Ned Blackhawk on How Native People shaped U.S. History (podcast)

 Ned Blackhawk on How Native People shaped U.S. History 

 July 5, 2023, CT WNPR 
 

This podcast, we are exploring the central role that Native peoples have played in the development of the United States, while facing legal discrimination that goes all the way back to the country's founding documents.  Professor of Law Matthew L.M. Fletcher gives us the context around the Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Indian Child Welfare Act.  And Ned Blackhawk discusses his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which tells the history of the United States, emphasizing how Native Americans have been essential to determining that history.

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BOOK: Until I Find You

 

Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.

In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.

Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

“Important, compelling reading. Nolan has interviewed countless people, obtained access to adoption files, read the human rights reports, and sorted through the legal history. This will become a key, authoritative account of the deeply corrupt state of Guatemalan adoption from the 1970s to the 2000s.”—Laura Briggs, author of Taking Children: A History of American Terror

 

MAPPING THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY (podcast)

My takeaway from this excellent podcast: The Supreme Court just makes up rules ... and it has all along...and IT'S CRAZY! And it's been going on since the invention of the DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY. - Trace, Blog Editor

MAPPING THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY: Johnson v. McIntosh and Federal Anti-Indian Law with Peter d’Errico

The goal of this Podcast is to help identify these systems of domination that have been sustained by greed and power, through the subjugation of human beings and the natural world.  

Philip P. Arnold and Sandra Bigtree, “S02E03 - Johnson v M’intosh and Federal Anti-Indian Law with Peter d’Errico,” Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery (Podcast), July 13, 2023. https://podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org/season2/episode-03/.

⤓ Download a transcript of the Episode as a PDF // LISTEN

War of Words: ICWA Faces Multiple Assaults From Adoption Industry

Suzette Brewer | 7/8/15 | INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY MEDIA

Yesterday the Phoenix, Arizona-based Goldwater Institute announced the filing of A.D. v. Washburn in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, a class-action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act based on their contention that the federal legislation “discriminates against Native children.” Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn, and Gregory McKay, director of the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) have all been named as defendants in the case.

The suit is being filed on behalf of “all off-reservation Arizona-resident children with Indian ancestry in child custody proceedings and the foster, pre-adoptive or prospective adoptive parents of these children,” according to the organization’s press release. “This case will not impact current or future cases that involve children or parents living on a reservation where a tribal court has jurisdiction; it will change the law so that state courts and agencies cannot discriminate against Native American children.”

Washburn marks the third major legal challenge to the 38-year-old federal law since the Bureau of Indian Affairs published new ICWA guidelines in the Federal Registry in February of this year, followed by the agency’s declared intention to seek a federal rule, which would make the statute more enforceable on state courts and social service agencies.

“While we have not yet reviewed the filing, we understand that a lawsuit challenging ICWA was filed yesterday. In matters in litigation, we will speak primarily through our briefs in court, but I want to assure the public that we will defend the Indian Child Welfare Act,” said BIA assistant secretary Washburn in a written statement. “Nearly 40 years ago, Congress determined that Indian children were being treated unfairly in the context of foster care and adoption. Congress determined that ‘an alarmingly high percentage of [Indian] children’ were subjected to ‘unwarranted’ removal from their homes and that a federal law was needed to protect Indian children. This law has been an important feature of the legal landscape for many years now and we firmly believe that the protection of the best interests of Indian children continues to be important today.”

According to the suit, the plaintiffs are seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against “certain provisions of ICWA and the accompanying BIA guidelines” on behalf of “A.D.,” a 10-month-old baby girl who is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. Another child plaintiff is a 4-year-old boy who is a member or eligible for membership in the Navajo Nation. The birth parents of both children have had their parental rights terminated by the state and both children reside off-reservation in Arizona. The Navajo Nation, as outlined in the brief, has repeatedly attempted to find ICWA-compliant homes for the boy—all of which were rejected by the state as “inappropriate” placements. If not for the Indian Child Welfare Act, according to the brief, the boy would already be in a permanent home under “race-neutral” Arizona law.

“When an abused child is removed from his home and placed in foster care or made available for adoption, judges are required to make a decision about where he will live based on his best interest. Except for Native American children. Courts are bound by federal law to disregard a Native American child’s best interest and place him in a home with other Native Americans, even if it is not in his best interest,” said Darcy Olsen, president of the Goldwater Institute in the organization’s press release. “We want federal and state laws to be changed to give abused, neglected or abandoned Native American children the same protections that are given to all other American children: the right to be placed in a safe home based on their best interests, not based on their race.”

But the original author of the Indian Child Welfare Act, retired South Dakota Senator James Abourezk, took the Goldwater Institute to task for their attempt to overturn one of his signature legislative achievements during his time in the United States Senate. Ironically, Abourezk’s late friend and colleague Senator Barry Goldwater actually voted in favor of ICWA when it was approved by the Senate in 1977.

“I knew Barry Goldwater—he was my friend and often came to me for advice on most tribal matters,” said Abourezk from his home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “I wish he were alive to see this travesty because he would never approve of it and you can quote me on that and make sure you emphasize the word ‘never.’”

Tribal leaders, their legal teams and ICWA advocates across the country seem universally opposed to the litigation. They view with skepticism adoption practices in the United States, and the economic factors and profits at play.

“The Native American Rights Fund is closely following the lawsuits filed in Virginia, Minnesota, and now Arizona,” said NARF staff attorney Matthew Newman. “What is abundantly clear is that these lawsuits are part of a coordinated, well-financed attack on the rights of tribal nations to protect their children. It is open season on the Indian Child Welfare Act.”

“At this point it is pretty clear that anti-ICWA advocates, who primarily represent adoption interests, have started a coordinated attack on ICWA,” said Kate Fort, Staff Attorney and Adjunct Professor for the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law. “They are looking for cases of opportunity in courts across the country by inserting themselves and trying to make the same constitutional arguments against ICWA. But this lawsuit will absolutely hurt vulnerable children and families in our state child welfare systems. Their claims that ICWA’s protections are substandard is simply not true. ICWA’s standards are considered the gold standard of child welfare practice. To say these lawsuits to dismantle ICWA are in the best interest of the child is really contrary to what is considered best practices by child welfare professionals.”
Stephen Pevar, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, says the whole point of enacting ICWA was to end decades of unnecessary removals of Indian children from their homes and communities.

“Congress held years of hearings [before enacting ICWA] and many Indians who were victims of state foster care cases testified,” said Pevar. “Based on that testimony and other research, Congress found that it is in the best interests of Indian children to be raised in an Indian home except in extraordinary circumstances. Therefore, the Goldwater Institute is wrong in saying that Congress overlooked the ‘best interest’ standard. Instead, Congress accepted that standard and concluded that there’s a presumption that it’s in the best interest of Indian children to be raised in an Indian home. In addition, the Supreme Court has already rejected the notion that ICWA creates racial discrimination when it imposes minimum federal standards on state courts in their handling of Indian child custody cases.”

But ICWA has come under assault in courts all over the country in the last several months, say legal experts, in states unwilling to deviate from the “business-as-usual” approach, in which an average adoption can bring anywhere from $40,000 to copy00,000 in fees and costs for private adoptions, depending on various factors, including living expenses for the birth mother.

In May, for example, Washington, D.C.-based attorneys Lori McGill and her husband, Matthew McGill, filed suit in federal court in Virginia seeking to challenge the new BIA guidelines which they believe impose “federalism” on state courts regarding the adoption of Indian children. Mrs. McGill, who played a key role in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl in 2013, told the National Law Journal in May that she gets emails on a weekly basis “from lawyers and adoptive parents telling me how ICWA is ripping their families apart.”

That same month, the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals openly dismissed the new BIA guidelines in a case involving a 4-year-old Cherokee girl who had been placed in a non-Indian foster home during emergency proceedings in 2013. At the time, an ICWA-compliant home was not available, though a year later the tribe filed a motion to transfer the girl to a Cherokee family that the tribe had located. In ordering the girl to stay with her foster parents over the tribe’s objection, the court’s contempt for the new guidelines was palpable.

“The BIA guidelines’ intentional disregard of these factors results in a one-size-fits-all approach to the placement of children with any tribal affiliation,” the judges wrote. “That result may bear little resemblance to what is really in the child’s best interests, despite the self-serving pronouncements of the BIA guidelines.”

In June, adoption attorneys representing tribal parents in Minnesota filed another suit, Doe v. Jesson, in which they argued the Minnesota Indian Family Protection Act (MIFPA) violates constitutional due process in requiring notice of adoptions to the tribe. On Monday, however, the Minnesota District Court denied a preliminary injunction based on state law requiring notice to tribes. The Court ruled that the MIFPA posed no threat of irreparable harm to the two tribal plaintiffs in complying with notice requirements. The tribe in the case, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, have declined to intervene.
But today’s litigation, say observers, strikes at the heart of not only of the Indian Child Welfare Act, but also the keystone of tribal sovereignty as a whole: The right of Indian tribes to determine their own membership and raise their children in their home communities.

“Using tragic stories to try to destroy the constitutionality of ICWA is not appropriate. As we know from Morton v. Mancari, Native status is a political identity not racial or ethnic, so laws that give any type of Indian preference or preferential treatment are not in violation of the equal protection clause,” said Victoria Sweet, a program attorney for the Reno, Nevada-based National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. “It’s ironic that [the Goldwater Institute] would argue that Native children get less protections when they actually get more and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise when the reality is clearly the opposite. We are not yet at a point where the initial purpose of ICWA has disappeared. We still need this law. It still protects Native children.”

“It’s 38 years later and I still get mail from Indian people who tell me how important this legislation is,” said Abourezk. “The tribes need to mount a unified attack against this lawsuit because it’s good law and what they’re doing is wrong. It would be an enormous tragedy to see them overturn it.”

RELATED: War of Words: ICWA Hearings Reignite Ancient Clash Over Indian Children, Part 1

Read more at INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

Indigenous Human Remains, Mostly Boarding School Children, Reported In 3 States This Week

Please share this story... thanks, Trace, blog editor

By Nancy Marie Spears

Secretary of The Interior Deb Haaland listens to testimony from a boarding school survivor during the first stop on The Road to Healing tour at Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma in July 2022. Photo by Nick Oxford.

Indigenous communities in three states this week are mourning the human remains discovered in their area.

Some have been waiting for confirmation that Native children were buried at the sites of local boarding schools, while other remains were discovered by sheer accident.

In southern Utah on July 11, twelve children’s bodies were found at a burial site at Panguitch Boarding School east of Highway 89 — becoming the only school among at least eight operated in Utah where student deaths and burials at the school have been verified.  The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah and its five sovereign bands are “devastated” by what was unearthed by Utah State University using ground-penetrating radar.

“Our hearts go out to the families of these children as we are left to consider how best to honor and memorialize their suffering,” said Ona Segundo, chairwoman of Arizona’s Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, in a statement provided to The Salt Lake Tribune.

In Nebraska, archaeologists began digging at the site of the long-shuttered Genoa Indian Industrial School 90 miles west of Omaha, hoping to uncover the location of the school’s cemetery.  Though the school closed in 1931 and most of its buildings were demolished, the dig is an attempt to locate children who never came home from the school and whose bodies were never uncovered. 

The process is expected to take several days, after months of trial and error to determine the exact location of the graves, The Washington Post reported July 11. 

Last summer, dogs trained to find decaying remains signaled to archaeologists that they had found a burial site in a piece of land bordered by railroad tracks, a canal and an agricultural field.

Then in November, ground-penetrating radar was again used and detected an area that was consistent with burials, but nothing could be confirmed until archaeologists broke ground. 

Researchers found that 86 children — described in a student’s letter, newspaper clippings and school records — had perished at the school, mostly because of disease. At least one death was caused by an accidental shooting.  The researchers have not yet identified 37 of the children.  Some of the bodies had been returned to their families, while others were buried at the school in a forgotten location.

In Pennsylvania, officials confirmed on July 9 that the human remains discovered during construction work by a gas crew late last month were Indigenous people.

On June 21, workers and contractors excavating on Short Canal Street in Sharpsburg unearthed human remains four to five feet underground while attempting to install a piece of equipment. Sharpsburg’s police and Allegheny County forensics consulted with anthropologists and archaeologists to confirm the remains belonged to Native Americans. 

The anthropologist from the Seneca Iroquois National Museum in upstate New York said the remains are specifically from an Iroquois group, according to Melanie Linn Gutowski, chair of the Sharpsburg Historical Commission.

 

READ MORE

Looking Beyond Haaland v. Brackeen

 

The ACLU submitted an amicus brief in the case, and has been following the issue closely because of the profound threat it poses to Indigenous communities, particularly federally recognized tribes in the United States. In light of this victory at the Supreme Court, we are now urging states to take action and introduce or strengthen existing state-level ICWA protections.

READ

STOLEN (podcast)

 

About Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's (Season 2)

Last May, investigative journalist Connie Walker came upon a story about her late father she'd never heard before. One night back in the late 1970s while he was working as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he pulled over a suspected drunk driver. He walked up to the vehicle and came face-to-face with a ghost from his past—a residential school priest. What happened on the road that night set in motion an investigation that would send Connie deep into her own past, trying to uncover the secrets of her family and the legacy of trauma passed down through the generations.

In Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's, Connie unearths how her family's story fits into one of Canada's darkest chapters: the residential school system.

HERE 

About Stolen: The Search for Jermain (Season 1)

In 2018, a young Indigenous mother named Jermain Charlo left a bar in Missoula, Montana, and was never seen again.  After two years and thousands of hours of investigative work, police believe they are close to solving the mystery of what happened to her.  We go inside the investigation, tracking down leads and joining search parties through the dense mountains of the Flathead Reservation.  As we unravel this mystery, the show examines what it means to be an Indigenous woman in America.

Stolen is hosted by Connie Walker.

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#60sScoop Survivors gather in Winnipeg for conference

 'STILL HEALING'

Glen Dawkins | Jun 24, 2023 |SOURCE

Katherine Strongwind is raising awareness of the 60s Scoop, and is photographed in Winnipeg on June 24, 2023. Photo by Chris Procaylo /Winnipeg Sun

Survivors of the Sixties Scoop gathered in Winnipeg on Saturday for the Manitoba Sixties Scoop Conference and share their stories and experiences of being taken from their families.  

“Since the apology of 2015, there really hasn’t been a bigger gathering of Sixties Scoop Survivors to talk about some of the issues that we’re still working our way through,” said 60s Scoop Legacy of Canada Director and spokesperson Katherine Strongwind. “We’ve had about 23 smaller healing gatherings, mostly in Winnipeg and some across western Canada and we thought it was really important to pull everybody together today to say, ‘You know, we are still here, we’re still healing ourselves.’  The province really needs to step up their game in terms of really how they’re going to be helping us.”

The “Sixties Scoop” refers to the large-scale forced removal or “scooping” of Indigenous children from their homes, communities and families of birth through the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and the subsequent adoption into predominantly Caucasian, Christian, middle-class families across Canada, the United States and overseas.

Many adoptees and Survivors were left with a lack of or poor sense of cultural identity. The forced physical and emotional separation from their birth families by the government’s assimilationist policies continues to affect adult adoptees and Indigenous communities to this day.  Many Survivors had parents, grandparents, and extended families who were forced to attend Indian Residential Schools.

“The purpose this afternoon is to pull people together and get some feedback from them on some of the very specific issues that adoptees and folks who have been through child welfare have such as name changes, child welfare records, adoption records, all of those sorts of pieces,” said Strongwind.

Organizers plan to draft a report for the provincial government but also for Indigenous leaders.

“I’m not sure (Indigenous leaders) really know what to do with us,” said Strongwind. “We’re coming home and we’re trying to reconnect our families and our communities but they don’t always have the best understanding of how to support us.”

Some 120 Scoop Survivors attended the one-day gathering.  Half of the cost of the gathering was covered by the provincial government with the remainder covered by fundraising.  City of Winnipeg donated the space at Sergeant Tommy Prince Place in the North End for the gathering through the Indigenous Liaison Unit.

“We invited a couple of speakers to share part of their story this morning and there’s definitely some similarities among all of us but also we wanted to talk about inspiring stories and ‘What’s worked best for you on your healing journey and how can we support each other?’ because so far we don’t have any kind of healing program specifically for Sixties Scoop Survivors,” said Strongwind. “So we’re supporting each other.”

Katherine Strongwind. Photo by Chris Procaylo /Winnipeg Sun

In 2015, then-Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger apologized on behalf of the province. Six years later, the 60s Scoop Legacy of Canada and Manitoba Senator Murray Sinclair called for a federal inquiry.

“We still don’t know how many kids were taken, where they were taken to, where they are now, how many died in care and those kind of pieces,” said Strongwind on what an inquiry would uncover. “We also know that people want to share their stories and their testimonies before they pass away.  Over the next year or so, we’ll focus on that but also gatherings like this are really important to get people together and learn from each other on how we can support each other on some of these pieces when we’re not be recognized, we’re not being acknowledged.

“We’re really out here on our own it seems like.”

The provincial government needs to provide funding for these sorts of gatherings but also provide a unit or some sort of fund available for Survivors to be able to access some of the services that they offer such as the post-adoption registry and child welfare records, Strongwind said. Even something as seemingly simple as making it easier for Survivors to legally change back to their traditional names.

“The province did the dirty work of the Sixties Scoop,” said Strongwind, who legally changed her name in November. “They were given jurisdiction in 1951 from the federal government and they really took that and ran and decided they were going to scoop up entire families off reserves and they thought they were going to make us into upstanding Christian citizens. In some respects, they were successful but we know that many of us ending up leaving that lifestyle and our families and ended up coming home to our biological families and communities. Culture plays a huge role in our healing.

“There’s all of these sorts of pieces that the province could be helping with but really aren’t.”

City could participate by providing spaces for gatherings and a memorial of some sort.

“All levels of government I feel have a part to play in this,” Strongwind said.

With some 10,000 Indigenous children in care in Manitoba, Strongwind believes Sixties Scoop Survivors can have role in preventing a recurrence of what happened to them.

“We want to use our experience as best practices to prevent that from happening in the future,”Strongwind said. “That’s part of the purpose that the 60s Legacy of Canada works towards every day.”

[gdawkins@postmedia.com]

60sScoop Survivor: ‘I basically rescued myself’

Guelph poet and ’60s Scoop survivor shares her personal journey through writing

How Cynthia (Wasizo kwe) Missabie became her own hero

By Joy Struthers | Guelph Mercury | Jun 27, 2023

Cynthia Missabie, a ’60s Scoop survivor, looks out at the Speed River in Guelph's Riverside Park. - Joy Struthers/Metroland

Local poet Cynthia Missabie took her name back when she was 40 years old, though she did not know how to pronounce it. 

Her adoptive parents had changed her name to Catherine Claire Cross, after their daughter who had died.

It was in the 1960s when she said she was three or four, when she was adopted by a “white, middle class” couple she still calls her mother and father. They were the parents of four boys and owned a Guelph bowling alley.

“I was part of the ’60s Scoop,” said Missabie.

Her birth mother and father were married but struggled with alcohol and illness. They had two little girls, and her birth mother also had four other children, who were all given up for adoption.

Missabie’s birth mother was from the Henvey Inlet First Nation located on the French River. She grew up living in a residential school and later lived in Toronto. Missabie’s birth father was from Newfoundland.

A very independent child, Missabie said she was happy with her new family at first.

“In the beginning, it was beautiful,” she said. “Then when I was about nine or 10, I was molested by my father, and he had it out for me, like he was attracted to me for years. I had to keep protecting myself.”

Her family had left Guelph, was moving around the United States, and even went to Puerto Rico.

“At first, it was an adventure, like, oh, I’m going to a new place, I’m going to meet new people,” Missabie said. “But then I got attached to those people.”

She would even change her name when she moved, from Catherine to Cathy, or Kate to Katie. Some people still call her by different names.

“I look back on that time and I think, wherever we lived, I tried to make some kind of friend, so I could escape,” Missabie said.

Finally, she admitted to her mother that she was abused by her father, and it split up the family temporarily.

“My mother moved everybody up to Canada for a year,” Missabie said. “At the end of the year, my parents got back together.”

She said her mother had been drinking for years, and “was a mess” without her father.

The children were all struggling, and Missabie said some of them still do.

“Not every story has a happy ending, and so many people lose themselves,” said Missabie.

For her, she said she loves the peaceful life she has created. She returned to Guelph in 1981 and has been here ever since.

Both her mother and father are now dead, but Missabie had tried to maintain relationships with her family, as well as learn about her birth relatives.

She has been in recovery for 34 years and runs a weekly meeting which incorporates both Alcoholics Anonymous and Indigenous teachings.

“Everything is a teaching, no matter how you go about your life. If this hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t be who I am,” she said. “And then there’s the idea of what I am leaving behind for other people.”

Missabie sings with the barbershop group, the Over Tones, and dotes on her dog, though she never had children of her own.

“I started writing because I was so depressed and lonely, I just had to do something,” she said.

One night she read a poem at an event and a man said to her, “You’re kind of angry, aren’t you?” And she thought, “well, if you had lived my life, you’d be a bit angry too.”

Truthfully, she said now she approaches things with a healthy sense of humour.

She is in a different place now emotionally then she was when she contributed poetry to “River Bundles, an Anthology of Original Peoples in the Waterloo-Wellington Area,” edited by Plume Writers Circle.

She was one of the original circle members in Guelph along with friends Hope Engel and Wendy Stewart. She also read her poetry with them at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.

She plans to contribute to an upcoming compilation, called “Blood Memory, an Indigenous Poets Society Anthology.”

“One thing I got through my writing, and what I gained over that time, is that I basically rescued myself. So, I had become my own hero in a way,” she said.

She shared that her spirit name is Wasizo kwe, or Woman who Glitters.

“I always thought I was kind of different, and it wasn’t always great, but now it’s wonderful,” Missabie said.

 SOURCE

 

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The Unravelling of a Colonized Mind

 

IMAGE

REBLOG from March 5, 2014 Lara/Trace

By Jana-Rae Yerxa

Sure everybody struggles. But to be born an Indigenous person, you are born into struggle. My struggle. Your struggle. Our struggle. The colonial struggle. There are many layers to this struggle. For the longest time, I didn’t even know what the true struggle was about yet I couldn’t escape it. It consumed me. Colonialism, as I have been forced to discover, is like a cancer. But instead of the cells in your body betraying itself, the thoughts in your mind work against you and eat you up from the inside out. You’re like the walking dead and you don’t even know it because you are so blinded. You can’t see the truth.

Here are some of the perverted ways colonialism infects the mind:
• With a colonized mind, I hate being Indian.
• With a colonized mind, I accept that I am Indian because that’s who the colonizer told me I am.
• With a colonized mind, I don’t understand that I am Anishinaabe.
• With a colonized mind, I believe I am inferior to the white race.
• With a colonized mind, I wish I was white.
• With a colonized mind, I draw pictures of my family with peach coloured skin, blonde hair and blue eyes because I’ve internalized that this is the ideal, what looks good and what is beautiful.
• With a colonized mind, I keep my feelings of inferiority to white people a secret from others and even from myself.
• With a colonized mind, I try diligently to mirror white people as closely as I possibly can.
• With a colonized mind, I desperately want to be accepted by white people.
• With a colonized mind, to gain the acceptance of white people, I will detach myself from all that does not mirror acceptable “white” standards, whether it is how one dresses, one speaks, or one looks.
• With a colonized mind, I feel as though I am swearing when I say “white people” in front of white people.
• With a colonized mind, I believe there is no racism.
• With a colonized mind, I believe that racism does not impact me.
• With a colonized mind, I deny my heritage and proudly say, “We are all just people.”
• With a colonized mind, when discussing issues pertaining to race, I try desperately not to offend white people.
• With a colonized mind, I do not know who I am.
• With a colonized mind, I believe I know who I am and do not understand that this isn’t so because I’ve become the distorted image of who the colonizer wants me to be and remain unaware of this reality.
• With a colonized mind, I could care less about history and think that our history don’t matter.
• With a colonized mind, I do not understand how the history created the present.
• With a colonized mind, I do not see how I have been brainwashed to be an active participant in my own dehumanization and the dehumanization of my people.
• With a colonized mind, I do not recognize how others dehumanize me and my people.
• With a colonized mind, I devalue the ways of my people- their ways of seeing, their ways of knowing, their ways of living, their ways of being.
• With a colonized mind, I cannot speak the language of my ancestors and do not care that this is so.
• With a colonized mind, I am unaware of how colonization has impacted my ancestors, my community, my family, and myself.
• With a colonized mind, I think that my people are a bunch of lazy, drunk, stupid Indians.
• With a colonized mind, I discredit my own people.
• With a colonized mind, I think that I am better than ‘those Indians’.
• With a colonized mind, I will silently watch my people be victimized.
• With a colonized mind, I will victimize my own people.
• With a colonized mind, I will defend those that perpetrate against my people.
• With a colonized mind, I will hide behind false notions of tradition entrenched with Euro-western shame and shame my own people re-creating more barriers amongst us.
• With a colonized mind, I tolerate our women being raped and beaten.
• With a colonized mind, I tolerate our children being raised without their fathers.
• With a colonized mind, I feel threatened when someone else, who is Anishinaabe, achieves something great because I feel jealous and wish it was me.
• With a colonized mind, when I see an Anishinaabe person working towards bettering their life, because my of my own insecurities, I accuse them of thinking they are ‘so good now’.
• With a colonized mind, I am unaware that I was set up to hate myself.
• With a colonized mind, I do not think critically about the world.
• With a colonized mind, I believe in merit and do not recognize unearned colonial privilege.
• With a colonized mind, I ignorantly believe that my ways of seeing, living and believing were all decided by me when in reality everything was and is decided for me.
• With a colonized mind, I am lost.
• With a colonized mind, I do not care about the land.
• With a colonized mind, I believe that freedom is a gift that can be bestowed upon me by the colonizer.
• With a colonized mind, I believe that I am powerless and act accordingly.
• With a colonized mind, I do not have a true, authentic voice.
• With a colonized mind, I live defeat.
• With a colonized mind, I will remain a victim of history.
• With a colonized mind, I will pass self-hatred on to my children.
• With a colonized mind, I do not understand the term “self-responsibility.”
• With a colonized mind, I do not recognize that I have choice and do not have to fatalistically accept oppressive, colonial realities.
• With a colonized mind, I do not see that I am a person of worth.
• With a colonized mind, I do not know I am powerful.

The colonial struggle, as I said earlier, has many layers. I am no longer being eaten from the inside. Yet it is no less painful. What is different today is that I am connected to a true source of power that was always there. It’s like my friend once said, “I come from a distinguished people whose legacy shines on me like the sun.” I now understand this and it is because of this understanding that my mind and my soul are freer than they have ever been. It is because of that gift- that awakening which came through struggle- that I will proudly continue to struggle for freedom. 

My freedom. Your freedom. Our freedom.

Jana-Rae Yerxa, is Anishinaabe from Little Eagle and Couchiching First Nation and belongs to the Sturgeon clan. Activist. Social Worker. Former professor. Current student. She is committed to furthering her understanding of Anishinaabe identity and resurgence as well as deconstructing Indigenous/settler relations in the contexts of colonization and decolonization. Jana-Rae is currently enrolled in the Indigenous Governance Program at University of Victoria.

LAST REAL INDIANS

 

This post is from 2014 but is STILL TRUE for too many of us...But we have the POWER to change ourselves. We must!  Trace

 

Cutting through the Brackeen v Haaland case

 

Was it a victory?

Read my friend Peter (law professor) on Substack.

Cutting Through the US Claim of a Right of Domination over Indigenous People: An Analysis of Haaland v. Brackeen

https://peterderrico.substack.com/i/130980867/haaland-v-brackeen-misplaced-celebration

READ

BAD OUTCOMES: Brackeen Case | New York Times and #ICWA

 reblog from 2019 & 2022

By Trace Hentz (blog editor)  

 

FIRST UP:  The New York Times headline June 5, 2019:   

Who Can Adopt a Native American Child? A Texas Couple vs. 573 Tribes  Here

 

I posted my comment which became a NYT Pick:

I am an adoptee and journalist who has documented the history and narratives of Native adoptees in three Lost Children anthologies. If the Brackeens had done any research prior, they would know the outcomes for Native adoptees are not good. Adoption gets pretty ugly when it doesn't work. Once kids are out of diapers, they start noticing and feel the isolation without kin. There are medical terms for our damage. The adoption industry will not advertise that most patients in psychiatric care are adoptees. They don’t warn adoptive parents their new child will suffer from “Severe Narcissistic Injury” or “Reactive Attachment Disorder.” This news would not be welcome. LINK

Of course some readers slam me for using the word "kin" ...or ask how do I know about the damage we suffer...  No shock... I get it: they don't get it and they don't know the history or the Native adoptees I  know personally... (There were 775 comments before they shut it off today and many are amazingly correct!)
 

An earlier comment from Ellen gets it:

This country has a long brutal history of removing Native children from their families with the intent of culture genocide. There is nothing different about this case. I am sure that the Brackeens are lovely (wealthy) people who care for Zachary, and the new baby they selfishly wrested from her family. Still, it does not undo the damage done to the Navajo nation, in losing 2 precious children, not to mention the damage done to the children in growing up apart from their culture...while being quite different in appearance from the rest of this family. But skin color is not the issue - the erasure of culture and sense of self is.

After reading the NYT story I am not surprised that the Navajo tribe and the Brackeens will share custody, as Judge Kim declared, but the Brackeens would have primary possession.  Taking Indian children off the rez and changing their identity to white and ending their sovereignty and treaty rights and a connection to tribal lands:  the old playbook is the new playbook.
It is always about possession.

 

We have covered this case on this blog (AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES) for the past few years. (please look at Goldwater Institute (34+ posts) for more insight on this case.)

Hundreds of tribal nations vehemently oppose the lawsuit Brackeen v. Bernhardt that splits Texas, Indiana, Louisiana and a coalition of conservative legal groups, including the Goldwater Institute, against the federal government, hundreds of tribal nations, 21 state attorneys general, Native American civil rights groups and child welfare organizations, including the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Children’s Defense Fund.
 

The NYT story reports:

So much remains suspended.

The decision about the act’s fate from the Court of Appeals for the

Fifth Circuit is imminent.

The Navajo are appealing Judge Kim’s custody order. 

 

What about the BRACKEENS?

Potential Adoptive Parents (PAPS) Chad and Jennifer Brackeen might want to learn Navajo history during this lengthy court battle in Texas. (Try this one in 2011: Illegal aliens? Deported adoptees?)

The total population of the Navajo people residing in their land is approximately 180,462 having a median age of 24 years old.   Navajo Nation is situated over a 27,000 square miles of large land within the vicinity of the state of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. It is considered to be the largest land that is primarily covered by the jurisdiction of the Native American within the territory of the United States.

What most people don't know:  The Navajo are survivors of a barely-known Mormon assimilation program from 1947 to the mid-1990s. 

Year after year, missionaries of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints approached Navajo families and invited children into Mormon foster homes.  As part of the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program, children would live with Mormon families during the school year to “provide educational, spiritual, social, and cultural opportunities in non-Indian community life,” according to the Church.  

Typically, the Mormon foster families were white and financially stable.  Native American children who weren’t already Mormon were baptized.  Although the LDS Church reached out to dozens of Indian tribes, most participants’ families lived within the Navajo Nation.

Roughly 50,000 children participated in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program, according to Matthew Garrett, a professor at Bakersfield College.

Rather than improving conditions on the Navajo reservation, the LDS Church asked that children assimilate to the way its white members lived. 
Some Church leaders interpreted the Book of Mormon literally and expected that Native American children’s skin would turn lighter as they grew closer to God.  

The Church now admits that not all Native Americans are descendants of the
Israelites, or Lamanites, as described in the Book of Mormon.   (Oh really, thanks)

In addition to the claims of damage done by sexual abuse, the lawsuits involving the Indian Student Placement Program assert that the culture of the Navajo Nation was “irreparably harmed” by the LDS Church’s “continuous and systematic assimilation efforts.” Although the last student in the Indian Student Placement Program graduated in 2000, plaintiffs are asking the Church to do all it can to enhance and restore Navajo culture and create a taskforce for that purpose. SOURCE:   Why Several Native Americans Are Suing the Mormon Church

Participants in the Mormon Church-sponsored Indian Student Placement Program have filed at least three sexual-abuse lawsuits. Lilly Fowler Oct 23, 2016

***

Practices of adopting Native American children directly followed the residential/ boarding schools.  Such adoption practices, which came into fruition through forms such as the forced removal of Native American children during Canada’s 60s Scoop and its parallel in the United States, the Indian Adoption Projects, exemplify the adaption of adoption as a settler colonial tool for dispossession and disenfranchisement. 

***

Narragansett author John C Hopkins wrote about his Navajo mother in law on his blog:

Chilocco Indian School opened in 1884 with 123 students. Its first graduating class was comprised of six boys and nine girls. The school finally closed its doors in 1980. The name Chilooco comes from the Choctaw word “chiluki” and the Cherokee word “tsalagi,” which means “cave people” in both languages.
A long, hard-used tarred road turns off Route 166 and ends where the abandoned, ivy-covered stone buildings stand in disrepair haunted by the ghosts from memories past.

Bernice Austin-Begay, a Navajo, recalled the long ride down the road when she was a child returning to school after a rare family visit.
“I’d be sad because I knew it would be a long before I would see them again,” Austin-Begay, Class of 1965, said. “I’d be thinking about my family, thinking about my sheep.” Austin-Begay was 10 when she was first taken to Chilocco.
More than 50 years later she still recalls the day the government agents came to Black Mesa, Ariz. and took her away.

“I was captured,” she said.

Many Indian families resented how the government swooped in and took the children away from their families and did all they could to thwart the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Austin-Begay’s family was one of those. Whenever her mother saw a car coming up the road she would send Bernice running, to hide in the hills until the “biliganas” left. (Biligana is the Navajo word for white man)
But one day the car arrived unexpectedly and young Bernice never reached the woods.

“I was too slow,” Austin-Begay said.  

 **
'CATASTROPHIC AND UNFORGIVABLE'

Starting in 1958, the Indian Adoption Project placed Native American children in non-Native homes, in what it said was an effort to assimilate them into mainstream culture and offer them better lives outside impoverished reservations.
The project was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal government agency, and the nonprofit Child Welfare League of America, in partnership with private agencies.
 There was a reason Indian leaders went to the Senate in the 1970s and demanded an inquiry into the staggering number of children disappearing in Indian Country. It was not just boarding schools creating this mass exodus of children. Adoption programs in 16 states removed 85% of Native children. Programs like the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), established by the Child Welfare League of America in 1967, funded in part by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, paid states to remove children and place them with non-Indian adoptive families and religious groups like the Mormon Church.  ARENA expanded to include all Canadian and United States adoption agencies and offered them financial assistance.

ICWA (the Indian Child Welfare Act) prioritizes placing Native children into Native homes or with kin or with families that are willing to keep them within a certain proximity to their cultures.

***
Associate Attorney General Tony West Delivers Remarks at the National Indian Child Welfare Association’s 32nd Annual
Protecting Our Children Conference ~ Monday, April 14, 2014

 "...There's more work to do because every time an Indian child is removed in violation of ICWA, it can mean a loss of all connection with family, with tribe, with culture.  And with that loss, studies show, comes an increased risk for mental health challenges, homelessness in later life, and, tragically, suicide."

READ 

Battle Pits Native American Tribes Against White Couple Over Adoption of
Native Child in Case With Potential Affirmative Action Implications THE ROOT

(to be continued)