Finding Otipemisiwak by Andrea Currie (60sScoop)

 Books  ·CANADIAN

Finding Otipemisiwak by Andrea Currie

The story of a Sixties Scoop survivor's search to find herself and her community

CBC Books ·  August 27

\

Otipemisiwak is a Plains Cree word describing the Metis, meaning "the people who own themselves."

Andrea Currie was born into a Metis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians - all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the Sixties Scoop was in full swing. Together with her younger adopted brother, also Metis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.

Finding Otipemisiwak weaves lyrical prose, poetry, and essays into an incisive commentary on the vulnerability of Indigenous children in a white supremacist child welfare system, the devastation of cultural loss, and the rocky road some people must walk to get to the truth of who they are. Her triumph over the state's attempts to erase her as an Indigenous person is tempered by the often painful complexities of re-entering her cultural community while bearing the mark of the white world in which she was raised. In Finding Otipemisiwak, one woman's stories about surviving, then thriving as a fully present member of her Nation and the human family are a portal. Readers who walk through will better understand the impact of the Sixties Scoop in the country now called Canada. (From Arsenal Pulp Press)

• 54 works of Canadian nonfiction to check out this fall

• Métis Sixties Scoop survivors gather to discuss next steps in reconciliation process

Andrea Currie is a writer, healer and activist. She lives in Cape Breton where she works as a psychotherapist in Indigenous mental health.

Theft of Tribal Lands

This ascendancy and its accompanying tragedy were exposed in a report written in 1924 by Lakota activist Zitkala-Sa, a.k.a. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin and others. The report, entitled Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes – Legalized Robbery, is a narrative of the most venal exposition of legalized land robbery in U.S. history.

 

A memorial to the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, when lands promised to the Muscogee Nation and the Seminole Nation were open to settlement to non-Indians. Photo: mike krzeszak

Oil boom = theft boom

And the more money a Native had, the more vulnerable they were in court. This was particularly true if oil land was involved.

READ:  The plunder, pillage, and robbery of the Five Tribes of Eastern Oklahoma

https://indianz.com/News/2024/08/28/albert-bender-the-theft-of-tribal-land-in-oklahoma/

 

‘I weave a West that’s honest’

Author J Hoolihan Clayton (adoptee) is First Nations Plains Cree. Having lived a diverse and authentic life in the American West, she now writes history as fiction in order to inspire and elucidate.

 

excerpt...

Alamosa Citizen: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who you are, where you come from, where you’re going, all of that good stuff.

J Hoolihan Clayton: Okay, well I’m Plains Cree. I was taken as an infant from the reserve in Canada in the Sixties Scoop and illegally adopted out across the medicine line into the United States.

I was adopted by a white family with a ranch in Wyoming. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming, basically in the middle of nowhere, no running water, no electricity. I spent a lot of time, from a young age around Native elders and old cowboys and basically it was there that I think I became a writer.

I was so fascinated with the stories. I seem to have sort of an idyllic memory. I retained stories and then as I grew older, I began to write stories for myself. Despite all the other things that I’ve done in my life, I’ve always been a writer. I learned cowboying growing up and wasn’t able to have a college education early on. I worked as a ranch hand and wound up fighting wildland fires for years until I sustained enough injuries that vocational rehabilitation sent me to the University of Montana and I was able to get a degree in education and history.

History has always been a passion for me.

So, from there, since I needed an indoor job, I started teaching and mostly focused on Native American education and history. And mostly taught Native students or Hispanic students. I also specialize in at-risk education programs. I ran the education in the juvenile detention center in Taos for five years.

I set up several alternative education programs. One in a treatment center on the Taos Pueblo. One on the Zuni Pueblo. I taught at Dulce on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation and in rural Hispanic areas mostly. Then I decided that, for a variety of reasons, administration, fighting cell phones, I decided to retire and write full time.

There’s a wonderful quote from E.L. Doctorow that the historian will tell you what happened, the novelist will tell you what it felt like. That’s my impetus in writing these books. I also, because of my troubled past, with having been stolen, and also spending many, many years living in and cowboying on reservations in Pueblos and working on Pueblos, I wanted to tell the stories that I was learning about Native groups that are told from a perspective that you don’t find. 

KEEP READING:  https://www.alamosacitizen.com/i-weave-a-west-thats-honest/

A member of Western Writers of America, J. Hoolihan has been published in western historical magazines, such as "True West" and "Wild West." During her extensive research, J. Hoolihan continues to accumulate an abundance of topics for a succession of factual stories pertaining to the 19th century American West. Her first novel, Commendable Discretion, was published in January 2021. With Great Discretion is the second book of this series.* "Throwing the hoolihan" is a technique that old time cowboys used for roping horses. "Hoolihan" has been Juliana's nickname for decades

A new beginning for Native representation on TV

 Their Shows Might Be Over, but They’re Just Getting Started

Historic Emmy nominees Lily Gladstone, Kali Reis, Sterlin Harjo, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai all see their celebrated shows ending as a new beginning for Native representation on TV.

By Marcus Jones August 24, 2024  

 

'Reservation Dogs,' 'True Detective: Night Country,' 'Under the Bridge'

FX/HBO/Hulu

However exciting it was for Lily Gladstone to receive her own first Emmy nomination for her work in the Hulu series “Under the Bridge,” the more meaningful aspect of her Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie nod was seeing “True Detective: Night Country” breakout Kali Reis be honored as well. “I love that I’m not alone in this category. Having just had a bunch of first time historical monikers applied to me, there’s something that’s very lonely about that,” the recent Oscar nominee told IndieWire over Zoom. “So it’s great to carry that with another actress who turned in just this stellar performance, and then just represents a whole other aspect of how diverse and how important it is to highlight how diverse Indian country is.” 

 

The conclusion of “True Detective: Night Country,” highlighting some of its Native actors that had mostly stayed in the background, was a twist the star did not see coming, but thoroughly appreciated. “Coming from the Native community, the nosy-ass aunties know everything. They know everything. If you want to know the tea, go to Auntie’s house,” said Reis. “Also on a serious note, the invisibility, the very thing that is something that we ‘are’ or people look at us or don’t look at Native people, especially Native women, as invisible, that invisibility is the very thing that was a superpower.” It reflected the ways in which indigenous organizations have to take finding answers for missing and murdered indigenous women into their own hands in a way Gladstone also found “invigorating.” 

 

KEEP READING:

https://www.indiewire.com/awards/consider-this/native-representation-emmys-lily-gladstone-reservation-dogs-kali-reis-1235039649/

Worried About a Loved One?

Learn more:

Anishinabek News: Nipissing First Nation teaches Anishinaabemowin on YouTube  https://anishinabeknews.ca/2024/08/29/nipissing-first-nation-teaches-anishinaabemowin-on-youtube/

 

Mary Kunesh fights for the silenced

 

This story is part of a partnership between Bethel University’s journalism program and ICT.

 

Mary Kunesh fights for the silenced

By Merrina O’Malley, Special to ICT
Minnesota state senator fights for the rights of missing and murdered Indigenous people by educating the public ... continue reading

 

This is a brilliant series on ICT:  https://ictnews.org

Native American Representation in film from 2007-2022
An analysis of the 1,600 top-grossing movies released from 2007-2022 found:
0.25 percent of all speaking characters were Native American
1 percent of films featured female Native American characters with speaking roles
77 percent of Native characters were male and 23 percent were female
Data from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

PODCAST: Once Upon A Time...In Adopteeland

from Missing Threads

Once Upon A Time...In Adopteeland (podcast)  189. Elizabeth Blake: "Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found"

LINK: https://www.onceuponatimeinadopteeland.com/episode/189-elizabeth-blake-connecting-threads-five-siblings-lost-and-found 

 

Blake has a recently released graphic memoir called Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found.  She is one of five children who were removed from their first family over time and placed in foster care, and most were adopted when young. She didn't know until decades later that she had lived with her first mother for weeks or months.   Because of closed adoptions, it took decades to connect scarce information to find her siblings.  She and her siblings have Ojibwe or A-nish-i-naabe and Northern European roots.  Some are enrolled tribal members, and all have Indigenous heritage.  After many years, they began to find each other, one by one. Because her siblings did not grow up together, it took time to know each other, feel solid in their identity, and develop a deep sense of belonging. This happy ending came after a complicated childhood with many challenges.  Her Website: https://www.elizabethblake.us/

Forced adoption survivors should be compensated, West Australia Parliamentary inquiry recommends

A WA parliamentary inquiry into the devastating forced adoption scandal of last century has recommended financial redress for mothers, adopted people and some fathers.

READ: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-22/forced-adoption-scandal-inquiry-financial-compensation/104249056

Tanya Talaga is Rewriting Canadian History Her Way

 

In The Knowing, her third non-fiction book, Talaga travels back in time—and unearths a few family secrets in the process

 

By Katie Underwood

August 22, 2024

Tanya Talaga has made a career of telling the unvarnished truth about Canada, to Canada. In her bestselling books, Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations, Talaga, a Globe and Mail columnist of Anishinaabe and Polish descent, turned her incisive eye on systemic problems like racism in policing and the suicide epidemic among Indigenous youth. But when it came to the personal, to her own family, Talaga always found more questions than answers.

In The Knowing, her third non-fiction book, out August 27, Talaga runs toward, not from, her history, filling in the gaps in her own ancestral line. It’s a lineage severed several times, as her First Nations relatives were forcibly sent to government- and church-sponsored residential schools, asylums and new families entirely as part of the Sixties Scoop. After years spent digging into the past, she’s learned a few things: about her grandmothers, about Canada’s past and that, when it comes to family, you can never really know the whole story. 

The Knowing revisits the colonial history of Canada, as well as the history of your own matriarchal line. What made you decide to weave in your own  family details? 

All Indigenous families share the same history; we all have people who are missing. I didn’t want to write a trauma porn book, talking about everyone else’s pain. Elder Sam Achneepineskum from Marten Falls First Nation once gave me some advice: our ancestors need to know who’s speaking. We need to tell people who each of us are, so everyone can understand what happened. 

 

...Figuring it all out, the how did we get here—that helps me a lot.  It’s reclamation. One person I met, Paula Rickard, is a professional genealogist who lives in Moose Factory, Ontario.  She’s built out a family tree of the James Bay coast that now has something like 12,000 names.  When I was just starting out, I messaged her Facebook page, and she responded with, “You know we’re related, too, right?” 

KEEP READING : https://www.macleans.ca/culture/tanya-talaga-is-rewriting-canadian-history-her-way/

Corruption and Bribery? A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided

 

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided 

Reveal illustration; Charles Deluvio/Unsplash; Dukas/Universal/Getty

In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child. He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child. That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families. This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.

Listen to the episode

🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Transcript

 

Dig Deeper

Read: ‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’ (The Cut) 

Read: Forever Home (Mother Jones)

Listen: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (Radiolab)

Listen: This Land podcast

 

Manitoba: Brandon's Eagle Healing Lodge strengthens Dakota, Cree, Anishinaabemowin and Michif speakers at 3-day camp

'It feels like home': Southwestern Manitoba camp connects language to land

Chelsea Kemp · CBC · Posted: August 9

Brandon Friendship Centre’s Eagle Healing Lodge program co-ordinator Denise Sinclair says the camp is helping people reclaim their Indigenous languages through land-based activities. (Chelsea Kemp/CBC)

Nestled in a ceremony site east of Southwestern Manitoba's biggest city, a group of language keepers is working to strengthen and grow fluent Dakota, Cree, Anishinaabemowin and Michif speakers.

They're part of the Brandon Friendship Centre's Eagle Healing Lodge's first land-based language camp.  Four teepees have been set up between the forest and prairies, each home to an Indigenous language in Westman.

"Language has always been connected to the land," says Denise Sinclair, program co-ordinator for the healing lodge. "Everything that we're doing here is specifically land-based ... in the language so that you can hear it [and] you can pass that on."

The three-day camp, held Tuesday through Thursday, was an opportunity for participants to learn and speak Dakota, Cree, Anishinaabemowin and Michif, she said.  They would speak their languages for different activities like setting up tents, smoking meat or medicine picking.

Julia Brandon, left, and Martina Richard crush chokecherries as a way to learn Anishinaabemowin. (Chelsea Kemp/CBC)

It's powerful seeing connections forged as people learn and speak their languages, Sinclair said. It's important work that has to carry on to help with language revitalization.

"Whatever you're learning you're going to remember … you're building that core memory with the language, that you needed growing up," Sinclair said.

Language as strength

The healing lodge has been cultivating a community centred on strengthening Indigenous languages since 2021, Sinclair said. It began as a program for Sixties Scoop survivors and grew to include residential school survivors and others.

Language serves to reconnect people with their culture and identity in a safe place centred on healing, Sinclair said.

"We have to remember that there's still that sense of …. something being taken," Sinclair said. "Now they feel safe to talk to us as learners because they feel that importance of passing on that language."

Martina Richard, from Waywayseecappo First Nation, camped out at the site for two days to immerse herself and her family in language and culture. Participants could choose to camp, or to go home for the night.

Eagle Healing Lodge Cultural support worker Lacey Hotain says she wants to strengthen her Dakota to pass it on to future generations. (Chelsea Kemp/CBC)

"Kill the Indian, Save the Man" - Carlisle Boarding School - US History ...

 

MORE: 

Full Text and Excerpts of Pratt's "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" Speech from Dickinson College: https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/.... 

American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many - NPR: https://www.npr.org/2008/05/12/165168... 

Death By Civilization - The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/education... 

If you can take 10 minutes, this animated film (above) is a good overview of that history. There is so much information to understand, that this animated film can reinforce some of the details.

If you haven't yet called or written your congressperson to support these two bills, here it is again. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSON AND SENATOR TO SUPPORT THE TWO BILLS PROPOSED BY SEC.DEB HAALAND TO INVESTIGATE AND BEGIN TO BRING HEALING TO NATIVE AMERICANS ADVERSELY TRAUMATIZED BY THE BOARDING SCHOOL ERA.

S.1723 TRUTH AND HEALING ACT

HR. 7227 TRUTH AND HEALING ACT

If you would like to be part of educating the public, please consider hosting our film NATIVE WOMEN AND ALLIES SPEAK: What You Weren't Taught in School

FILM TRAILER:   

CNA promo.12.12.23 from Arla Patch on Vimeo.

VISIT: www.coalitionofnativesandallies.org

Voices from Pezihutazizi Oyate: Boarding School Histories

 

As hurtful truths come to light regarding historically operated Federal Indian boarding schools in the United States, many Native Nations are reclaiming their voices.  For the Upper Sioux Community (“Yellow Medicine Nation”) living in Minnesota, these historical truths are known to have cast profound ripples that impact their present.  This mini documentary explores community interpretations of this boarding school past and offers hope for justice and healing. 

Continue the discussion and learning by downloading the "Voices from Pezihutazizi Oyate" discussion guide here: http://boardingschoolhealing.org/wp-c...

READ:  https://www.yahoo.com/news/investigation-nearly-1000-native-children-183000794.html

How Tribal Nations Are Reclaiming Oklahoma | Still Waiting on Museums

NEW YORKER: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/how-tribal-nations-are-reclaiming-oklahoma

Published in the print edition of the August 12, 2024, issue, with the headline “Promised Land.”

**

Museums closed Native American exhibits 6 months ago. Tribes are still waiting to get items back

PHILIP MARCELO Associated Press

VIDEO: https://apnews.com/video/indigenous-people-american-museum-of-natural-history-ontario-government-regulations-new-york-city-9eb66fe1b9964355b14c7057c12dd904 

---

NEW YORK (AP) — Tucked within the expansive Native American halls of the American Museum of Natural History is a diminutive wooden doll that holds a sacred place among the tribes whose territories once included Manhattan.

For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or Doll Being, has been hidden from view after the museum and others nationally took dramatic steps to board up or paper over exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant items to tribes — or at least to obtain consent to display or study them.

Museum officials are reviewing more than 1,800 items as they work to comply with the requirements while also eyeing a broader overhaul of the more than half-century-old exhibits.

But some tribal leaders remain skeptical, saying museums have not acted swiftly enough. The new rules, after all, were prompted by years of complaints from tribes that hundreds of thousands of items that should have been returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 still remain in museum custody.

“If things move slowly, then address that,” said Joe Baker, a Manhattan resident and member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, descendants of the Lenape peoples European traders encountered more than 400 years ago. “The collections, they’re part of our story, part of our family. We need them home. We need them close.”

The leader of the tribe in Oklahoma said he visited the Peabody this year after the university reached out about returning hair clippings collected in the early 1930s from hundreds of Indigenous children, including Cherokees, forced to assimilate in the notorious Indian boarding schools.

“The fact that we’re in a position to sit down with Harvard and have a really meaningful conversation, that’s progress for the country,” he said.

As for Baker, he wants the Ohtas returned to its tribe. He said the ceremonial doll should never have been on display, especially arranged as it was among wooden bowls, spoons and other everyday items.

“It has a spirit. It’s a living being,” Baker said. “So if you think about it being hung on a wall all these years in a static case, suffocating for lack of air, it’s just horrific, really.” 

This story was first published on Jul. 29, 2024. It was updated on Jul. 31, 2024, to correct the scope of repatriations to tribes undertaken by the Field Museum in Chicago.

 

HERE:  https://apnews.com/article/museums-not-returning-native-american-artifacts-0b7428c77341a9a80f022e0167ad4c8b

“The only thing they didn’t do was put us in (an oven) and gas us”

TEEN VOGUE

Nearly 1000 Native American Children Died in Abusive US Boarding Schools, Report Finds

Angie Jaime 8/1/2024

---

An investigation commissioned by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools where Native American children were forced to assimilate into white, American society.  While the report found that at least 973 Indigenous children died while attending schools in the system, it also acknowledges that the actual number of deaths is likely higher.

“The federal government – facilitated by the Department I lead – took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people.  These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair,” Haaland said in a statement.

In the 150 years between 1819 and 1969, thousands of Native children and youths were forcibly taken from their homes, as part of systemic efforts from the federal government and Christian religious leaders to eradicate Indigenous culture and identity.  The report estimates the U.S. federal government spent $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars over the 150 years that the government supported the boarding school system and similar assimilation policies.

It wasn’t until 1975 that tribal nations received the right to manage tribal schools, many of which were on tribal land, and parents could not prevent their children’s placement in off-reservation schools until the Indian Child Welfare Act passed in 1978.

“For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children,” Assistant Secretary and citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe) Bryan Newland said in the same statement.

“This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations – that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways. It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and Tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”

The findings follow listening sessions held by Haaland throughout the U.S. over the past two years, in which dozens of boarding school survivors described what they endured while separated from their families.

“I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred,” Whirlwind Soldier testified during a 2022 event on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation led by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. “The only thing they didn’t do was put us in (an oven) and gas us,” she said, invoking Holocaust atrocities.

Within the report, Assistant Secretary Newland includes a number of steps that aim to support a path to healing the nation, including among its recommendations: issuing a formal apology from the U.S. government and “investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.”

The report, Haaland said, just the beginning of a long road to healing.