PART FOUR: Victims of Adoptions and Lies: Ceremony for Adoptees

 We found PART 4 in this series from 2012! Woot!

By Trace Hentz

I woke up with two thoughts: there are two victims of adoption who need help and not necessarily from each other: the adoptee and the first mother. Each has its own burden and neither can heal the other.

“I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile I keep dancing.” That is a line in the book “Bird by Bird” by Ann Lamott.  Her comical book offers instructions on writing and life and so far -- I’ve had good belly laughs. Yep, Ann made a funny book!

In part two of her book, Ann was fighting herself over jealousy of another writer friend. She wrote, “Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic - jealousy especially so - but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime poisoned by it."

Poison is nothing to mess with.  I spoke with an adoptee friend last night and Levi is sure we adoptees need to create new ceremonies, even some just for us adoptees. I was nodding at every word Levi said.  A lifetime of isolation from what we know to be ours, our blood rights as Indigenous People, our language and culture and the healing offered by participating in ceremony, it was not ours growing up white and adopted and assimilated.

But we adoptees are not victims, Levi said. No, we are changed by adoption but not its victims.

I thought about ceremony, what ceremony I missed growing up, and what other Indian people probably took for granted growing up. That does make me jealous. I didn’t get to meet my grandmothers in flesh, only in dreams.

I am sad I do not how to make my own regalia. I see others dance at powwow and wish someone had time to teach me what I need to know.

I can think of a million things I’d like to know. When I met relatives in Illinois last year, I was over the moon happy.  My Harlow cousins filled many holes in my heart.

I am in reunion. Jealousy is not my poison.

For those not in reunion, their hearts ache.  We need to find a way to heal them.

Levi Eagle Feather has contributed to this blog.

This is the lost post, Part 4 of the series Victims of Adoption and Lies.

In Many Cases, Children were Abducted

Will U.S. Christians Atone for Church Boarding Schools? Indigenous Leaders Are Skeptical

By Gina Ciliberto

Jul 20, 2021

On July 16, a brigade of cars and motorcycles crossed over the Missouri River via the Chief Standing Bear Bridge. Their arrival in South Dakota marked the conclusion of a three-day journey to return the remains of nine children to the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation more than 140 years after the children died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa.

The remains of a tenth child were returned to the Aleutian people in Alaska in June. During the 10 exhumations, a set of unidentified remains was also uncovered.

According to the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center of nearby Dickinson College, there are known to be more than 180 graves at the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery. But as the Anchorage Daily News reports, “The true number may never be known, historians say, given poor record keeping, sloppy burial practices and the relocation in 1927 of a cemetery so that a parking lot could be constructed.” Some of the graves contain errors in both children’s names and their tribes.

These recent exhumations follow the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves in residential schools in Canada in June.

For Indigenous communities, the existence of these schools and the abuse, neglect, and murder committed within them are not new; Indigenous communities have been aware of — and harmed by — boarding schools, many of them run by Christian groups, for generations. And though Indigenous people have ideas about how Christian communities can atone for their involvement in the schools, many are not sure Christians are willing to listen.

The Christian legacy

For Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican nation and co-director of racial justice for Minnesota Council of Churches, the fact that there’s a graveyard attached to any school is unconscionable.

“Christians sometimes want me to acknowledge the good intentions of the boarding schools at the time,” said Jacobs, whose great grandfather was taken to Carlisle. Jacobs finds such attitudes dismissive. “There’s a graveyard attached to a school. At what point does that become OK? They were forcibly taken from their families and they died. Regardless of what the cause of death was, their bodies were never returned to their families. These families are left devastated not knowing where their child is. There’s no justification of that at all.”

Opened in 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first boarding school in the United States that housed Indigenous children in an off-reservation setting, far from their homes. In 1891, the U.S. passed a compulsory attendance law that required Indigenous children to go to the schools. The Carlisle school eventually served as the blueprint for over 300 boarding schools for Indigenous children across the U.S. as well as a similar program in Canada

While the U.S. government opened 25 federal off-reservation boarding schools, more than 300 other schools were run by Christian groups with support from the government.

Upon arrival, the schools forced students to cut their long hair, a significant element of Indigenous faith and culture. The schools gave children English names and forbade them to speak their native language. In short, the church-run schools worked in cooperation with the government to strip the children of their spiritual and cultural practices and replace them with Christianity.

Some children were also exploited for free labor: They were sent to farm or perform housecleaning for local non-Natives. There are numerous reports of children at these schools being underfed, malnourished, and sick.

Dr. Tink Tinker, a citizen of the Osage nation and professor emeritus of American Indian cultures and religious traditions at Iliff School of Theology, said that people in the United States don’t want to know “that they killed Indians, cheated Indians, and stole land in order to create this romantic experiment called the United States.”

“Americans don’t want to know that children at boarding schools were fed a diet that put them at great risk of disease,” Tinker told Sojourners. “What the boarding schools demonstrate is that genocide was planned and supported by the state, that is the federal government of the United States.”

This is not news

While the existenece of Indigenous boarding schools has largely been erased from U.S. history, Indigenous people have been advocating for greater truth-telling for decades. And they hope change is coming.

On June 22, following the discovery of mass graves of Indigenous children at Canadian residential schools, Deb Haaland, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, announced the creation of a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to conduct a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies in the United States.

“The Interior Department will address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said to the National Congress of American Indians. “I know that this process will be long and difficult. I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.” Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo; her great-grandfather attended the Carlisle school.

Colette Yellow Robe, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne, grew up knowing about boarding schools. Her mother survived boarding school and her grandfather attended and survived Carlisle. In April, she said at least one of her family members died under suspicious circumstances at a boarding school.

“We knew this was there, the cover-up of the death or murders,” Yellow Robe told Sojourners.

“When some of us went to high school, some went to the boarding schools that are still open. Or historically you just knew someone’s family who went to boarding school,” Yellow Robe said. “It’s common. It’s a part of everyday existence. It’s like driving by a national park: It’s just there.” Though attendance is no longer mandatory, the U.S. still runs several boarding schools for Indigenous children.

Ruth Hopkins, a Dakota and Lakota Sioux writer and former tribal judge, told Sojourners her father was abducted and taken to a boarding school when he was still nursing. “My whole life I've known about it. I’ve heard different things spoken about in hushed tones,” she said.

Hopkins said that the schools were forced upon Indigenous communities: families who refused to send their children to the schools could be denied treaty rations or sent to jail. In many cases, children were abducted from their homes by nuns and priests. To this day, Hopkins said, Indigenous people are wary of outsiders or white people on reservations.

“If they see outsiders coming, or white people coming, they don’t want them to be around their children or see their children. That’s from boarding schools, because they used to come and take peoples’ kids,” Hopkins said. One of her grandmothers used to hide one of her children every time a stranger came onto her property. The rest of her children were brought to boarding schools.

Now, the legacy of boarding schools affects everything from her community’s lack of knowledge of their native language to how Hopkins folds her towels: the way her father was taught at boarding school. It’s a legacy of trauma.

“You have all of these people who were put through extreme abuse and neglect,” Hopkins said. “You have people who didn’t really learn how to parent correctly. And they have all of these missing pieces in them from their culture and their language being taken away.”

Going forward

Indigenous people have suggestions for how, after centuries of abuse, Christians can begin to make restitution for these crimes.

The experts interviewed for this piece hope that Christians will advocate against pipelines, many of which directly violate treaty rights between the U.S. government and Indigenous communities.

As Tinker put it, Indigenous communities need non-Natives “to become allies in the Indian struggle for freedom” by physically standing up for Indigenous dignity, as some did at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest in 2016 and 2017. He implores Canada and the United States “to resist the military industrial complex and its fossil fuel subsidiary as they try to lay pipelines across Indian land or close enough to Indian land to threaten Indian water supply.”

Jacobs, who also serves as a parish associate at Church of All Nations Presbyterian Church in Columbia Heights, Minn., is calling for reparations for Indigenous people. He maintains that every predominantly white church in this country should have a line in their budget that is dedicated to local Indigenous language and cultural reclamation projects, “and it should be a significant amount of the annual budget.”

“It should be a significant amount because, for Indigenous people, the legacy of boarding schools is that it cost us everything,” Jacobs said. “We lost our language. We lost ties with our families and our culture. At a minimum, I tell churches that the work of repair looks like them paying a price to help try and mitigate and reverse some of the damage that came out of those boarding schools.”

However necessary, reparations and anti-fracking advocacy might be a big leap, especially for U.S. churches that have not claimed responsibility for the boarding schools or the murders of Indigenous children within them. The national Native American Boarding School Healing coalition lists 14 different religious groups that operated boarding schools in the United States, including Roman Catholics as well as Presbyterian, Quaker, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Mennonite, and other Protestant denominations.

There’s some hope this is changing: While the Vatican has refused to release residential school records, two religious communities in Canada have released records as well as the United Church of Canada.

In December, the pope is scheduled to meet with representatives of Canada’s three biggest Indigenous groups — the First Nations, the Métis, and the Inuit — to “apologize for the church’s role in operating schools that abused and forcibly assimilated generations of Indigenous children.” A statement from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said that Pope Francis is “deeply committed to hearing directly from Indigenous Peoples, expressing his heartfelt closeness, addressing the impact of colonization and the role of the Church in the residential school system, in the hopes of responding to the suffering of Indigenous Peoples and the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.”

Christian organizations would do well to not only tell the truth about boarding schools but to release any information pertaining to them.

Amber Starks, an Afro-Indigenous activist who is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, said that acknowledgement looks like an honest verbal acknowledgement and concrete action, not a halfhearted committee or one-time donation.

“There’s a lot of talk about restitution, but it just doesn’t seem authentic,” Starks said. “It doesn’t seem like the church as an institution genuinely cares about the ongoing harm of its participation in colonialism, in imperialism, and in genocide. Since it doesn’t care about those things, it doesn’t care about the healing that has to go into that.”

For Native communities, it’s clear that Christians are both complicit in and beneficiaries of the legacy of U.S. boarding schools. Will Christians acknowledge this reality?

Starks hopes so.

“Be willing to be exposed for the wrong that you’ve done,” Starks said. “It shouldn’t take years to return the bodies of our relatives to tribes so that tribes can bury them in accordance with tradition and protocol. Where’s the humanity in that? Why would it take that long?”

“There are all of these lives buried underneath this place that you call holy ground,” she continued. “And it’s not holy. It’s been desecrated because you committed genocide.”

US churches and traumatic legacy of Native American schools

 (excerpt)

U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Some U.S. churches have been reckoning with this activity for years through ceremonies, apologies and archival investigations, while others are just getting started. Some advocates say churches have more work to do in opening their archives, educating the public about what was done in the name of their faith and helping former students and their relatives tell their stories of family trauma.

“We all need to work together on this,” said the Rev. Bradley Hauff, a Minnesota-based Episcopal priest and missioner for Indigenous Ministries with the Episcopal Church. “What’s happening in Canada, that’s a wakeup call to us,” said Hauff, who is enrolled with the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

KEEP READING

This photo made available by the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia shows students at a Presbyterian boarding school in Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1883. U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Native American and Alaskan Native children were regularly severed from their tribal families, customs, language and religion and brought to the schools in a push to assimilate and Christianize them. (AP)

A whole line of political and civil service leaders through history didn’t want you to know the truth

Time to dismantle Indigenous Affairs, ban feds from Indigenous education and child welfare, prosecute church leaders

By Rose LeMay      July 26, 2021

Workers at some of the residential schools are still alive and walking amongst us and they must be prosecuted. Church leaders need to be prosecuted. The Catholic Church needs to pay its reparations. The federal government needs to dismantle the Department of Indian Affairs, and forthwith be banned from Indigenous education and child welfare.

Officials and schoolchildren, pictured outside the Providence Mission Indian Residential School, Fort Providence, N.W.T., circa 1920. A whole line of political and civil service leaders through history didn’t want you to know the truth—truly a Canadian pact of forgetting. Those who continue to spew some propaganda to uphold 'the good intent' of residential schools need to be held accountable, writes Rose LeMay. Photograph courtesy of the Library and Archives Canada 

 

READ MORE 

 

What the U.S.A. can learn from our northern neighbor's #TRC reconciliation efforts

 Healing a bitter past: the Canadian model

. 

By Douglas Harper | July 23, 2021 | Star Tribune

JONATHAN HAYWARD, Canadian Press via AP file.

A memorial is seen outside the Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, on June 13.

Recent reports have prompted me to recall the Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings I attended with a Canadian friend in Edmonton, Alberta, in March 2014. The commission's purpose was to bring light to the dark history of Canadian residential schools, which were modeled after similar schools for Native children in the United States.

Perhaps the fear that we in America will discover similar unmarked graves of Native children who died in the boarding schools we forced them to attend will lead us to seek the truth and attempt reconciliation, as our Canadian neighbors have done.

What would a truth and reconciliation commission achieve? What did it achieve in Canada? Why would we venture on such a path?

On a practical and immediate level, the meetings held across Canada awakened people. It awakened me, the outsider looking in, feeling shame and remorse.

The meetings gave voice to those harmed by the residential schools. One account remains vivid:

A First Nations man described how he lived with his tightly knit extended family of nomadic hunters and harvesters. One day when he was eight or nine a boat came upriver to where they were camped; Indian agents came ashore and an argument ensued. He was wrenched away from his parents, who were screaming in disbelief, and forced onto the boat. As the boat pulled away the last thing he saw was his parents waving their arms. It was the last time he saw them.

When he arrived at the school they cut off his hair and burned his traditional clothes, and fed him food he found repulsive. He could not speak English and no one could speak his language. He slept in a large room among strangers. He was physically punished for doing things wrong he didn't even understand. He had no idea why he was there and why such terrible things were happening to him. Eventually, as he learned English, he was taught that his beloved grandparents from whom "he had never heard a bad word" worked for the devil. Yet he missed his family more than he could express.

He described sexual abuse, corporal punishment and bullying. When he left the school as a teenager he fit nowhere. He had lost his native culture and language, which he had learned to be ashamed of. But he didn't fit into white society, which for him was racist. Like many he fell victim to alcohol and drugs.

His story was one of many.

The second purpose of the meeting was apology. A representative from the Catholic Church, which had administered most of the schools, read a letter that began: "We, the Bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories, apologize to those who experienced sexual and physical abuse in residential schools under Catholic Administration … also we apologize for participating in governmental policies that separated children from their parents and that suppressed their cultures."

Representatives of the provincial and national governments addressed the audience: "We apologize. Nothing we can say can make this past go away. We may have thought we were doing good, but we were doing something terribly wrong. Hopefully by saying this we can begin a process of healing."

Later, Frank Oberle, Minister of Aboriginal Relations wrote: "Residential schools will always be among the great wrongs of Canadian history. An example of the profound harm that we are capable of when inequality, paternalism and racism prevail over our sense of common humanity."

The third purpose was concrete change. The most important may have been mandating that the unvarnished history of the residential schools become part of the K-12 curriculum across Canada. The commission also produced four lengthy documents that contained the results from their research and public hearings, free and easily available on the web. The overview is found in "Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada," easily searchable.

These reports remind us what humane societies do: they study their missteps, even evils such as slavery and cultural genocide. They admit to wrongdoings and invite those who were harmed to speak. The most powerful speak humbly and ask for forgiveness. Finally, humane and honest societies rewrite their history when new knowledge and new awareness comes to the surface. They do it in the open, in a dialogue where all are invited to speak.

I'd be thrilled if some of the Americans riled up about "critical race theory" would read these Canadian documents and think about what it really means to face up to our past, make amends and move forward.

Douglas Harper, of Forest Lake, is professor emeritus of sociology, Duquesne University.

**

Residential schools: How the U.S. and Canada share a troubling history

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland says she wept when she heard news from Canada about what are believed to be unmarked burial sites of children's remains near a former residential school.

The news made Haaland think of her own Pueblo ancestors such as her grandmother, who as a girl was taken from her family, put on a train and placed in the American version of a residential school for five years.

After crying, Haaland took action. The New Mexico politician now leads the federal department that ran U.S. assimilation schools — she's the first Indigenous person to do so. And she's launched an investigation into their legacy.

In a memo last month to the Department of the Interior, she said the news from Canada should prompt a reflection on what Americans refer to as native boarding schools. She requested a report by next year on the schools, their cemeteries and on the possibility of finding unidentified remains.

It's only fitting that movements to assess the legacy of assimilation schools in both Canada and the U.S. should occur simultaneously. That's because they've been intertwined from the start. That point was made several years ago in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.

An architect of Canada's residential schools policy, in an 1879 paper, looked at boarding schools just established in the U.S. and urged Canada to create similar ones. On the basis of that paper from Nicholas Davin, Canada's federal government opened three such schools, starting in 1883 in the future province of Saskatchewan.

Both countries borrowed ideas from reformatories being constructed in Europe for children of the urban poor, said the Truth and Reconciliation report.

Haaland's great-grandfather was taken to the institution that most influenced Canada's program: the now-defunct Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The founder of that school, army officer Richard Pratt, infamously voiced the philosophy behind his program: "Kill the Indian [in him] … and save the man," meaning Indigenous Peoples should be assimilated, not exterminated.  

Read more on this story here.

**

Final funding for Woodland Cultural Centre from Canada and Ontario Government helps complete Phase 3 of the restoration project.

“Our government stands shoulder to shoulder with Indigenous partners as we support community-directed work to identify and commemorate Indigenous Residential School sites across the province. Today’s investment in the Woodland Cultural Centre is critical to the important work being done by Six Nations of the Grand River to build a national resource to support public education and centre for healing for the community.”  – The Honourable Greg Rickford, Ontario’s Minister of Indigenous Affairs

 “It was a good day to know that the site of the former Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School will receive the funding necessary to restore the building and will house the history and stories of the “Mushhole” school children.  Having the site designated as a National Heritage Site is significant to this history as well.” – Roberta Hill, Mohawk Institute Residential School Survivor  

Download PDF Press Release Here

Learn more about the Save the Evidence Campaign

**

READ: US churches reckon with traumatic legacy of Native American schools

“Boarding schools — along with the entire structure of our churches and government and policing and military — combine to create a particular world. White Christians are safe in that world.” — @gindaanis 

 

 

Part 3: Victims of Adoption and Lies: Control the Message

REBLOG

Part 3
By Trace L Hentz

I woke up with two thoughts: there are two victims of adoption who need help and not necessarily from each other: the adoptee and the first mother. Each has its own burden and neither can heal the other.

CONTROL THE MESSAGE

Since I started this Victims series, I've heard from two new adoptees who came across this blog. I'm very happy - not because they are adopted but because we can now connect and relate as members of our own unique band of Native American adoptees. As each week passes, and the more I post about this history, perhaps even more adoptees will contact me.*

"Victim" is a word I don't like to use but in the case of Native adoptees, it fits. The adoption projects and programs in North America (US and Canada) intended to wipe out an entire population of Indian children by assimilating them (making them white) using closed adoptions. It was officially called the Indian Adoption Projects - but Canada and many states had their own programs like New York State's "Our Indian Program" and the Mormon's own Indian Adoption Program. How do you damage or destroy a culture? You abduct and claim their children as your own.

How this was planned and orchestrated is still kept under legal wraps, but the thousands of Indian children who were transracially adopted are certainly "victims" of planned ethnic cleansing. Not telling adoptive parents they were part of this program is quite a significant lie of omission, too. (Someday my hope is America will see an apology and eventually all parents will be informed. In the older days this country tried eugenics and sterilizing undesirables, and it's usually people who are considered minorities who are targets for this treatment.)

In adoption terminology, we are called transracial adoptees because we were raised outside our culture, in our case First Nations and America Indian territories. We're raised by non-Indian parents, far from the reservation. That would certainly destroy any contact and connections to our first families. With a closed adoption, no one would ever be able to find anyone, right?

It failed. My second book Two Worlds (out in 2012) is an anthology filled with adoptees that are living proof that the adoption/assimilation plan backfired. Adoption didn't kill our spirit or destroy our blood. The adoptees in this book did reunite with their relatives and tribes, despite closed adoptions.

Now with the amount of adoptees who've opened their adoption, including me, I'd imagine there would be more news and media coverage, right? No. Somehow the US adoption industry has its reputation and bankrolls to protect, and their jobs to protect, so they must protect their territory, control the message or lose their business.

I see how it works. A young lady doctor from California said to me a few days ago, "I wish to adopt a child and save them from being an orphan." I have heard and read those exact words before. The adoption industry has controlled that message and this mindset from their very beginning. This very nice doctor is young and open-minded so I asked her to consider that a child has its own name and ancestry - and would she consider becoming a legal guardian instead of an adoptive parent? I told her to get children out of the foster care system and if she could, raise as many children as she could afford. She is undoubtedly going to read up and do research, based on our conversation.

In the old mindset and in many adopters’ minds, there are still orphans! Can they imagine each baby has a mother and both are usually from a Third World Country, including Indian reservations in North American still plagued by poverty; and beyond that each baby has a country and relatives - so hardly anyone in the world is a true orphan!

That very old mindset has not been altered since the early 1900s (or 1958 when I was adopted). That is how you control the message. This doctor is among thousands of people planning to adopt in the near future with no clue how adoptees feel about this - even in 2012.

My point here is we have to do the work to change that mindset and control the message ourselves. We have to take to the streets and call lawyers and get lawmakers to open adoption records in every state. Until then, the adoption industry is winning and will still control the message.

*No one had done a blog for American Indian Adoptees like this prior, by the way. I started research in 2005, wrote my memoir on this history, and then created this blog in 2009 with medical studies, ideas, news and updates.

PART FOUR was accidentally deleted. Look for Part 5... Please write a comment or contact me. Thanks - Megwetch everyone!!

This series ran in 2012 on American Indian Adoptees. It was my most popular series on the topic of adoption…

Lost Lives, Lost Culture

(click) New York Times: “Lost Lives, Lost Culture: The Forgotten History of Indigenous Boarding Schools” (USA)

The discovery of the bodies in Canada led Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first
Native American to head the department that once ran the boarding schools in the United
States — and herself the granddaughter of people forced to attend them — to announce that
the government would search the grounds of former facilities to identify the remains of
children.
That many children died in the schools on this side of the border is not in question. Just last
week, nine Lakota children who perished at the federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pa., were
disinterred and buried in buffalo robes in a ceremony on a tribal reservation in South Dakota.
Many of the deaths of former students have been recorded in federal archives and
newspaper death notices. Based on what those records indicate, the search for bodies of
other students is already underway at two former schools in Colorado: Grand Junction Indian
School in central Colorado, which closed in 1911, and the Fort Lewis Indian School, which
closed in 1910 and reopened in Durango as Fort Lewis College.

I have the pdf if you cannot access this story. Email me: laratrace@outlook.com

BACKGROUND: painful month for Canada's Indigenous communities

 HERE AND NOW | JULY 0, 2021 | BACKGROUND

Indigenous Kids' Bodies Recovered — Not Discovered, Says Canada's Assembly Of First Nations Chief

• Robin Young, Camila Beiner, Karyn Miller Medzon

It’s been a painful month for Canada's Indigenous communities.

RoseAnne Archibald was recently elected Canada's first female national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, leading more than 900,000 Indigenous people in 634 First Nations Communities.

Just days later, another 160 unmarked graves were uncovered at a former Indigenous residential school site on a Southern Gulf Island off of British Columbia. This discovery adds to the more than 1,000 graves believed to contain remains of children forcibly taken from their families and housed in the so-called schools from the late 1880s to the 1990s.

Survivors describe horrific mental and physical abuse at the sites, including the prohibition of any Indigenous cultural practices such as the use of their own languages.

“I don’t like to call them schools — they were institutions of assimilation and genocide,” Archibald says. “And our survivors said that for the longest time they were told stories of the deaths and murders that happened in these schools.”

The investigation and location of the mass graves were conducted with the use of ground penetrating radar technology.

Less than a week ago, members of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nations held a day of testimony about the findings at the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia where the remains of 215 children were discovered in late May.

“It was extraordinarily emotional and heartbreaking,” Archibald says. “And as I was sitting in the room, I was watching other people and many of them were triggered into their old trauma.”

Archibald describes the powerful testimonies by elders who were only 5 or 6-years-old when they were taken to the schools, eliciting tears from fellow survivors in the audience. Many survivors still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, she says.

“That’s where the majority of Canadians have been deeply affected by this,” Archibald says, “because they see their own children and they understand that now, No. 1, that genocide did happen in Canada and that our children were targets of that.”

"I don’t like to call them schools — they were institutions of assimilation and genocide."

RoseAnne Archibald, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations

Elder Evelyn Camille, a survivor of the Kamloops boarding school, said that fellow students had attempted to warn the authorities about the atrocities against children at the schools but their words fell on deaf ears.

“We tried to mention over, and over, and over, ‘there are many children missing,’ ” she told the audience. “Many of our children tried to cross the river to swim across, many were lost in the water, many of our children who ran away during the winter froze to death on their way home. The black robes start lying about the children.”

Archibald says cultural genocide — the refusal to let kids speak their own languages — was one aspect of the abuse. One survivor told her about being forced to eat soap. Others were beaten.

But she says there were also horrific examples of physical genocide that the children were forced to witness.

“One of the worst stories I heard was a survivor saying that babies were put into incinerators in the schools,” she says. “These are crimes against humanity and crimes against children.”

It’s important that people hear about these atrocities, she says, because truth must proceed reconciliation. As Canadians learn and process this chapter in history, she says survivors can focus on healing the intergenerational trauma they experience.

And the government, she says, needs to be part of the healing by creating programs that provide funding and resources to the community.

“Reparations have to happen to communities [and] to families right across Canada,” she says. “When you think of mental health and addiction issues, almost all of that comes out of the colonization experience, particularly the fact that every family has just had to send their children to school.”

Archibald points to the research of Dr. Pamela Toulouse who says that 100% of First Nations people suffer from intergenerational trauma.

“That’s the impact of these institutions,” Archibald says.

Shoes, flowers, and stuffed animals sit outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School where flowers and cards have been left as part of a growing makeshift memorial to honour the 215 children whose remains have been discovered buried near the facility in Kamloops on June 5, 2021. (Photo by Cole Burston / AFP) (Photo by COLE BURSTON/AFP via Getty Images)

Archibald is calling for an independent criminal investigation into the church organizations that operated these institutions. She says the investigation should also delve into the role of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in removing the children from their families and policing the schools.

As to what she wants from a criminal investigation, she says the answer is simple: “justice.”

“That’s what these children deserve,” she says. “It is the government of Canada that has to be accountable for this.”

So far the remains of more than 1,600 children have been located, and she anticipates that “thousands upon thousands more” will be located as investigations continue.

Because she says there’s a conflict of interest in Canada investigating its own wrongdoing, Archibald and the Assembly of First Nations want outside help from the United Nations International Criminal Court.

Another issue for First Nations survivors is the complicity of the Catholic church in the operation of the schools, Archibald says.

A First Nations delegation will be headed to the Vatican this December to meet with Pope Francis, who has not apologized for the church’s role. Archibald has said she would not participate in the trip.

“We need more than an apology. We need reparations. We need justice,” she says. “We’re not going to get that by having a lovely visit with the pope in the Vatican.”

Since the first graves were discovered in May, at least five Catholic churches were set on fire in protest.

“I get it, there is so much hurt,” Archibald says. “You’re talking about thousands of children.”

She explains Canadians need to do more than destroy or burn the symbols and edificies of colonization. The entire system needs to be decolonized, she says.

“First Nations need to live in a world that our spirituality, that our culture and our language are respected and lifted up,” she says. “This whole genocide process was about destroying everything about us — including taking the lives of our children.”

What needs to happen now, she concludes, is to address the systemic issues that affect Indigenous people — racism, hatred and condescension.

“We can lift each other up,” Archibald says, “and live in a world where everyone is safe and loved and respected and deemed worthy.”

---

Karyn Miller-Medzon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Camila Beiner and Miller-Medzon adapted it for the web.

Rosebud ancestors buried in emotional ceremony | Carlisle Industrial Institution

A studio portrait from about 1880 shows Ernest (Knocks Off) wearing a Carlisle Indian School uniform. Ernest arrived at the school in the first group of students from Pine Ridge and Rosebud on Oct. 6, 1879, and died on Dec. 13, 1880. His remains were finally shipped home to his family 140 years later in July 2021. (Photo courtesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society)

Rosebud ancestors buried in emotional ceremony

Vi Waln
Special to Indian Country Today

ROSEBUD INDIAN RESERVATION — Dora Her Pipe (Brave Bull) just wanted to go home.

After being ripped from her family in South Dakota at 16 and shipped 1,500 miles to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, she asked to be sent home in January 1881 because of illness.

Just three months later, she was dead. It would take another 140 years before she returned to her family and her homelands, wrapped in a buffalo robe in a cedar box.

“My sisters, brother and I are the fifth-generation descendants of Her Pipe,” Bernadine Red Bear, daughter of the late Christine Crow Dog-Red Bear, told a group gathered Saturday, July 17, at the public burial service for the children.

“We didn’t know we had a relative in Carlisle. We are the only living family members to take care of our relative, Dora Her Pipe (Brave Bull).”

Dora, the daughter of Brave Bull, was among nine Sicangu ancestors to make it home last week, more than a century after they died at the notorious boarding school. They were escorted home to Rosebud Friday, stopping first at Whetstone Bay, where they had taken a steamboat to Pennsylvania in 1879.

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Indigenous Kids' Bodies Recovered — Not Discovered, Says Canada's Assembly Of First Nations Chief

More than 1,000 graves in Canada are believed to contain the remains of Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families and housed in the so-called schools from the late 1880s to the 1990s.

More unmarked graves have been unearthed at a former Indigenous residential school site in Canada. The graves are believed to contain remains of Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families from the late 1880s to the 1990s. We talk with Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald.  That and more, in hour two of Here & Now's July 20, 2021, full broadcast. You can find more at hereandnow.org — and follow us on Twitter, Instagram or join the conversation on Facebook.

This program aired on July 20, 2021.

READ MORE

• Nevada Indian Commission Head On Residential School Deaths In U.S.: 'Shocking' But 'Known All Along'
• Canadian Indigenous Chief: 'Nobody Can Deny Residential Schools Were The Genocide Of Our People'

 

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

 

The Return: Remains of Indigenous children at Carlisle laid to rest

 

Remains of Indigenous children who died at assimilation school returned to tribe, laid to rest

'It's a shame that something this horrific has to occur for people to realize the truth.' 

After over a 100 yrs the children who died at Carlisle Indian Boarding School are laid to rest by the youth of this generation. Wrapped in buffalo robes and back to the comfort of Grandmother Earth in their ancestral Lakota lands.

 

Phil West |IRL Published Jul 19, 2021

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A heart-wrenching video shows a group of Indigenous people laying the bodies of children to rest, said to be those found buried at Carlisle Indian Reform School in Pennsylvania.

The video, posted to the r/PublicFreakout subreddit, shows a somber ceremony with tribe members gathered in a field. Some of them are waiting to receive and bury the children, while others are in a line saluting the procession.

The Reddit post identifies the people as Lakota; the video shows the flag of the Rosebud Sioux, one of seven Lakota nations, flying alongside the American flag during the ceremony.

According to an ABC News report that ran Saturday, “The remains of nine Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania meant to assimilate them into white culture have been returned to their South Dakota tribe for burial on its reservation.” Tribe officials told the outlet that some children would be laid to rest in a veterans’ cemetery, while others would be buried in family graveyards.

The retrieval of the children’s bodies, interred on the school grounds for more than a century, was the culmination of a six-year effort. A caravan of young Lakota adults took the bodies from the site of the former school for Native Americans, about 20 miles west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to South Dakota.

In the article, Christopher Eagle Bear, a 23-year-old member of the youth council responsible for returning the remains, said, “On this day, it is an honor to be Lakota. Hopefully, what we do here can inspire another youth group to move the road further than what we have started.”

Carlisle was one of a number of boarding schools where, in the words of U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Native American children were subject to “forced assimilation practices.” Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet member in U.S. history, announced last month there would be a nationwide investigation into the boarding schools and the practices there.

Many of the Redditors who saw the ceremony on the website were moved by it, including one who said, “Even without killing children, Indian boarding schools facilitated native assimilation. The death of their culture, their language, and their way of life superseded their literal death. It’s a shame that something this horrific has to occur for people to realize the truth.”

Indigenous chief to Trudeau: Turn over residential school records

Experts say the graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School are only the beginning.

Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Chief Rosanne Casimir speaks ahead of the release of findings on 215 unmarked graves discovered at Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, July 15, 2021 [Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters]

By Hilary Beaumont

15 Jul 2021

Warning: The story below contains details of residential schools that may be upsetting. Canada’s Indian Residential School Survivors and Families Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419.

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir on Thursday called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Mission Oblates of Mary Immaculate to open their student attendance records “immediately and fully” so her community can identify the hundreds of children buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Casimir said her community’s search has only just begun, and she asked the provincial and federal governments to contribute funding and resources to help her community continue the investigation, and protect children’s remains.

“To the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, we’re still waiting for you to reach out to us to acknowledge the latest truths from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. I look forward to a fulsome conversation where we can finalise the details of the federal government providing the needed support as well as access to our student records,” said Casimir at a news conference in Kamloops, British Columbia.

From the late 1800s until 1996, Canada forced 150,000 Indigenous children to attend assimilation institutions called “residential schools”, where they were forbidden from practising their culture or speaking their language. Many were physically and sexually abused, and thousands are believed to have died.

In May, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc was the first in the country to release a preliminary discovery of 215 Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School that were found using ground-penetrating radar.

In recent months, other First Nations have used the same technology to search residential school sites, bringing the total number of Indigenous graves to more than 1,000 — many of which were not included in historical records, or had headstones removed.

Searching for graves

On Thursday, experts said only two acres (0.8 hectares) of the 160-acre (65-hectare) residential school site have been searched with ground-penetrating radar. Sarah Beaulieu, the radar specialist who participated in the search, said she further analysed the probable grave sites and concluded that there are approximately 200 likely graves — not 215 as first reported.

“With ground-penetrating radar, we can never say definitively that they are human remains until you excavate,” she said. “They have multiple signatures that present like burials, but because of that we need to say that they are probable until one excavates.”

Beaulieu said survivors led the search because they knew there were graves at the site, adding that archaeologists found a juvenile tooth near the site in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and a tourist found a child’s rib bone in the same area in the 2000s.

She said it was likely the graves contained children’s remains. “The majority of the anomalies were between 0.7 and 0.8 metres (27.5 and 31.5 inches) below the surface, which is fairly shallow, and it fits with the knowledge keepers’ descriptions of children having to dig graves, for one. It also fits with when you have a juvenile burial, because they are smaller in length, they typically are not dug as deeply.”

Beaulieu said no graves have been excavated yet. It is not clear when or if an excavation will happen.

“We are here today because of Indian Residential School survivors and intergenerational survivors who were unrelenting in carrying those painful truths about missing children forward,” Casimir said. She said survivors witnessed abuse and were required to dig graves, and it is because they spoke their truth that her community can verify where children are buried.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a years-long process documenting survivors’ stories, confirmed 4,100 children who died in the institutions – from abuse, neglect, disease, fire, and from exposure after running away.

But the full scope of how many children died, and the causes of their deaths, is still unknown. According to the TRC, it was not until 1935 that the government adopted a formal policy on how to report and investigate deaths at the institutions. The commission found that, for half of the recorded deaths, the government did not include the cause of death.

More than 7,000 survivors of the institutions testified before the TRC. In its final report (PDF), the commission concluded the practice was cultural genocide, and that Canada had “set out to destroy the political and social institutions” of Indigenous people with a goal of seizing land.

According to the UN, the policy of forced assimilation institutions was popular all over the world — in Canada, the United States, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Russia, Scandinavia and East Africa — because it was cheaper than waging war against Indigenous people.

Survivors’ stories

During the news conference, survivors of the Kamloops institution shared their stories.

Mona Jules said her 13-year-old sister became sick and passed away at the Kamloops institution, but her parents were not notified until after her death. “They wanted to know, why wasn’t she taken to a doctor, to the hospital? It was right across the bridge,” she said. “There were no answers.”

Residential school survivor Mona Jules takes part in a presentation of the findings on 215 unmarked graves discovered at Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, July 15, 2021 [Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters]

Jules said she and other children were beaten for speaking their Indigenous language. She is still fluent and has spent her life teaching it to anyone who wants to learn.

“I’ve spent years trying to revive what that school has snuffed out. And it’s working — we have many of our young people who speak it and they’re running language departments, having meetings in the language, speaking it to one another. I still work with them, when I can, and I’ll continue to do that for as long as I can.”

Source: Al Jazeera

 

Keep reading

More unmarked residential school graves discovered in Canada

Imams in Canada express solidarity with Indigenous people

Canada: At least 600 graves found at Indigenous boarding school

Unmarked Indigenous graves found at another school in Canada

 

What will a US probe into Indigenous boarding schools uncover?

Government to study troubled legacy of forced assimilation policies. 13 Jul 2021