Why isn't there a US Truth and Reconcilation Commission?

REBLOG from 2015

By Trace Hentz, blog editor

I've been asked why America has not issued an apology for their Indian Adoption Projects or ARENA adoptions when Canada is now openly admitting what it did, calling it cultural genocide, lawsuits have been filed and adoption records opened and repatriation services have been created for 60s Scoop adoptees... in CANADA, but not here!

Why is America in denial? Why don't we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for the thousands of Native adoptees here who suffered the same fate as Canada's 60s Scoop adoptees? 

First: Most Americans (including politicians) don't even know it happened here! Call it bad history...

Second: It will take many adoptees to come together - for many years we didn't know what happened either or how we were part of a devious racist corrupt government program!

Why don't we have a class action lawsuit? We could!

Years ago, I did contact NARF (sending them books) and the ACLU and inquired but no one was interested. One adoptee isn't enough to warrant suing the federal government! I wanted this to happen eventually so I worked on three four books, hoping this would pave the way for a future lawsuit, finding many adoptees who were part of these programs, having them write and document their own stories. They could be part of the lawsuit.

 To my knowledge, Maine is the only state with a TRC. It's a first step. 

This book is also our history and the basis for a strong lawsuit:

A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World Margaret D. Jacobs hardcover 2014. 400 pp. 978-0-8032-5536-4

Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential Schools Speak to Horrors Faced By Students

OG History is a Teen Vogue series in which we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.

By Ruth Hopkins |July 14, 2021

COLE BURSTON

Trigger warning: This piece contains sensitive content involving the abuse of children.

The truth never stays hidden forever.

This summer, non-Natives were shocked and horrified to learn that the remains of thousands of Indigenous children are buried in unmarked graves at residential and boarding schools in Canada and the United States.

It began on May 27, when the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Nation of British Columbia announced that they had uncovered the remains of 215 students near Kamloops Indian Residential School. Indigenous children, some as young as three years old, died there after being taken to the institution, which was run by the Catholic church until the federal government assumed control in the 1970s. According to the nation’s chief, Rosanne Casimir, the missing children are undocumented deaths, meaning that to their knowledge the families were never told of their passing.

But that was just the start. Within the week, the Muskowekwan First Nation of Saskatchewan announced that, after working in partnership with two universities, they had also found at least 35 unmarked graves near the former Catholic-operated Muskowekwan Indian Residential School before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work had begun in 2018 but was put on hold due to the pandemic. The community held a ceremony for the spirits of the dead Indigenous children that they had found, but they’re still looking for more graves. The school was open until 1997.

Soon after, the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation of Manitoba released a statement that they too are recovering remains found in 104 “potential graves” at three separate sites near Brandon Indian Residential School, which was run by both Methodist and United churches from 1895 to 1972. Records account for only 78 bodies and some that have been found are not within sites designated as cemeteries.

As a Native woman and the daughter of a boarding school survivor, each of these grisly discoveries has been absolutely soul-crushing for me to process. But hearing word of the remains of Dakota children being found at Brandon really hit close to home. They are a part of my Native Nation, the Oceti Sakowin (Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota Sioux). Members of the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation descend from Dakota who left Minnesota after the Dakota War of 1862, when the U.S. government broke our treaties, starved us, hung 38 of our warriors in the largest mass execution in U.S. history, put bounties on our scalps, and exiled us from our ancestral homelands.

The Sioux Valley Dakota Nation is concerned about not only uncovering the remains of their dead but identifying them as well. “The children buried at these sites must have their identities restored and their stories told,” said Jennifer Bone, Sioux Valley Chief, in a video statement.

Then, on June 24, the Cowessess First Nation said it had found an astonishing 751 unmarked burial sites near the former Catholic-run Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Their Chief, Cadmus Delorme, said the area is being treated as a “crime scene.”

Right after the announcement by Cowessess First Nation, the Lower Kootenay Band of Ktunaxa First Nation stated that the bodies of 182 children had been found at the Catholic-run St. Eugene's Mission School in Cranbrook, British Columbia. Some were buried only three or four feet below ground.

Children's red dresses are staked along a highway near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

COLE BURSTON

Part of the small memorial honoring the recently discovered mass grave at the Kamloops Residential School.

Rick Madonik

Folks have reacted by setting up memorials in honor of the children all over North America. Others may be responding by setting fires. While no suspects have been named, since news broke that more than 1,000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been discovered at residential schools in Canada, fires have destroyed four Catholic churches located on Indigenous lands. Additional churches and statues of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, and other historical figures were vandalized on Canada Day, July 1.

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Native and non-Native leaders alike, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have asked Pope Francis to apologize on behalf of the Catholic Church for its role in running residential schools. The Pope recently agreed to meet with representatives from three of Canada’s largest Indigenous groups in December. But the Vatican hasn’t released residential school records, despite repeated requests to do so.

The Canadian government itself has long known about the severe abuse and neglect that occurred at residential schools, though. In 2015, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called residential schools “cultural genocide.”

In fact, investigators hired by Canada’s government located 5,315 alleged abusers who either worked at or attended residential schools — not to charge them criminally, but to see if they would testify in hearings that would determine whether residential school survivors received compensation, the CBC reported in 2016.

You see, the Canadian government is already bound to settlement agreements with residential school survivors. Canada’s government is currently appealing a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling ordering Ottawa to pay $40,000 each to 50,000 First Nations children separated from their families and put into residential schools via a program run by the local child welfare system. (Federal leaders have offered payment to individual school survivors via a government-created settlement fund and two class-action lawsuits, but Indigenous leaders say reparations must also be granted to communities and nations).

The American equivalent to Canada’s residential schools is boarding schools. Native children throughout the United States were forced to attend these institutions, which essentially functioned as reeducation camps, over the past 150 years or so, for the purposes of being indoctrinated with Christianity, assimilated into white society, and trained as laborers.

If families declined to enroll their children in these schools, the Bureau of Indian Affairs could withhold Treaty-promised food rations and other goods. Government agents, priests, and nuns would also push their way into homes on reservations and quite literally abduct Native children and take them to boarding schools. Some of those children were never seen or heard from again.

1950: North American Indian children in their dormitory at a Canadian boarding school.

Hulton Archive

The first off-reservation boarding school was established in an old Army barracks. It was called Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Started by Civil War Lieutenant Colonel Richard Henry Pratt to “kill the Indian and save the man,” he preached “civilizing” Native children by (often literally) beating their Native languages, religions, customs, and kinship bonds out of them. More than 10,000 were taken to Carlisle, and many dozens of students died there. There are 186 Native children buried in the boarding school cemetery, some with headstones carved with the word “Unknown” upon them. Right now, the remains of 10 children who died at Carlisle are finally being returned to their families.

There were 367 of these boarding schools in the United States, and attendance was less about learning to read and write, and more about learning to obey and submit. Children were given new names and stripped of their cultural and physical identities, forced to wear Western dress and cut their hair. Many died from preventable causes. Physical and sexual abuse were common. Schools were unsanitary, unsafe, and riddled with disease. Students were not given adequate nutrition, access to medical care, or even proper attire. Children were also involuntarily leased out to white homes as menial laborers, where some were killed. Some died while trying to escape.

The Catholic church also sold Native children to strangers for as little as $10. In 1952, Tekakwitha Indian Mission did just that on the Lake Traverse Reservation, where I live and am an enrolled Tribal member.

Residential and boarding schools were prisons of atrocity where extreme brutality, torment, misery, and suffering were inflicted upon the most vulnerable members of Native society. Stories of what went on in those places have persisted among survivors and their families for decades. Stephanie Scott, the executive director of Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation told ABC News, “We’ve heard stories about young girls getting pregnant and the children being born and put into incinerators…of children being hidden in walls. We went to the community one time where there was a caretaker’s house where we found this strap that was covered in blood.”

My own father, who was pulled from his mother’s arms at the age of four and taken to boarding school, told stories of other children freezing to death in their bunks. All of my aunts and uncles were also forced to attend these institutions. One of my uncles refused to stop speaking the Dakota language and was beaten on a daily basis for his defiance. Years later, he would become one of his Tribe’s last fluent language speakers and taught the language to elementary school students on the Spirit Lake Nation Reservation. On a few occasions, my father, who died from COVID-19 in November, spoke of another brother in hushed tones — one that never came home. We do not know where his remains are. They are not in our family cemetery.

While the Western world is just realizing the horrors of residential and boarding schools, Native communities have always known. We did not forget all the children who never returned. We kept their memory alive, never giving up on them. Survivors, with tears in their eyes, bravely recounted the crimes they had witnessed and how they were robbed of their innocence. Because of residential and boarding schools, entire families and communities live with intergenerational trauma, passed down from deeply wounded survivors who never healed.

Canada is ahead of the United States in regard to uncovering the truth about residential and boarding schools. Here in the U.S., it took one of us to cut to the heart of the matter. Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native woman to head the Department of the Interior, spurred on by the recent discoveries of unmarked graves up north, recently launched an investigation into boarding schools in the United States. Her grandparents were forced to attend one and she didn’t forget the evils of those schools. 

Now, thanks to her leadership, the U.S. will search the grounds of former boarding schools for the remains of Native children who were stolen from their families and their people to be brutalized and stripped of their culture and kinship bonds. A reckoning is coming, one that must happen if our nation is going to endure. Thousands of lost children, whose lives were stolen, cry out to be found — for justice and for peace. At long last, the public has heard them.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: The U.S. Used the Indian Removal Act to Commit Ethnic Cleansing

REPARATIONS: US should follow Canada’s lead, reckon with its own destructive legacy

Canada confronts ‘cultural genocide’ against aboriginal people

June 16, 2015 |  by Lauren Carasik | Al Jazeera America

On May 31 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released a summary of its report on the history and legacy of the nation’s residential schools. The report concluded that Canada’s aboriginal policy, designed “to eliminate aboriginal governments … and cause aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada,” has caused unspeakable and enduring suffering that amounts to “cultural genocide.”

The U.S. also had a shameful program of residential schools for its Native American children, often operated by churches with government funding. A reckoning for the destructive legacy of forced assimilation is long overdue. It’s time for the U.S. to follow Canada’s lead in establishing a truth and reconciliation commission and acknowledge the havoc its policies have wrought.

Canada’s legacy

Started in the 1880s, the schools were funded by Canadian government but run primarily by churches. An estimated 150,000 aboriginal children attended the residential schools during their century-long tenure. But the goal was never to educate the children. Instead, the schools were designed to destroy aboriginal culture by removing children from reservations and severing ties with parents and communities, in order to inculcate ‘civilized’ and Christian values. The last residential school closed in 1998, but the aftereffects continue to exact a devastating toll today. This is true not only for those haunted by their stay at the schools but for the entire community of aboriginals whose culture and systems of government were targeted for annihilation.

Many of the 80,000 survivors recounted their harrowing tales of forced separation from their communities and brutal physical, sexual and psychological abuse to the Commission. And the TRC found that more than 3,000 aboriginal children perished in the in residential schools from abuse, neglect and illness. Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, estimated that the figure could be far higher, since shoddy record keeping obscured the Commission’s final accounting.

The TRC was formed as part of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, in the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged and apologized for the harm caused by Canada’s residential schools. But he has refused to commit to implementing the Commission’s 94 recommendations, including provisions for health, education, justice and commemoration. Canada cannot simply close this sordid chapter and move on. Instead, it must enact policies and programs that would ensure aboriginal communities have the support, tools and resources to heal and thrive.

The grave injustices of North American residential schools and their aftermath are clear. But seeking and speaking the truth is only the beginning of a long process of reconciliation.

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Richard Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who pioneered the concept of off-reservation boarding schools opined in an oft-quoted 1892 speech. At the time, Pratt’s goal of cultural rather than physical genocide, though despicable, was less extreme for its time than that of others who advocated for the outright extermination of the nation’s native people.

But, as in Canada, the U.S. schools served their intended purpose of demolishing Native American traditions and history. Thousands of children died from abuse, neglect and malnutrition. Others were harshly punished for residual ties to their culture or spirituality. And the schools often pushed boys toward manual labor and girls to domestic service. As a 2009 United Nations report concluded, instead of working toward full integration “the training prepared Native children to be assimilated into the bottom of the socio-economic ladder,” where many continue to struggle.

The historical trauma inflicted on parents can haunt subsequent generations. Researchers found stress hormone adaptations in the children of Holocaust survivors, perhaps caused in utero, that may predispose them to ill health. And the effect is not limited to environmental factors: it may actually be woven into DNA. This trauma may partly explain the social ills that continue to plague Native communities both in the U.S. and Canada, including high rates of addiction, mental illness, domestic and sexual violence, family disintegration and poor physical health. Reservations in the U.S. experience suicide epidemics, and though the reasons are not clear, there is agreement that one of the factors is “the legacy of federally funded boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native American children from their homes,” according to The New York Times.

Need for reparations

The U.S. has made some efforts to end its history of forced assimilation.  For example, in 1978 Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act to keep Native American children with their families or communities. But nearly 40 years later, the law has failed to meet its mark, and Native American children are still being fostered and adopted into communities that fail to reflect their cultural heritage. Last month a commission in Maine found that the state placed five times as many Native American children in foster care as non-native children. Maine is hardly alone: In 2013, advocates in Nebraska linked a spike in the number of the state’s Native American children in foster care to the legacy of boarding schools. And placement of children within their communities for fostering and adoption is hampered in part by lack of appropriate homes.

That shortage, which reflects the damage inflicted by governmental policy, reinforces the need for comprehensive reparations to heal and rebuild damaged communities. The specifics of a reparations package must be crafted and embraced by Native American groups. It would likely include individual and collective restitution, restoration and truth telling.

The grave injustices of North American residential schools and their aftermath are clear. But seeking and speaking the truth is only the beginning of a long process of reconciliation. Both Canada and the U.S. must commit to atoning for the schools’ horrors by expending political capital and economic resources to help Native communities truly recover.

Lauren Carasik is a clinical professor of law and the director of the international human rights clinic at the Western New England University School of Law. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 

READ MORE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/native-american-boarding-schools_n_7513310.html

http://www.amnestyusa.org/node/87342

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/14/1200994/-Native-schools-and-stolen-generations-U-S-and-Canada#

http://www.sagchip.org/ziibiwing/planyourvisit/pdf/aibscurrguide.pdf

http://www.kumeyaay.info/history/History_Indian_Boarding_Schools.pdf

US should follow Canada’s lead and reckon with its own destructive legacy

Library and Archives Canada / Reuters

Canada confronts ‘cultural genocide’ against aboriginal people

 

Opinion by Lauren Carasik | June 16, 2015

On May 31 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released a summary of its report on the history and legacy of the nation’s residential schools. The report concluded that Canada’s aboriginal policy, designed “to eliminate aboriginal governments … and cause aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada,” has caused unspeakable and enduring suffering that amounts to “cultural genocide.”

The U.S. also had a shameful program of residential schools for its Native American children, often operated by churches with government funding. A reckoning for the destructive legacy of forced assimilation is long overdue. It’s time for the U.S. to follow Canada’s lead in establishing a truth and reconciliation commission and acknowledge the havoc its policies have wrought.

Canada’s legacy

Started in the 1880s, the schools were funded by Canadian government but run primarily by churches. An estimated 150,000 aboriginal children attended the residential schools during their century-long tenure. But the goal was never to educate the children. Instead, the schools were designed to destroy aboriginal culture by removing children from reservations and severing ties with parents and communities, in order to inculcate ‘civilized’ and Christian values. The last residential school closed in 1998, but the after-effects continue to exact a devastating toll today. This is true not only for those haunted by their stay at the schools but for the entire community of aboriginals whose culture and systems of government were targeted for annihilation.
Many of the 80,000 survivors recounted their harrowing tales of forced separation from their communities and brutal physical, sexual and psychological abuse to the Commission. And the TRC found that more than 3,000 aboriginal children perished in the in residential schools from abuse, neglect and illness. Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, estimated that the figure could be far higher, since shoddy record keeping obscured the Commission’s final accounting.
The TRC was formed as part of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, in the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged and apologized for the harm caused by Canada’s residential schools. But he has refused to commit to implementing the Commission’s 94 recommendations, including provisions for health, education, justice and commemoration. Canada cannot simply close this sordid chapter and move on. Instead, it must enact policies and programs that would ensure aboriginal communities have the support, tools and resources to heal and thrive.

The grave injustices of North American residential schools and their aftermath are clear. But seeking and speaking the truth is only the beginning of a long process of reconciliation.

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Richard Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who pioneered the concept of off-reservation boarding schools opined in an oft-quoted 1892 speech. At the time, Pratt’s goal of cultural rather than physical genocide, though despicable, was less extreme for its time than that of others who advocated for the outright extermination of the nation’s native people.
But, as in Canada, the U.S. schools served their intended purpose of demolishing Native American traditions and history. Thousands of children died from abuse, neglect and malnutrition. Others were harshly punished for residual ties to their culture or spirituality. And the schools often pushed boys toward manual labor and girls to domestic service. As a 2009 United Nations report concluded, instead of working toward full integration “the training prepared Native children to be assimilated into the bottom of the socio-economic ladder,” where many continue to struggle.
The historical trauma inflicted on parents can haunt subsequent generations. Researchers found stress hormone adaptations in the children of Holocaust survivors, perhaps caused in utero, that may predispose them to ill health. And the effect is not limited to environmental factors: it may actually be woven into DNA. This trauma may partly explain the social ills that continue to plague Native communities both in the U.S. and Canada, including high rates of addiction, mental illness, domestic and sexual violence, family disintegration and poor physical health. Reservations in the U.S. experience suicide epidemics, and though the reasons are not clear, there is agreement that one of the factors is “the legacy of federally funded boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native American children from their homes,” according to The New York Times.

Need for reparations

The U.S. has made some efforts to end its history of forced assimilation.  For example, in 1978 Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act to keep Native American children with their families or communities. But nearly 40 years later, the law has failed to meet its mark, and Native American children are still being fostered and adopted into communities that fail to reflect their cultural heritage.
Last month a commission in Maine found that the state placed five times as many Native American children in foster care as non-native children. Maine is hardly alone: In 2013, advocates in Nebraska linked a spike in the number of the state’s Native American children in foster care to the legacy of boarding schools. And placement of children within their communities for fostering and adoption is hampered in part by lack of appropriate homes.
That shortage, which reflects the damage inflicted by governmental policy, reinforces the need for comprehensive reparations to heal and rebuild damaged communities. The specifics of a reparations package must be crafted and embraced by Native American groups. It would likely include individual and collective restitution, restoration and truth telling.
The grave injustices of North American residential schools and their aftermath are clear. But seeking and speaking the truth is only the beginning of a long process of reconciliation. Both Canada and the U.S. must commit to atoning for the schools’ horrors by expending political capital and economic resources to help Native communities truly recover.

Lauren Carasik is a clinical professor of law and the director of the international human rights clinic at the Western New England University School of Law.

SOURCE: The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.