They Hid Him from Residential School, He Grew to Be Chief | The Tyee

[Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Find the first here.]

Chief Adam Dick was the boy who lived. He was the child in the bullrushes. Whether you prefer J.K. Rowling or the Bible, there are many legends across many cultures that tell of children hidden from malign forces intent on destroying a people and a way of life — heroes who must survive before re-emerging to continue the battle. On the west coast of B.C., Chief Adam Dick was destined to be that kind of warrior.
His chieftain name is Kwaxsistalla Wathl’thla. Kwaxsistalla means “The smoke from his big fire reaches around the world;” Wathl’thla means “the late.”  Chief Dick died of heart failure last year at age 89. He was a chieftain of the Kawadillikall Clan of the Dzawatainuk Tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, and took with him an unmatched knowledge of Kwakwaka’wakw music, culture and practice.
But before he died he succeeded in passing much of his knowledge along, and in the process helped transform our common understanding of life on the coast before Europeans arrived, and before the residential school system devastated Indigenous families.
“We would have lost the knowledge,” says Kim Recalma-Clutesi, also known as Ogwiloqwa of the Qualicum First Nation. “For six generations children in that area were removed to go to residential school. The only way to transmit that knowledge is to actually live there with the old people. He was the last contact with those really old teachings.”
If you picture the residential school system as a giant meteor, an obliterating force that wreaked havoc in First Nations communities across Canada, you might assume all was lost. But the impact did leave survivors. Adam Dick was one. It is no accident that young Adam, a descendant of clan chiefs, was spared. His deliverance was the collective act of his community.

GREAT READ: They Hid Him from Residential School, He Grew to Be Chief | The Tyee

Read the first in this two-part series here. 

I see dead people

Repost from 11/12/2010

By Trace Hentz (blog editor)

Well, actually I do not see dead people but I know people who are living like they are dead.

OK, imagine this.... You are a child and you disappear. Not only are you upset, your entire family is crazy with despair and your parents are distraught. They might go on television and beg the people who took you to please bring you back. Your mom and dad might even divorce since they cannot forget you and they can’t seem to heal since you are missing.

You (the child) on the other hand, might be too young to fight back, or even try and escape. But you want to.

That is child abduction and we all take this seriously in American and all over the world.

Now, change the word child to adoptee.

This life changing event: “adoption” does change you and your parents. America and the world do not think of adoption as abduction but I do. Why? It feels the same to the child. And to some mothers, it feels exactly like your child was abducted.

The trauma of being abducted or adopted is the same for the child. You are feeling you are not where you are supposed to be. Let’s not get into the medical terms but those words do exist in medical journals.

So, I ask you, when will people who adopt children begin to understand that adoptees have feelings they cannot describe or display? Some adopters I know have taken this very personally and have tried to make the child feel better and assure them they will meet their natural parents someday. I have friends who have adopted and some are remarkable in their sensitivity. Some of them advocate for open adoption, so their adopted child meets their parent on a regular basis, if at all possible.

So, if you are adoptive parents and reading this, I need you to do something TODAY. Forget that there are laws preventing disclosure when it’s a sealed adoption. I want you to request the adoption file – the legal proceedings. All of it! You signed the documents so you can request them.

OK, you did it. When your adopted child asks, I want you to tell them you have the name of their natural mother and that you will help her/him find their natural parent(s) when they turn 18. It depends on the child and when they ask. If they don’t ask, I want you to give them the file when they are 18 as a gift.

That is why I see dead people. If you are a mystery, it feels like you’re dead.

16th Annual Gathering for Our Children & Returning Adoptees Pow Wow

"It's that time of year again when we call out for our relatives who are making their way back to the circle. We encourage birth mothers/fathers and relatives to be part of this celebration of life and healing. Dancers! Please come dance and welcome our relatives back to our circle. Adoptees, formerly fostered individuals, birth relatives, foster parents, foster youth, adoptive parents and your children - this pow wow is for you, come and celebrate and let us celebrate with you!" 

- Sandy White Hawk

Why ICWA still matters

Here

SALT LAKE CITY — Over the summer, Shari Pena’s 3-month-old foster son chuckled for the first time when his older sister sneezed, kicking off a new family tradition.

The Penas gathered to celebrate the giggle, a milestone in the child’s Navajo culture. They shared a chicken and rice dish in their West Valley home and took a pinch of salt from the baby’s palm, a gesture symbolizing his generosity.

As the federal law governing child welfare cases for Native American children has withstood recent legal challenges in Utah and in other states, the Penas are among those cheering the victories. The Indian Child Welfare Act sets special standards in the adoption and foster care proceedings and gives preference to Native American families — part of an effort by Congress to correct historical bias against them.

“It’s important that these kids stay in native homes,” Pena said. “We understand one another, our past and our ancestors.”

Pena, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said certain aspects of Navajo culture mirror her own upbringing in Oklahoma, including a strong focus on family. For newer factors like the first laugh party, she seeks guidance from the child’s biological grandmother and his four foster siblings.

ICWA Article in the Deseret News by ilpc

Indicted Paul Petersen involved in ICWA case(s)

Here.

Indian Child Welfare Act experts agreed that the Bright Star contract potentially misled the adoptive parents by saying the law “does not apply” in their situation.

“That is just wrong,” said Professor Fort, who also serves as director of the Indian Law Clinic at Michigan State University and authored a case law book titled American Indian Children and the Law.

She pointed to a section in the Indian Child Welfare Act that states the law does apply in adoptions of Native children. And she invoked a federal regulation published in 2016, which states that the Indian Child Welfare Act applies in any “voluntary proceeding that could prohibit the parent or Indian custodian from regaining custody of the child upon demand.”

In other words, the Indian Child Welfare Act applies in voluntary adoption cases when a Native birth mother gives up her parental rights. It’s unclear from the September Bright Star contract whether the birth mother agreed to give up her parental rights after the birth of her child.

Mormon Paul Petersen’s adoption work was the focus of an Arizona Republic article in 1998. Petersen started facilitating adoptions as a college student. At left is Matt Long, who is now Petersen’s attorney.

This is the gentleman who is also now indicted for trafficking Marshallese women and selling their babies. 

ilpc | October 22, 2019 at 12:10 pm | Tags: adoptions, Arizona, baby selling, Bright Star, ICWA, marshall islands, Paul Petersen, trafficking, Utah | Categories: Author: Kate E. Fort, ICWA, Research | URL: https://wp.me/p7zky-kGl

➢	Paul Petersen Involved in at Least One ICWA Case by ilpc MORE: Marshallese Adoptions Fuel A Lucrative Practice For Some Lawyers

➢Arizona Native American leaders want adoption fraud probe expanded

Petersen, 44, was arrested Oct. 8 and indicted on 32 counts — including human smuggling, sale of a child, conspiracy and fraud — in three states. He’s been accused of recruiting, transporting and offering to pay more than 40 pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to adopt out their babies in the United States between November 2015 and May 2019. Petersen’s attorney has said prosecutors have miscast his client as a human smuggler. He could face a $5 million fine and up to 315 years in prison.
Rep. Myron Tsosie wants the investigation to be widened.
“Rather than protecting Native American children and keeping them with families from their tribes, his firm apparently is skirting the federal Indian Child Welfare Act to facilitate adoptions of native kids,” Tsosie said in the release.

Source: Arizona Native American leaders want adoption fraud probe expanded

Graves at Red Deer Industrial School

Shallow graves, deep scars: Unmarked cemetery in Alberta reflects atrocities at one of Canada’s deadliest residential schools

By Omar Mosleh Star Edmonton

Sun., Oct. 13, 2019

 

RED DEER—The red and yellow autumn leaves crunch under Lyle Keewatin Richards’ feet as he walks, sinking into the still snow on a small plot of private land on the outskirts of Red Deer. He treads carefully, for with every step he knows he may be walking on the grave of a child who attended the Red Deer Indian Industrial School.

The unmarked cemetery is located on a mostly empty stretch of farmer’s field, dotted with a few small shrubs and trees, next to a steep valley overlooking the Sylvan Creek. It’s about 500 metres away from the original site of the Red Deer Industrial School, established in 1892 and considered one of the most atrocious examples of the suffering, abuse and neglect that were rampant in Canada’s residential school system.

A 2008 geological survey found 20 burial sites in the field, but it is estimated between 50 and 70 children who attended the school between 1893 and 1918 are buried on the grounds. The Red Deer Industrial School was plagued by widespread disease, a defective sanitation system that led to further contamination and illness, underfunding, overcrowding and one of the highest mortality rates of any such school in Canada.

Richards stops to place a piece of tobacco on the ground, saying a prayer for the children in their final resting place. The only sign that this is more than just an empty field are two pairs of red and white prayer flags dangling from tree branches. Richards explains the flags went through a sweat lodge ceremony, and were prayed over by an Elder before being hung to honour the children.

Looking closer, one can observe slight depressions in the ground, marking the shallow graves.

“At this site there are little tiny graves,” Richards notes. “What the hell is that about? Some of the atrocities, I don’t even like to contemplate.”

As Richards walks, he recalls the time he welcomed a large group of students from various First Nations in Alberta to learn about the unmarked cemetery as part of a school field trip.

“I said I’m sure happy these kids are here, because they get to go home,” Richards said. “These kids never got to go home.”

Work continues to identify children who died at the Rapid City Indian Boarding School

October 15, 2019 | Megan Murat

 

RAPID CITY, SD —  Work continues in Rapid City to identify children who died at the Indian Boarding School and find ways to honor them.
At this point there are two known burial sites in town. One is in Mountain View Cemetery, where ten children are laid to rest. The other is an unmarked site near the former Sioux San Hospital which is said to hold an unknown number of graves.
The Indian Boarding School Lands Research Project is putting together a committee to properly mark the site.
“In conjunction with Mniluzahan Okolakiciyapi Ambassadors on their website as well as Black Hillls Area Foundation were trying to raise about $50,000 to put together a memorial and a fence.” said Heather Dawn Thompson, volunteer for Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Research Project.
The memorial would serve to represent both known and unknown children who died at the school and the fence would protect the property itself.
Another part of this research project has to do with the land where the boarding school was originally located.
Over 1,200 acres between Mountain View Drive and Canyon Lake Park once belonged to the Indian Boarding School. Over time the land has been divided up and re-purposed for different uses. About 40 acres of that land has been found to have been used in violation of federal law.
Talks are in the works of swapping land back for Native American use.
“Historically the requests have been for an Indian community center, for housing, for pow wow grounds for cultural centers,” continued Heather Dawn Thompson, “And so were having a conversation about what that looks like today.”
Thompson says they’ve been working closely with Rapid City and the school district to determine how to handle the situation.
The school district was originally gifted the land.
The organization is hosting four additional meetings this month and in November to discuss the land issue moving forward.

The U.S. stole generations of Indigenous children to open the West

The U.S. stole generations of Indigenous children to open the West Indian boarding schools held Native American youth hostage in exchange for land cessions. BY NICK ESTES

Nearly 200 Native children lie buried at the entrance of the Carlisle Barracks in the “Indian Cemetery” — the first thing you see when entering one of the United States’ oldest military installations. It is a grisly monument to the country’s most infamous boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and closed in 1918. Chiseled onto the white granite headstones, arranged in the uniform rows typical of veterans’ cemeteries in the U.S., are the names and tribal affiliations of children who came to Carlisle but never left. Thirteen gravestones list neither name nor tribe; they simply read “UNKNOWN.” It’s a chilling scene that I was unprepared for when I visited last year on the 100-year anniversary of the school’s closing. And the experience was made even more jarring by the mandatory background check and armed checkpoint I faced just to visit the cemetery and the school’s remnants. The campus is an active military base, and the heightened security measures are due to post-9/11 precautions. The unquiet graves of these young casualties of the nation’s bloody Indian wars lie next to the Army War College, which trains officers for the nation’s longest war, the war on terror. The cemetery was not supposed to be at the front entrance. It was an accident: In 1927, to make room for a parking lot, the Army dug up the children’s graves and relocated them behind the base — out of sight. Then, in 2001, the back of the base was turned into the entrance to satisfy new security protocols. Now, Carlisle’s deadly past is on full display. Carlisle, and boarding schools like it, are remembered as a dark chapter in the history of the ill-conceived assimilation policies designed to strip Native people of their cultures and languages by indoctrinating them with U.S. patriotism. But child removal is a longstanding practice, ultimately created to take away Native land. Although Carlisle is located in the East, it played a key role in pressuring the West’s most intransigent tribes to cede and sell land by taking their children hostage. A century after its closing, however, unanswered questions surround the Carlisle Indian School’s brutal legacy. Secrets once thought buried — why did so many children die there? — are coming to light. And the descendants of those interred are demanding more than just the return of their stolen ancestors. “The past of Carlisle is really about justice,” says Ben Rhodd, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s tribal historic preservation officer. Since April 2016, his office has been pursuing the return of 11 children buried at the Carlisle Indian Cemetery. Even in death, Rhodd explains, Rosebud’s children remain “prisoners of war,” held at a military base and unable to return to their home on the Rosebud Reservation, children who were “hostages taken to pacify the leadership of tribes that would dare stand against U.S. expansion and Manifest Destiny.” >> Read the rest of the story

Missing Chapter: A new series about hidden histories

How the US stole thousands of Native American children

In our latest episode of Missing Chapter, we explore this long legacy of the forced assimilation of Native American children. And how native families are still fighting back against the impacts today.

For decades, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools. Students were systematically stripped of their languages, customs, and culture. And even though there were accounts of neglect, abuse, and death at these schools, they became a blueprint for how the US government could forcibly assimilate native people into white America. At the peak of this era, there were more than 350 government-funded, and often church-run, Native American boarding schools across the US.

READ ARTICLE

Illegal Adoption Scheme

Thread: Yesterday, Arizona attorney Paul Petersen, who is also the elected Republican assessor of Maricopa County, was federally indicted for his involvement in a human trafficking adoption scheme. His involvement dates back years and spans three states.https://t.co/OK8rXGVa4b

— Kathryn Joyce (@kathrynajoyce) October 10, 2019

Here and here.

A public official in Arizona has been arrested in connection with charges that he ran a multimillion-dollar scheme in which he smuggled pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to profit from their newborn babies. Authorities say Maricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen's fraudulent adoption enterprise left a trail of forged documents and violated U.S. and international laws.

Petersen operates an adoption law firm. For years, he has connected American families seeking to adopt with women from the Marshall Islands — but state and federal prosecutors say Petersen falsified documents and lied about the mothers' residency so he could enrich himself.

Federal indictment here.

We posted previous coverage of the Marshallese adoption schemes from the Hololulu Civil Beat.

Adoption Attorney Charged in Illegal Adoption Scheme Involving Marshall Island Babies by Kate Fort

Staggering Adoption Industry Profits

reblog from Musings of the Lamb blog:

By 2012, Adoption Will be a 5 BILLION Dollar Plus industry

Even the banking and insurance industry has more regulations applied to then than adoption and we know what they do to try and make money at all costs.
An industry analysis of Fertility Clinics and Adoption Services by Market Data Enterprises of Tampa, FL, has placed a $1.4 billion value on adoption services in the US back in’ 99. No other government or private agency has bothered since then. With a projected annual growth rate of 11.5% to 2012, this makes adoption the largest unregulated industry in the US.

Do the math; even if we follow those conservative projections, because the market has exploded since this last study was done making 11.5% is very mild of a percentage, we have a number that is in excess of 5 billion dollars by the end of 2012 with a growth rate of at least a half billion a year and growing.

Let’s all repeat: NO REGULATIONS PLUS LARGE SUMS OF MONEY EQUALS CLIMATE FOR CORRUPTION. That, folks, is human nature.
http://www.adoptionbirthmothers.com/its-not-about-you-but-it-is-2/#more-3268

Dawnland wins EMMY

Documentary co-produced by NAS professor wins Emmy

by Emily Zhang | 10/8/19

Duthu began his involvement in the project as a consultant.

Source: Eli Burakian/Courtesy of Dartmouth College

“Dawnland,” a documentary co-produced by Native American studies professor N. Bruce Duthu, recently won the News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Research.
“Dawnland” tells the story of indigenous child removal in the United States during the 20th century — when child welfare authorities forced Native American children to live in non-Native foster care, adoptive homes or boarding schools. The documentary follows the first so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States for the contemporary Wabanaki community in Maine.
Duthu said that he believes “Dawnland” serves as a cautionary tale about “state power being misdirected against vulnerable populations.”

Brackeen seek new court hearing

Families Seek A Fresh Court Hearing In A Case Related To The ICWA

US News: Brackeen v. Bernhardt

Families and states seeking to replace the 1978 ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) that favoured Native Americans in the foster care system and procedures in terms of an adoption involving native American children want a fresh court hearing. On October 1, the people seeking a fresh hearing, want their problem to be addressed in front of an entire panel of the appeals court judges. The challenge included non-Native American families in a lot of states who have legally adopted or want to adopt Native American Children.

The Choctaw girl case

In a case related to provisions set by the ICWA, the Supreme Court declined to mediate in settling a case on account of a Choctaw girl who had been sent to foster care with a non-Native American family in California after her biological parents were unable to provide for her.
The couple attempted to adopt the young child, infringing upon state laws and the ICWA, in spite of the fact that the state and courts had cautioned them that the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma had jurisdictional authority and that the objective of family reunification was very important.


The couple was represented by a lawyer who has challenged the tribal jurisdiction in other ICWA cases. The couple declined to let go of the young girl in 2016, regardless of a court request. This resulted in the concerned court giving an order of forced separation of the girl from her foster family.

read 

Individual Petition for EnBanc Review

State Petition for EnBanc Review

The Court has asked the federal and tribal parties for response briefs, which are due October 23rd.

State and Individual Parties File for En Banc Review in Brackeen v. Bernhard [ICWA] by ilpc

Goldwater is attempting dismantling ICWA and tribal sovereignty.