Early court involvement is closely linked to broader social and health inequities, research shows. Children drawn into the justice system often face poverty, unstable housing and limited access to mental health support, creating a cycle of disadvantage that persists into adulthood.
Investigation: https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/native-american-children-more-likely-to-be-21154567.php
Repatriation does not mean those items have been physically returned to the Indigenous communities they belong to, explained Alyson Rollins of Western. Rather it means, legally, those items are “no longer in our control, but they’re still in our care.” Tribes can pick up the remains and artifacts at any time.
A database released by ProPublica in January 2023 prompted a nationwide look into the more than 600 institutions that possess remains, including Western. Institutions that receive federal funding have been required since 1990 to return “cultural items” and remains to American Indian Tribes, Alaska Native villages and Native Hawaiian organizations, after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
Western has repatriated artifacts since before NAGPRA, but committed in 2023 to accelerating its efforts.
The university is in possession of 63 culturally affiliated remains — 41 of those have been repatriated. Another 18 remains have unidentified tribal affiliations, meaning Western must work with 34 Native American tribes and Canadian First Nations to determine where they belong.
Five remains have been physically transferred to ancestral communities. Rollins, who is the new NAGPRA program and collections manager at Western, said the university is still storing the rest for various reasons. For example, a tribe may have requested the university hold the items until members can pick them up.
Tribes are not bound by federal deadlines like institutions are, NAGPRA Advisory Committee Chair Judith Pine said. Communities can decide for themselves when to physically retrieve the remains and artifacts.
Pine said Western is “standing by to facilitate and assist.” Pine and Rollins describe the university’s relationship with local tribes as “long-standing” and positive.
Western returned three ancestral remains to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Josephine Jefferson, the Swinomish Tribe’s historic preservation officer told CDN in a January email. She said they’re now being taken care of by the tribe’s “spiritual people and elders.”
“This is where they belong,” Jefferson told CDN in 2023. “They don’t belong in a science lab. They don’t belong in a museum to be looked at. And they don’t need to be studied, because we are human, we are people, and we’re the first peoples of this land.”
READ: https://indigenous.boston/federal-district-court-affirms-yakama-reservation-boundaries
A federal clerk's
error put more than 90,000 acres of Yakama Nation land in the hands of
Washington state. Because of forced treaties and a clerical error, Yakama
reservation is over a million acres — but not all of it belongs to the tribe. Grist >
It was barely a choice. In 1855, a time when the ink of border lines on United States maps had scarcely dried, Yakama Chief Kamiakin (left) was told to sign over the land of 14 tribal nations and bands in the Pacific Northwest — or face the prospect of walking “knee deep” in the blood of his people.
Legend has it that, when he put pen to paper, he was so furious he bit through his lip.
By signing, he ceded over 10 million acres across what is now known as Washington state. In return, the Yakama Nation was allowed to live on a reservation one-tenth the size of their ancestral lands, about 100 miles southeast of Seattle.
But the story doesn’t end there. The treaty map was lost for close to 75 years, misfiled by a federal clerk who put it under “M” for Montana.
With no visual record to contradict them, federal agents extracted even more Yakama land for the nascent state, drawing new boundaries on new maps. One removed an additional 140,000 acres from the reservation, another about half a million, and still other versions exist.
By the time the original map was discovered in the 1930s, it was too late. Settlers had already made claims well within reservation boundaries, carving the consequences of this mistake into the contours of the land. Non-Native landowners remain to this day.
The Yakama want that land back. Most tribal members know the story of Kamiakin and his bloodied lip when he signed the treaty. Ask Phil Rigdon, a Yakama citizen and nationally recognized forester. As the superintendent of the Yakama Nation Department of Natural Resources, he deals with a medley of issues, but his most important work is getting the reservation land back. After working on this for nearly 20 years, he knows that it takes time and an entire community to make the progress they want.
“It’s a family thing for us, as we do this business,” he said.
#LANDBACK 🗺
The Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska (Tlingit & Haida) and Washington’s Department of Children, Youth and Families have signed an agreement on how to provide support services to the Tribe’s enrolled members — the first formal partnership between that department and an out-of-state Native nation.
Around 23%, or 1,600, Tlingit & Haida tribal children and youth under 18 live in Washington state. This agreement specifies roles and responsibilities shared by the tribes and the Department of Children, Youth and Families to administer services under the Indian Child Welfare Act, including child protective services, foster care, dependency guardianship, termination of parental rights and adoption proceedings for those children. The department has similar agreements with a number of tribes based in Washington.
The Tlingit & Haida is the largest federally recognized Alaska Native nation, with 22,000 citizens throughout the United States.
In November 2023, the Tlingit & Haida opened an office in Lynnwood with at least 20 staff members to serve more than 8,000 tribal citizens who live in Washington, according to Alaska television station KTOO. These services include tribal court, enrollment and case management of child welfare cases.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/10/2020-census-dhc-a-aian-population.html
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OLYMPIA, Washington — Following the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools on Saturday, Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced today the five members of his office’s Truth & Reconciliation Tribal Advisory Committee. The committee will study how Washington state can address the harms caused by the government’s historical role in the shameful legacy of Indian boarding schools.
The National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools, also known as “orange shirt day,” is observed on Sept. 30 to raise awareness about residential boarding schools.
The five new members of Ferguson’s Truth & Reconciliation Tribal Advisory Committee will hold public listening sessions across the state over the next year to begin a two-year journey toward uncovering the full history of Indian boarding schools in Washington.
“These schools are not just a shameful part of our history — the trauma they caused reverberates through generations of Indigenous families,” Ferguson said. “This week, we do more than just observe the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools. With this new committee, we start a long but essential journey toward healing.”
“We are grateful for Washington state’s leadership in not only investigating its role during the Indian boarding school era, but also its willingness to promote healing for survivors,” said Deborah Parker (Tulalip), CEO of The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. “We need other states to follow suit and work with Tribes and Native communities to bring the truth about this dark history to light.”
During the 2023 session, the Legislature directed the Attorney General’s Office to convene the Tribal Advisory Committee to study boarding schools in Washington through a truth and reconciliation model. The committee’s five members must be citizens from federally recognized tribes in diverse geographic areas across the state. They must also either have personal, policy or specific expertise with Indian boarding school history and policies, or have expertise in traditionally and culturally appropriate truth and healing endeavors.
The Truth & Reconciliation Tribal Advisory Committee members are:
The committee had its first meeting on Sept. 26. The Tribal Advisory Committee will hold the first of its public listening sessions around the state in January 2024.
To reconnect parents and children, the tribe opened a supportive family housing center.
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| Sche’lang’en Village, located on the Lummi Reservation in Washington. (Sche’lang’en Village) |
Several years ago, the Lummi Tribal Council told Diana Phair, the executive director of the tribe’s Housing Authority: “We have 200-some children in foster care. We need to bring our children home.”
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| Mary Big Bull-Lewis is taking a creative approach to returning ownership of the land and its stories to Native people. |
...
“This is a way of reaching more than just a single group of people — it can be a community education,” she says. “There’s not as many of us here on the homelands, but we need to change that conversation about talking about us in the past. We haven’t gone anywhere.”
“We haven’t gone anywhere.”
All around her, Big Bull-Lewis sees similar stories of a Native history covered up by settler transfiguration. Her hometown itself, Wenatchee, takes its namesake from the Wenatchi people, tweaking only a few letters. Yet it’s not unusual for non-Native locals to have never heard of the Wenatchi people at all. Therein lies the problem:
Their stories aren’t told.
GREAT READ: A path to getting Native lands back
Your History Class Was a F*cking Lie by Sean Sherman (Or: How the American Educational System Has Always Been a Racist Propaganda Program...
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