Buried Secrets Podcast

Chief James H. Red Cloud, grandson of the famous Chief Red Cloud who allowed the Jesuits to set up a school on Lakota land, addresses the 1958 graduating class of Holy Rosary Mission and a Jesuit father. Credit: Courtesy of the Red Cloud Indian School and Marquette University Holy Rosary Mission/Red Cloud Indian School records

 

Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools

This week on Reveal, we’re bringing back a two-part investigation with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) about boarding schools for Native children and the United States’ effort to come to terms with an educational system that was designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.” ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember has been reporting on these boarding schools for more than 20 years. Much of her work focuses on the role the Catholic Church played in shaping federal policy toward Native people. The church was given more than 10,000 acres of tribal land by the federal government, as well as access to money that had been given to tribes through treaties with the U.S. government to build and operate the schools. In part one of this investigation, Pember takes us to the Catholic-run Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which is now trying to bring truth and healing to its community despite the open wound from the school’s history.

Listen to the episode

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

 

DIG DEEPER

📝 Buried Secrets: Red Cloud takes the lead in uncovering boarding school past. Read.

📝 Red Cloud Indian School will dig for graves. Read.

📝 The Catholic Church siphoned away $30M paid to Native people for stolen land. Read.

📝 Deaths at Chemawa. Read.

📝 ‘Sometimes we hear the voices of children playing there.’ Read.

Previous episode From Victim to Suspect

 

Buried Secrets: Red Cloud takes the lead in uncovering boarding school past

 UPDATED

Pine Ridge school’s Truth and Healing effort looks for long-sought answers

• Mary Annette Pember
• Oct 15, 2022

WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

This story and a two-part podcast are the result of a collaboration between ICT and Reveal to examine Indigenous boarding schools in the United States. The podcast, “Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools,” starts with part 1 on Saturday, Oct. 15, and concludes with part 2 on Saturday, Oct. 22.

Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 2

READ

We see exactly what Goldwater wants #AttackonICWA #ICWA #NAAM2019

Indian child welfare legal challenge is about ending tribal sovereignty

 

by Mary Annette Pember

Before the law more than a quarter of American Indian and Alaska Native children were removed from their homes

This story is like a scary movie. In “Fatal Attraction” Glen Close’s character won’t give up her murderous quest. She comes back again and again. The legal challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act follow a similar plot line.

The scene in the 1970’s for American Indian and Alaska Native children was disturbing, some 25 to 35 percent of the population were removed from their homes by state welfare and private adoption agencies. This was slow motion genocide by literally removing the future from the home.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted as to reverse this narrative and to recognize that tribes, as sovereign nations, have control over the welfare of their own children.

Attacks on the law, enacted in 1978, have inexplicably risen in the past seven years and attracted the support of a seemingly disparate array of high power ultra conservative players and organizations.
Today’s challenges to the child welfare protocols aren’t only about adoption because if the Indian Child Welfare Act is found to be unconstitutional that would undermine tribal governments. So much is at stake: The authority of tribal courts, economic nationhood, including casinos, and the control of tribal land, potentially an opening for fossil fuels and other extractive industry development.
“Eliminating ICWA is part of an ultra-conservative agenda to return Indian Country to the Termination Era, abrogate tribal treaties, and made tribes and tribal citizens fully subjects to state law,” said former tribal prosecutor J. Eric Reed.

The latest Indian Child Welfare Act challenge is again before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court made the unusual decision to vacate its August 9 decision in Brakeen v. Bernhardt finding child welfare law is not race-based but a valid, constitutional statute; then the court announced it would rehear the case En Banc.

The use of En Banc, in which all judges of a particular court hear a case, is a relatively uncommon legal procedure usually reserved for the purposes of maintaining uniformity of the court’s decisions or to show that the proceeding involves a question of exceptional importance.

In its original decision finding ICWA to, indeed, be constitutional, one of the three judges, Priscilla R. Owen wrote her dissenting opinion in an August 16 modification. Owen wrote that in requiring states to maintain records relating to placement of Indian children as part of compliance with Indian Child Welfare Act violates the constitution’s 10th Amendment anti-commandeering doctrine. According to the 10th Amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.”

Owens wrote: “The defendants in the present case contend that the Indian Commerce Clause empowers Congress to direct the States as it has done in the ICWA. They are mistaken. Where a federal interest is sufficiently strong to cause Congress to legislate, it must do so directly; it may not conscript state governments as its agents.”

This opinion underscores the rise of Federalist philosophies in conservative politics supporting states rights over federal authority, questioning the constitutionality of requiring state governments to carry out federal policies.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals long considered the most politically conservative court in the country, has grown more so after five appointments to its ranks by President Trump. A total of 17 judges occupy the court.

According to federal court watchers, President Trump is engaged in a quiet revolution to populate federal courts with judges who align with his brand of politically conservative politics. Although his 157 judicial appointments place him roughly even with both Barack Obama and George W. Bush during the same point in their tenures, his focus on federal appeals courts sets him apart from his predecessors according to the New York Times. If all of his current nominees are confirmed, they will account for 1.4 of the country’s federal appeals court judges.

National Public Radio’s Carrie Johnson described Trump’s appointment of James Ho to the Fifth Circuit Court as exemplifying the Trump era. A first time judge, Ho’s first Fifth Circuit opinion has been described by legal scholars as political commentary rather than legal opinion. In Zimmerman v. City of Austin, involving limiting campaign contributions in Austin, Texas, he wrote in his dissenting opinion, “If you don’t like big money in politics, then you should oppose big government in our lives,”

Vanita Gupta, president and chief operating officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights issued a statement about Trump’s court nominees: “The majority of his nominees have long records of hostility to civil and human rights, and too many are unqualified. Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans are transforming our federal courts because their agenda is failing in Congress and the court of public opinion.”
She notes that appointments to the federal judiciary are lifetime positions.

History of Brakeen v. Bernhardt before the Fifth Circuit

On October 4, 2018, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act is unconstitutional because it’s race-based.

The ruling was based on Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, non-Natives, experience in trying to adopt a Native child, an enrolled citizen of the Navajo and Cherokee Nations whom they had fostered for a year-and-a-half. In 2017, the Brackeens filed a lawsuit in Texas seeking to adopt the two-year-old boy, identified in the lawsuit as A.L.M. Although a Navajo family was available to take the boy in January 2018 the Brackeens won their case in a Texas district court, and successfully finalized their adoption. But their lawsuit, Brackeen v. Bernhardt, proceeded anyway, joined by several other plaintiffs, including the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana, and eventually landed before Judge O’Connor.

Most media coverage of O’Connor’s ruling, such as a story by National Public Radio, tended to gloss over the law's political and legal context and the far-reaching implications of its reversal.
Many failed to mention that conflicts concerning the child welfare system that can often be traced back to the failure of state and county authorities to notify a tribe when an enrolled child enters child protective services. And most neglected to explain that tribal identity is based not on racial identifiers, or whether a child “looks Indian,” but on their political and citizenship connections to a sovereign nation. And that gets at issues that go far beyond the ability of non-Natives to adopt Native American children.

The designation that the children of enrolled tribal citizens are automatically enrolled citizens as well “is foundational to federal Indian law,” noted a statement released by the Native American Journalists Association. In March 2019, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans heard oral arguments in the Brackeen case and issued its now vacated decision in August finding that the child welfare law is not race based, unconstitutional nor does it counter the 10th amendment. If the court finds during rehearing that ICWA is unconstitutional on any front, it opens the door to overturning tribal sovereignty.

And without sovereignty, treaties between the U.S. government and tribes could be subject to debate.
Reversing the Indian Child Welfare Act would mean that “the hundreds and thousands of federal statutes benefiting Indians would be open for reconsideration,” said Michigan State University law professor Matthew Fletcher, a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and editor of Turtle Talk, the leading blog on American Indian law and policy. “Federal services for Indians and statutes such as the Indian Self Determination Act, Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and others could be challenged.”

And that might be the point. Tribal leaders, legal scholars and child welfare advocates speculate that attacks on the law are seldom rooted in genuine concern for American Indian children, but are merely the latest strategy for right-wing groups to advance agendas rooted in racism, greed and the othering of poor people.

Since 2013, challenges to the law have gained new urgency and support from wealthy right-wing interest groups. Brackeen v. Bernhardt was itself bankrolled by an unlikely alliance of right-wing political, legal, economic and religious groups that outwardly appear to have little connection to Indian Country or its children. They include right-wing think tanks, representatives of the private adoption industry, the evangelical adoption movement, anti-treaty rights organizations and conservative fossil fuel industrialists.

Although the final goals of these seemingly disparate groups may differ, their shared strategy of commodifying Native American children reveals a colonial mindset that not only depicts Native American people as incapable of managing their own affairs, but also frames their children and resources as free for the taking.

According to J. Eric Reed, former tribal prosecutor and a member of the Choctaw Nation, the current legal fight is part of a strategy that feeds into ending the federal government’s trust relationship with tribes as well as challenging federal authority over states’ rights.

“Brackeen v. Zinke,” said Reed, “is a right-wing foot in the door to rewrite the Constitution.”
Although the decision to rehear Brankeen v. Bernhardt appears to be based on Owen’s dissenting opinion that ICWA violates the Constitution’s anti commandeering doctrine, it will mean all plaintiff’s complaints in the original case will be up for reconsideration.

The law’s opponents are emboldened by each small favorable court decision in their favor. For instance, since 2013, with an infamous lawsuit known as “Baby Veronica” that reached the Supreme Court, challenges to ICWA have increased. In the Baby Veronica case—formally called Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl—powerful interests in the adoption industry and evangelical churches joined with high-profile attorneys to challenge ICWA’s authority regarding the adoption of an infant citizen of the Cherokee Nation named Veronica. Eventually the non-Native couple seeking to adopt Veronica, Matt and Melanie Capobianco, prevailed.

Although the court found that ICWA was, indeed, constitutional, it found in favor of the Capobianco’s because the child’s Native father had not maintained custody since her birth. Not long after the Supreme Court ruled in the Capobiancos’ favor, Veronica’s non-Native biological mother, Christina Maldonado, signed onto a lawsuit against the U.S. government claiming that ICWA was unconstitutional. (She later dismissed the suit voluntarily)

“ICWA opponents want another crack at the Supreme Court,” said Nicole Adams of the Colville Confederated Tribes and advisor at the Partnership for Native Children.
“Redefining ICWA as race-based furthers their final agenda of dismantling Indian law as a whole,” she said.

Chiracahua Apaches arriving at the Carlisle Indian School, 1886, and after "training" in 1886. From the Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (National Archives)

The Roots of the child welfare act
Most people in the U.S. have never heard of the Indian Child Welfare Act, enacted in 1978 to stop the near wholesale removal of Native American children from their birth families to non-Native foster and adoption placements. Today, under that law, tribes typically try to place children who come into tribal or state care with a family member, a member of their tribe or, failing that, a family from another tribe.

“Typically, the mainstream press picks up a story regarding ICWA only when a non-Indian family has somehow been injured,” said Terry Cross, founding director and current advisor for the National Indian Child Welfare Association

But the law stems from generations of abusive policies that tore Native American families apart. Beginning in the late 19th Century, the federal government forced or coerced the separation of thousands of Native children from their families, sending them to federal or religious boarding schools often many hours away from their homelands.

Created as part of President Ulysses S. Grant’s Peace Policy of 1869, the boarding school era was framed as a bloodless, more humane answer to the country’s “Indian Problem.” The schools’ explicit mission was to destroy Native cultures, languages, and spirituality, and prepare the children for assimilation into American society. Modeled on education tactics used on Native prisoners at Fort Mason in the 1870s by Captain Richard H. Pratt, the boarding schools followed a punitive philosophy of rigid order and Pratt’s motto: “Kill the Indian, and save the man.”

Today, Native American and Alaska Natives remain overrepresented in foster care at a rate 2.7 times greater than their proportion in the general population.

It’s these dynamics that ICWA was created to address: helping ensure that tribes, as sovereign nations, have jurisdiction over their own children. Since the act’s establishment, several prominent child advocacy organizations have declared it the gold standard for child welfare policies and practices for American Indian children.

Despite the law, tribes often decide not to transfer eligible children to tribal jurisdiction for a number of reasons: that the child may have close tribal and family connections in a non-Indian placement, or the tribe may lack the resources to intervene in cases located far from the reservation. Notably, in the Brackeen, the tribs ruled in favor of the non-Native family’s adoptions. These scenarios, however, seldom receive media coverage.

There is little data regarding states’ compliance with Indian Child Welfare Act, but a 2015 study by Casey Family Programs suggests that many government child protection agencies fail to follow the law. The lack of federal oversight for enforcing ICWA adds to gaps in compliance.
“For years, under ICWA, tribes have been making determinations in child welfare cases based on the best interest of the child,” noted law professor Matthew Fletcher. “Suggesting that tribes don’t routinely make child welfare decisions based on the best interest of the child is just ignorant.”
The legal battle over ICWA will likely continue for several years, and Fletcher and others believe that future challenges are inevitable.

Termination of tribal sovereignty
From the mid-1940s through 1970, the federal government employed a series of assimilationist policies designed to privatize American Indian lands, destroy tribal cultures, and reverse the tribes’ and government’s “trust relationship,” which protects tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources.The assault on this trust responsibility and Indian rights became known as the Termination Era.

But the 2018 ruling Brackeen v. Bernhardt, Judge O’Connor seemed to endorse the anti-tribal government view that it’s a race-based statue.

“If you’re a right-wing interest group and can figure out a way to get the case heard in Judge O’Connor’s court, you can expect a sympathetic ear,” Fletcher said.

The leading figures in the newest anti-Indian Child Welfare Act drama include the right-wing think tank the Goldwater Institute; the National Council for Adoption, representing the private adoption industry; and an evangelical Christian adoption movement that sees adoption as a means to live out their faith.

Ancillary supporters include the Koch brothers; the DeVos family; the Mercer Family (who are among Trump’s largest donors); the Cato Institute; the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); the anti-treaty group Citizens Equal Rights Alliance which advocates for the termination of U.S. and tribal treaty agreements; the Southern Baptist Convention, and others.
“It’s like this weird triad of strange and powerful bedfellows,” said Adams. Some of the players may have unwittingly signed on to this war and don’t necessary share the duplicitousness of others. But their combined opposition to ICWA represents titanic influence, power, and money in service of an anti-tribal sovereignty agenda.

One of the richest anti-ICWA funders is the Goldwater Institute. Since 2015, the libertarian non-profit has underwritten several legal challenges to ICWA. Attorneys at the Goldwater Institute filed an amicus brief in Brackeen v. Bernhardt, reiterating its past claims that ICWA is race-based and unconstitutional. And Timothy Sandefur, the Institute’s vice president for litigation, compared ICWA to discrimination suffered under Jim Crow laws, telling The Nation in 2017 that ICWA subjects Native children to an unfair set of rules based on race.

The Institute, along with the Cato Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the current Fifth Circuit’s decision to hold En Banc hearings on ICWA.
The Institute describes Indian communities as environments “where poverty, crime, abuse and suicide are rampant,” and cites data showing that American Indian children have the highest rate of foster care of any ethnic group as an argument against ICWA. In essence, this blames American Indians for the outcomes of generations of federal assimilationist policies and recommends more of the same as a solution.

And yet, as Fletcher noted, “The Goldwater Institute has no history of expressing interest in either Indian or family law.” Although the Goldwater Institute has created an organization called Equal Protection for Native Children and frequently works with other ICWA opponents such as the Cato Institute, it has no history of working to improve the economic, educational, or health circumstances of Native children. Indeed, according to the organization’s income tax filing from 2016, its primary areas of research include constitutional law, education reform, and healthcare policy.
Among the Goldwater Institute’s major donors are the Koch brothers, well-known opponents to federal power and spending. Through their various advocacy organizations, the Koch brothers fund and support groups such as ALEC, which, like the Goldwater Institute, has called for a constitutional convention that would focus on elevating states’ rights and reducing federal oversight and regulation.
The other ally against the child welfare law the National Council for Adoption, and the adoption movement it represents. Matthew McGill, the lead plaintiffs’ attorney in Brackeen v. Bernhardt, is part of a husband-and-wife legal team with a long history of challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act.

McGill’s wife, Lori Alvino McGill, also a lawyer, represented the adoptive parents and the non-Indian biological mother in the Baby Veronica case ,accompanying them on a media tour, including an appearance on the Today Show that helped make their challenge to ICWA a national story.
The couple represent a larger constituency in the private adoption industry, which has become a powerful lobby against ICWA. Private adoptions are a lucrative business, with attorney fees routinely running between $10,000 and $40,000. But as obstacles to international adoptions have grown, there is a greater interest in domestic adoptions in the U.S.—including adoptions from Indian Country.
Many clients of private adoption attorneys like the McGills are members of a Christian adoption movement that encourages evangelicals to see adoption as a means to live out their faith help the needy, and evangelize children. The statement of faith for Nightlight Christian Adoptions — the agency affiliated with the Baby Veronica case — holds that adoption fulfills the Bible’s mandate to make disciples of all nations.

Practicing Christians are more than twice as likely to adopt than the general population, according to a 2013 study by the Barna Group. The study also found that most adoptive parents are White, while the children they adopt are overwhelmingly non-White.

For many Native Americans, these demographics bear a troubling resemblance to historical interactions between White Christians and Native peoples—whether the Catholic Church’s 15th Century documents granting European Christian explorers permission to use any means necessary to subdue and convert indigenous peoples, or the more recent abuses of the boarding school era.
“There is nothing original about some of the evangelical Christian adoption movements to focus on Native children and take it upon themselves to decide what’s best for Native families,” said the Partnership for Native Children’s Nicole Adams.

Sandy White Hawk, program manager with the Indian Child Welfare Act Law Center in Minneapolis, and a team of researchers, found that adult American Indians who were adopted to non-Indian parents experienced high rates of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in their adoptive families. Adoptees also experience traits common to trauma survivors such as anxiety, intrusive imagery or nightmares, depression, withdrawal/isolation, guilt, and unresolved grief. The National Indian Child Welfare Association also cites studies indicating that Indian children placed in non-Indian adoptive homes suffer a far greater risk than the general American Indian population of psychological damage and have a higher tendency to abuse drugs and alcohol.

“I believe some of the motivation for evangelical Christians to adopt American Indian children comes from a savior complex,” said White Hawk. “Minority populations are often portrayed as unable to care adequately for their children; some of the adoptive parents may believe they are offering homes for unwanted, neglected children.”

But too often, then as now, this impulse may spring from a failure to understand American Indian culture or extended family structure, wherein aunts or uncles might raise a child instead of her biological parent. As child welfare workers labeled that tradition as neglect, generations of Indian children were removed from their homes.

“Instead of saving Native families, these policies robbed them of the nurturing traditional values where the whole community embraced the child,” said Nicole Adams. “Who are these people to think they can take away ICWA, one of the few good things Native people have to protect our families?”

What’s next?
“Right now we know one judge from the panel (Owen) was concerned about one or two sections of the statute, but not its entirety. It may be the En Banc court will re-open the whole panoply of constitutional challenges; We just don’t know yet,” said Matthew Fletcher.
Amicus briefs are due December 16 and January 14, 2020. Oral arguments and case hearing are scheduled in New Orleans for the week of January 20, 2020.

Mary Annette Pember works as an independent journalist focusing on Indian issues and culture with a special emphasis on mental health and women’s health. Winner of the Ida B. Wells Fellowship for Investigative Reporting, Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, the USC Annenberg National Health Fellowship and Dennis A. Hunt Fund for health journalism she has reported extensively on the impact of historical trauma among Indian peoples. She has contributed to ReWire.News, The Guardian, The Atlantic and Indian Country Today. An enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, she is based in Cincinnati, Ohio. See more at MAPember.com.

Portions of this article first appeared in Public Eye Magazine on November 11, 2019 for Political Research Associates

Trauma May Be Woven Into DNA of Native Americans

Courtesy crystalinks.com/smudging.html

Folks in Indian country wonder what took science so long to catch up with traditional Native knowledge.

 

 

Mary Annette Pember | Indian Country Today Media

Trauma is big news these days. Mainstream media is full of stories about the dramatic improvements allowing science to see more clearly how trauma affects our bodies, minds and even our genes. Much of the coverage hails the scientific connection between trauma and illness as a breakthrough for modern medicine. The next breakthrough will be how trauma affects our offspring.

The science of epigenetics, literally “above the gene,” proposes that we pass along more than DNA in our genes; it suggests that our genes can carry memories of trauma experienced by our ancestors and can influence how we react to trauma and stress. The Academy of Pediatrics reports that the way genes work in our bodies determines neuroendocrine structure and is strongly influenced by experience. [Neuroendocrine cells help the nervous and endocrine (hormonal) system work together to produce substances such as adrenaline (the hormone associated with the fight or flight response.] Trauma experienced by earlier generations can influence the structure of our genes, making them more likely to “switch on” negative responses to stress and trauma.

In light of this emerging science and how it works with the way we react to trauma, the AAP stated in its publication, Adverse Childhood Experiences and the Lifelong Consequences of Trauma, “Never before in the history of medicine have we had better insight into the factors that determine the health of an individual from infancy to adulthood, which is part of the life course perspective—a way of looking at life not as disconnected stages but as integrated across time,” according to the AAP in their recent publication examining the role of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACES) on our development and health.  The now famous 1998 ACES study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente showed that such adverse experiences could contribute to mental and physical illness.

“Native healers, medicine people and elders have always known this and it is common knowledge in Native oral traditions,” according to LeManuel “Lee” Bitsoi, Navajo, PhD Research Associate in Genetics at Harvard University. (Courtesy SACNAS)

Folks in Indian country wonder what took science so long to catch up with traditional Native knowledge. “Native healers, medicine people and elders have always known this and it is common knowledge in Native oral traditions,” according to LeManuel “Lee” Bitsoi, Navajo, PhD Research Associate in Genetics at Harvard University during his presentation at the Gateway to Discovery conference in 2013.

According to Bitsoi, epigenetics is beginning to uncover scientific proof that intergenerational trauma is real. Historical trauma, therefore, can be seen as a contributing cause in the development of illnesses such as PTSD, depression and type 2 diabetes.

What exactly is historical or intergenerational trauma?  Michelle M. Sotero, an instructor in Health Care Administration and Policy at the University of Nevada, offers a three-fold definition. In the initial phase, the dominant culture perpetrates mass trauma on a population in the form of colonialism, slavery, war or genocide. In the second phase the affected population shows physical and psychological symptoms in response to the trauma. In the final phase, the initial population passes these responses to trauma to subsequent generations, who in turn display similar symptoms.
According to researchers, high rates of addiction, suicide, mental illness, sexual violence and other ills among Native peoples might be, at least in part, influenced by historical trauma. Bonnie Duran, associate professor in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Director for Indigenous Health Research at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute says, “Many present-day health disparities can be traced back through epigenetics to a “colonial health deficit,” the result of colonization and its aftermath.”

According to the American Indian and Alaska Native Genetics Research Guide created by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), studies have shown that various behavior and health conditions are due to inherited epigenetic changes.

Authors of the guide refer to a 2008 study by Moshe Szyf at McGill University in Montreal that examined the brains of suicide victims. Szyf and his team found that genes governing stress response in the victim’s hippocampus had been methylated or switched off. Excessive trauma causes us to produce hormones called glucocorticoids which can alter gene expression. Chronic exposure to this hormone can inhibit genes in the hippocampus ability to regulate glucocorticoids. Szyf suggested that the genes were switched off in response to a series of events, such as abuse during childhood. All victims in the study were abused as children.

Nature or Nurture? It’s Both!
Szyf, in collaboration with another scientist at McGill, Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, did research showing a significant difference in the hippocampus between adults rats raised by attentive and inattentive mothers. Adult offspring of inattentive rat mothers showed genes regulating sensitivity to stress to be highly methylated. The rats with attentive moms did not.

To test their research they switched the parents for rat babies born to bad and good mothers. The babies born to attentive moms but given to inattentive moms also developed highly methylated genes and grew to be skittish adults. The opposite proved true for babies born to bad moms but given to good moms. As adults the rat babies born to bad moms but raised by good mothers appeared calm.
This research seems to combine the historically polarizing theory of nature versus nurture in determining behavior. Nature is that which is inherited while nurture is the environmental influences.
Native researcher Teresa Brockie PhD, Research Nurse Specialist at the National Institute of Health suggests that such gene methylation is linked to health disparities among Native Americans. In her article in Nursing and Research and Practice, she and her research colleagues note that high ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experience) scores have been linked to methylation of genes that regulate the stress response. They further noted that endocrine and immune disorders are also linked to methylation of such genes.

The researchers found that Native peoples have high rates of ACE’s and health problems such as posttraumatic stress, depression and substance abuse, diabetes all linked with methylation of genes regulating the body’s response to stress. “The persistence of stress associated with discrimination and historical trauma converges to add immeasurably to these challenges,” the researchers wrote.
Since there is a dearth of studies examining these findings, the researchers stated they were unable to conclude a direct cause between epigenetics and high rates of certain diseases among Native Americans.

One of researchers, Dr. Jessica Gill, Principal Investigator, Brain Injury Unit, Division of Intramural Research, National Institute of Nursing Research wrote in response to questions to the NIH’s public affairs office, “Epigenetic studies provide a unique opportunity to characterize the long-term impact of stressors including historical trauma on the function of genes. The modification of gene function through epigenetic modifications can greatly impact the health of the individual and may underlie some of the health disparities that we observe in populations including Native Americans. This line of research is of great promise for nurse scientists, as it will be instrumental in the promotion of the health and well-being of patients impacted by trauma and stress.”

Although epigenetics offers the hope of creating better and more specific medicines and interventions for mental health problems, it also suggests the notion that Native peoples and other ethnic groups may be genetically inferior.

Researchers such as Shannon Sullivan, professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte, suggests in her article “Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health: Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism,” that the science has faint echoes of eugenics, the social movement claiming to improve genetic features of humans through selective breeding and sterilization.

Inherited Resilience
Epigenetics is indeed a hot topic, and pharmaceutical companies are actively searching for epigenetic compounds that will help with learning and memory and help treat depression, anxiety and PTSD.
Many researchers caution, however, that the new science may be getting ahead of itself. “There is a lot of research that needs to be done before we will understand whether and how these processes work,” says Joseph Gone, professor at the University of Michigan and member of the Gros Ventre tribe of Montana.

Scientific developments such as epigenetics can offer exciting new insights not only into how our bodies react not only to trauma but also how we manage to survive it.
Native peoples ability to maintain culture and sense of who they are in the face of such a traumatic history suggests an inherited resilience that bears scientific examination as well, according to Gone.
Isolating and nurturing a resilience gene may well be on the horizon.

This project is made possible by support from The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism and Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, University of Southern California;  the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

SOURCE http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/05/28/trauma-may-be-woven-dna-native-americans-160508

Tiny Horrors

Tiny Handcuffs. Photo by Mary Annette Pember

A Chilling Reminder of How Cruel Assimilation Was—And Is

Mary Annette Pember, Indian Country Today, January 01, 2013

For such small objects, the child’s handcuffs are surprisingly heavy when cradled in the palms of one’s hand. Although now rusted from years of disuse, they still convey the horror of their brutal purpose, which was to restrain Native children who were being brought to boarding schools. “I felt the weight of their metal on my heart,” said Jessica Lackey of the Cherokee tribe as she described holding the handcuffs for the first time.
Lackey, an alumnus of Haskell Indian Nations University, was working at the school’s Cultural Center & Museum when the handcuffs were unwrapped last spring after being kept in storage for several years. I had heard rumors about the existence of the handcuffs during visits to Haskell over the years and had made numerous inquiries to school authorities about them, but people seemed very reluctant to discuss this touchy artifact. This past summer, however, Haskell agreed to allow a public viewing of the handcuffs. Andy Girty, one of the elders who first blessed the handcuffs when they were given to Haskell in 1989, helped unwrap them for me.
Known as the Haskell Institute in its early years, the school opened its doors in 1884. It was originally founded as an instrument of the final solution to this country’s “Indian problem”; Haskell Institute’s mission then was embodied in the now infamous motto of Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” This mind-set led to decades of forced acculturation through brutal military-style incarceration cloaked as education in U.S. Indian boarding schools.
Although begun as a model for assimilation, native students have, over the years, transformed Haskell into a model for self-determination. The school’s early curriculum featured training in domestic and farming skills but has since evolved into four-year university.
Haskell’s Cultural Center & Museum, located on campus, tells the full—and often cruel—story of Haskell’s painful past as well as providing a venue to showcase Native art, culture from the past and present. Opened in 2002, the center features the permanent exhibit Honoring Our Children Through Seasons of Sacrifice, Survival, Change and Celebration, featuring artifacts, photos and letters from the school’s early days.
Read the rest here: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/tiny-horrors-chilling-reminder-how-cruel-assimilation-was%E2%80%94and-146664?fb_action_ids=10151260247109550&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

Mother and Daughter Both Adoptees: Knowing you're Indian is not enough

A Mother's Day story: Mother and daughter both given up for adoption 

By Mary Annette Pember (photos and story)

May 14, 2012

This year, for the first time in a long time, Mother’s Day didn’t bring with it the painful unknowns for Jeanne Winslow and Rachel Banks Kupcho of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.  Jeanne and her daughter Kupcho met for the second time last October, more than 35 years after Winslow gave her newborn up for adoption.
“The day I got the call was the day I knew my life had changed forever,” says Winslow. That call on a cool October day carried the news that her daughter had found her and wanted to meet.
Their reunion was not a made-for-TV event filled with balloons and flowers. Winslow recalls that seeing her daughter for the first time in such a long time was quietly powerful, a bit like the first time she heard the drum and knew deep in her body that she was American Indian.
Like Kupcho, Winslow was put up for adoption as a newborn and raised by non-Indians.
Their story puts a quintessential Indian twist on the standard Mother’s Day tale of maternal perfection, and shows the inexorable pull of blood and spirit that so many Native people describe when they speak of wanting to know their culture.
I first met Kupcho in Minneapolis back in 2008 while doing a story about the challenges faced by American Indian adoptees who want learn more about their cultures and their birth parents. At the time, she knew only that her birth mother was Ojibwe from Minnesota. Her adoptive family was supportive and understanding of her efforts. A bright, confident young woman, Kupcho is convinced that without the unconditional love of her adoptive parents she would not have been strong enough to pursue her passion and calling of working to support the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). While working with the National Indian Child Welfare Association, she met Sandy White Hawk, executive director of the First Nations Repatriation Institute in Minneapolis. White Hawk, an adoptee herself, founded the organization to advocate for Native adoptees in accordance with ICWA and to help unite adoptees with their birth families, cultures and tribes.
In October, they informed me that they had found Kupcho’s birth mother, Winslow, a children’s counselor living in Iowa.
Winslow and Kupcho, along with Kupcho’s 18-month-old daughter Mika, quickly arranged a meeting. Kupcho recalls that Winslow seemed to be in quite a hurry to meet her. She soon found out why.
Winslow’s birth mother (and Kupcho’s grandmother), Audrey Banks, who Winslow had met 20 years earlier, was dying. Winslow immediately rushed everyone to her mother’s bedside.
“There were four generations in that room meeting for the first time,” Winslow recalls. “That was the first thing Kupcho and I did together. It was the greatest privilege and honor to be there with her. It was a very healing experience. This has all been about circles connecting. At first, it was just my circle but now I see that so many others are interconnected.”

Kupcho didn’t know it at the time, but she had previously connected with her grandmother—Audrey was well known and respected in the Minneapolis Native community for her work helping social service agencies maintain compliance with ICWA.
Like Kupcho, she earned a master’s degree in social work in order to better serve Native children. “There has definitely been something bigger at work in my life; there has been a path I am meant to walk,” Kupcho says of this coincidence.
In many ways, Audrey’s experience as a young Ojibwe woman may have helped set the direction of that path. 
Born on the Leech Lake reservation, Audrey was sent to the Pipestone Indian boarding school at age 9 and remained there for the remainder of her childhood. After moving to Minneapolis she gave birth to three boys and three girls.
According to her daughters, social workers from Catholic Charities showed up at her bedside after each birth, pressuring the single mother to give the girls up for adoption.
“She said that she felt coerced by the social workers that said that the girls would have better lives if they were raised by white people,” recalls Bernadine Harroun, Audrey’s second daughter. “I think that influenced her decision to go into social work and help keep Indian kids with Indian families.”
Bernadine and her younger sister, Winslow were adopted by the same family and raised together. Bernadine initiated the search for Audrey and Winslow and was responsible for their first meeting in 1989. They learned that Audrey, all of her children and Kupcho all lived and grew up within 20 miles of each other.
“Most of the stories of Native adoptees finding their families are like miracles,” White Hawk says. The distinguishing factor for Native adoptees, according to White Hawk is that the children were prayed for by generations of parents who knew hard times were coming. “Native people have that spiritual pull, like a spiritual umbilical cord that compels us to seek out our families,” she says.
Many Native adoptees report that hearing the traditional drum often activates that spiritual pull. Indeed Winslow recalls the first time she heard the drum. “I heard it and I knew I was Indian. The drum goes to some place so deep,” she recalls. (She didn’t know it at the time, but her uncle, well-known activist Dennis Banks was one of the people at that drum. He was giving a presentation at Winslow’s suburban high school about the happenings at Wounded Knee.)
Except for the strange longing awakened in her by the drum, Winslow says life in her adoptive suburban home was good. Ironically, because of this positive experience, she was able to make the difficult decision to relinquish her own daughter for adoption. Newly independent and sexually inexperienced, she found herself pregnant at age 19. “I knew that I couldn’t give my daughter the chance she deserved unless I did something drastic,” she recalls.
With the support of her adoptive family, Winslow put Kupcho up for adoption. “Leaving the hospital without her was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. Over time, however, she was at peace with her decision although birthdays, Christmas and Mother’s Day were hard. “I never stopped wondering about her,” says Winslow.
There was always a lingering, fear, too that Kupcho would be angry with her if and when they reconnected. She says, however, that her meetings with Kupcho and Mika have been smooth and joyous. She compares it to dancing in the circle for the first time with Audrey. “Somehow my feet knew what to do,” Winslow recalls.
“I can’t imagine the pain Winslow went through in making the brave choice to give me up for adoption. I give her tons of credit,” says Kupcho, adding that Winslow needn’t have feared she would be angry. “If anything her love gave me the wonderful life I have now. The home I was adopted into has afforded me the ability to do the work that I do.”
Kupcho is starting a new job with a non-profit organization that licenses foster homes for Native children. Her main focus is creating permanent, supportive homes. Although her adoptive placement was loving and good, advocating for a child to be in a loving home is not specific enough.

“Being with family is ideal,” Kupcho says. “Love is not always enough. Going to the occasional pow wow is not enough. We need to know about our traditions and culture. Even knowing you’re Indian is not enough. With the experience of meeting my birth family, I understand this more fully. As a mother and as an adoptee I have a better sense of myself. I have a stronger, more confident gait. This is the only thing my adoptive parents haven’t been able to give me.”

Finding her birth mother, however, was not the whole key to Kupcho’s search. “I needed to know where I came from and make that tribal connection. When visiting the reservation I am suddenly among family and I feel good,” she says.
Both Kupcho and Winslow report that they are going forward with their new relationship without expectations and going with that process as it unfolds. Their first Mother’s Day was one of quiet joy. “I’m a mother, now I have somebody,” explains Winslow. “Plus it’s great to be a grandma.”
“Mother’s Day is definitely more complicated now, but only in my mind. I’m taking it as it comes,” says Kupcho, laughing.
Sandy White Hawk’s message for Mother’s Day and every day thereafter: “We need to encourage our birth mothers to forgive themselves and remember we wouldn’t be here without them. We need to tell them that regardless of the kinds of lives we have had, we can have good lives from this day forward and for that we are grateful.”

NOTE: This is an update to a 2010 story that was published on DailyYonder.com.

Read more: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/05/14/daughters-given-up-for-adoption-seek-knowledge-about-their-culture-and-birth-mothers-112830#ixzz1urPQTkzG

To Dry the Eyes of Indian Adoptees (Daily Yonder, 3-16-2010)

Before 1978, most Native American adopted children were taken into non-Indian families. Some of those "Lost Birds" have found a way to make peace with the past and reclaim their native culture.

By Mary Annette Pember (published in the Daily Yonder, March 2010)

The story about the arrest of white missionaries trying to adopt allegedly orphaned Haitian children struck a chord with me. Similar media stories about well meaning white celebrities adopting pretty babies of color from poor third world countries have also rubbed me the wrong way. You see, American Indians have a long history of white folks trying to help us by taking away our children.  It is estimated that between 1941 and 1978, white parents adopted 35 percent of American Indians in the U.S., often forcibly.  Indians have learned that no amount of good intention can wipe away the painful loss of our culture.

Not long ago, I traveled to Minneapolis as I worked on a story about the Lost Birds. The Lost Birds are those Indian people who were adopted by non-Indian families prior to 1978. More personal than I had realized, this story caught me by surprise; it touched the center of who I am as an Ojibwe woman and as a mother. 

We adopted our son Danny from my tribe in 2005 when he was 7 months old.  Danny came into our lives as though directed by an outside force. Both my husband I felt that he was meant to be raised by us and that he was meant to know he is an Ojibwe man. That “knowing” has been a deep wordless tie between us and one to which I feel all people, non Indian and otherwise, are entitled. 

So, it was with some trepidation that I began a story about Rachel Kupcho, an Ojibwe women and her adoptive white parents. Would I be able to keep my feelings about interracial adoption in perspective?

I worried about this and other things during my flight to Minneapolis. Unexpectedly, I noticed the Mississippi River or Great River in the Ojibwe language as the plane descended into the Twin Cities.   The power of that great water caught me by surprise, pinching my heart in a nameless, primordial way and I felt a homecoming not without pain. With relief, I recalled that in Ojibwe tradition, we women are the ones who care for the water and I was comforted. I thought of our traditional Ojibwe stories describing this connection with place and the land.  Once again, I was awed by the wisdom and nuance of my culture that at once understands yet celebrates the ineffable.  A wave of calm washed over me; I knew that the story would emerge in the way that it should.

In the end, I came to see that many mothers, Indian and non-Indian but all women who care for the water,  built Rachel’s life and strength, like the Great River.

At first glance Rachel didn’t look like much of a Lost Bird to me. In fact she appeared to be just the opposite. Confident and beautiful, she strode around the Minneapolis American Indian Center [6] with calm authority. She seemed to easily carry the pride that is so typical of an Anishinabikwe or young Ojibwe woman as she worked to organize the annual Gathering of Our Children and Returning Adoptees Powwow.

Sandy White Hawk has helped organize this powwow for several years. She is executive director of the First Nations Orphan Association [7], an organization that helps returning adoptees find their way back to their culture. Since Sandy suddenly took ill, Rachel stepped in at the last minute to coordinate the event. Organizing a powwow is no small task.  There is quite a bit of protocol involved and the potential for drama is high. Rachel, however, seemed born to the task; to look at her I would have never suspected this was the first time she had overseen a powwow or that until a few years ago had had very little exposure to her culture. Like many who attended this powwow Rachel was adopted at birth and raised by white parents.

When the doors of the Indian Center opened up, people began to trickle in. It was easy to identify the Lost Birds.  Their fear and guarded emotions seemed almost palpable as they stepped uncertainly into the gym. They were drawn by the sound of the drum that they may have been hearing for the first time on that day. Looking more deeply into their faces, I sensed hope, a hope that they might begin to return home.
Mary Annette Pember photo -- Rachel Kupcho, herself adoped by non-Indian parents, welcomed participants at the Gathering of Our Children and Returning Adoptees Powwow in Minneapolis.

I noticed Rachel ushering people into the gym with a calm smile and I wondered how she has come by such self-assurance. The simple yet enormous answer begins with her parents, Keith and Lisa Kupcho.  Typically, they are in the background, quietly helping set up tables for the event. They discretely excuse themselves once the heavy lifting is finished. They will return when their daughter needs them later in the evening for the Wanblenica or Orphan’s Song and ceremony.

Like so many Indian children prior to 1978, Rachel was given up for adoption by her birth mother  from the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation in Minnesota and placed with a non-Indian family. Rachel, however, does not share the typical Indian adoptee history that is so often filled with stories of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Painful and more insidious than the physical abuse that adoptees report, has been a rejection of their natural spirit. The shame of being Indian and therefore inferior is a lasting wound that remains open for countless adoptees. Too many try to medicate these wounds with alcohol and drugs, vainly trying to ease their pain.

This generation of “Lost Birds” as they are often called, resulted from the well -intentioned U. S federal policy of assimilation that sought to integrate Indians into mainstream culture. The policy was intended to help lift Indians out of the poverty and social ills that plagued the reservations. Instead, it supported the near wholesale removal of children from their homes, families and cultures.  Before the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, that gave tribes jurisdiction over their own families, thousands of Indian children who entered the social services system were adopted into non-Indian families. In their misguided efforts to help raise Indian people from poverty, churches and social service agencies mistook Indian culture as the culprit in the community’s problems. Therefore all things “Indian” were to be stamped out. Language, culture and the Indian tradition of child rearing that includes extended family, were viewed as backward and wrong. Understandably, many Indian adoptees internalized these messages and have had difficulty returning to their cultures. Rachel Kupcho, however, seems to have made her way back to her people with relative ease, achieving a comfort level that is enviable.
To know her story fully, I must meet all the mothers, the water caregivers who have contributed to her life and journey home.

Rachel is one of four ethnically diverse children adopted and raised by Lisa and Keith Kupcho in Chanhassen, Minnesota about 20 miles outside of Minneapolis. Small and brown at the front, the Kupcho home sits a bit further back from the street than do the other houses. I imagine a certain sweet shyness about the house. Inside, the walls are richly covered with paintings, photos and prints of women of color and their children, lots of children. Photos of the Kupcho children and a seemingly endless convoluted photo storyline of their friends’ children and grandchildren are everywhere.

Mary Annette Pember photo -- Lisa Kupcho, at right, and her daughters (l-r) Eve, Rachel, and Sarah, catch up around the kitchen table in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The Kupchos also have a son, Aaron. All their children were adopted.

We visited over coffee in her kitchen. There was an aura of love in that kitchen that seemed to speak of bottomless acceptance. I found myself moved to tears several times during the interview.

“Fortunately, I learned early on that I couldn’t fix everything in my children’s lives,” said Lisa.
Potentially, there was a lot to “fix” in being a white mother to her racially diverse clan. Now grown, the children are; Aaron, Filipino and Norwegian, Sarah, Scotch and Irish, Rachel,  Ojibwe and Italian and Eve, African American and German.

She recalled being confronted by an African American instructor years ago during a parenting class about adopting and raising mixed race children.

Lisa recovered from her sense of feeling unjustly accused and resisted storming out of the class.
“I realized that I needed to hear what this woman had to tell us. She prepared us for not thinking we could fix everything with parental love alone, “ she recalled.
Not only did she learn that she wouldn’t be able to isolate her children from the hurt of racism, she learned to be open to those who could mentor her through the parenting process.

Mary Annette Pember photo -- Sandy White Hawk, who directs the First Nations Orphan Association, began the powwow for adoptees and attended the most recent gathering with her husband, George.

Enter Sandy White Hawk, a challenging mentor if there ever was one. Sandy recalls her Indian caregiver handing her, at 18 months, through the window of a pickup truck into the hands of white missionaries who had come to the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota to “help the Indians.” Sandy internalized her adoptive parents message that she was and ever would be a pagan, a member of an inferior race. She was also physically and sexually abused in the home. Seeking to soothe her wounded soul, she turned to drugs and alcohol. Nothing seemed to take away the hurt until she found recovery and  ‘came home’ over 20 years ago to her people and culture. She recalls the sense of relief and healing upon hearing the American Indian drum for the first time.

“The drum goes to that place where there are no words. As adoptees when we first hear it, we realize it has been what we were longing for.”

Since, she has been compelled, almost obsessed in an effort to share this experience with other adoptees, knowing in her belly that a healing path lies therein. Working with a number of elders and spiritual leaders including Jerry Dearly, Lakota, she helped bring the Wanblenica or Orphan’s Song and ceremony that wipes away tears to Indian adoptees. It was during a Wanblenica that she came into the Kupcho’s lives.

The first Wanblenica offered by Sandy’s group was presented at an annual National Indian Child Welfare Association conference in Duluth. Rachel had recently been hired at NICWA and was helping to organize the conference. Typically, her parents were there as well, pitching in where they could, happy to be of service to their daughter. The theme of the conference was “Reclaiming the Stolen Ones.”

Lisa recalls Keith’s look of surprise over the theme’s name. “Stolen? Ooooh, a bit harsh.” he said.
Rather than feeling threatened, Lisa saw the conference as a learning opportunity. Soothing Keith, she reminded him of their motto: “Whatever is good for our kids, is good for our family.”

Lisa has come to believe that there is a core piece of something missing for adopted kids, a piece of abandonment for which they must seek healing in their own way.  She has spoken often to her children about this need and assured them of her support if they choose to explore their biological background and culture more fully.

“Whatever I can do or bring into their lives that makes them more healthy and whole advances our relationship. When you’re a mother first, you do whatever you can to make your child feel well and whole and supported.”

She was excited and honored to participate in the Wanblenica.  In the end “Rachel’s growth has been our growth,” she affirms.

Mary Annette Pember photo -- Rachel Kupcho stood between her parents, Lisa and Keith, at the Wanblenica, the Lakota Orphan Song and Ceremony. Rachel said it was "the most profound moment of my life.”

Lisa and Keith stood firmly behind Rachel during the ceremony, their hands resting on her shoulders.  Tears streamed uncontrollably down her face during the Wanblecheya.  “I felt so unbelievably loved. It was the most profound moments of my life.” Rachel recalls.

For Lisa, the ceremony represented a healthy sense of completion. “It was an embrace and acknowledgment of loss,” she said.

Although she has never felt lost or misplaced, Rachel felt the relief of being welcomed into the circle of her culture at last. Not only was the event a homecoming, according to Rachel, it was an acknowledgment from her parents that her quest for her heritage is important.

“Up until that point, it was the only thing they weren’t able to give me, but they were present when I received this gift,” she remembers.

Rachel is now convinced that without the unconditional love and support of her parents, she would not be strong enough to do the work that has now become her passion and her calling.

Working to support the Indian Child Welfare Act is now her life.  She is a court advocate for ICWA and helps Sandy in her efforts to gain funding for a project to create a social work curriculum that includes knowledge about Indian families and culture. “Everything that has happened in my life has prepared me to do this work.”

Lisa sees Sandy as a wonderful mentor and role model for Rachel. “It has almost been a relief to have others in our lives who could give Rachel what she needs”, Lisa laughs, recalling some mother daughter challenges. In the end, for Lisa, she has gained a friend in Sandy.

The passion of these three women, from such different backgrounds, has intertwined to form a tapestry of family love and support. I am reminded of my earlier vision of the Great River and how it unites its many channels into one big river, much like these women or water caregivers have united to grow Rachel into an Anishinabikwe.

As the Adoptees Powwow comes to an end, the Sisseton Wahpeton Vietnam Veterans Color guards insist on having their photo taken with Rachel. Wearing full eagle feather headdresses and military fatigues, they surround her creating a vision of embrace, acceptance and support. She has, indeed, arrived home.
Note: The reporting and writing for this project were supported by a grant from the USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism.

[There will be stories from my archives and research posted -- Trace]