Secretary Haaland Message to Indigenous Boarding School Survivors

Blood Quantum use is controversial

 

How a US colonial notion of ‘blood quantum’ for tribal membership is threatening Indigenous nations

"Blood quantum" is a U.S. colonial notion to identify whether someone is Indigenous and to which tribal band they belong. Its use is controversial.

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More: Wisconsin’s story doesn't start with Jean Nicolet. A brief history of forced relocation and 'landcestry.'

More: 28 site names that slur Indigenous women are being removed in Wisconsin. Here's what's happening next.

Indigenous academics argue that all First Nations in the U.S. will soon have to address blood quantum to deal with declining enrollments.

Quick Note: Google is harvesting data - but as far as we know, there is not another platform to use for this blog... STAY TUNED!

[Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real

[Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real: photo: Daughter Jane and Lorraine 

Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real

Daughter Jane and Lorraine

It was a bracing morning being brought back to reality about how the world see the woman who gave up a child for adoption. Not nicely is the short answer. 

A ten-minute morning interview for drive-to-work radio show in the New York/New Jersey area led to be being mentally whacked for having a relationship with a married man, which I did, and his having an Irish Catholic background was another reason to pile on the  criticism.  She gave the listeners advice--don't have an affair with a married man, look where that led for this stupid person I'm interviewing.

We did cover that I found her, that her adoptive parents had already tried to find me, that her epilepsy was almost certainly caused by the birth-control pills I took when I was pregnant but did not know...and then she asked how my relationship with my daughter was today.

I had to say that she died.  Since the next question was going to be about that--I told the truth.  She died by suicide.  Mincing words is not my style.  I was able to say some more but since people listening today might come to the blog to read about suicide, 

I'm excerpting a small section of Hole In My Heart below: 

    While there are no good statistics on adoptees who actually commit suicide, research on adopted populations shows that a disproportionate number are likely to. No matter how you slice the numbers, adoption increases the probability of suicide, no matter how many adoptees never have a thought of it, no matter how many adoptees are successful, smart, and may one day end up on the Supreme Court. It is unlikely there will ever be good statistics on how many adoptees commit suicide because “adopted” is not noted on death certificates. 

    What we do know is that more adoptees than non-adoptees think about suicide quite often.  Google “suicide and adoption” and what pops up is an entry from the medical journal Pediatrics, “Adoption as a Risk Factor for Attempted Suicide during Adolescence.”  That study unequivocally states, “Attempted suicide is more common among adolescents who live with adoptive parents than among adolescents who live with biological parents.” The connection between adoption and suicide persisted even after the researchers adjusted for depression, aggression, and impulsive behavior.  Not surprisingly, “family connectedness,” whether among the adopted or non-adopted, did decrease the likelihood of suicide attempts. 

    Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported that adopted teens were almost four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who lived with their natural parents, even after adjustment for factors associated with suicidal behavior, such as psychiatric disorder symptoms, personality traits, family environment, and academic disengagement.  Girls were more likely than boys to attempt suicide.  About 75 percent of the adopted teens in the study (more than 1,200, all living in Minnesota) were adopted before the age of two and were foreign born—mostly from South Korea.

    This deep dive into suicide and adoption followed a study by the lead researcher and others who concluded that being adopted approximately doubled the odds of having a disruptive behavior disorder and having contact with a mental health professional. Interestingly, international adoptees were less likely to exhibit behavior disorders.

B. J. Lifton wrote that at a seminar for adoptive parents when she brought up the fact that the percentage of adoptee suicide was statistically high, a prominent psychiatrist asked if that nasty bit could be deleted from the tape, which was to be later sold as a record of the talk.  Lifton agreed but later wrote she was sorry she had. --from Hole In My Heart.

The Great Divider: How the Baby Veronica case was the sign

 REBLOG from February 24, 2014

By Trace Hentz

OK, as promised, I have more thoughts after I went to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School last Friday to hear a review of the Baby Veronica Case - and to hear what NCAI, NARF and the Tribal Supreme Court Law Project at Yale were doing while this major case was going on... and I reported to you yesterday what they said essentially…

There weren't any surprises for me unless you count how these panelists didn't use the time to discuss the genocide that actually occurred prior the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and the child abductions by social workers and missionaries - nor did they mention human trafficking and the Nightlight Adoption Agency dealings with Maldonado, the birthmother.  They did mention boarding schools.

So, I was truly upset. From what I heard, it appears American Indians are eons behind in civil rights and we can't seem to win a case in the Supreme Court.  I’d heard that warning years prior but this time at Yale was a bit more in my face. This case was about adoption by non-Indians, something I lived myself.

We had Justice Alito writing an opinion that Veronica is 1.2% Indian.  NARF attorney Joel West Williams asked the Yale audience, "Who in America is 1/16 or 3/256th anything?"  Yet we have a judge issuing his opinion by measuring an Indian for their Indian-ness which equates to measuring a child’s blood? This is still happening?

·        JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court:

This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee. Because Baby Girl is classified in this way, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that certain provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 required her to be taken, at the age of 27 months, from the only parents she had ever known and handed over to her biological father, who had attempted to relinquish his [**736]parental rights and who had no prior contact with the child. The provisions of the federal statute [*2557] at issue here do not demand this result.

 

·        Jun 25 2013: Judgment REVERSED and case REMANDED. Alito, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Kennedy, Thomas, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., and Breyer, J., filed concurring opinions. Scalia, J., filed a dissenting opinion. Sotomayor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Ginsburg and Kagan, JJ., joined, and in which Scalia, J., joined in part. Read more here

·         

I couldn’t sleep ... Dusten Brown never had a chance. He went to Iraq knowing the Capobiancos had his daughter but he had to serve a year and a JAG lawyer took his case.  The puzzle remains why Maldonado mysteriously breaks up with him and severs all communication. Was she punishing her high school sweetheart Dusten by selling his baby or was she manipulated by the adoption agency to take their money?

Then it hit me - keeping America ignorant of Indians, culture, actual history - this all works to take Indian children.  Judgment is easy.  Third World poverty (which we didn’t create) somehow equates to abuse of children.  Add their general ignorance of sovereignty and culture, what it means to be Cherokee or Lakota or Navajo or any tribe - and it means you can't win public opinion polls or cases before the Supreme Court? 

Ignorance about Indians? Exactly!

It's been going on since colonial contact.  Please, let's not call them settlers anymore but invaders.  America has always been the Great Divider, building its fences, writing its laws, counting on classism and racism to divide us. 

America wins every time when it perpetuates this ignorance of Indians.  Do Indians do a good job of educating others about culture, or what's important to us?  Not really.  We're way behind in any civil rights movement.  We've had movies romanticizing us over 100 years and it's hard to kill those "savage" “redskin” stereotypes drilled into all our heads!  

What do Americans know about Indians? Nothing.  Practically zilch.

America's "taking care" of Indians only works to create HATE among Americans who view us as privileged in some way that they are not.  Like why do we even have a law that keeps nice white people from adopting Indian babies?  Trust me, ICWA is under attack.

I do know that Indians are way ahead in surviving every broken treaty and then fighting each other over small scraps of power.  Some tribes even subscribe to "blood quantum" as if they need to purge their citizen rolls of those who may be too white or too black.

We have Supreme Court Justices using the blood quantum argument and you see that is not entirely their fault (they all went to law school but didn’t even have a course on Indian Law at those Ivy League schools) but it tells me - do not go anywhere near them.  They are not even aware of their ignorance.  Dusten Brown didn't have a chance, not in that court.

We Indians shouldn't go anywhere near that court or any court with that level of stupidity.  No, you can't tell Americans they are stupid.

What the panel did say was each and every tribe needs to create and have their own child protection network. I agree since it's pretty evident that you can't trust any non-Indian social worker to go to the reservation and use their mother- father “family unit” example.  Only Indians can decide who the right people are to care for its children.  That person might be an auntie, grandmother or another relative, depending on who in the tribal family is willing and able.

And the panel said we need more American Indian lawyers who become judges - because the way it is now - Indians can’t win.

For many years Vine Deloria and others did try very hard to educate others (with their brilliant books) on the white man’s level, even earning degrees in white man’s colleges like Yale and Harvard, but it all comes down to this:  whites don’t really care.

And if we really think about it, this is a very dangerous situation to be in.

Footnote:  I attended white schools like most everyone else - Really nothing I learned was true or real about Indian culture or history. I learned more sitting at the kitchen table of my friend Ellowyn who is Oglala Lakota, who gave me an education about Indians not written about anywhere.  Then there was my one adoptive aunt (a first-born American) who calls me a liar when I told her there were Indian Boarding Schools, and this was right after I visited Haskell in Kansas.  No, Americans are not learning about Indians or the truth of our history. 

The Baby Veronica case is the sign, whether we wish to see it that way or not - but we can no longer ignore the ignorance or the danger surrounding this case. 

 

THIS BLOG HAS MANY POSTS ABOUT THE BABY V CASE... Yes, she was adopted out...

 

BLOODISM? READ THIS

REMINDER

Hey Adoptees:

We are still doing the COUNT 2024.  Have you filled out a survey? go to:

https://thecount2024.blogspot.com/

encrypted email for Trace (private)

tracelara@pm.me

REQUEST FREE PDF: Almost Dead Indians (+The Count 2024)

Interview:

• https://blog.americanindianadoptees.com/2024/01/tonight-first-voices-radio-all-native.html

I have received a small amount of surveys... please fill out and mail one SOON! 

Trace

I had no idea what being Native was

REBLOG FROM 2018 - she explains how the Class Action in Canada was not working!

 

We applaud Colleen! She's our hero!

Colleen Cardinal is a mother, author, and survivor of the Sixties Scoop. She joins us this week to talk about how she perceived being Indigenous as a child, intergenerational trauma, and how Canada has failed to address its past treatment of Indigenous peoples. [Episode 17 Transcript]

BAD RIVER - MOVIE Trailer #protectgreatlakes

Bad River Trailer - Quannah ChasingHorse and Edward Norton Narration from 50EGGS on Vimeo.

 

Please see this FILM...

BAD RIVER is a full length documentary that takes us into the heart of an epic battle the Bad River Ojibwe are waging to save Lake Superior. Acclaimed New Yorker writer, Bill McKibben calls the film "a powerful chronicle… and a hopeful picture of the emerging possibilities for power” Narrated by Quannah ChasingHorse and Academy-Award nominee, Edward Norton. Opening in select @amctheatres across the US MARCH 15. 

For ticket and venue information https://www.badriverfilm.com/dates/ #badriverfilm #environment #water #waterislife #nature #socialjustice #indigenous #firstnations #river #greatlakes #protectgreatlakes

 

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”

 

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.

Other participants from South Dakota and Oklahoma described watching classmates being sodomized by priests, and throwing “green stuff” all over them that “stung like hell.” Others from those states called the torture not just physical, but psychological as well.

“It was warfare against Indian children,” explained a South Dakota participant. “So the littler children, when they got bigger, they could beat up little children for crying, and the nuns looked the other way. That was part of their strategy.”

Other survivors of boarding schools and their descendants outlined ways the schools negatively impacted their relationships with parents, children and communities. 

“I experience feelings of abandonment because I think of my mother standing on that sidewalk as we were loaded into the green bus to be taken to a boarding school,” said a participant from Arizona, according to the report. “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.”

“...we continue to heal as the full story of that dark chapter is brought to light. Through truth, reconciliation, and our traditional ways of knowing, we can take healing even further.”

Cheyenne Brady, Center for Native American Youth

The report outlined eight recommendations to guide the path the nation should take to heal from this history. They include a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government for its role in implementing these policies and investing in responses to the present-day impacts of the system.

“I want you to imagine a Native community with no kids left, just the parents and grandparents,” Brian Schatz, Chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said about boarding schools’ impact at a legislative hearing last week. “Imagine not just the trauma for that group of children who were abducted, but what kind of community is left there? As a parent I would be absolutely catatonic for the rest of my life.”

The report’s recommendations include establishing a national memorial to commemorate survivors and descendants; repatriating the remains of children and objects — including the boarding school sites themselves — to tribes; investing in further research on the economic and health impacts perpetuated by the schools; documenting survivors’ experiences; and finally, building relations with countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada to see what can be learned from similar but unique assimilation policies there.

The goal, the report states, will be to exchange “best practices for healing and redress” between federal and Indigenous governments in the aftermath of “Indigenous child removal through boarding schools and predatory foster care and adoption practices.”

“The federal boarding school program created immeasurable trauma for our people that is an active piece of our everyday lives,” said Cheyenne Brady of the Sac and Fox Nation, who is the Associate Director of Youth Programs at the Center for Native American Youth. “The resilience of our ancestors has been passed down alongside that trauma, and we continue to heal as the full story of that dark chapter is brought to light. Through truth, reconciliation, and our traditional ways of knowing, we can take healing even further.”

SOURCE