1949 MOVIE: Canadian Pacific | Randolph Scott

Canadian Pacific - A surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railroad must fight fur trappers who oppose the building of the railroad by stirring up Indian rebellion.

Scalp Bounties | DAY OF MOURNING | Thanksgiving in Plymouth

👉 “Bounty” shows daily at the Old State House and can be viewed online at the Upstander Project’s website, which also features a timeline and a teacher’s guide to the film and the issues it deals with.

New film at Old State House highlights Cambridge’s ties to colonial ‘scalp bounties’

By Beth Folsom |November 11, 2024

Spencer Phips’ scalp bounty proclamation issued in 1755. (Image: Penobscot Nation Museum)

“Bounty,” the newly installed film at Boston’s Old State House, is only nine minutes long, but its powerful and disturbing message looms much larger for audiences. Whether tourists or locals, visitors to the Old State House usually expect to tour the 1713 building to glimpse the legislative history of Massachusetts, particularly the events and public debates surrounding the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre and other aspects of Revolutionary history. Now part of Revolutionary Spaces, which also oversees the Old South Meeting House, the Old State House is sharing the history of brutal attacks on New England’s Indigenous peoples as part of Massachusetts colonial policy – a legacy that is surprising and unnerving to those used to a purely celebratory telling of the colony’s story.

The exhibit, housed in the Old State House’s council chamber, tells the story of so-called “scalp bounties” – one that has a direct connection to Cambridge as a whole and, in particular, to History Cambridge’s headquarters at 159 Brattle St. The adopted son of Sir William Phips, the first governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Spencer Phips entered politics in his own right in 1721 when elected to the provincial assembly. His family connections had set Phips up for political and economic prominence and, several years after his graduation from Harvard in 1703, he bought a large tract that encompassed much of what is now East Cambridge and settled there with his family.

Phips was appointed to the governor’s council in 1721, and from 1732-1757 was the lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which included the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Plymouth Colony, the Province of Maine, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. During two periods (1749-53 and 1756-57) Phips served as acting governor while William Shirley was abroad.

As a prominent landowner and politician, Phips had set his children up to marry well; in the 1730s Phips’ daughter Rebecca married the up-and-coming merchant and land speculator Joseph Lee and settled into 159 Brattle St., known commonly as the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House. While we do not have direct evidence that this house, which serves as the headquarters of History Cambridge, was occupied by enslaved people on a permanent basis, we know that Joseph Lee and Rebecca Phips enslaved two men, Caesar and Mark Lee/Lewis, on other Massachusetts properties that they owned, and it is likely that one or both stayed with the Lees when they were at their Brattle Street property.  Spencer Phips, too, was an enslaver, holding five people in bondage, so his children would have grown up expecting to be waited on by enslaved servants.

In addition to his land in Cambridge, Phips was part-owner of a large tract on what is now the central coast of Maine (then part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay). In 1719, the owners began to develop the land for white settlement to the objection of the local Abenaki People, who argued that their leaders had made land grants to the colonists without authorization from the tribe.  Conflicts increased in the 1720s, leading to what is known as Dummer’s War from 1723-1727. For the next several decades, tensions flared between the Abenaki and the colonists, leading Shirley to declare war on the Abenaki in 1754.

In its declaration of war, Massachusetts made an exception for one group of Abenaki: the Penobscot People, whom the colonial government claimed were exempt from their attacks.  In reality, the position of the Penobscot made them vulnerable to the same brutality at the hands of colonists as other Abenaki.  In the ongoing colonial battles between the English and the French, Indigenous peoples were pressured to take sides; although the Penobscot desired to remain neutral, their geographic location meant that they could not escape colonial politics. Seen as pro-British by the French and pro-French by the Maine colonists, the Penobscot found themselves pushed increasingly toward French alliance because of incidents such as a 1755 attack by New England militiamen on a Penobscot fishing party.

In 1755, while Shirley was away from the colony, Phips issued a declaration of war against the Penobscot, offering cash rewards for each scalp of a Penobscot person turned into the colonial government. Phips’ proclamation put a value of 50 pounds for males over age 12, while women and male children under 12 were deemed to be worth 25 pounds and female children were worth 20 pounds. The next year, the colonial assembly voted to allow scalp bounties of up to 300 pounds – by far the largest sum ever offered in a wartime declaration.  In 1759, Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Pownall seized control of the Penobscot River and the homelands of the Penobscot people by force. 

Phips signed the declaration of war and the scalp bounty proclamation in the council chamber of the Old State House; in 2021, Upstander Project created a short film featuring several current-day Penobscot families reading the text of the proclamation aloud in the chamber.  Penobscot Nation tribal ambassador Maulian Bryant emphasized the importance of not only telling the story of the Phips Proclamation, but doing so in the physical space where these and other decisions were made that so greatly affected the Penobscot and other Indigenous peoples:

It conveys this empowering sense of resilience and that Penobscot people, Indigenous people all over this country were not supposed to still be here. That there were very systematic attempts to exterminate our people in order to have our land taken. So the fact that we are still living here in our home, and we will grapple with this trauma and we will reflect on it and honor our ancestors, but we need to do that by being strong, proud Penobscot people. And this project was a way to reclaim some of that space.

SOURCE: https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/11/11/new-film-at-old-state-house-highlights-cambridges-ties-to-colonial-scalp-bounties/

History Cambridge is proud to partner with the Upstander Project to work toward the amplification of Indigenous voices and a broader understanding of local Indigenous histories during this Native American Heritage Month and well beyond.

 

🦃THANKS BRADFORD?

 Plymouth still celebrates (of course)

I do not... Trace
 

The National Day of Mourning plaque on Cole's Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts

The first National Day of Mourning event was held on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1970 on Cole's Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts. James delivered an amended speech^[1] beside a statue of Ousamequin, including

"We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail. You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian." - Frank "Wamsutta" James, first National Day of Mourning, November 26, 1970[2][4]

The event was attended by close to 500 Native Americans from throughout the United States^[1] and has been held annually on the fourth Thursday in November every year since.  James' speech was one of the first public criticisms of the Thanksgiving story from Native American groups.^[2]

DAY OF MOURNING:  NOVEMBER 28, 2024 

HEADLINES

Seattle Magazine: Chef Overcomes Personal Troubles to Celebrate his Native American Roots

Arizona Republic: Thanksgiving always reflected culture. Indigenous chefs are reclaiming it

I thought my biological family didn’t want me. But they'd never stopped looking for me

"I felt so much pain that I had been carrying melt away."

TODAY Illustration / Courtesy Yvette McKinley

Nov. 22, 2024

By Yvette McKinley, as told to Rachel Paula Abrahamson

When I was a toddler, I was stolen from my home in the middle of the night. Child welfare authorities banged on the door and said, “We’re here for Yvette,” and my parents had no choice but to hand me over.

I’m one of more than 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada who were ripped from their families during what is known as the Sixties Scoop. The Canadian goverment believed that Indigenous people were not fit to raise children. In the words of former prime minister Hector Langevin, “To educate the children properly we must separate them from their families. Some people may say that is hard but if we want to civilize them we must do that."

Similar things happened in the United States, where an estimated 25% to 35% of Native American children were removed from their families before the Indian Child Welfare Act was established in 1978.

My siblings — I’m the youngest of 14 — were sent to federally operated, Catholic boarding schools where they were given English names and forbidden from speaking their aboriginal language. In these programs of forced assimilation, many experienced horrific physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

I was more fortunate.

In 1974, I was adopted by a white Christian couple in Oregon. They were told by the adoption agency that my biological parents didn’t want to raise me. For decades, I believed that story, too.

My adoptive parents were kind, but I always had a sense of being different.Courtesy Yvette McKinley

It was quite easy for a white couple to adopt an Indigenous child at the time. My adoptive parents started the paperwork in January, flew up in March to meet me for the first time, and the very next day they took me back to their home in Oregon.

Growing up, I was aware that I was Indigenous, but it’s not something that I embraced. At school, my classmates called me an Indian. Redskin was another one I heard a lot. My mom says I always asked her to buy me white tights so my legs would look white like the other girls. I didn’t want brown skin. I didn’t want to be different.

It wasn’t until my 20s that I started to get more curious about my history. My brother, who is half Japanese, had started looking for his biological family, so I decided I would, too. I knew my birth parents had the same name, Acoby, so I started by writing to every Acoby I could find in the Canadian providence of Manitoba.

The first person I heard back from was my sister Lorraine, who shared that we are members of Swan Lake First Nation. She said our parents had never stopped looking for me. When I read those words, I felt so much pain that I had been carrying melt away. I had spent my life believing that they didn't want me.

From Lorraine I learned about how our sister Charlotte was taken at a doctor's appointment when she was 5 months old.  My mom handed Charlotte over to a nurse, not realizing she would never hold her baby again.  My mom went back to that doctor's office every single day for months begging for them to let her see Charlotte, but she was gone.

My sister Charlotte (left) and me: I've discovered a whole family I never knew I had.Courtesy Yvette McKinley

At the age of 24, I reunited with my mother.  My dad, a former chief of Swan Lake, had died a few years earlier.  My sisters were there to translate for our mom who spoke only Ojibwe.  She was relieved to learn I was raised by kind parents.  For all those years she had wondered if I was OK, and I’m glad she was able to have some closure. 

It’s so hard to put into words what it was like to be surrounded by people who look like me.  There’s this feeling of acceptance.  But at the same time, I feel so Caucasian when I’m around my biological family.  Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere, which is not uncommon for survivors of the Sixties Scoop.

Since reconnecting with my birth family, I travel to Swan Lake reserve every summer.  I feel at peace there.  It’s just prairie land and it’s a part of me that I didn’t know I had been missing. 

Now I have sisters that I text and call.  We do big family dinners.  When we’re together there is this overwhelming sense of calm. 

I love sitting around with the council people and learning about where I came from. At my first powwow, I met family members I never knew existed — aunts, uncles, cousins.  Unfortunately, the tribe can’t recognize me as a family member because the Canadian government erased my birth certificate.  But I do have my Ojibwe name, which means Morning Sky in English.  My kids now want to get their spiritual names. 

I'm working to get my real birth certificate.  The one I have now lists my adoptive parents as my parents.

I received a $25,000 apology check from the Canadian government.  And that’s what my life is worth in their eyes.  It’s like, "We destroyed your entire family.  We took you from your home, from your family.  Here’s a check for $25,000.”  That hurts a lot.

There are so many people that don’t know anything about what happened to my people during the Sixties Scoop.  One summer, I stopped at a burger stand just a few miles from Swan Lake and the woman working behind the counter had never heard of the Scoop.

I want the government to acknowledge what they did and honor those children who never made it out alive from their schools.  Let’s call it what it is: The Sixties Scoop, like the Holocaust, was a genocide. 

At least 4,120 children are known to have died in the residential schools in Canada. In the U.S., a federal investigation found that at least 973 children died in residential schools — and the actual number is probably much higher, since many were buried in unmarked graves.

My siblings were sent to those schools.  They say their hair was cut off.  They were beaten for speaking our language and singing our songs.  They were forced to study the Bible.  My sister Yvonne can only talk about it in little tiny segments because it was so traumatic. 

We are healing together.

I will never forget how Swan Lake First Nation chief Jason Daniels welcomed me back.

"You're home," he said. "This will always be your home."

FALCON Strength in Numbers: Gary

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Two Worlds: What Really Happened?

BUY NOW http://amzn.to/2CjtyRr

reblog from 2017

(The first edition came out in 2012)

GREENFIELD, MA (2017) Tragic, true, heartbreaking, astonishing... those words have been used to describe the anthology Two Worlds, the first book to expose in first-person detail the adoption practices that have been going on for years under the guise of caring for destitute Indigenous children in North America.

What really happened and where are these Native children now? 

The new updated Second Edition of TWO WORLDS (Vol. 1), with narratives from Native American and First Nations adoptees, covers the history of Indian child removals in North America, the adoption projects, their impact on Indian Country, the 60s Scoop in Canada and how it impacts the adoptee and their families.

"This book changed history," say editor Trace Hentz. "There is no doubt in my mind the adoption projects were buried and hidden... we adoptees are the living proof."

The Lost Children Book Series includes: Two Worlds, Called Home: The Roadmap, Stolen Generations, In The Veins: Poetry and ALMOST DEAD INDIANS (2024). The book series is an important contribution to American Indian history.

Trace Hentz (formerly DeMeyer) located other Native adult survivors of adoption and asked them to write a narrative for the first anthology.  These adoptees share their unique experience of living in Two Worlds, surviving assimilation via adoption, opening sealed adoption records, and in most cases, a reunion with their tribal relatives. Indigenous identity and historical trauma takes on a whole new meaning in this adoption book series.

As Hentz writes in the Preface, "The only way we change history is to write it ourselves." This book is a must read for all that want the truth, since very little is known or published on this history.

"I was asked to update this book by one adoptee contributor and I added a new narrative by Levi Eagle Feather, and more information on the 60s Scoop. Please tell your friends and other adoptees," Trace Hentz says. "One day in America, we Lost Children will have our day in court."

(Since 2012, this anthology has traveled the world, and I hope it helped you!)

 On BOOKSHOP: https://bookshop.org/p/books/two-worlds-lost-children-of-the-indian-adoption-projects-vol-1-second-edition-trace-l-hentz/11587960?ean=9780692372104

On Amazon, Kindle, Kobo...

The Ground We Walk On | Wisconsin once home to tens of thousands of burial mounds

By Frank Vaisvilas

Marquette University history professor Bryan Rindfleish put it best when he said there’s a sacredness to the ground we walk on in Wisconsin when you realize that everywhere you step holds thousands of years of Native American history underneath.

He said Increase Lapham, the prominent civil engineer who helped transform Milwaukee from a small village into a booming city, realized that, as well.  In the mid-1800s, as developers flattened hundreds of ancient Indigenous mounds all over the city, Lapham saved at least two mounds with his design of Forest Home Cemetery, researchers recently learned.

But, as Rindfleish points out, that didn’t stop Lapham or the cemetery owners at the time from burying people along the edges of the mounds.

About 20,000 mounds, effigy and conical, were built in Wisconsin.  Only about 4,000 remain today, partly because of development over the last 200 years. They also were destroyed by amateur archeologists and ordinary Wisconsin residents.

It was not uncommon for Wisconsin families to have Sunday picnics on top of these mounds and then spend the rest of the afternoon digging for artifacts and even human remains to keep in their private collections, or to sell to museums or universities.

Early non-Native settlers in Wisconsin had theorized in the 1800s that the mounds were built by some “lost race” or even the Vikings because they couldn’t accept that Native Americans, whom they were removing from their lands at the time, would be capable of creating such massive and impressive earthworks.

Later researchers determined that the effigy mound systems closely resemble the clan systems and spirit animals still used by many local Indigenous tribes today, such as the Thunderbird and Water Panther.

Conical burial mounds started being built in Wisconsin around 500 B.C.  Effigy mounds depicting people, animals or spirits were built from about 700 A.D. to around 1100.

There is still some debate about which tribe, exactly, built the mounds, especially those in southeast Wisconsin.

The Ho-Chunk Nation has taken the lead today in protecting remaining mounds from development, and its historians and elders claim their ancestors built the mounds, especially in central and southwestern Wisconsin.

The Potawatomi claim southeast Wisconsin as their ancestral homeland, but Menominee tribal historians claim their tribe’s ancestral territory included all of what is now known as Wisconsin, as well as parts of Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. Menominee historians say the Menominee were here before any other tribe and any other people dating back at least 10,000 years. 

This debate between tribal historians tends to heat up when there’s any push or movement for a new casino in Kenosha and whether it will be owned and operated by the Menominee Nation, currently among the most impoverished of tribes.

If you like this newsletter, please invite a friend to subscribe to it. And if you have tips or suggestions for this newsletter, please email me at  fvaisvilas@gannett.com.

Ancient Indigenous mounds found in Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee

Experts believed there was only one surviving ancient Indigenous mound in Milwaukee. Now, two rediscovered mounds bring that number to three.

READ MORE

https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2024/11/14/ancient-indigenous-mounds-found-at-milwaukees-forest-home-cemetery/76221371007/

 

New law is unlocking secrets of closed Minnesota adoptions

WATCH VIDEO:  https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/kare11-extras/new-law-unlocking-secrets-closed-minnesota-adoptions/89-ae27a68d-722d-4849-a1db-6827c83030d2

 

More than 2,800 Minnesota adoptees have already requested copies of their original birth records. Very few are finding contact preferences from their birth parents.

 

Author: Kent Erdahl

November 21, 2024

MINNETONKA, Minn. — From the moment a law change gave Minnesota adoptees the right to access their original birth records, Lisa Belknap knew she'd be applying the first chance she got.

She just never imagined it would arrive in her mailbox on her birthday.

"I'm shaking," said Belknap, who invited KARE11 to be there as she opened her birth record. "I thought... just how remarkable that is, to get your birth certificate on your birthday, for the first time. The real one."

Like many Minnesotans who were involved in closed adoptions, Belknap spent most of her life with very little information about her birth parents. Limited information about their medical history, along with a few baby photos from her six weeks in foster care, were her only clues to her past. 

But while she always wondered where she came from, she wants to make it clear that she never wondered who her family is. She was quickly adopted by loving parents, and an older brother.

"Do they feel uncomfortable about the fact that I might find my birth family? Absolutely not. No," Belknap said. "I think the main thing my parents have always been concerned about is what I might find."

Birth Parent Contact Preference

Because any Minnesota adoptee who is 18 or older can now request their birth record and attempt to find their birth parents, the state spent a year trying to publicize the changes and give birth parents a chance to offer their contact preferences.

"We asked them to fill out a Birth Parent Contact Preference form," said State Registrar, Molly Mulcahy Crawford. "There's a space where they can share anything they want. Maybe their address, maybe how to get ahold of me if they want contact, maybe to explain why I don't want contact."

Despite those efforts, and a potential pool of 175,000 Minnesota adoptions, fewer than .5% of birth parents have returned that form in the last year.

Mulcahy Crawford: "In total, we've received 377 birth parent contact preference forms."

Erdahl: "Do you know how many said? Yes, I can be contacted versus I prefer not to?" 

Mulcahy Crawford: "It's about 50/50, but regardless of that preference, if an adopted person makes a request under the new law, they're going to get a copy." 

Erdahl: "In other words, noboby can stop them from still contacting them." 

Mulcahy Crawford: "Right."