BACK UP BLOG

This blog is a backup for American Indian Adoptees blog
There might be some duplicate posts prior to 2020. I am trying to delete them when I find them. Sorry!

SURVEY FOR ALL FIRST NATIONS ADOPTEES

SURVEY FOR ALL FIRST NATIONS ADOPTEES
ADOPTEES - we are doing a COUNT

If you need support

Support Info: If you are a Survivor and need emotional support, a national crisis line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: Residential School Survivor Support Line: 1-866-925-4419. Additional Health Support Information: Emotional, cultural, and professional support services are also available to Survivors and their families through the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program. Services can be accessed on an individual, family, or group basis.” These & regional support phone numbers are found at https://nctr.ca/contact/survivors/ . MY EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me

Monday, December 30, 2019

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Lost Bird of Wounded Knee Zintkala Nuni



Lost Bird Story Summary                                

In the spring or summer of 1890, Lost Bird was born somewhere on the prairies of South Dakota. Fate took her to Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation on Dec. 29, 1890.
On that tragic day, hundreds of Lakota men, women and children died in a confrontation with U.S. troops and the woman who likely was the child’s mother was among them. But as she was dying, she and her baby found some scanty shelter from the bitter cold and wind in the bank of a creek.
Four days after the massacre, a rescue party found the infant, miraculously alive, protected by the woman’s frozen body.
The infant was passed from one person to another and her sensational story attracted the attention of powerful white men. Eventually, this living souvenir of Wounded Knee ended up in the hands of a National Guard general.
Lost Bird was adopted by Gen. Leonard Colby and, without her knowledge or consent, his suffragist wife, Clara Bewick Colby. The baby’s original name died on the killing field, along with her chance to grow up in her own culture. She became, literally and figuratively, Zintkala Nuni, the Lost Bird.
So Lost Bird - Zintka, as her adopted mother called her - ended up the daughter of a very socially and historically prominent white couple. She had one big advantage - a mother who came to love her. Though Zintka’s adoption was a surprise to her, Clara Colby took on the duties of motherhood in addition to her work as a suffragette activist, lecturer, publisher and writer.
However, Zintka’s childhood was marred by her exposure to racism, possible abuse from adoptive relatives and the indifference of her father. Poverty entered into the mix when Gen. Colby abandoned his wife for the child’s nursemaid/governess and failed to provide adequate support for Clara Colby and Zintka.
The increasingly restless child endured miserable stays with relatives and at boarding schools and became harder and harder for her mother to control.
At age 17, Zintka was sent back to her father and his new wife in Beatrice, Neb. The result was disastrous. A few months later, Gen. Colby placed his now-pregnant daughter in a stark and severe reformatory. Her son was stillborn, but the girl remained in the facility for a year.
Zintka eventually returned to her mother. At one point, she seemed to have found happiness in marriage, but the relationship disintegrated when she discovered her new husband had given her syphilis, then incurable. She struggled with the effects of that illness for the rest of her life.
She had a number a careers during her short life: work with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, various entertainment and acting jobs, and possibly prostitution. Three times, she managed to visit South Dakota in search of her roots, but her welcome was cool.
By 1916, Zintka was living in abject poverty. She and her then-husband, who suffered from illness, were trying to make a living in vaudeville. She had had two more children. One died, probably that year, and Zintka gave the other to an Indian woman who was better able to care for him. Later that year, she lost her loving mother, Clara Colby, to pneumonia.
Eventually, Zintka and her husband gave up vaudeville and moved in with his parents in Hanford, Calif., in 1918. Zintka fell ill on Feb. 9, 1920, as an influenza epidemic swept across the nation. On Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, she died.
Clara Colby tried to raise Zintka as a white girl in an unaccepting society and tried to erase her unceasing attraction to her Lakota culture. In the end, Zintka was rejected by both.
Lost Bird finally came home in 1991, in an effort spurred in part by author Renee Sansom Flood, author of "Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota." Her grave was found in California and her remains were returned to South Dakota and buried at the grave site at Wounded Knee. Her tragic story led to the organization of the Lost Bird Society, which helps Native Americans who were adopted outside their culture find their roots.
Sources: "Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota" by Renee Sansom Flood.

Friday, December 27, 2019

Indigenous Slaves, known as Panis


https://www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/population/slavery/
The Panis territory
The outlined territory shown on this map represents the region from which originate the majority of aboriginal slaves known as Panis. It includes the Pawnee, but also other aboriginal peoples that their enemies enslaved or bartered against European products.


2017- Canada’s 150th birthday prompted much looking back at our history. And one of the things Canadians have long been proud about is our status as the final stop on the Underground Railroad, a safe refuge for American slaves fleeing bondage.

This is true, and we should be proud. But let’s not be too proud ― after all, the colonies that became Canada also had slavery for more than two centuries, ending only 30 years before U.S. President Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

When Britain took over New France, about 7 per cent of the colony was enslaved, or around 4,000 out of a population of 60,000. Two-thirds were indigenous slaves, known as Panis, and the other third African, who cost twice as much and were a status symbol. The British did not set them free.


“We don’t know about what happened before the Underground Railroad, which is that indigenous and black Canadians endured slavery.” —Afua Cooper, historian


Unlike our American cousins, Canada did not itself end its slavery ― in fact, in 1777 slaves began fleeing Canada for Vermont, which had just abolished slavery. It took Britain to finally outlaw the practice across their entire empire in 1834.

There had been a history of First Nations enslaving prisoners of war prior to colonialism, however they were often exchanged as part of alliance-making or to replace their own war dead. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights reports that “unlike Aboriginal peoples, Europeans saw enslaved people less as human beings and more as property that could be bought and sold. Just as importantly, Europeans viewed slavery in racial terms, with Aboriginals and Africans serving and white people ruling as masters.”

Indigenous Slaves, known as Panis


https://www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/population/slavery/
The Panis territory
The outlined territory shown on this map represents the region from which originate the majority of aboriginal slaves known as Panis. It includes the Pawnee, but also other aboriginal peoples that their enemies enslaved or bartered against European products.


2017- Canada’s 150th birthday prompted much looking back at our history. And one of the things Canadians have long been proud about is our status as the final stop on the Underground Railroad, a safe refuge for American slaves fleeing bondage.

This is true, and we should be proud. But let’s not be too proud ― after all, the colonies that became Canada also had slavery for more than two centuries, ending only 30 years before U.S. President Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

When Britain took over New France, about 7 per cent of the colony was enslaved, or around 4,000 out of a population of 60,000. Two-thirds were indigenous slaves, known as Panis, and the other third African, who cost twice as much and were a status symbol. The British did not set them free.


“We don’t know about what happened beforethe Underground Railroad, which is that indigenous and black Canadians endured slavery.” —Afua Cooper, historian


Unlike our American cousins, Canada did not itself end its slavery ― in fact, in 1777 slaves began fleeing Canada for Vermont, which had just abolished slavery. It took Britain to finally outlaw the practice across their entire empire in 1834.

There had been a history of First Nations enslaving prisoners of war prior to colonialism, however they were often exchanged as part of alliance-making or to replace their own war dead. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights reports that “unlike Aboriginal peoples, Europeans saw enslaved people less as human beings and more as property that could be bought and sold. Just as importantly, Europeans viewed slavery in racial terms, with Aboriginals and Africans serving and white people ruling as masters.”

The Other Slavery

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He also played a central role in the European adoption of Indian or Native American slavery.

When we think of slavery in early America, we often think of the practice of African and African-American chattel slavery. However, that system of slavery wasn’t the only system of slavery that existed in North America. Systems of Indian slavery existed too. In fact, Indians remained enslaved long after the 13th Amendment abolished African-American slavery in 1865.

LISTEN: Episode 139: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: Indian Enslavement in the Americas - Ben Franklin's World

Thursday, December 26, 2019

Kikotan Massacre

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of what the English colonizer John Rolfe described as the “20 and odd Negroes” (a number that was actually closer to 30) has dominated social media and the summer’s newscycle. But there’s an aspect of this commemorative activity that hasn’t received much attention. I refer specifically to the violence that occurred at Point Comfort less than a decade before the slave ship White Lion made anchor in August 1619. On that spot, a bloody event worthy of historical introspection took place: the massacre of the Kikotan Indians.
That bloody event is important because it made it possible for the English to take Native lands and build Fort Henry and Fort Charles. 
The Kikotan massacre prepared the ground for the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia.

READ: How the Kikotan Massacre Prepared the Ground for the Arrival of the First Africans in 1619 | History News Network

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Breaking the Maya Code: The Intolerance Meme


One Catholic Priest Destroyed the Entire Mayan Written Language


By Craig A. James |  The Religion Virus



The New York Times described the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphs as “one of the great stories of twentieth century scientific discovery.”
Tragically, this decipherment was only necessary because of a one-man Spanish Inquisition, a deliberate, decades-long campaign by a single Catholic priest to destroy the Mayan language and culture. The priest, Diego de Landa, wiped out all knowledge of the written language, and nearly destroyed the spoken language too.
Diego de Landa’s one-man inquisition perfectly illustrates the power of the Intolerance Meme, an idea that evolved in the Jewish religion a few centuries before the birth of Jesus, and was taken up with a vengeance by Christians in the third and fourth centuries AD.
The Intolerance Meme declares that not only is Yahweh the only god, but in addition, anyone who worships other gods is committing a sin. The Intolerance Meme justifies all sorts of atrocities in Yahweh’s name: Murder, slavery, forced conversion, suppression and destruction of other religions, racism, and many other immoral acts.
This was Diego de Landa’s background when he discovered that many of his Mayan “converts” had actually incorporated the Catholic Yahweh/Jesus/Spirit, along with the various saints and angels, into their own traditional religion. When Landa discovered “idol worship” among some of his converts, he felt that his “children” had turned their backs on him, and his life’s work was a failure.

Being a good Roman Catholic, and a carrier of the Intolerance Meme, Landa was furious – he saw this as a betrayal, and started an inquisition that resulted in torture and death across the Yucatan region. He was determined to wipe out all knowledge of the Mayan religion, and saw the Mayan language and hieroglyphs as a key. Fifty years later, in 1699, Spanish soldiers burned a town that had the last school of scribes who knew the Mayan hieroglyphs. By 1720, not a single person alive knew what the hieroglyphs meant.

The Roman Catholic church’s response? They punished Landa. But not for murder, not for torture, and not for destroying an entire culture’s history. No, none of these things were worthy of the Church’s sanctions. Diego de Landa’s crime was that he carried out an inquisition without authorization.

It took over two hundred years, and an international team of linguists, anthropologists, archeologists, mathematicians, an architect, a few brilliant hobbyists, and one twelve-year-old child prodigy hieroglyphics expert, to undo the damage that Landa caused. Armed with their fierce determination and perseverance, they recovered the written language, bit by bit, word by word, symbol by symbol.

Thanks to this dedicated group, the meaning of almost 90% of the hieroglyphs is now recovered.

As for Landa, he had to spend a few years under house arrest in Spain, contemplating his disobedience and praying. Once he’d done his penance, he was promoted to Bishop of Yucatan, and sent back to Central America where he lived out the remainder of his life.

Special thanks to filmmakers David Lebrun and Amy Halpern-Lebrun, who graciously agreed to be interviewed during my trip to the Red Rock Film Festival in Utah.

I highly recommend their excellent film, Breaking the Maya Code. You can also watch the shorter one-hour Nova version online, courtesy of PBS and WGBH Boston.

Craig A. James is a writer, computer scientist, evolutionist, and movie producer. He lives in Southern California.
Films that explore the rich ways humans have made sense of their world through myth, ritual, art and science.

Source: Breaking the Maya Code - Night Fire Films - Films that explore the rich ways humans have made sense of their world through myth, ritual, art and science.

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Top Stories of 2019: The Indian Child Welfare Act Under Fire


We’re counting down 10 of the biggest stories The Chronicle of Social Change published in 2019. Each day, we’ll connect readers with a few links to our coverage on a big story from this past year.

Forty-one years ago, Congress approved the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) after years of painstaking research and activism revealed that up to 30 percent of all Native American children had been removed from their parents by state and local governments, and were often placed into the homes of white families.
ICWA has been challenged in court numerous times, most recently in the 2018 case Brackeen v. Zinke, which called into question the law’s connection to sovereignty as opposed to race. This year saw a number of developments in the Brackeen case.

Lead Read

Sending Them Home looks at the only annual memorial event in the nation that honors Native children lost to boarding schools and foster care. The founder and lead organizer of the event, long-time activist Frank LaMere, passed away in June 2019.

Also Read

Federal Law Protecting Indian Children and Families Will Stand provides an overview of the Brackeen v. Zinke case with a focus on what happened this year.

Trump Administration Limits New Foster Care Data on LGBTQ, Education, and Native American Families examines the Trump administration’s efforts to cut down an Obama-era plan for 272 new data points on children and families to 183. Many of the rescinded points pertained specifically to the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Keep reading

Indian Warriors: The Untold Story of the Civil War


Indian Warriors: The Untold Story of the Civil War






https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_a0sdI5tCDYSUNtaHZMNVpqNm8/view?usp=sharing




Though largely forgotten, some 20-30 thousand Native Americans fought
in the Civil War.


Ely Parker was a Seneca leader who found himself in
the thick of battle at the side of General Ulysses S. Grant. Stand
Waite, a Confederate General and a Cherokee was known for his brilliant
guerilla tactics. Also highlighted is Henry Berry Lowery, who became
known as the Robin Hood of North Carolina. Respected Civil War authors
Thom Hatch and Lawrence Hauptman help reconstruct these stories, along
with descendants like Cherokee Nation member Jay Hanna, whose
great-grandfathers fought for both the Union and the Confederacy.
Together, they reveal a new perspective and the very personal reasons
that drew these Native Americans into the fray.



Indian Warriors: The Untold Story of the Civil War

Indian Warriors: The Untold Story of the Civil War


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_a0sdI5tCDYSUNtaHZMNVpqNm8/view?usp=sharing

Though largely forgotten, some 20-30 thousand Native Americans fought in the Civil War.
Ely Parker was a Seneca leader who found himself in the thick of battle at the side of General Ulysses S. Grant. Stand Waite, a Confederate General and a Cherokee was known for his brilliant guerilla tactics. Also highlighted is Henry Berry Lowery, who became known as the Robin Hood of North Carolina. Respected Civil War authors Thom Hatch and Lawrence Hauptman help reconstruct these stories, along with descendants like Cherokee Nation member Jay Hanna, whose great-grandfathers fought for both the Union and the Confederacy. Together, they reveal a new perspective and the very personal reasons that drew these Native Americans into the fray.

Monday, December 23, 2019

Genocide at Yosemite





Buffalo Soldiers at Yosemite

Buffalo Soldiers at Yosemite National Park, NPS


The story of genocide at Yosemite National Park



When
the conservation community talks about the first major federal actions
to preserve land in the United States, we often cite the Yosemite Grant:
Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 decision to cede Yosemite Valley and Mariposa
Grove to the state of California for use as a public park. Lincoln’s
decision set the precedent of the U.S. government setting aside land for
the purpose of preservation that led to the establishment of the first
national park, Yellowstone.



What is often overlooked when celebrating
this event is the violent, forced dispossession in Yosemite Valley
carried out by a California state militia force known as the Mariposa
Battalion fewer than two decades earlier. In 1851, the unit attacked the
villages of the Indigenous Ahwahneechee people living in the valley,
burning their homes and food supplies to force them off the land. After
the attack, the U.S. allowed a few surviving Ahwahneechee to stay on
the land, but only if they agreed to serve as a “cultural attraction”
and weave baskets for visiting tourists.



Yosemite National Park’s name is actually derived from an
Ahwahneechee word shouted by villagers as militia forces attacked and
drove them off the land.



Ironically, the word that eventually became the name of the national
park is derived from an Ahwahneechee word shouted by the villagers
during the Battalion’s attack. Battalion soldiers thought the word
“Yosemeatea”" was a place name, but it was actually the Ahwahneechee
word for “killers.” 




Thus, Yosemite National Park is actually named for
the act of genocide committed by European-Americans a few years before
the valley was federally designated as a state park.


While shocking, this example is not unique to Yosemite. It is
emblematic of the fact that the history of parks, forests and other
public lands in the U.S. is interwoven with episodes of great cruelty,
often inflicted on the original and traditional inhabitants of what we
call North America. It reminds us that the legacy of the conservation
movement is complex and often dishonorable.

source






Genocide at Yosemite

Buffalo Soldiers at Yosemite
Buffalo Soldiers at Yosemite National Park, NPS

The story of genocide at Yosemite National Park

When the conservation community talks about the first major federal actions to preserve land in the United States, we often cite the Yosemite Grant: Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 decision to cede Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to the state of California for use as a public park. Lincoln’s decision set the precedent of the U.S. government setting aside land for the purpose of preservation that led to the establishment of the first national park, Yellowstone.

What is often overlooked when celebrating this event is the violent, forced dispossession in Yosemite Valley carried out by a California state militia force known as the Mariposa Battalion fewer than two decades earlier. In 1851, the unit attacked the villages of the Indigenous Ahwahneechee people living in the valley, burning their homes and food supplies to force them off the land. After the attack, the U.S. allowed a few surviving Ahwahneechee to stay on the land, but only if they agreed to serve as a “cultural attraction” and weave baskets for visiting tourists.
Yosemite National Park’s name is actually derived from an Ahwahneechee word shouted by villagers as militia forces attacked and drove them off the land.
Ironically, the word that eventually became the name of the national park is derived from an Ahwahneechee word shouted by the villagers during the Battalion’s attack. Battalion soldiers thought the word “Yosemeatea”" was a place name, but it was actually the Ahwahneechee word for “killers.” 

Thus, Yosemite National Park is actually named for the act of genocide committed by European-Americans a few years before the valley was federally designated as a state park.
While shocking, this example is not unique to Yosemite. It is emblematic of the fact that the history of parks, forests and other public lands in the U.S. is interwoven with episodes of great cruelty, often inflicted on the original and traditional inhabitants of what we call North America. It reminds us that the legacy of the conservation movement is complex and often dishonorable.
source

Sunday, December 22, 2019

I've never told anyone

Stories of life in Indian boarding schools

A young girl prays at her bedside
A young girl prays at her bedside at a boarding school. A new book by an Ojibwe author tells the stories life for American Indian children in boarding schools designed to purge their language and culture.
Courtesy of North Dakota State University Press | Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions
Denise Lajimodiere's interest in the Indian boarding school experience began with the stories of her parents.
"Mama was made to kneel on a broomstick for not speaking English, locked in closets for not speaking English,” she said. “They would pee their pants and then the nuns would take them out [of the closet] and beat them for peeing their pants.”
Lajimodiere is Ojibwe, and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. She was an educator for 44 years, working as an elementary school teacher and principal before ending her career recently as as an associate professor of educational leadership at North Dakota State University in Fargo.
Her parents were separated from their families and sent to federal government-run boarding schools as children. Thousands of Native children met the same fate during the boarding school era, which scholars estimate lasted from the late 1800s to well into the middle of the 20th century.
children at Indian boarding school
Denise Lajimodiere's grandfather Benjamin an his sister Martha, circa 1898.
Denise Lajimodiere for MPR News
The children were sent to the schools to be purged of their Native cultures, languages and spiritual practices — forced to learn English, and often abused.
The experiences of those children, now with children and grandchildren of their own, have left a deep scar on many in the generations that came after them.
“Papa was beaten with a belt. He saw one of his fellow students die from a beating at the school,” she said.
Her parents rarely talked about their boarding school experience. She only was able to coax stories from her father in the last years of his life.
“Papa said, 'I just couldn't learn that language,'“ she said, “so they put lye soap in his mouth and the kids would get blisters."
Lajimodiere believed her parents’ boarding school abuse was a reason for the family dysfunction she grew up with, so she began a decade-long quest to understand it, interviewing people who went through the experience.
"It's a journey I had to go on to forgive my dad for the way we were raised, for his temper, his verbal abuse and for the beatings,” she said. “So, it was a long journey to understand why my father was the way he was."
What she found was a trove of stories closely guarded for decades by those who lived them. She tells those stories in their own words in her new book, “Stringing Rosaries.” She collected the stories using strict academic research protocols, but the listening was intensely personal.

Many of the former boarding school residents she interviewed prefaced their stories by telling Lajimodiere, “'I've never told anybody my story. I've never told my kids. I've never told my grandkids. I had to think about these stories all my life about what happened to me. I don't want my kids to have to think about it or know about it,’” she said.
Denise Lajimodiere, author of “Stringing Rosaries.”
Denise Lajimodiere, author of “Stringing Rosaries.”
Amber Mattson | Courtesy of Dreamcatcher Photography
For most people, Lajimodiere promised anonymity before they would share with her the stories.
She recalls one elderly woman who refused to even let family know she was being interviewed for the book.
"She became very quiet, even though it was a huge house, and no one was in the house,” recalled Lajimodiere. “She started whispering about being sexually abused and she said, 'I don't know why I'm telling you. I have not told anybody.' Almost every survivor in the book experienced sexual abuse, or they witnessed it."
Lajimodiere found that, while the stories people told her were often infused with painful and traumatic memories, that pain was not universal. Some people recalled their time at a boarding school fondly. But Lajimodiere says even those people — who said they preferred the school experience to alcoholism, abuse or hunger they experienced at home — shared stories of abuse in the boarding schools.
As she traveled the country doing research on boarding schools and collecting stories, Lajimodiere said she would often find herself sitting in her car, sobbing, after an interview.
She realizes now that she was experiencing the collective intergenerational trauma of losing language, culture and identity. Her parents both spoke their native languages, Ojibwe and Cree, before they went to boarding school.
"My father never spoke Cree again; that was completely beaten out of him,” said Lajimodiere. “So, now, at my age, I'm trying to relearn Ojibwe. Ojibwe is the language of our ceremonies — and our ceremonies have come back very strong."
Lajimodiere thinks connecting with traditional ceremony and culture is helping Native Americans across the country recover from the generational impact of the boarding school era.
She asked people she interviewed what it would take to heal from the trauma they experienced.
“Some of the people in the book say an apology would be a recognition of what the government did to us. Others have said, 'Boarding schools destroyed my childhood; I'll never get that back, so an apology would mean nothing,’" she said.
“Many of them said [what would be healing would be] a return to tribal spirituality and to the languages, our traditions and our ceremonies," she said.
Lajimodiere felt compelled to share the stories because many who attended boarding schools in the first half of the 1900s are now elderly and dying.
She's clear that she doesn't want the stories to elicit pity. She wants understanding.
“I want the world to know that part of why we are the way we are,” she said, “with high alcoholism, high diabetes and a lot of other health issues, one of the overarching reasons is the boarding school era.”

More:

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Adults bamboozled me into believing in Santa Claus

I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that anyone would create false documents to protect birth parents from their own children. Hearing this information was an emotional low. When I was a child, adults had bamboozled me into believing that Santa Claus existed—and I had believed them. My reaction was the same now as it had been then. Childish stories about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and a dozen other fairy tale characters living in pumpkins and tree houses in Never Land seemed harmless at the time, but these stories offered conclusive proof that adults lied to children to intentionally deceive them.
KEEP READING

Adults bamboozled me into believing in Santa Claus

I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that anyone would create false documents to protect birth parents from their own children. Hearing this information was an emotional low. When I was a child, adults had bamboozled me into believing that Santa Claus existed—and I had believed them. My reaction was the same now as it had been then. Childish stories about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and a dozen other fairy tale characters living in pumpkins and tree houses in Never Land seemed harmless at the time, but these stories offered conclusive proof that adults lied to children to intentionally deceive them.
KEEP READING

Indian Land Forever

"Indian Land Forever": The 50th anniversary of the Alcatraz Island takeover


The 1960s comedian Lenny Bruce once wrote that Native Americans' worst mistake when Europeans supposedly discovered America was believing possession really is nine-tenths of the law.
It's now common knowledge that the arrival of European settlers ushered in centuries of violence and misery for America's First Peoples. But when Bruce wrote those words, American mythology hadn't yet accepted that stark reality.
So, it was a wake-up call when, 50 years ago this fall, Native American activists seized the notorious prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, which had recently been closed by the government. Their leader, 27-year old Mohawk Richard Oakes, cited an 1868 Indian treaty that gave natives the rights to abandoned federal land. "We invite the United States to acknowledge the justice of our claim," he said.
keep reading 

For more info:

Indian Land Forever




"Indian Land Forever": The 50th anniversary of the Alcatraz Island takeover





The 1960s comedian Lenny Bruce once wrote that Native
Americans' worst mistake when Europeans supposedly discovered America
was believing possession really is nine-tenths of the law.

It's now common knowledge that the arrival of European settlers
ushered in centuries of violence and misery for America's First Peoples.
But when Bruce wrote those words, American mythology hadn't yet
accepted that stark reality.

So, it was a wake-up call when, 50 years ago this fall, Native
American activists seized the notorious prison island of Alcatraz in San
Francisco Bay, which had recently been closed by the government. Their
leader, 27-year old Mohawk Richard Oakes, cited an 1868 Indian treaty
that gave natives the rights to abandoned federal land. "We invite the
United States to acknowledge the justice of our claim," he said.

keep reading 



For more info:






Indian Land Forever

"Indian Land Forever": The 50th anniversary of the Alcatraz Island takeover


The 1960s comedian Lenny Bruce once wrote that Native Americans' worst mistake when Europeans supposedly discovered America was believing possession really is nine-tenths of the law.
It's now common knowledge that the arrival of European settlers ushered in centuries of violence and misery for America's First Peoples. But when Bruce wrote those words, American mythology hadn't yet accepted that stark reality.
So, it was a wake-up call when, 50 years ago this fall, Native American activists seized the notorious prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, which had recently been closed by the government. Their leader, 27-year old Mohawk Richard Oakes, cited an 1868 Indian treaty that gave natives the rights to abandoned federal land. "We invite the United States to acknowledge the justice of our claim," he said.
keep reading 

For more info:

Friday, December 20, 2019

Native Americans Weren't Guaranteed the Right to Vote in Every State Until 1962


Native people won citizenship in 1924, but the struggle for voting rights stretched on much longer.







Calvin Coolidge and Native American group at White House








Do
U.S. citizenship and voting rights go hand and hand? For most of the
country’s history, the answer has been no—just look at the example of
Native voting rights, which weren’t secured in all states until the
1960s.

Native Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens when the country
ratified its Constitution in 1788, and wouldn’t win the right to be for
136 years. When black Americans won citizenship with the 14th Amendment in 1868, the government specifically interpreted the law so it didn’t apply to Native people.




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To Veronica Brown

Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

OUR HISTORY

OUR HISTORY
BOOK 5: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects