The Business of Killing Indians

 

Hey there! Boozhoo!

They didn't believe me when I wrote about Indian slavery (First Contact) in 2000, since there was nothing out there to read, for me and you, ordinary people.  But remember, it was in their archives, like scalp bounties. They just didn't bother to write about it. And get this: I am reading LEGACY OF VIOLENCE and hidden in the back of the book, in the notes, is the British hid and destroyed evidence of their crimes (ABOVE PHOTO) ... oh really? As if we had not noticed...

WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?

I think this question every time I watch a zoom lecture and some new book or person is rewriting history!

Not writing about it - that is/was a crime against humanity - how "supposed historians" hid, deleted or erased what happened - globally I might add... we should not forget it - and how the ANCIENT EMPIRE killed across continents. How long? Forever!

It's a pattern you see, once it emerges. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

KEEP IN MIND: THEY DID NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW. 

 

Professor discussed the history of scalp warfare in the southwest borderlands 

KRWG | By Scott Brocato

April 22, 2026 

Dr. William S. Kiser, author of "The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America"

Dr. William S. Kiser is a Las Cruces native and currently a professor of history and department chair at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He spoke about his latest book, “The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America” on April 23 at NMSU’s Branson Library. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Dr. Kiser about the talk and his book.

Scott Brocato:
First, give us an overview of what your book covers.

Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
The book itself covers about 250 years of North American history, and it spans geographically everywhere from French Canada in the 16 and 1700s to Mexico in the 1800s to Gold Rush California, mid-nineteenth century Texas, the British colonies. So it's actually very expansive in scope with respect to what I call “scalp warfare” or Indian scalp hunting.  It was a practice that I'm sure we'll get into more here in a few minutes, but a practice that was very prominent across the continent as a form of colonial conquest.  My talk itself at NMSU (April 23) is going to focus exclusively on scalp warfare in the southwest borderlands, so it will not be nearly as broad as the book.

Scott Brocato:
Well, let's go ahead and talk about scalp warfare. Explain what it was and when and where it began.

Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
So “scalp warfare” is, it's a term that I coined myself in writing this book to describe a specific type of violence and conflict that commonly occurred across North America between various Indian tribes and various colonial groups. And of course, there are many forms of conflict between natives and newcomers. Many of those fall within more traditional frameworks of, you know, whether it's the British Army, the French Army, the Mexican Army, the U.S. Army, and members of various tribes.

But scalp warfare was different in that it involved not professional armies, but it involved usually paramilitary operatives and even civilians who temporarily kind of set aside their normal daily activities or businesses and took up arms in small groups to track down, fight, and kill Indians who were viewed as enemies at the time.  And there was an economic incentive behind this because they would take the scalps and oftentimes they could redeem those scalps for cash payments with the local governments that sponsored these types of actions.  So it's a form of conflict and violence that proliferates over a three-century period, not in isolation, but alongside other more traditional conflicts between Indians and settlers.

Scott Brocato:
Focusing on the mid-19th century, the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora implementing their bounty systems to monetize the killing and scalping of Apache people as a strategy for conquest, why was this system implemented about the Apaches? Why were they so hated?

Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
In the case of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora and the Apache tribe, there was a long-standing hatred between the two groups that went back into the 1700s, and it revolved a lot around reciprocal raiding and captive taking.  For multiple generations, Apaches had raided rancherias, haciendas in northern Mexico; and killed, plundered, and taken women and children as captives, and then assimilated those captives into their Apache tribe.  At the same time, Mexican settlers were doing the same thing to Apaches.  So this was really a reciprocal type of violence that bred a deep, deep animosity and hatred between the two sides over many decades.

And by the time you get to the 1830s, the local Mexican governments in Chihuahua and Sonora--and again, this was done at the local level, not the national level in Mexico City--as a new strategy for their warfare against Apaches, they began passing laws that allowed for the payment of scout bounties to try to encourage civilians, in addition to the Mexican army and soldiers, to encourage civilians to go out and try to hunt and kill Apaches for profit.  And the scout bounties that they implemented in Chihuahua and Sonora offered the equivalent of, in a lot of cases, an entire year of wages for the average Mexican worker at the time.

So there were windfall profits to be, you know, potentially to be gained by killing Apaches, and the scalps were used as the evidence scalp hunters actually called scalps receipts. They use this, I call the book The Business of Killing Indians, because a lot of the scalp hunters actually used business language and they treated it as a business to make money, the profit incentive. They would redeem the scalps, or what they called the receipts, in the state capital for the bounty money.

Dr. William S. Kiser, "The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America"

Scott Brocato:
There were even public celebrations about the slain victims, their scalps on display, for example, at a church.

Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
Yeah, and that's a very common characteristic of scalp warfare across time and place. In the case of northern Mexico specifically, in addition to the economic incentives for taking scalps, there was also a performative aspect, kind of like a martial masculinity, and it was also performing racial hatred.

So the scalps were taken and then redeemed for the cash rewards, and then afterwards, the scalps would oftentimes be displayed publicly in these towns, sometimes on the plaza, sometimes in front of the church, sometimes across the front of the courthouse. Sometimes the scalp hunters themselves would, after receiving the cash payout, they would keep the scalps and they would decorate their houses with them. There are actual eyewitness accounts of scalp hunters who had scalps nailed to their front doors.

And this was a performative aspect, because these men were treated as celebrities and heroes in their local societies, and so displaying playing the scalps and celebrating it, was a way of sort of celebrating their victories over their native enemies. And it was a way of demonstrating their celebrity status in these frontier communities in really a very gruesome, macabre kind of way.

Scott Brocato:
When did scalp warfare begin to wane, in particular the warfare we're discussing between Mexico and Texas?

Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
With respect to the Southwest borderlands, the scalp warfare begins really in the 1830s. The first codified scalp bounty in Mexico is 1837, and it continues to occur...there are certain time periods where it's more prominent than others. It was very common in the 1840s and ‘50s. less so in the 1870s and ‘80s, but the last known Apache scalp that was redeemed for a bounty in Mexico was in 1886, and actually it was September of 1886. And that's significant, because September of 1886 is the same month that Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. Army, and the Apache War is officially ended. So scalp warfare, in an official kind of a sense, with respect to the Apache tribe, literally ended the same month that the broader wars between the Apaches and the American and Mexican militaries ended.

Scott Brocato:
What lessons can be gleaned from learning about scalp warfare of the past? Do you see any modern parallels--minus actual scalping--in terms of similar racial animosity today?

Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
Certainly, the racial animosities are there in different areas. In the book, I don't really try to draw specific parallels or comparisons to current events or examples of racial violence. But what I do try to do in the book is I try to highlight the legacies of scalp warfare, because it was so violent, so brutal, and rooted in such deep hatred, and the legacies in particular for the victims with respect to indigenous oral traditions. and oral histories.

So, for example, in the case of the Chiricahua Apaches, there's the oral traditions of the tribe, which hold that an Apache person who is killed will enter the afterlife in the same physical condition that they leave their earthly life.  So what this means is that if an Apache is killed and then scalped, they are essentially doomed to an eternity in the afterlife in that defiled, humiliated condition. So scalp warfare--and that's the Apache example, but many tribes have variations of those oral traditions about an afterlife and the mutilation of the corpses--so scalp warfare has a sort of a spiritual, a traumatic impact, not just on the victims, but on their survivors as well. And that is passed down through oral histories and oral traditions in ways that I try to highlight, you know, sort of the continuity of that trauma.

And there are also other examples of, you know, the modern legacies of scalp warfare in terms of memorialization.  For example, in Nova Scotia and Canada in the last decade or so, they've taken down several public monuments to former British governors who implemented scalp bounties back in the 1700s.  So you start to see it's less prominent and certainly less common, but there are memorials and monuments across Canada, the United States. celebrating perpetrators of scalp warfare, that there's kind of been a reckoning with that in modern times, similar, I guess, in some ways to Confederate monuments, but on a much, much smaller scale.

 

If you want to read my book ATROCITY: ALMOST DEAD INDIANS, I shared what I could find about scalp bounties - and it was shocking... 

Vanessa Ambtman-Smith is challenging colonial systems in healthcare

 Arieh Leving, Senior Video Producer

•  Apr 20, 2026  

Professor Vanessa Ambtman Smith from the Department of Geography and Environment and the Indigenous Studies Program, March 18, 2026.

Kai Wilson / GAZETTE  

Vanessa Ambtman-Smith’s first experience at a hospital lasted 21 days. 

Now, she’s making it her life’s mission to make sure Indigenous children never have to fight for their rights in Canada’s healthcare system again.

Born during the Sixties Scoop, Vanessa was removed from her home and immediately placed into the child welfare system. After 21 days of waiting in the hospital, she was adopted by a non-Indigenous family in Alberta.

Today, Vanessa is an assistant professor in both the department of geography and environment and the Indigenous studies program at Western University. Before that, she spent two decades working in the healthcare field.

“My journey has naturally gone from working as an advocate in Indigenous healthcare to becoming a professor and an Indigenous health researcher. I’ve had to be an educator my whole career,” says Vanessa.

Her research explores Indigenous healing practices and traditional healing spaces within hospital settings. Through education and policy reform, Vanessa is committed to removing the colonial foundations of healthcare systems and making sure that hospitals are safe places for Indigenous patients.

According to Vanessa, anti-Indigenous racism is one of the most significant determinants of Indigenous health. She attributes this outcome to how non-Indigenous people have been educated to carry biases and stereotypes towards Indigenous people.

Vanessa recounts the story of Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man, who died from a bladder infection after waiting for 34 hours in a hospital emergency room.

KEEP READING:

https://westerngazette.ca/culture/vanessa-ambtman-smith-is-challenging-colonial-systems-in-healthcare/article_afc69aa7-3cc7-423e-83b6-9f5cae210b5b.html 

 

This Day in History: April 16, 2013: Supreme Court hears ‘Baby Veronica’ custody case

Charleston-area custody fight centered on Indian Child Welfare Act and Cherokee father’s parental rights

APRIL 16, 2026 

WASHINGTON (WCSC) — On this day in 2013, a Charleston-area custody fight landed before the United States Supreme Court in Washington, DC, as justices heard oral arguments in the “Baby Veronica” case.

After an hour and a half of emotional arguments, the justices took up the battle over a 3-year-old girl whose South Carolina adoptive parents were fighting her Cherokee biological father for custody under the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Supporters on both sides watched as lawyers argued three key questions: whether her biological father, Dusten Brown, counted as a “parent” under the ICWA, whether the law only applied when there was already an Indian family in place and whether parts of the law were constitutional at all.

Two months later, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that several core ICWA protections did not apply to a non-custodial Native American father when the child had never lived with him and sent the case back to South Carolina.  By that fall, after more legal wrangling in South Carolina and even Oklahoma, Baby Veronica was returned to her adoptive parents on James Island.

The case became one of the most closely watched custody and tribal rights cases in decades.

PLEASE USE THE SEARCH BAR ON THIS WEBSITE TO READ ABOUT THIS CASE... 

ICT NEWS + more

 Trump Cuts, the Breathing Healing Bus, Native Sports and More

 

 

VIDEOS and HEADLINES: APTN:

Edmonton judge has paused potential referendum on Alberta separation - APTN News

The Need for a New History (podcast): Stolen Science, hosted by Dr. Darrell Racine

STORY:  https://news.brandonu.ca/2026/04/16/brandon-university-professor-launches-podcast-exposing-the-stolen-scientific-legacy-of-indigenous-peoples/

This episode questions preconceived notions of Indigenous contributions to Canadian and western European societies. It argues that we require a new perspective on Indigenous people’s participation in and influence on historical events and social setting. The episode concludes with the idea that we all become better informed when we recognize Indigenous participation in the production of science.

Progress for Indigenous communities often takes decades, as seen with NAGPRA

 Through Indigenous Eyes: Slowly but surely

Graphic by Elise Samson  

By Sorsha Khitikian|  April 16, 2026

This semester, I have tackled relevant, breaking news stories as they have occurred.  From the Bad Bunny Superbowl Halftime Show to the horrific acts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the immediate issues of the day have been my major focus.  While I believe this coverage is vital, I also recognize that the vast majority of Indigenous issues lie beneath the surface because they have remained issues for years, decades, even centuries.  Progress on these issues happens in spurts and is often covered through a non-Indigenous lens.  As this is my last column for this semester, I want to bring attention to one of those issues: NAGPRA, or the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act.

Prevalent within American popular knowledge is the issue of the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ or the belief that Native Americans were extinct or on their way to extinction.  This understanding of Indigenous people was legitimized through the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in the early 1900s.  Anthropologists and archaeologists would go to traditionally Native areas and gravesites (after Indigenous people were forced onto contained reservations), dig up ancestral bodies and take them for scientific study.  They wrote and studied Indigenous people as if their entire cultures were dead.  Then, bodies were displayed by educational institutions and museums. While this process began in the early 1900s, the same display tactics have been documented in grave robberies as recently as four months ago.

The University of California, Berkeley, was one of the premier institutions for anthropology.  Located in my tribe’s proverbial backyard, anthropologists affiliated with the institution stole over 40 bodies of my ancestors.  My tribe is not alone; in 2024, it was announced that over 215,000 bodies of Indigenous people were stolen and displayed across the United States.  Millions of funerary objects have also been reported.

NAGPRA, a federal law passed in 1990, orders museums and educational institutions that have Indigenous bodies and funerary objects in their collections to repatriate said items to the tribes they originated from.  The original law was astonishingly limited in scope; only federally recognized tribes were eligible to have items repatriated, museums had the ability to delay repatriation almost indefinitely and private collections were not required to be evaluated.  Accordingly, NAGPRA led to astonishingly little repatriation progress over the following 30 years.

In 2023, the non-profit news organization ProPublica published an expose on NAGPRA’s failures.  In a series of investigative articles, it brought public attention to this systemic issue. It published and has been consistently updating a database that shows which institutions are actually engaging in repatriation.  In the same year, the Department of the Interior revised NAGPRA to close loopholes, set a firm time limit for repatriation and strengthen the power of tribes in the repatriation process. These changes have already had profound effects, with institutions hiring curators that specialize in NAGPRA and repatriation becoming increasingly accessible to tribes. However, systemic issues, such as federal recognition and private collectors, remain.

While 2023 was a watershed moment, progress concerning NAGPRA has occurred slowly but surely.  For example, my home state of California adopted NAGPRA at the state level in 2001.  In 2020, they amended the law so that institutions were required to repatriate bodies to non-federally recognized tribes.  And the work still isn’t done.  For example, while UC Berkeley repatriated 18 of my tribe’s remains between 2002–05, it has yet to make 23 of my ancestors available, even 20 years later.  Nationally, 42% of all remains have not been repatriated.  These numbers can be shocking, especially since issues with NAGPRA have been criminally underreported.

Engaging with Indigenous issues requires you to confront your own knowledge biases and prejudices.  As Americans, we must unlearn the ‘Vanishing Indian’ trope, we must recognize that our universities and institutions have benefited from grave robbery and we must advocate for Indigenous communities that are fighting for justice.  We must also think critically about what stories are not being told.  This work is a labor of empathy and connection; it is meant to make us uncomfortable, to make us question and to make us care.  This work extends far beyond NAGPRA.  I hope that, in some small way, this column has helped you to see the world through Indigenous eyes.  And I can’t wait to continue on this journey with you.

SOURCE:  https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2026/04/through-indigenous-eyes-slowly-but-surely

These reels are experimental, unconventional and may challenge any misconceptions people may have when they think of Inuit art

Newly uncovered Inuit animation from the '70s screening for the first time

Films created in an animation workshop in Kinngait were unscreened for more than 50 years

Bianca McKeown · CBC News April 12 

A still from 'Arctic Workshop Reel 1', a newly uncovered sand stop-motion animation by Timmun Alariaq. (National Film Board of Canada)

Of all the animation reels made in Kinngait in the 1970s, Jamesie Fournier says he remembers the sand reels best.

“It has an ethereal, dreamlike quality to it," he said. "Just seeing animation in sand and seeing one image blur into another, but also seeing a culture reflected into that as well, something that's uniquely Inuit... I thought, well, that is quite something.” 

Many of these stop motion animation sand reels were made by Timmun Alariaq in the 1972 Sikusilarmiut animation workshop in Kinngait, Nunavut.  The workshop was put on by the National Film Board of Canada, with support from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the government of the Northwest Territories. 

Some of those sand reels aired in the 18-minute film “Animation from Cape Dorset” in 1973, which went on to win an award at Animafest Zagreb and gain international attention. 

But many reels were put in storage and never screened to a wider audience. 

That was until last summer, when the National Film Board of Canada uncovered and digitized these forgotten reels, labelled “Arctic Workshop Reel 1", "Arctic Workshop Reel 2" and "Arctic Workshop Reel 3."

Watch "Arctic Workshop Reel 1", one of the films newly digitized by the National Film Board of Canada (above)👆

These newly uncovered reels run for more than 50 minutes and are made by 12 different filmmakers — nearly triple the number of reels first screened to the public in “Animation from Cape Dorset.”  

“Think of it as a director's cut,” Fournier said. “All of [the reels] had never seen the light of day or had never gotten into any sort of acclaim or accreditation for the artists. So, being able to have this body of work, and being able to make it widely available to folks is really an exciting, exciting time.”

Fournier is the coordinator for the Aulajut Nunavut International Film Festival, where the reels screened to a public audience for the first time in Iqaluit this week.

The reels will be screening in Kinngait next week and Igloolik the week after to share them with more communities. They are also available to watch on the National Film Board of Canada’s website. 

Uncovered reels are 'modern and experimental'

Peter Raymont directed the 1975 film “Sikusilarmiut” about the workshop. He says he was “honoured” to be invited to go to Kinngait and make the film. 

“Amazing footage, right?” he said, smiling. “Made by these kids just sort of experimenting with various animation techniques. And I was told to splice it all together and to send it to film festivals.”

Raymont says it’s “wonderful” that these uncovered animation reels are now available to watch.

“That's remarkable, because we didn't include all the films, obviously, that the animators of [Kinngait] were doing in 1973 when they won that award,” he said. “They kept making films ... and now they're all available to see.”

The stop motion animation reel 'Magic Man' directed by Salomonie Pootoogook and starring Timmun Alariaq made in the 1970s. This reel was a part of the 1973 film 'Animation from Cape Dorset' and was screened for the public at the time. (National Film Board of Canada)

Like Raymont, Fournier says the reels are experimental, unconventional and may challenge any misconceptions people may have when they think of Inuit art.

“Here you see a body of work that is very modern and experimental, especially for the 1970s era," he said. "So we have this feeling of a new wave of artistic expression coming out that defies the traditional beliefs that we [have about] Inuit art.” 

Fournier says these reels still hold up today. He said he’s equally amazed by the other vibrant work made by artists from these workshops, like the reel “Magic Man”, which depicts a person flying. 

“That's the exact same thing that people are producing now, just with their cell phones as a reel clip,” he said, smiling. “But that’s what these guys were doing in 1972 on the land in Kinngait.”

SoURCE:  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/newly-uncovered-inuit-animation-reels-from-1970s-screening-for-first-time-9.7159815 

Transportation remains key issue impacting MMIWG2S on Highway of Tears, 2 decades later

 IMPORTANT

This sign warning women against hitchhiking is displayed in Moricetown, a Wet'suwet'en village 33 kilometres north of Smithers. (Simon Charland-Faucher/CBC)

 

READ:  https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/mmiwg2s-highway-tears-transportation-9.7159942 

New billboards for missing and murdered women aim to change narrative of B.C.'s 'Highway of Tears' 

Bi-Giwen: Coming Home – Truth Telling from #60sScoop

blog photo (not exhibit)

New Exhibit – Opening Saturday, April 11, 2026. This travelling exhibition from the Legacy of Hope Foundation was developed with input from the National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network. This innovative and challenging exhibition features the first-person oral testimonies of 12 Indigenous Survivors of the Sixties Scoop, and reflects upon their pain, loss, enduring strength, courage, and resilience. Warning: This exhibition contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some visitors and may be triggering. The Legacy of Hope Foundation is a national, Indigenous-led, charitable organization that has been working to promote healing and Reconciliation in Canada for more than 19 years.

MORE INFO

http://www.museumwindsor.ca

WHERE

Chimczuk Museum

401 Riverside Drive West

Windsor, Ontario

ICT NEWS

 Indian Country Today News!

Living with Treaties Conference

 IMPORTANT TO KNOW!

Commentary on the Final Panel Today in the Living with Treaties Conference

By Matthew L.M. Fletcher on April 10, 2026

Eric Hemenway, Mae Wright, and Emily Proctor — all citizens of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians — spoke today at the Living with Treaties conference. Eric worked for two decades with the tribe as historian and archivist; he now works for UM SEAS, focusing on public education. Mae is the tribal historic preservation officer. Emily is an elected official, formerly serving as tribal child protective services worker. None are lawyers but every lawyer who represents tribal interests should listen carefully whenever people who are their clients speak. Eric, known to some wags as the “bones guy,” brought home dozens, if not hundreds, of ancestors from their places of exile. Mae must make decisions about which cultural resources to pursue under NAGPRA. Emily must make decisions on which portions of the Waganakising homeland the tribal council should pursue (she buys a lot of wetlands). They all work with extremely limited resources, forcing them to make existentially challenging decisions. Many of these decisions involve trauma. It’s one thing to acknowledge the trauma caused by dispossession of Indigenous relatives and resources. It is another to make decisions to expend limited tribal resources to bring home relatives, sacred objects, and land. Successes happen, but disappointments do, too, and they can build up, sometimes becoming overwhelming. Not long ago, the tribe sued Emmet County and the State of Michigan, seeking judicial recognition of their reservation boundaries established in 1836 and 1855 treaties. They did so for two reasons. First, to assume authority under NAGPRA to be able to respond to the discovery of ancestors remains and funerary objects. Second, to assume authority under the Indian Child Welfare Act. Both laws establish territorial jurisdiction within reservation boundaries. Close to LTBB is the footprint of Holy Childhood Indian Boarding School, where dozens of Anishinaabe children perished and were buried in mass graves. In the absence of recognized reservation tribe has no authority to properly bring home those relatives. Similarly, Emmet County judges long have been reluctant to transfer ICWA cases to tribal court, which would stop being a problem if the reservation boundaries were recognized. The tribe lost the reservation boundaries case, however. These issues show reasons why tribes do what they do. From a tribal lawyer’s perspective, Eric, Mae, and Emily are clients. I don’t mean clients like the Indigenous statesmen that show up at conferences like NCAI and testify in the Senate Committee. I mean real tribal leaders, mostly unelected bureaucrats who do the real work. A panel like this should be at every Indian law conference.

Indigenous people 8 times more likely to be incarcerated than others (Canada)

  

KEEP READING:  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nunatsiavut-government-response-9.7155937 

Tribal leaders reflect on a year of uncertainty — and possibility

 

by Anna V. Smith, B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster, Chad Bradley and Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi, High Country News
April 9, 2026

Over a year into the second Trump administration, Indigenous communities have seen dramatic changes, from rescinding land-management policies that were more inclusive of Indigenous knowledge and reducing $1.5 billion in climate funding for tribal initiatives to removing tribal flags from Veterans Affairs hospitals. The administration has regularly bypassed tribal consultation or rolled back the work the previous administration did in partnership with tribes.

---

To better understand the on-the-ground impacts, High Country News reporters and editors spoke with the leaders of intertribal coalitions, commissions and Native-run community organizations across the Western U.S. Tribal leaders described the haphazard changes that affected their funding and staffing amid an atmosphere of uncertainty, but a few also mentioned a sense of possibility: While some changes have caused irrevocable community harm, there are also unexpected opportunities within the disruption — opportunities to reflect, remember their elders and to make new choices with the generations to come in mind.

These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

---

Click to read about tribal leaders' experiences during this time

Autumn Gillard (Southern Paiute)

Coordinator for the Grand Staircase Escalante Intertribal Coalition

During his first term, President Donald Trump shrank Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half. Last spring, the five tribes with ancestral lands within Grand Staircase-Escalante formed an intertribal coalition to better advocate for the monument and ensure that their perspectives were included in its management under a second Trump administration. In early March, Republican members of Congress sought to repeal the monument resource management plan that had been approved under the Biden administration.

Location: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah

“The groundwork actually started in 2019 to establish the coalition. A previous cultural manager from one of the tribes said we really need to have a tribal coalition for this monument, so that Indigenous voices can be heard.

“The resource management plan prior to 2020 did not include Indigenous voices in the management of our ancestral landscape, and so we had worked diligently as the coalition to make sure that we were putting comments in for this new process for the resource management plan that was approved in January of 2025.

“The (congressional actions) would severely impact the process that tribes had taken to integrate our traditional ecological knowledge into the commenting process for this management plan. It could also prohibit a future Resource Management Plan — maybe there wouldn't even be one. It would diminish all of the consultation that was held between the government and tribes. We worked so hard, and we have some individuals that have worked on these comments that are no longer with us. We’re not going to be able to re-retrieve that beautiful cultural knowledge.”

---

Cody Desautel (Colville)

President of the Intertribal Timber Council

The Intertribal Timber Council, which comprises some 50 tribal nations, is focused on the management of forests, fire and natural resources. 

Location: Colville Reservation, Washington

“The Department of Interior fire reorganization has us concerned. The structure and how the leadership gets built out will be important in ensuring that they understand Indian Country; what some of their responsibilities will be for protecting tribal trust resources and then how they navigate (contracting with tribal governments), which will be new to most of them. There’s a lot of unknowns going into this fire season.

“With the reduction of the workforce in the U.S. Forest Service, and particularly under the leadership of the new chief, there seems to be a renewed objective to partner with tribes. We’ve got several bills working through Congress now that would expand tribal co-management authorities on adjacent federal land, and we've had some discussions about what shared stewardship agreements might look like. There's as much tribal-specific legislation moving through Congress as any point I've seen in my career.

“We always tend to pivot, recognizing where we’ve got opportunities with any given administration, and sometimes we pick up one political agenda with a change and then set down one that we worked on in the past. From a forestry and fire perspective, typically there’s a lot of alignment with those, and so we seem to be able to maintain some of the momentum that we’ve gained in past Congresses. 

“I think there’s always opportunity, even when there’s change. One of the best things that has come out of this administration is the focus on partnerships. Downsizing the federal government has impacts to us; it also creates opportunity when they're looking to have other partners do some of that work. I think tribes are situated to do that.”

KEEP READING: https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-leaders-reflect-on-a-year-of-uncertainty-and-possibility/

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

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Native lands have become the latest target for Big Tech

READ:  https://ictnews.org/news/in-indian-country-data-centers-come-with-a-familiar-threat-of-colonialism-these-organizers-are-fighting-back/

Canadian government has decided to end funding for MMIWG2S+

 

Indigenous Groups on Ending of Some Federal MMIWG Supports – April 8, 2026 -  👉click CPAC

Escape from Psychiatry

An Essay on the Locked Door Between You and a Drug-Free Life

Unbekoming Apr 10

You changed your diet. You found a naturopath. You stopped filling prescriptions you never understood and started asking questions your GP couldn’t answer. One afternoon you walked out of the clinic where you’d been a patient for fifteen years, and you didn’t go back. Nobody stopped you. Nobody called. The transition from one paradigm to another was, in the end, unremarkable. You found a different practitioner who spoke a language that made more sense, and you moved on.

Now imagine doing that on 40mg of paroxetine.

You can’t. And the reason you can’t reveals something about psychiatry that separates it from every other branch of medicine: the treatment itself locks you in. Not metaphorically. Chemically.

A person who decides their GP’s approach to cholesterol or blood pressure is wrong can simply stop taking the statin or the ACE inhibitor, experience some rebound effects, and move on. The decision is uncomfortable but it’s a decision. A person on psychiatric drugs — antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, mood stabilisers — faces a problem that is not comparable. Their brain has been physically restructured by the medication. Stopping it is not a decision. It is an ordeal that can last months or years, that can produce symptoms worse than anything that brought them to psychiatry in the first place, and that the entire medical system is designed to interpret as proof that the drugs were needed all along.

READ: https://open.substack.com/pub/unbekoming/p/escape-from-psychiatry?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email 

Rhythms of the Heart (video)

 David Moses Bridges, a nationally recognized Maine Passamaquoddy craftsman, fights to preserve his heritage, culture, and family while battling a rare form of cancer. Told through intimate and touching interviews, indigenous artistry, and original music.

Mapping Violence of Missing Murdered

Wisconsin woman teams with MIT to map violence against Indigenous people in Great Lakes region

https://www.wakingwomenhealingint.org/

  https://youtu.be/p5rAkdEVC9g?si=2va4O4VPvFYc3mi7

This is a growing map of MMIW/P resources available across Turtle Island to help groups and families quickly locate agencies, non-profits, grassroots, and other organizations that provide direct services to families of MMIW/P and survivors of violence. The map was co-developed by Waking Women Healing Institute, the Data + Feminism Lab, and MIT students. We hope to improve responses and increase access to support for those experiencing violence and cases of MMIW/P.  Each dot opens a pop-up that shares the location, contact details, and services available for each known entity. Notably, this is an on-going, collaborative effort to map Indigenous-led, community-based organizations and we welcome your suggestions for groups that should be on the map. Please reach out to us with your suggestions at sthompson@wakingwomenhealingint.org and dignazio@mit.edu.

Waewaenen to Profs. Elizabeth Rule, Gabriella Carolini and Larry Susskind for leading the Indigenous Environmental Planning course from which our collaboration began.

MAP👇

To view the map you can scan the QR code above or click this link: https://shorturl.at/hOGgt

We have expanded the mapped resources to include so called Canada, United States, and Mexico.  The image to the left is a highlighted view of what users will experience when navigating the map.  They can search and filter resources by 3 main categories: Direct Services, Coalition, and Both Coalition & Services.

NEWS and UPDATES from Trace

Ellowyn's Lakota doll

REBLOG from 2011 AND EDITED:

 

I thank everyone for reading this BLOG and for signing up to get it via email (top box).
 

Back in 2011:
On average I hear from three new adoptees each week. That is good. That was and is my prayer. That is why I am a journalist who blogs about adoption news and being adopted. I will help anyone who contacts me and I will get them the help they need if I cannot do it myself.
I have been working all year on a brand new second edition of ONE SMALL SACRIFICE and it should be out in a few weeks. It's the same book with a few more chapters. It has two prefaces, four major chapters and an epilogue.  Also, there is a new WARNING to readers that this is NOT a chronology but written as I was learning and remembering my own childhood and doing the search for my family.  My book has Indian history born of pain and experience, history you won't read in newspapers or mentioned in North American classrooms.
 

One of the best comments I hear is I did a lot of research. Yes, indeed. Over five years and counting and I am still learning.
Book 2: TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects is ready and we are looking for a publisher.  This new anthology goes further and tells individual adoptee stories, in their own words. This book will change hearts and exposes more of our history! I will let you know when we do get it published.
The ultimate goal of this blog is to find new adoptees (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects) and to have a group of adoptees testify before Congress to expose how we were adopted and erased from our tribal nations - deliberately.  Some of us were physically and sexually abused (YES) and in many states we are STILL denied access to adoption records so we cannot go home to our tribes and families.

 

A few days ago I made a new relative in South Dakota, Evelyn Red Lodge, also an adoptee and a journalist at Native Sun News. Evelyn is working to make these hearings happen, in the not-too-distant future. She helped NPR do their three-part investigation (posted on this blog in November) which made headlines across the globe. 
Adoptees like Evelyn and Sandy White Hawk at First Nations Orphans Association are rewriting history and helping others to heal with their activism. Here is a link to Evelyn's story on Indianz.com: http://64.38.12.138/News/2011/003731.asp
Evelyn is helping to organize a rally for residents in South Dakota to stop the adoptions of Indian children in her state. More happen each day, in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act. 32 states are in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act, according to recent NPR reports.
As I wrote on this blog, our governments in North American made us orphans and sealed our records so we'd disappear completely. But they can't erase our blood or our memory.
If erasure was the intention of the Indian Adoption Projects - to separate families and ensure adoptees would lose contact with their tribal relatives - in many ways they succeeded.
Now, today, our major task is to expose this attempted ethnic cleansing and rejoin our families and our nations.
Until all adoption records are open, in particular the Indian Adoption Projects and Indian Programs, conducted secretly in many states, I will not rest.
And neither should you...

The Challenge of Indian Child Welfare Act Enforcement in the Modern Age of Child Dependency

 

Kathryn E. Fort has published “The Challenge of Indian Child Welfare Act Enforcement in the Modern Age of Child Dependency” in the Yale Law Journal Forum.

Here is the abstract:

Nearly fifty years after its passage, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) remains a vital part of the child welfare system to protect Native children and families. Since then, both federal and state law have incorporated provisions of ICWA for the benefit of all families in that system. However, ICWA itself is regularly disregarded and misunderstood by practitioners and judicial officers. This Essay describes the application of ICWA in the current child welfare system, as well as identifies programs designed to improve implementation of the law, all from the perspective of an appellate practitioner with twenty years of ICWA experience.  While there is no magic wand to wave that can fix the persistent barriers to ICWA enforcement and implementation, the continued work of those committed to changing the current system creates solutions that can benefit Native families and, if history is any guide, ultimately all families.

right click to enlarge

LINK: https://turtletalk.blog/2026/04/09/kate-fort-on-icwa-enforcement/#like-113815 

 

PDF: https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/01KN2PHFX065GCH031FH4KAC1J.pdf