DOI report on boarding schools: “Acknowledge, Apologize, Repudiate” + NEW policy to prevent family separation due to poverty

 

LISTEN HERE: https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/thursday-august-1-2024-thursday-august-1-2024-doi-report-on-boarding-schools-acknowledge-apologize-repudiate/

For the first time, the United States is owning up to its role in the deplorable treatment of Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children at Indian Boarding Schools over more than a century. The report from the U.S. Department of Interior documents the deaths of nearly 1,000 children at boarding schools—many in collaboration with Catholic and other Christian institutions. The report includes distressing testimony collected at public meetings around the country from boarding school survivors and their relatives, detailing the personal costs of the government’s attempts to eradicate Native cultures and languages. It recommends the federal government not only formally apologize, but also establish a path and funding to account for the wrongs and the continuing harm resulting from it.

GUESTS

Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community), Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior

Ben Barnes (Shawnee Tribe), chief of the Shawnee Tribe and National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition board member

Gwen Carr (Cayuga), executive director of the Carlisle Indian School Project

Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation), publisher and editor of Native News Online

NATIVE AMERICA CALLING: August 1, 2024 – DOI report on boarding schools: “Acknowledge, Apologize, Repudiate”

 

Related Stories

Cronkite News: Bill brings accountability for Indian boarding school era (July 29, 2024)

VIDEOS: Lawmakers call for passage of Indian boarding school bill (July 25, 2024)

AUDIO: S.1723, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act (July 24, 2024)

‘Bring our kids home’: Winnebago Tribe in court over children buried at Indian boarding school (July 16, 2024)

Tom Cole: Bringing the dark history of Indian boarding schools to light (July 11, 2024)

Indian boarding school bill sees renewed momentum on Capitol Hill (June 20, 2024)

Press Release: Senate Committee on Indian Affairs prepares Indian boarding school bill for passage (June 20, 2024)

AUDIO: H.R.7227, Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act (June 19, 2024)

Cronkite News: Projects document Indian boarding school experience (January 18, 2024)

Winnebago Tribe sues for return of children buried at Indian boarding school (January 17, 2024)

VIDEO: Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland addresses National Congress of American Indians (November 20, 2023)

DVIDS: Tribes reclaim children lost at Carlisle Indian boarding school (October 11, 2023)

‘It’s really meaningful to me’: Omaha Nation students visit site of former boarding school (April 19, 2023)

 

NEW:

Biden-⁠Harris Administration Actions to Keep Children and Families Safely Together and Supported 

The White House hosts a convening on transforming child welfare and announces new policy to prevent family separation due to poverty

 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/30/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-actions-to-keep-children-and-families-safely-together-and-supported/

 Children should not be separated from their families due to financial hardship alone. Several states, like Kentucky, Indiana, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Kansas have already clarified that poverty alone should not cause child removal.

Details: 

• Allowing child welfare agencies to draw on federal funds to finance background check operations to facilitate quicker licensing for kin and others who provide foster care.
• Rolling out a new website spotlights states and Tribes that have adopted new kinship licensing rules, as well as data on their kinship placement rates.
• Publishing a resource guide on federal programs that provide supports to grandparents and kin in their caregiving roles. 
• Conducting a series of listening sessions to identify federal flexibilities needed for states and Tribes to adopt kinship licensing rules and kinship first approaches.
• Respecting Tribal sovereignty. The Administration expanded the scope of Public Law 102-477 plans, which now deliver over $300 million in flexible funding to 298 Indian Tribes to strengthen the economic stability and mobility of families in Indian Country – including by braiding child welfare funding with workforce funding to help preserve families. And just over a year ago, the President celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision in Haaland v. Brackeen, which upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act as a necessary safeguard to ensure that whenever possible, children should be kept with their extended families or community.
  

 

EDITOR NOTE: It blows my mind the system that created poverty (and forced adoptions in Indian Country) is aiming to fix that - what, after 100+ years? Really? THEY CREATED POVERTY! We already had KINSHIP care for kids on the rez... it's called family and relatives!

So Biden-Harris really really need the NATIVE VOTE in 2024, apparently...

The billions of dollars spent to run all these gov't agencies and departments to remove Native kids could have ended poverty a long time ago.

That is why some call this POVERTY PORN...   TRACE

124 Native People's Remains go home

just a few images from their collection

 

American Museum of Natural History Repatriates Remains of 124 Native People

7/30/2024  hyperallergic.com /938886/american-museum-of-natural-history-repatriates-remains-of-124-native-people/

 

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New York City’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is repatriating the remains of 124 Native individuals and 90 Native cultural items as it faces increased pressure to return the thousands of human remains in its holdings. The news follows an updated and stricter set of federal rules under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) that went into effect at the beginning of this year.

Last Thursday, July 25, AMNH President Sean Decatur updated staff on the institution’s repatriation efforts in a letter first reported by the New York Times. According to his announcement, AMNH has conducted “more than 400 consultations, with approximately 50 different stakeholders, including hosting seven visits of Indigenous delegations and eight completed repatriations” in 2024. 

A Hyperallergic investigation last year found that the museum’s collection of around 12,000 remains from communities within and outside the United States includes the bodies of Black New Yorkers acquired from medical schools in the late 1940s. Collected across 150 years of acquisitions, donations, and expeditions, a majority of these remains originate from Indigenous or colonized communities and lack identification. 

Earlier this year, AMNH joined other museums around the country in removing swaths of Indigenous artifacts from public view by closing two galleries dedicated to Native American history, in order to abide by the updated NAGPRA regulations. 

The newly enacted rules now mandate institutions to “obtain free, prior and informed consent” from tribal communities “before allowing any exhibition of, access to, or research on human remains or cultural items.”  Despite these recent regulations, tribal community members have continued to raise skepticism over institutional delays in returning the remains of their ancestors, while issues like contaminated collections and damage to cultural objects have also posed complications.

In an email to Hyperallergic, an AMNH representative noted that the museum’s recent repatriations do not account for objects that were on display in its since-closed galleries, as “reviews and consultations for [these items] are ongoing.”

The Federal Register shows that in April, AMNH identified the remains of three individuals affiliated with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians of the Santa Ynez Reservation, situated in southern California.  Their bodies were taken from San Miguel Island and Santa Rosa Island, located off the Santa Barbara coast.  In the late 19th century, the museum acquired one set of remains from James Terry, a curator in its anthropology department, and the two others from Felix von Luschan, an Austrian-born anthropologist and ethnologist whose private collection of more than 5,000 human skulls was sold to AMNH after his death.  That same month, AMNH identified the remains of another four individuals and one associated funerary object affiliated with seven tribal communities in California, including the Santa Ynez tribe.

Today, many families of individuals in AMNH’s collections still have not received information about their ancestors’ whereabouts, according to recent reports.

 

👉👉WHAT?

While it no longer does so, in the past, the Museum applied potentially hazardous pesticides to items in the collections. Museum records do not list specific objects treated or which of several chemicals used were applied to a particular item.  (WHAT?) (POISON!) Therefore, those handling this material should follow the advice of industrial hygienists or medical personnel with specialized training in occupational health or with potentially hazardous substances.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/08/2024-07365/notice-of-inventory-completion-american-museum-of-natural-history-new-york-ny

 

You Cannot Give Thanks for What Is Stolen

READ: hyperallergic.com /783269/you-cannot-give-thanks-for-what-is-stolen/

 

 

 

 

Government Releases Stunning New Tally of the Historical Harms of Indian Boarding Schools

The Interior Department has concluded an unprecedented yearslong review finding nearly 1,000 children died, separated from their tribes and families, with many buried across hundreds of institutions created for ‘forced assimilation.’ 

By Nancy Marie Spears

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland embraced boarding school survivor Delores Twohatched at the first stop on the “Road to Healing” tour in July 2022, Photo by Nick Oxford.

The federal government has concluded a comprehensive inquiry into one of the American continent’s darkest and most tragic episodes: The more than century-long tactics to forcefully assimilate Native American children separated from their families and tribes into hundreds of so-called Indian boarding schools.

In a rare and sweeping admission, the federal agency that oversaw that network is now calling for a formal national apology to the descendants of those who died or suffered rampant abuse and trauma in this system.

The 105-page volume announced Tuesday builds on information the Interior Department uncovered in May 2022 as part of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. It significantly increased the number of student deaths to nearly 1,000, and tallied and detailed the federal dollars going into federally-run and church-operated schools and burial sites. The department also confirmed the massive public investment and priority the young United States once placed on this human toll: More than $23 billion from taxpayers in today’s dollars and more than 150 treaties with tribes baked the schools into the national infrastructure.

“The most important thing is that our work to tell the truth about the Federal Indian boarding school system be paired with action,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, noted in the report. “As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past. Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”

These volumes — and the Interior Department’s oral history project — represent the first-ever comprehensive attempt by the federal government to recognize and document the experiences of survivors as well as tracking the impact of generations of genocidal policies against Indigenous children and their families.

In the process of publishing these two volumes in the last two years, Interior Department staff and contractors painstakingly sifted through approximately 103 million pages of U.S. government records and met with Indigenous leaders and government officials to compile the findings. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, through her “Road to Healing” tour that began in Anadarko, Oklahoma, participated in listening sessions with hundreds of boarding school survivors at 12 locations across the country. The experiences of some of those individuals are included in this second volume. 

Many of the employees who worked on the project were Indigenous, said Sec. Haaland, the first Indigenous woman in a U.S. cabinet and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. It’s a dramatic contrast to the way the agency operated for nearly two centuries: as an anti-Indigenous driving force in advancing these policies.

The report notes that “Indian education” was a treaty right, and a priority in the relations between tribes and the U.S. government — as evidenced by the 100-plus treaties that “explicitly include Federal Indian boarding schools or general Indian education provisions.”

“I think of my mother standing on that sidewalk as we were loaded into the green bus to be taken to a boarding school. And I can see it – still have the image of my mom burned in my brain and in my heart where she was crying. What does a mother think? She was helpless.”

— Road to Healing tour participant from Arizona

“I am immensely proud of the hundreds of Interior employees — many of them Indigenous — who gave of their time and themselves to ensure that this investigation was thoroughly completed to provide an accurate and honest picture,” said Sec. Haaland. “The Road to Healing does not end with this report — it is just beginning.”

The final report builds on findings in the first report, released in 2022, adding to the nation’s understanding of the federal policies of the Indian boarding school system. The initial findings accounted for 500 child deaths across 19 schools, while the updated list of boarding schools now includes 417 institutions across 37 then-territories or states. 

The children’s death tally has doubled.

Nearly 1,000 children — 973 Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Native American children buried in 74 marked or unmarked gravesites across 65 different school sites — died while attending schools operated by the federal government. 

And the total does not include children who died whose records weren’t available or who attended “Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories, and Indian boarding schools operated by religious institutions and organizations that received no U.S. Government support.”

The atrocities occurring within school walls range from abusive to culturally genocidal, with matrons, priests and other school employees using various methods to erase the cultures and identities of tribal children.

In Alaska, children were given a number that was haphazardly written on everything they owned — that is, all the non-cultural items they were allowed to keep.

The Anaktuvuk Pass Eskimo from Central Alaska “came in after we did, they had all their parka, their caribou pads,” an Alaska Native participant, who spoke to Haaland during her stop in that state, said in the report. “They came in, they stripped them down, put all their clothes, the food they bring in, dry caribou, salmon, and stuff like that, they put it all on the side. I think I probably cried when they took all their clothes down there and burned them in the furnace, all the beautiful, beautiful parkas and everything.” 

Another Alaska participant described being forced to eat Western processed foods. “We all got violently ill because our bodies couldn’t process changing our diet over from our traditional Native foods. And we had vomiting, we had diarrhea, we had both and we were often punished for soiling our pants or clothing or bedding and we got beaten for that.”

Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland listening with Secretary of The Interior Deb Haaland in 2022 at Riverside Indian School in Oklahoma. Photo by Nick Oxford.

Governor Hochul Convenes Historic Indigenous Nations Summit in Albany NEW YORK

 

JULY 30, 2024

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul convened leaders from the Indigenous Nations across New York State for a historic summit at the New York State Capitol in Albany.

PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.

Today's summit was attended by the following Indigenous Nations:

• Cayuga Nation
• Oneida Nation
• Onondaga Nation
• Tonawanda Band of Seneca
• Tuscarora Nation
• Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe
• Shinnecock Nation
• Unkechaug Nation

This summit follows Governor Hochul's commitment to supporting and strengthening relationships with Indigenous peoples across the state. As part of this commitment, Governor Hochul has:

• Appointed the First Deputy Secretary for Indigenous Nations. Elizabeth Rule was appointed Deputy Secretary for Indigenous Nations. Elizabeth is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Assistant Professor specializing in Native American Studies at American University. Prior to joining American University, Elizabeth directed George Washington University's Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy. She received her bachelor's degree from Yale University, and her master's degree and Ph.D. from Brown University.
• Visited the Onondaga Nation Longhouse. Governor Kathy Hochul made a historic visit to the Onondaga Longhouse – the first visit by a sitting Governor in more than half a century – for a conversation with Onondaga Nation leaders, including Tadodaho Sid Hill, representatives of the Council of Chiefs, and Clan Mothers.
• Returned more than 1,000 Acres of Land to the Onondaga Nation. Governor Kathy Hochul, joined by United States Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Onondaga Nation Tadodaho Sidney Hill, announced a historic agreement as part of the Onondaga Lake Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Program that will return more than 1,000 acres of scenic land to the Nation. As Natural Resource Trustees for the settlement with Honeywell International, Inc., the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service signed a resolution that directs Honeywell to transfer the title to more than 1,000 acres of open space in Central New York's Tully Valley to the Onondaga Nation - one of the largest returns of land by any state to an Indigenous nation.
• Proposed to Strengthen Stability of Indigenous Families. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is a federal law created to protect the best interests of Native American children involved in child custody proceedings. The law emerged as a response to the disproportionate rates at which both residential boarding schools and state actors removed Native American children from their homes, communities, and Indigenous Nations. This year, New York’s Deputy Secretary for Indigenous Nations and the Office of Children and Family Services, will advance, in consultation with Nation leadership and stakeholders, strategies to strengthen the objectives of the Indian Child Welfare Act, underscoring New York’s commitment to redressing injustices inflicted upon Indigenous communities.
• Ensured Dental Care Access for Indigenous Nations. As part of the FY 2025 Budget, New York State will include $2.5 million in funding for Indigenous Nations dental health care, with the aim of addressing gaps in access. This funding will help ensure Indigenous Nations dental offices and providers can offer treatment without referring patients off-site and away from Nation territories. This builds on Governor Hochul’s commitments to lifting up Indigenous Nations throughout New York, including directing New York’s Deputy Secretary for Indigenous Nations and the Office of Children and Family Services to advance strategies to strengthen the objectives of the Indian Child Welfare Act and commencing a comprehensive review of artistic representation of Indigenous peoples at the New York State Capitol.
• Responded to Offensive Representations. To ensure that all New Yorkers are welcomed in the State Capitol, Governor Hochul will commence a comprehensive review of artistic representation of Indigenous peoples in the Capitol, with invited participation from representatives from each of the nine Indigenous Nations. All New Yorkers should feel welcome and respected when visiting the Capitol, but unfortunately, offensive imagery and distasteful representations of populations in the art which adorns the Capitol can alienate visitors. Assessments of offensive artistic representations of Indigenous peoples are informed by precedent more than eighty years old, and Indigenous peoples, in particular, are often depicted in artworks in a manner that reflects harmful racial stereotypes and glorifies violence against Indigenous peoples. Such depictions do not reflect the values of New York State.

 

Does adopting make people high? #WonderDrug

reblog from 2013 (edited)

By Trace A. DeMeyer  Hentz (blog editor)

I’ve been reading blogs by Christian folks who saved an orphan and plan to do it again.  Apparently using the words “Christian” and “Orphan” somehow makes this adoption business holy. “Doing God’s work,” some potential adoptive parents (PAPS) are blogging... how they are so compassionate and defend it’s the Christian thing that they adopted babies - because these babies were orphans and in need and “born in another womb” decreed by God to be adopted by them.   

 

Really.  Really?  

Orphans in this day and age?

A few PAPS were upset that no one understands how difficult it is for them as married couples to cope with infertility... how no one feels sorry for them.  So that makes it perfectly alright for them to go out and buy adopt that baby.  (Yup, it’s always a baby they want. They get angry if you argue with them.)  

So adopting makes them feel good. It doesn’t really matter a woman will have to sacrifice her baby for them. (Some birthmothers may also feel euphoric they gave a couple a precious baby.  Maybe a few did it for cash.)  It’s a mind bender that it doesn’t enter their minds that the baby hurts and is devastated losing their mother (or father) and this wound lasts a lifetime…

There are thousands upon thousands of PAPS who want only a baby and defend their reasons why.  Adoption agencies are more than happy to make their dreams come true.

I have a new theory.  It’s a crazy world out there.  People want to feel better so they’ll rescue someone, in this case a baby, and this “giving” back will create euphoria in their brain chemistry.  I think the adoption industry has manipulated and used “adopting babies” as the wonder drug that clouds the mind from adoption reality.  (They also steer clear of the adoptee perspective or Nancy Verrier’s Primal Wound in their adoption propaganda.)

So these righteous saviors of babies are on a mission to make themselves feel better. Adopting makes them high.

Read this:

Giving and Brain Chemistry

Norm at normblog quotes a piece in the New York Sun about giving:

 

…the surprising conclusion is that giving affects our brain chemistry. For example, people who give often report feelings of euphoria, which psychologists have referred to as the "Helper's High."  They believe that charitable activity induces endorphins that produce a very mild version of the sensations people get from drugs like morphine and heroin.

Norm offers a thought experiment: if a pill reproduced exactly the same brain effects, wouldn't people still give?  I agree this suggests there's more to it.

Adding to that, and reflecting on my own thought processes related to giving, I think this is a good case illustrating the interactions between levels of causes in human behavior.  Proximately, I often go through with a charitable act despite fretting that it will be boring, too much trouble, too costly, or otherwise unpleasant.  But upon doing it, or soon afterwards, I feel a sort of euphoria I would associate with the endorphin effect described in the NY Sun article.

I will suppose that the euphoria and the associated brain chemistry register somehow in my mind -- in behaviorist terms, an association is reinforced between the feeling and the act of giving -- and this association comes into play the next time a choice for giving arises.  But even if so, the association is barely liminal, and I don't reflect along the lines of 'I'll get a nice endorphin rush if I go through with this.' Rather, I think along the lines of 'good people do things like this, and I want to be a good person despite the short-term fuss I will have to endure' -- and I think the euphoric brain chemistry is a bonus (and should be seen as a second-order cause) that keeps acts of giving on the list of thinkable, possible alternatives. The next time I am faced with a choice to give or not to, I will have inarticulate impulses pushing for it, and these impulses will be rooted in brain chemistry.

Source: http://danceswithanxiety.blogspot.com/2007/12/giving-and-brain-chemistry.html 

I do expect some people will disagree so please leave a comment... (Unless you are HIGH!)  Trace