of white supremacists.

The remains of these 215 children were discovered at a site that used to house Canada’s biggest residential school for indigenous children. It was run by the Catholic Church from the 1890s through the 1970s, until the federal government shut it down. These latest reports on the mass graves are part of a twenty-year effort by Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nations people in order to find the missing children in many of the unmarked mass graves at former school sites such as Kamloops. Between 1883 and 1996, around 150,000 children passed through the Canadian version of this system, which was eventually abolished. Thousands of unaccounted-for children have yet to be found. They were never seen again by their families. When pressed for answers, the schools would tell families that their children had died, run away or simply disappeared, and they would generally refuse to return the body in case of death.

The brand of hatred that has motivated white people to assault Muslims in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe is intimately connected to the ideology that created the “Indian boarding school system” in the US and Canada. Indian boarding schools were part of America’s and Canada’s so-called “civilizing mission”. They were the quintessential example of how white supremacy had been at the heart of both of these countries since the earliest days of their founding, rather than being a marginal, radical, and fringe ideology. European settlers wanted to civilize these “savages”, seeing their own Anglo-Saxon Christian culture as vastly superior to the many different tribal languages and cultural practices that the indigenous peoples had.

Richard Henry Pratt, an American general, had captured a group of indigenous men as prisoners of war. He taught them how to speak, read and write English, dressed them in military uniforms and trained them to do labor. He photographed the results of this assimilation experiment and presented them to the federal government. This is how he was able to secure funding for the first Indian American boarding school, set up to “kill the Indian and save the man,” as Pratt called it. The schools quickly spread across the US and other colonial countries like Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, Canada.

With the aid of Christian missionaries, the Canadian and American governments forcibly removed thousands of indigenous children from their families and made them attend these schools, where speaking indigenous languages and their cultural traditions and spiritual practices were prohibited. Children who did not comply with the rules were subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuse, as well as violence. According to some eyewitness accounts, priests, for example, would rape students, and when they got pregnant and gave birth, the babies would be killed, in some cases brutally by being burned in furnaces.

Indigenous children were forced to cut their braids, a very important part of their culture. Their names were changed. As punishment for speaking in their native language, some were forced to wash their mouths with soap, as if to imply that their mother tongues were dirty.