A
historic process is exposing the injuries inflicted by Maine’s child
welfare system on generations of Wabanaki people — and illuminating a
way forward to bring healing and change.
By Virginia M. Wright | Photographed by Séan Alonzo Harris |
SOURCE
"...I was taken from my home.
I don’t know how old I was, but I was pretty young. They took all of us
— my sisters, my brother, and me — and they placed us in foster care.
Then, slowly, my mother got us back. I was the last one to come home.”
With
her square-frame glasses and dark hair that falls loosely past her
shoulders, Cheryl looks like a college student, but she is in her late
40s, a mother of four grown children and a grandmother of two. We are
meeting in a friend’s office near her home on Wabanaki tribal land, away
from neighbors’ curious eyes.
For the past four months, I’ve been
reaching out to Wabanaki community leaders, trying to connect with
people who have testified before a truth and reconciliation commission
investigating Native Americans’ experiences with Maine’s child welfare
system. In addition to Denise Altvater, the Passamaquoddy woman who
helped launch the probe by publicly sharing her story about life in an
abusive foster home in the late 1960s, only one other person with direct
foster-care experience has agreed to meet with me. Cheryl is not her
real name — she asks to share her story anonymously out of respect for
her mother, whose own childhood was marred by forced enrollment in an
Indian boarding school, where children were beaten for speaking their
language and practicing their customs.
Cheryl
tells me she was a teenager when she began asking questions about
fragments of memory that she couldn’t explain — strange faces, an
unfamiliar house, places visited. It was her older sister who told her
that the recollections were not a dream, that they’d been separated from
their mother, and from each other, for nearly three years. Their mother
never spoke of it — at least not with words.
“My mother never
liked the state,” Cheryl says. “She wanted to keep us out of school, but
she made us go to keep DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services)
from knocking on the door. She was very strict. No phone calls. No going
to see friends. No friends over, either. As a teenager, it was hard for
me to understand, but she had her reasons: to protect us.”
In
some Maine tribes at that time — the mid-1970s — as many as one in three
children were in foster care, usually with non-Native families. “The
system was pretty hard on Native Americans,” Cheryl says. “We stick out
in a white community. There were always fingers pointing, women
reporting on our families, and then, all of a sudden, the state would be
involved. It happened to me once. I know how it feels.”
Late one
hot summer night, when her children were little, Cheryl rushed her son,
who was burning with fever, to the emergency room. The next day, a state
caseworker came to her door. “The nurse had called DHHS because my
child was dirty,” she recalls, a trace of anger in her voice. “It’s not
like you’re going to put your child in the bathtub at 3 in the morning.
My children weren’t taken, I only had to take parenting classes, but
still.”
We would know our language and our traditions if our grandparents hadn't gone to that school.
— Krista Stevens, Micmac community leader
Cheryl
gave a statement to the truth commission, she says, in part because she
wants better things for her kids and grandkids. Mostly, though, she did
it for her mother. “My hope is to be a voice for those who don’t talk,
for those who are keeping it inside,” she explains. “They never share
with others because the pain was so great, and it is even still. Our
elders are very proud people. We respect their silence. We respect their
privacy. But it’s like a volcano, where it’s quiet, but things are
happening underneath. Then, all of a sudden, it erupts. Just because
they’re not saying anything, it doesn’t mean that something isn’t there.
Their silence is so loud.”
On an
evening in late April, Carol Wishcamper, co-chair of the Maine
Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),
welcomed roughly 140 people to the first of five forums airing the
findings and recommendations from the commission’s 2½-year investigation
(a final written report was to be presented at a closing ceremony on
June 14 in Hermon). “I feel it’s important to recognize that we are in
the Dyke Center at Husson College in Bangor, Maine, on Penobscot
territory, and to be very aware of all that has come before in this
spot,” said Wishcamper, who is a prominent philanthropist and a
consultant for educational organizations.With that simple statement,
softly delivered in a thin, high voice, Wishcamper was preparing the
mostly white audience for the unsparing subtext of the report they were
about to hear: Indian child welfare is tangled in a complex web of
issues dating back to colonization, and it can only be effectively
addressed by reckoning with a still-unfolding history of genocide,
racism, and conflicts over tribal sovereignty.
The commission’s
five members were seated in February 2013 at the behest of
Maine-Wabanaki REACH, an organization comprised of both Natives and
non-Natives, mostly women, who have worked in child welfare for the
state, private agencies, and the four nations of the Wabanaki
Confederacy: Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Micmac, and Maliseet. REACH (the
name stands for reconciliation, education, advocacy, change, and
healing) evolved out of a state-tribal workgroup formed in 1999 after a
federal review found that Maine was not complying with the 1978 Indian
Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which sets standards for child custody
proceedings that aim to keep Indian children with their relatives and
tribes, even when they have to be removed from their parents.
The
commission’s mandate, signed by five Wabanaki chiefs and Governor Paul
LePage, was to find out what happened and is still happening to Wabanaki
families in the child welfare system, to recommend improvements, and to
illuminate a path forward that promotes healing and cooperation. It is
the first truth and reconciliation effort in the U.S. to address Native
child welfare practices, and it is believed to be the first in the world
to be collaboratively developed from the start by all parties — in this
case, the Indian nations and child welfare workers.
Nearly 160
individuals, more than two-thirds of them Wabanaki, have given testimony
to the TRC. Others who have testified are DHHS employees, guardians ad
litem, family court judges, and foster and adoptive parents. The
commission’s staff also has examined DHHS data for the past 12 years and
found that, while the state has greatly improved its practices since it
was admonished in 1999, Native children are nonetheless entering state
custody at a rate that is five times greater than that of the general
population.
“We are finding this continued taking must be
considered within the context of genocide,” TRC’s executive director
Charlotte Bacon told the gathering in Bangor. Bacon referenced the 1948
United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide, which defines “forcibly transferring children of [an
ethnic] group to another group” as a genocidal act. “As people who love
the state of Maine, we want to believe that this didn’t happen here.
It’s even harder to believe that it’s continuing to happen. But we have
to believe it in order to make progress in terms of making change and
really living with Wabanaki families as neighbors.”
A lot of people are fighting demons, and they need to realize the demons are not their fault.
— Dena Joseph, Micmac community leader
These
are some of the stories that made front-page news in Maine in recent
months: The federal government joined the Penobscot Indian Nation in its
lawsuit against the state over fishing and hunting rights on the
tribe’s ancestral river. The state Department of Environmental
Protection announced it would disregard a federal Environmental
Protection Agency order to tighten pollution standards to ensure that
tribes can safely eat fish from their waters. The MSAD 54 school board
rejected Wabanaki representatives’ request to stop using the name
“Indians” for Skowhegan Area High School sports teams. The Maine
Department of Marine Resources banned the use of elver fyke nets by
Passamaquoddys licensed as sustenance fishermen, saying they were
circumventing a state quota system. Governor Paul LePage rescinded a
2011 executive order promoting cooperation between the state and its
“sovereign Native American tribes,” because the state’s interests “have
not been respected.” And, in May, the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy
nations withdrew their representatives from the Maine Legislature,
citing their deteriorating relationship with the state.As a resident of
this state for more than 30 years, I can’t remember another time when
interactions between the tribes and Maine’s state and local governments
have been so contentious. But perhaps that is largely my own failing: I
wasn’t paying much attention, a shortcoming that I would comfortably bet
I share with most residents of our overwhelmingly white state. When I
began interviews for this story, I noticed that my conversations with
Wabanaki people often ranged into other topics, many of them matters I
regarded as history, like the 1980 Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement
or the 17th-century’s bloody conflicts between Native Americans and
colonists. Over and over, I’d try to steer the conversation back to the
subject of child removals, until one day, while listening to a
presentation by Passamaquoddy activist Esther Attean, I finally got it:
the Wabanaki are living with the consequences of these events every day.
The
average age of death for Wabanaki people is 54 years. Seventeen percent
of Maine Native Americans have diabetes, compared to 8 percent of the
general population. Unemployment in Maine indigenous communities ranges
from 15 to 20 percent, which is three to four times higher than the
state as a whole. More than half of the residents of the Passamaquoddy
Indian Township Reservation are living below the poverty level (the
percentage of people living below the poverty level is 43.8 percent at
the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation and 33 percent at the
Penobscot Indian Island reservation). Alcohol abuse or dependence is
reported by 14 percent of Native Americans. And there are too many
Native children in foster care. Everything is connected, Attean says.
Tug on the thread of one issue, and you’ll find it is attached to
everything else.
The conditions that people have been kept in are deplorable, worse than third-world countries.
— Gkisedtanamoogk, TRC Commissioner
Slender,
with long dark hair, Esther Attean grew up on the Passamaquoddy
reservation of Sipayik, or Pleasant Point, in the late ’70s and early
’80s, when the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement was being negotiated
and, she says, “the newspapers were full of racist letters to the
editor.” Roman Catholic nuns served as the child welfare agents, she
recalls, and “if they saw your kids were dirty, they could take them.” A
founding member of the 1999 ICWA workgroup, Attean is one of the forces
— if not the force, some of her colleagues say — behind truth and
reconciliation. As the co-director of REACH, along with her Muskie
School of Public Service colleague Penthea Burns, she has coaxed wary
tribal communities into opening their doors to commissioners and their
staff, and she has spent much of the last year traveling around Maine to
give lectures about the grim treatment of Native people by state and
federal government and about the healing power of telling the truth.
At
one such gathering in Bangor, after introducing herself in both
Passamaquoddy and English, Attean told her audience that Wabanaki people
have suffered a 98 percent population decline since Europeans arrived
on these shores. Disease is the biggest culprit, she said, but the
Wabanaki were also devastated by war and forced removal from their lands
throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Only four of the 20 distinct
Wabanaki tribes that once ranged throughout Maine survive. Between them,
they count 8,000 members, about .6 percent of the state’s 1.3 million
people.
Maine has sometimes lagged behind the rest of the nation
in remedying injustices rooted in racial discrimination. Native
Americans didn’t win the right to vote in state and local elections
until 1967, making Maine the last state to grant them suffrage. Thirteen
years later, the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement brought millions
of dollars to the impoverished Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet
tribes. The funds would help to greatly improve living conditions, but
the pact, unique in the U.S., created a muddy jurisdictional arrangement
that has found the state and tribes clashing over sovereignty time and
again, whether the context is fishing or logging or child custody
matters.
Child
welfare practices have exacted their own devastating toll, Attean said.
Hundreds of Native children have been removed from their homes in
Maine, beginning in the late 1800s with the federal Indian boarding
school movement, which set out to assimilate Indians into white society,
and continuing into the 1970s with adoption projects that deliberately
placed Indian children in non-Indian homes. Children lost touch with
their families, their language, and their spiritual and cultural
traditions. “They returned to their communities with trauma that has
filtered through the next generations,” Attean said.
Intergenerational,
or historical, trauma was first conceptualized by Columbia University
associate professor Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart in the 1980s as a way
of understanding why so many American Indian communities are not faring
well. It has since been embraced in the field of psychiatry to explain
difficulties experienced by children and grandchildren of Holocaust
survivors.
Simply put, it describes how a parent’s
post-traumatic syndrome affects his children and their children in turn,
a phenomenon multiplied in Native communities where injuries have been
inflicted repeatedly and experienced widely by many families and many
generations.
Reconciliation is a continual process of learning how to be in the same space together.
— Esther Attean
“What
makes all of these injuries worse is the denial of all this history,”
Attean tells me. “It’s denied. It’s repressed. It’s pushed down. Because
it’s too hard to admit that it hasn’t stopped. Reconciliation starts
with acknowledgement of the truth about what happened, not to lay blame,
but just to say yes, this happened, and what are we going to do about
it now. To me, reconciliation is a continual process of learning how to
be in the same space together. Reconciliation would be not seeing what
my people are going through with elver fishing, not seeing what the
Penobscots are going through with the river, not seeing a Penobscot
woman have to write to the paper to explain what a Skowhegan Indian is.”
On
the coastal Sipayik reservation near Eastport, Esther Attean’s
sister-in-law, Denise Altvater, is telling me about a collection of old
photographs she recently found in her mother’s home. “There was a
picture of me and my sisters. It was Easter, and we all had Easter
baskets. I had on a beautiful dress and new shoes, and I was sitting on
my father’s lap,” she recounts with wonder. “There was another picture
of us in our bedroom. Do you remember those bedspreads that had little
balls like popcorn on them? Those were the kind of bedspreads we had.
I’m looking at those pictures, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t ever, ever
remember living that kind of life.’”The pictures were taken in the early
1960s in Buffalo, New York, where Altvater’s father was a police
officer. When her parents separated, Altvater’s mother brought her six
daughters home to Sipayik. Like many of the homes on the reservation at
that time, theirs was little more than a shack, with no running water or
electricity. The girls slept on mattresses in the attic. They were
often hungry, and Altvater remembers being humiliated by store clerks’
scorn when she presented the food vouchers that were doled out to
families by the state Indian agent as payment for logging operations on
Passamaquoddy land.
One day in 1966, when Altvater’s mother wasn’t
home, state caseworkers came into the house, stuffed the girls’
clothing into garbage bags, loaded all of them into two station wagons,
and drove to a foster home in Old Town, 2½ hours away. There, the girls —
Altvater was just 7 — suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse. It
would be four years before caseworkers moved them to a safe home in
Hampden.
This history is denied. It’s repressed. It’s pushed down. Because it’s too hard to admit it hasn’t stopped.
— Esther Attean
“Sitting
here today, the biggest thing on my mind is that it was set up so they
had an excuse to take children from the reservations because of the
conditions that we had to live in,” Altvater says. “I don’t know why I
was taken to this very day. I’ve sat with the people who have access to
records. I’ve made written requests to get them, and I’ve been told that
they are lost.”
Altvater’s story has become symbolic of the TRC
effort because she has been willing to speak publicly about her
experience and the damaging effects it had on her and her family. Two
sisters have died, one at age 41 from diabetes, which Altvater says went
untreated during those years in Old Town, the other at age 51 from a
drug overdose. A recovering alcoholic for 30 years, Altvater, 56, says
she struggled to parent her three children, describing her younger self
as moody and withdrawn. She wipes away tears as she describes a
conversation last year with her adult son. “I said, ‘I want you to
please tell me the truth because I need to know: When you were younger,
did I beat you?’ He looked at me, and he said, ‘Mom, how can you not
remember?’ He told me everything that happened. He said, ‘The worst
thing you ever did was say you wished I’d never been born. One night I
came to kiss you goodnight, and you pushed me away. I was always afraid
to come home, because I never knew what kind of mood you were going to
be in.’” She has worked to make amends and describes her relationship
with her son as strong and loving. “You talk about the truth, you deal
with it, and you apologize,” she says.
In a 2012 interview with
WCSH-TV, Martha Proulx, a DHHS Office of Child and Family Services
assistant administrator and REACH member, said that the state
acknowledges that children often were removed from their homes simply
because they were poor and Native. Even though the policies of
assimilation ended when ICWA was enacted in 1978, Proulx added, Native
children were still being removed at higher rates than non-Native
children, and they stayed in state custody longer. “People were doing
their best with the knowledge at the time,” Proulx said. “Unfortunately,
this knowledge wasn’t the best, and it did impact families in a
negative way.”
It was set up so they had an excuse to take children because of the conditions we had to live in.
— Denise Altvater
When
I emailed Proulx in April to request an interview, she responded
enthusiastically and said she would run it past the DHHS press office.
The next day, Governor LePage rescinded his executive order promoting
cooperation with the tribes. When I followed up with Proulx, she said
she was still waiting for approval. I didn’t hear from her again.
Likewise, my request for an interview with Child and Family Services
director Jim Martin hit a dead end, and Governor LePage himself did not
respond to questions submitted by email to his spokeswoman, Adrienne
Bennett.
Indian families were not the only ones affected by DHHS
practices. In the early 1980s, Bette Hoxie fostered the infant son of a
Wabanaki woman who was struggling with substance abuse (the father had
denied paternity). The boy, who had significant medical needs, had been
placed in Hoxie’s care three times by the time he was 20 months old, and
she began adoption proceedings with the blessing of his mother and
extended family. “We made some hard decisions together that formed a
bond that you can’t begin to understand if you haven’t done it,” she
says.
She was blindsided when she found herself in district court,
sitting across from representatives of the now-defunct Central Maine
Indian Association, who had come to oppose the termination of parental
rights. “Suddenly, I was worrying about whether my child is going to be
my child,” recalls Hoxie, who is the executive director of Adoptive and
Foster Families of Maine and the mother of 11 children, eight of whom
are adopted. “I knew about the Indian Child Welfare Act, but I thought
it had been circumvented with the dialogue that had gone on between DHHS
caseworkers and the biological family members of my son. It was pretty
shocking.”
Unfortunately, this knowledge (at DHHS) wasn’t the best, and it did impact families in a negative way.
— Martha Proulx
DHHS
brought in a pediatrician and a child psychologist, who testified that
the boy’s needs would best be met with the Hoxies, and the termination
was approved. “If it hadn’t been for those doctors coming in, I probably
would have been quite beyond myself,” says Hoxie, who chalks up the
incident to caseworkers’ inexperience with ICWA, which was then
relatively new.
The Hoxies’ attempts to maintain their son’s
connection to his culture had mixed results. His mother’s tribe welcomed
him to powwows and other ceremonies, and he remains close to some
members of her family (the mother is now deceased). The reception was
cooler in his father’s community. After being turned away from one
event, Hoxie didn’t try again. “I didn’t want to force myself on anyone,
and he was still young, and we were going through enough just getting
him physically well,” she explains. “But I think having a stronger
connection with his tribal roots would have been good for him.
“One
of the things that I’ve learned about adoption is that it is
bittersweet. Your joy is built on someone else’s extreme loss and
sadness. I keep going back to the idea of wouldn’t it be nice if,
instead of terminating parental rights, we could resolve a situation by
simply adding another layer of family —
adoption without termination of parental rights? That is the philosophy of Native American tribes across the United States.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of terminating parental rights, we simply added another layer of family?
— Bette Hoxie
Wholly
reliant on grants for its funding, the TRC initially envisioned a
small-budget version of the sharing panels organized by the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which is investigating residential
Indian schools, or the public hearings held by the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated human rights abuses
under apartheid. But getting people to share their stories was not
easy.“We started off bringing people together so they could share their
statements publicly, but sometimes the ramifications of that, even in
their own communities, created more detriment,” says TRC co-chair
gkisedtanamoogk
(pronounced key-said-TAH-NAH-mook), a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag
Tribe of Massachusetts and a Native studies professor at the University
of Maine. “So it has been a more intimate process, where we have gone
into these communities by invitation and gathered statements
individually. We’re dealing with a lot of pain. We have as a backdrop
the policies of both the United States and Canada to destroy a culture
and to do it by the forcible removal of children from their communities
and families. The impact of that is horrifying for both the child and
the family. You can’t begin to imagine what people have been carrying
all of this time. With truth and reconciliation and their courage to
share their story, they are finally getting this tremendous weight off
their chest.”
DHHS employees, meanwhile, have been “forthcoming
and supportive,” Carol Wishcamper says. The state has worked closely
with the tribes and made “really consistent improvement” since 1999, she
says. Nevertheless, the TRC found there is room to do more, including
being more vigilant about identifying Native children when they come
into the system and licensing more Native foster homes. (Maine currently
has a severe shortage of foster and adoptive homes in general.)
“But
even if those things happen, we really need to look at the larger
context and try to untangle the knot of sovereignty issues and the
ongoing impacts of institutional racism,” Wishcamper says. The TRC has
found, for example, that conflicting cultural attitudes about child
rearing may be contributing to the disproportionate removal rates.
“White culture has its own judgmental attitudes toward what constitutes
family, which is different than the tribal definition of family,”
Wishcamper says. “In a tribal community, it’s okay if you have three
aunties you’re spending your time with — you can be with one auntie one
night, another the second night, and another the next, and that’s being
with your family. In white communities, two parents in a house raise
their children. We want the child to have his own bedroom and to be in
the home in a more consistent way. So we need to think outside our own
heads, which is very hard to do.”
As people who love the state of Maine, we want to believe that this didn’t happen here.
— Charlotte Bacon
TRC
and REACH members use the word “genocide” broadly to describe not only
physical destruction of the Wabanaki during the 1600s and 1700s, but
also the cultural and epistemological eradication that was government
policy during the boarding school and adoption project era, and which
they say continues, if unintentionally, under current policies and
practices. REACH’s non-Native staff members include that history in
their Ally program, which is training people around the state to be
advocates for the Wabanaki on various issues, like the ongoing clash
between the state and the Penobscots over rights to the Penobscot River.
“One
of the challenges we’re going to have is getting people to absorb how
they have benefited from tribal oppression,” says Matthew Dunlap, a TRC
commissioner and Maine’s secretary of state. “Because it’s easy in this
conversation to say, ‘This is not my responsibility. I did not wipe out
16 nations of people, that was in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. That was not
us.’ But it was us. We’re the heirs of that, so we have to be
accountable for that personally and collectively as a community.”
A
few months ago, Luke Joseph had a suggestion for his sons, Kohen, 4,
and Knox, 2. “I said, ‘You know what? I think we should grow our hair
out.’ Now, Knox has got a decent head of hair on him. It’s almost to his
shoulders. Kohen’s hair is a little longer than mine. And they like
it.”I am sitting with Luke, his wife Dena, and Dena’s cousin, Krista
Stevens, in the community room of the Micmac Cultural, Community, and
Educational Center, located in a small tribal housing development in
Presque Isle. Once a week, Dena and Krista come here to lead healing
circles for people who have given testimony to the TRC — a ritual that
also is being led by REACH staff members in other tribal communities and
will continue after the commission disbands.
Luke, whose roots
are Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet, says his desire for a
traditional hairstyle grew out of his work as the Aroostook Band of
Micmacs’ ICWA director for the past two years. In addition to working
with DHHS caseworkers to make sure ICWA procedures are followed, he
travels all over the state to visit children in foster care and share
aspects of Wabanaki life and culture that they would otherwise miss.
We need to untangle the knot of the ongoing impacts of institutional racism.
— Carol Wishcamper
But
Luke is just learning about many of these things himself. His parents
grew up during the ’50s and ’60s in a small Maliseet settlement of
tarpaper shacks near the Houlton town dump, a place so bleak it was
known as Hunger Hill. When his mother was 8 or 9, she was placed in a
foster home in St. Agatha, 100 miles away, and she did not come home
until she was 19, an experience she has rarely spoken about. Luke’s
father spent much of his adult life incarcerated for crimes related to
his alcoholism, but his mother “busted her butt” and became a supermom,
frequently taking in kids she encountered through her work as the
Maliseets’ social services director. “We’d come home from school and
these kids would get off the bus and come down the road with us,”
recalls Luke, who grew up in a white neighborhood. “My mom would say,
‘Oh, by the way, these people will be staying with us for a few days.’”
Dena
and Krista have inherited a similar legacy. Dena’s mother spent time in
foster care and later lived in fear that her own children would be
taken. Their grandmother and late grandfather were enrolled in Nova
Scotia’s Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, infamous for its use of
corporal punishment. “Both of them were fluent in Micmac before they
went there, but now if you ask my grandmother for a certain word, she
doesn’t know,” says Krista, a single mother of three. “There is a big
gap, a loss. We would have known our language and been brought up in our
traditions if they hadn’t gone to that school.”
They’re working,
though, to reclaim their culture. Dena and Krista open and close their
healing circles by smudging — burning a bundle of medicinal herbs
(tobacco and sage) to purify the space. An eagle feather is passed
around the circle from speaker to speaker until no one has anything more
to say. Luke and Dena listen to drumming music as they go about their
household chores, something they never heard in their homes when they
were kids. Luke’s sister is a pipe carrier, who conducts sacred
ceremonies. “It’s neat to see how this generation is picking up the
stuff our parents and grandparents weren’t allowed to do — if they did,
they were persecuted,” Luke says. “I see a revival in our culture,
people getting back in touch with the spiritual side of our heritage.”
This
too is reconciliation and healing, says Esther Attean. During her
presentations, she talks about decolonizing the diet and reviving the
traditions and spiritual rituals that sustained the Wabanaki for
thousands of years. “There were once 20 tribes in the Wabanaki
confederacy and we remain,” she told the audience at Husson College. “We
are still here for a reason: we have strengths. For all that trauma
that’s been handed down, there’s a lot of strength that’s been passed
down too.”
Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Key Findings
- Native children are entering foster care at a rate that is 5.1 times greater than the nonnative population.
- There is continued resistance to the idea that native people in Maine have experienced and continue to experience genocide.
- State
child welfare workers and Wabanaki people have different concepts of
child rearing and the role of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).
- State compliance with and training around ICWA has greatly improved, but there is a continued need for systemic change.
- Conflicts between ICWA and the Adoption and Safe Families Act are creating tensions in native child welfare matters.
- Tribal and state cooperation in all matters makes a significant difference, but it takes years to cultivate.
- Nonnative people are more likely than native people to report their relationships with the other to be good and trusting.
Key Recommendations
- Respect tribal sovereignty.
- Honor traditions and culture that implement the spirit of ICWA.
- Celebrate the cultural renaissance of the tribes.
- Develop more substantive trainings in ICWA for child welfare workers.
- Maintain conversations between all stakeholders and be willing to work past roadblocks.
- Investigate the creation of a joint legislative commission on tribal-state affairs.
- Encourage
Governor LePage to reinstate his 2011 executive order recognizing the
“special relationship between the state of Maine and the sovereign
Native American tribes located within the state of Maine.”
- Monitor ICWA compliance, develop policies, and choose liaisons with the input of tribes.
- Resolve issues with the disbursement of Federal Foster Care Program funds.
- Support better communication between tribal child welfare offices and foster and adoptive parents.
- Educate state and tribal child welfare workers on the new Bureau of Indian Affairs regulations for ICWA.
- Fund tribal courts for the Micmac and Maliseet tribes.
These are preliminary findings. A final report will incorporate feedback from five public forums.
The
Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation
Commissioners in 2016. Left to right Sandy White Hawk, Gail Werrbach,
gkisedtanamoogk, Matthew Dunlap, and Carol Wishcamper. Photo from TRC.
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