CBC News - Canada December 20, 2010
Residential students also abusers: hearings
Allegations are surfacing at compensation hearings that students abused fellow pupils at Canada's now-closed residential schools for aboriginal people, CBC News has learned.
The allegations are being made as federal adjudicators work out a compensation package at hearings under the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history.
Nearly 6,000 people have been identified as abusers at the hearings, according to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. Most of those named are former teachers and clergy, many of whom have died, but 20 to 25 per cent of those accused were students.
The government is hiring private investigators to track them down and they'll get a chance to tell their side of the story. But no cases will be referred for criminal investigation.
Former student Mary, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition her real name not be used, said she named her student abusers to her lawyer before her hearing in June, adding that one of them still lives near her.
Mary said she blocked out her memories of sex and drug abuse at the age of 12 or 13 by other students at the Port Alberni Residential School in British Columbia until a year ago when she started therapy and had to prepare for her hearing.
Put in danger
She said she didn't realize her abusers would be notified about her accusations until she bumped into one of them on the street.
"His whole attitude towards me changed — aggressive and scary. …I don't think the government realized how much more danger they're putting us in."
In a separate case, Charlie Thompson had to defend himself on Dec. 9 against a woman's accusations of sexual assault while the two were at the Port Alberni Residential School.
"When I got the call, it was like I was just left hanging, and I'm just thankful I'm OK," said Thompson, who was sexually abused by staff at the Port Alberni school.
"I'm strong enough to have this kind of call, but I'm thinking about those people who are not OK who received the call."
Thompson, who said it was a case of mistaken identity, said he took the opportunity to defend himself at his accuser's hearing.
"I didn't feel good. I felt like a criminal …. But I told my truth. That's all I can do."
Creating friction
Jennifer Wood, who works with residential school survivors, said the whole process of identifying former students as abusers is creating a lot of friction in the aboriginal community.
"How do you cope? How do you get through this?" she said.
The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs said contacting alleged abusers is a better alternative than going through the criminal courts.
Director general Luc Dumont said it's only fair for people to be told they've been accused of abuse.
"The adjudicator[s] have to ask questions that will unfold how the abuse took place … and make an assessment. It's not an easy task."
Dumont said this process was set out and agreed upon in the settlement agreement. He said there may be remote communities with fewer resources, but a toll-free crisis line is open 24/7 and people will be referred to the help they need.
Survivors like Thompson said they're living through the trauma all over again.
"There doesn't seem to be anybody that I know of who's doing anything to make it better for the former students of residential schools," said Thompson. "Nobody seems to understand that those institutions created a whole lot of dysfunction."
A decision in Thompson's case is expected next April.
Thousands of the former students say they endured sexual, physical and psychological abuse while attending the schools, which were run by churches and funded by the federal government from the 1870s until the mid-1970s.
As of May 31, more than 5,800 hearings have been held and 5,074 claimants have been compensated for a total of $615 million, the government said.
This article was found at:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/12/20/residential-schools-abuse.html
RELATED ARTICLES:
Canadian Indian residential schools designed to assimilate natives traumatized individuals and generations
Survivors of Indian residential schools need to tell their stories to restore self-worth after trauma of abuse
A brief history of Canadian residential schools designed to indoctrinate and assimilate aboriginal children
Canadian Truth Commission investigates fate of thousands of aboriginal children who died in mysterious circumstances
Canadian residential school Truth Commission begins to address over a century of child abuse, thousands of children still missing
‘Apology? What apology?' Church’s attempt at reconciliation not enough, says counsellor
Church-run Canadian residential schools denied human rights to all aboriginal children in their custody
'This Is How They Tortured Me' [book review]
Mothers of a Native Hell
Pope expresses 'sorrow' for abuse at residential schools - but doesn't apologize
When will church learn lessons about abuse scandals?
The following comment section continues the comments posted on the following two posts in this archive:
Posts
Parliament window to mark residential schools
ReplyDeleteCBC News October 27, 2011
A painful chapter of Canada's history will soon be on display over the door MPs use to enter the House of Commons every day.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan announced Thursday the legacy of Canada's Indian residential schools program will be permanently etched on Parliament Hill in stained glass.
An aboriginal artist will be commissioned to design a new centre panel for the window over the members' entrance to the House of Commons foyer in Centre Block.
"The art work will honour the First Nation, Inuit and Méis children who attended Indian residential schools and the families and the communities who were impacted by its legacy," Duncan said, looking straight at the external window where the art will be installed.
A panel of art experts will choose an artist to design the window. The panel has not yet been convened, and Duncan couldn't estimate a total cost, but the minister said the government planned to have the art installed in 2012.
"We’re not making this a long term project. We want to get it done," Duncan said.
'Gesture of reconciliation'
The minister said the window is intended to "encourage all Parliamentarians and visitors for generations to come to learn about the history of the Indian residential schools and Canada’s reconciliation efforts."
Duncan said he's consulted with aboriginal leaders about the window as an "important gesture of reconciliation" and "they get it."
On June 11, 2008 the federal government made an official apology for the residential school program in the House of Commons. It was the highlight of a series of commemorations and reconciliation efforts that continue through the work of the federally-funded Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Duncan said Thursday that "the history of residential schools tells of an education policy gone wrong."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2011/10/27/pol-residential-schools-window.html
RCMP to report on residential schools role
ReplyDeleteThe Canadian Press October 28, 2011
The RCMP is planning to release a report that documents the force's involvement in Canada's infamous native residential school system.
The Mounties issued a statement today saying the research report will be presented Saturday to the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is holding hearings in Halifax.
The statement says the report covers more than 100 years and represents the first complete assessment of the RCMP's involvement in the Indian Residential School system.
About 150,000 aboriginal children attended residential schools, some of them forcibly taken from their homes by the RCMP under legislation that made attendance mandatory.
In May 2004, the RCMP's commissioner publicly apologized to Canada's Aboriginal Peoples, saying he was sorry for those who "suffered tragedies at residential schools."
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has a five-year mandate to document the history of residential schools, inspire reconciliation and produce a report by 2014.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/10/28/residential-school-rcmp.html
RCMP 'herded' native kids to residential schools
ReplyDeleteCBC News October 29, 2011
Former aboriginal students who say the RCMP herded them off to residential schools are expressing a sense of validation following the release of a report into the Mounties' role in the notorious school system. However, not all the survivors believe the report will help with their healing. The RCMP released the report Saturday at a Halifax session of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is looking into how 150,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families over more than a century.
The 463-page report found that the RCMP had a major involvement in bringing students from First Nation communities to the residential schools. Various data sources were collected over a 30-month period between April 2007 and September 2009 to answer questions about the RCMP's relationship with schools, students, federal agencies and departments.
...
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been holding public sessions in Halifax since Wednesday. The report says that at times, RCMP withheld information from parents of residential school students about what was happening with their children, and at times they acted like truant officers to schools. "Students saw themselves herded like cattle and brought into RCMP cars and taken into school. What they say is that these stories have come out throughout the years, but what this does today is validate those stories and show that they were true," CBC reporter Michael Dick said in Halifax.
RCMP stress in the report that the force did not know what was going on behind the schools' walls, where abuse was rampant, and that they were trying to act in the best interest with the information they knew at the time. The Mounties stressed that the abuse in residential schools happened all over the country. Approximately 150,000 aboriginal children were forced to attend residential schools. The Mounties were summoned to forcibly take the children to the schools if their families resisted sending them away.
The truth and reconciliation commissioners have been listening to powerful testimony from people who suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the schools and who were forced to give up their native language and customs. Manitoba Justice Murray Sinclair chairs the commission, established as part of a landmark $4-billion agreement reached in 2007 with survivors who had filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government and the churches that ran the schools.
"It is for the purpose of establishing a national memory around this so that future generations of people will be able to understand not only what happened but why it happened. And that will ensure that it does not happen again," Sinclair said. The commission has a five-year mandate to document what happened to aboriginal children at residential schools and produce a report by 2014.
The churches that operated the schools started apologizing in 1986 — and in 2004, the RCMP's commissioner publicly apologized for what happened. Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public apology in 2008.
read the full article at:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/10/29/truth-reconciliation-rcmp-report.html
read the RCMP report at:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/pdf/RCMP-role-in-residential-school-system-Oct-4-2011.pdf
RCMP mostly unaware of abuse at residential schools: report
ReplyDeleteby MICHAEL TUTTON, Canadian Press October 29, 2011
RCMP officers usually weren't aware of the need to investigate abuse in Canada's infamous native residential school system because aboriginal families were reluctant to tell them what was occurring behind closed doors, says a report by the police force. Deputy Commissioner Steve Graham presented the research report on Saturday to the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was holding its final day of Atlantic region hearings in Halifax.
The 457-page report written by Marcel Eugene-LeBeuf said the police acted on behalf of the federal government to track down children who had run away from the schools and to tell parents they had to send their children to the schools. However, the researchers said that police generally weren't aware of abuse, which is defined in the report as “improper physical or sexual behaviour and actions that contributed to the loss of cultural roots.”
“Children would rarely denounce the abuse they suffered, and the school system prevented outsiders from knowing about the abuse that occurred. Discipline was kept strictly internal to the school system and was not associated to the police,” the authors said in the report's summary. “The report shows that Indian residential schools were essentially a closed system between the Department of Indian Affairs, the churches and school administrator. The problems within the schools did not attract police attention or intervention because they were mostly dealt with internally or were unknown to the police.”
The report covers more than 100 years and represents the first complete assessment of the RCMP's involvement in the Indian Residential School system. Government-funded, church-run residential schools operated from the 1870s until the final closure of a school outside Regina in 1996. The researchers conducted 279 interviews and travelled to 66 communities between 2007 and 2009 to examine the police role in supporting the system.
After Mr. Graham completed his brief presentation to the commission, he gently placed the study into the bentwood box, where expressions of reconciliation are placed by those participating in the panels. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has a five-year mandate to document the history of residential schools, inspire reconciliation and produce a report by 2014.
The report said a lack of trust of the police by natives was the biggest barrier to investigations being carried out up until the 1990s. “Without public or police knowledge of wrong-doing, there would be no investigation and no charges laid against abusers. This is supported by the relatively small number of files in RCMP records on these matters for the period covered by the research project,” said the report.
The appendices of the report summarizes 60 investigations between 1957 and 2005 from B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, the three territories and Manitoba. It says there were 619 victims who appeared before the courts and over 40 perpetrators identified with charges being laid for crimes ranging from indecent assault to sexual interference and assault causing bodily harm.
In May 2004, then RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli publicly apologized to Canada's Aboriginal Peoples. “To those of you who suffered tragedies at residential schools, we are very sorry for your experience,” he said at the time.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rcmp-mostly-unaware-of-abuse-at-residential-schools-report/article2218750/
A FEW HUNDRED MORE RECENT ARTICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE FOLLOWING TWO PAGES:
ReplyDeleteCanadian Indian residential schools designed to assimilate natives traumatized individuals and generations
https://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2011/02/canadian-indian-residential-schools.html
Edmonton mural celebrates Catholic bishop's role in the horrific abuse of aboriginal children in residential schools
https://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2011/03/edmonton-mural-celebrates-catholic.html
Study shows empirical link between residential schools and Indigenous youth in care
ReplyDeleteby Michelle Ghoussoub, CBC July 04, 2019
New research conducted at the University of British Columbia is shedding light on the relationship between residential schools and the modern day child welfare system.
Brittany Barker, a postdoctoral fellow with the BC Centre on Substance Use, said the impact of intergenerational trauma from the residential school systems is well understood among Indigenous communities, and the overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in care has been previously documented.
But Barker, who completed her doctoral work at UBC in April, said her research shows for the first time an empirical association between having been in the residential school system, and subsequent generations being at higher risk for being in the child welfare system.
"The crux of the argument is that the family exposure to the residential school system is driving the overrepresentation of Indigenous kids in care," she said.
Barker, who had previously investigated the child welfare system, said the findings are "probably the most powerful, important study I've ever done."
The findings have been published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Barker's data was collected between 2011 and 2016 from 675 people in Vancouver under the age of 35 who use drugs, around 40 per cent of whom self-identified as Indigenous.
The research found that two thirds of participants who self-identified as being Indigenous had at least a grandparent and/or a parent that attended a residential school.
Those who had a parent or both a parent and a grandparent who had been in a residential school had more than two times the odds of having been personally placed into care compared to Indigenous participants who had no immediate family exposure to the residential school system.
For more than 100 years, First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their families to attend residential schools, most of which were run by churches and funded by the federal government. There were more than 130 residential schools in operation between the 1870s and 1996.
continued below
Barker also conducted a secondary analysis which compared Indigenous participants who reported no immediate family exposure to residential schools to the non-Indigenous part of the cohort, and found there was no significant difference difference in the likelihood of being in the child welfare system.
ReplyDelete"Being [of] Indigenous ancestry had over two times the odds of having been in care. But it was actually residential school exposure, that family exposure to the residential school system, that was driving that difference between groups," she said.
"You would expect that there would be a significant difference between Indigenous young people and non-Indigenous young people. […] If you can account for family exposure to the residential school system, which we did in this paper, then there's no longer that difference."
Barker said more research needs to be done across different areas in Canada, and that the research should be replicated with a high sample size of Indigenous youth. But she said the numbers could actually be higher, as some Indigenous people don't know they had family members in residential schools, because of the stigma associated with the institutions.
Barker said she believes that in order to address intergenerational trauma, more resources need to be given to support potentially vulnerable parents.
"If you look at the number one reason that Indigenous youth are taken into the child welfare system, it's for charges of neglect. And if you break down neglect, it's parental substance abuse, it's exposure to intimate partner violence, it's housing instability, it's food insecurity, it's poverty – a lot of it is markers of poverty and then the remnants of the trauma of the residential school system," she said.
In 2008, the federal government formally apologized for the residential school system and other policies of assimilation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) final report said the residential school system amounted to "cultural genocide" against Indigenous people in Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/study-links-trauma-from-residential-schools-to-overrepresentation-of-indigenous-youth-in-care-1.5199421
Residential school survivors society calls for action following discovery of children's remains
ReplyDeleteCourtney Dickson · CBC News May 28, 2021
The Indian Residential School Survivors Society (IRSSS) is calling on the federal government and the Roman Catholic Church to take action following the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried on the Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds.
On Thursday, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said preliminary findings from a ground-penetrating radar survey uncovered the remains. Since then, federal government officials and leaders have taken to social media and sent out news releases offering support.
The school was run by the Catholic Church from 1890 to 1969 when the federal government took over administration to operate it as a residence for a day school until it closed in 1978.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted Friday that this discovery is "a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country's history" and offered thoughts and support.
Speaking for the Archdiocese of Vancouver, Archbishop J. Michael Miller told CBC News in an emailed statement that the findings fill him with "deep sadness."
"The pain that such news causes reminds us of our ongoing need to bring to light every tragic situation that occurred in residential schools run by the Church. The passage of time does not erase the suffering that touches the Indigenous communities affected, and we pledge to do whatever we can to heal that suffering."
'Prayers only go so far'
Angela White, executive director for the IRSSS, said that both the church and the federal government need to take action.
"Reconciliation does not mean anything if there is no action to those words," she said.
"Well-wishes and prayers only go so far. If we are going to actually create positive strides forward there needs to be that ability to continue the work, like the Indian Residential School Survivors Society does, in a meaningful way."
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report from 2015 calls for the federal government to provide sustainable funding for existing and new Indigenous healing centres to address the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual harms caused by residential schools.
Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir has also expressed a desire for federal government accountability.
"It's all well and good for the federal government to make gestures of goodwill and support regarding the tragedy," Casimir said during an interview on CBC's Daybreak Kamloops.
"There is an important ownership and accountability to both Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc and all communities and families that are affected. And that needs to happen and take place."
continued below
Calls for Pope to respond
ReplyDeleteIn a media release, IRSSS co-chair Rick Alec, a member of the Ts'kw'aylaxw First Nation, called for action specifically from the Pope.
"My Creator is asking their God why disciples would do this to us," he said. "The Pope needs to answer this question. There is no more denying it. Now there is physical evidence from these unmarked graves."
The TRC's report also called upon the Pope to issue an apology to survivors, their families and communities for the church's role in the abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools.
In 2018, a letter from the president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said Pope Francis can't personally apologize for residential schools.
The IRSSS's White said that if the Catholic Church apologized today for its involvement in residential schools across Canada, it would be meaningless, as they've had many years to make those apologies.
She said acknowledging the history and the reality of residential schools validates what survivors have been sharing for years and is an important part of the healing process.
Support available
Support is available for anyone affected by the lingering effects of residential schools, and those who are triggered by the latest reports. The IRSSS can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-721-0066.
A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former students and those affected. Access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.
Within B.C., the KUU-US Crisis Line Society provides a First Nations and Indigenous-specific crisis line available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's toll-free and can be reached at 1-800-588-8717 or online at kuu-uscrisisline.com.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/indian-residential-school-survivors-society-calls-for-action-1.6045448
The Vatican holds billions in assets. Residential school survivors say the Pope should step up on compensation
ReplyDeleteCanadian delegation preparing for final meeting with Pope Francis Friday
by Jason Warick · CBC News · Mar 31, 2022
As a Canadian delegation prepares for its final meeting with Pope Francis in the Vatican Friday, a growing chorus in Canada is hoping Francis commits to immediately remedying the Roman Catholic Church's broken compensation promises to residential school survivors.
Canadian bishops announced a renewed fundraising effort last fall — $30 million over five years — and say work is well underway.
But critics are skeptical. Even if that money can be raised, they say it's wrong to make the dwindling number of elderly survivors wait that long. They say that if Canadian bishops won't do it immediately, the Vatican should.
Although all the full specifics of the Vatican's holdings are unknown, a tabulation of known assets puts them in the tens or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars.
Survivors say the compensation money isn't for them — it's to fund addictions and mental health supports, job training, recreation, language preservation and other programs for their descendants suffering through intergenerational trauma.
"It affected my children, my grandchildren. So many are lost," said survivor and mental health worker Audrey Eyahpaise of the Beardy's & Okemasis Cree Nation.
The survivors say the Vatican is just as responsible as the local religious orders and dioceses.
"This has been a struggle for many years. They've been patient. They keep hearing broken promises," said University of Saskatchewan Indigenous studies professor and Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation member Bonita Beatty.
"It's a hierarchy. They report up to the Vatican. So yes, he [Pope Francis] is responsible for the various arms of his government. He can't just wash his hands of it."
Billions in assets
Francis's supporters say he has moved the church toward greater transparency, but a definitive dollar figure of the Roman Catholic Church's wealth remains unavailable.
CBC News collected publicly available information to obtain a partial list of the church's assets. They include:
The Vatican
In 2020, the Vatican released a public statement pegging the total assets of its 70 governmental departments at approximately $5.5 billion Cdn, according to the Reuters news service. That includes its worldwide embassies and media holdings. It doesn't include St. Peter's Basilica, its museums and art works, or Vatican Bank holdings.
Vatican Bank
Various estimates cited by the Financial Times, CNN and other publications place the Vatican Bank's holdings at approximately $6 billion to $10 billion Cdn. It holds accounts for more than 1,000 individuals and church-affiliated entities.
Art and architecture
The Vatican has said it considers the work of Michelangelo, Raphael and others in its collection to be priceless, so assigned them a value of one Italian lira — less than one Canadian penny. But an article in New York Magazine stated "even a fraction of the works could likely fetch billions." This doesn't include the unknown quantity of Indigenous art and religious items housed at the Vatican.
Investments
Exact figures are unavailable, but media reports state the Vatican holds significant gold reserves, Italian stocks and other investments. Information disclosed at the recent criminal trial of one of the Vatican's cardinals revealed a $338-million Cdn purchase of former Harrod's auto showroom in London's wealthy Chelsea district, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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Land
ReplyDeleteThe Vatican released a statement last year stating it owns more than 5,000 properties worldwide, with the majority inside Italy, according to The Guardian.
The wider Roman Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental landowner in the world, according to the University of Notre Dame's Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate. Its holdings total roughly 177 million acres, an area slightly larger than the province of Saskatchewan.
David Murphy, director for the Fitzgerald Institute's "church properties initiative," agreed land is the Roman Catholic Church's most valuable asset, but he said the exact — or even an approximate — dollar value remains a mystery.
"It's super murky. There's really no good answer," Murphy said in an interview.
"I've been on the job seven months and I'm still trying to get a handle on it."
At an average price of $900 Cdn per acre — the cost of the cheapest vacant farmland in Saskatchewan — the total would reach nearly $160 billion. Many churches, cathedrals and Vatican embassies sit on much more valuable urban land in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and other centres.
The church could also have even more land not listed. That's because religious orders such as Oblates or Jesuits are not required to disclose their holdings to local bishops, he said.
Bishops admit to 'shortcomings'
Some experts say the Catholic Church still owes Canadian survivors more than $60 million after signing the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
The Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops admits to the "shortcomings" in those efforts, but disputes this figure, saying they fulfilled all legal obligations.
Legally, the case was closed after a Saskatchewan judge approved a controversial buyout proposal several years ago and the federal government declined to appeal the decision.
Following the discovery of unmarked graves across Canada last summer, as well as new revelations about the Catholic Church's failed compensation efforts, the CCCB announced a new five-year, $30-million fundraising campaign.
Jonanthan Lesarge of the CCCB said in a statement that dioceses in Saskatchewan, Vancouver and other centres are already fundraising, and the national campaign has named an Indigenous group of directors and taken other action. CBC News asked last week for a national dollar amount raised so far, but none was available.
Mayo Moran, provost and vice-chancellor of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, spent 15 years chairing the compensation committee for residential school survivors.
She said church officials need to immediately remedy "the litany of promises that have been made and not fulfilled." That includes compensation.
Moran said it's extremely urgent, and that the Vatican should step up if Canadian officials won't act quickly.
"I don't think there's any doubt that as a moral matter, the church as a whole — that is, the Vatican and the Pope as well — should be putting pressure on and stepping up."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/vatican-assets-residential-school-compensation-1.6404280
Pope Francis apologizes to Indigenous delegates for 'deplorable' abuses at residential schools
ReplyDeleteFirst Nations, Inuit and Métis conclude historic week of meetings
by Olivia Stefanovich · CBC News · Apr 01, 2022
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
Pope Francis has apologized for the conduct of some members of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada's residential school system, following a week of talks with First Nations, Inuit and Métis delegations.
The delegates had gathered for a final and public audience with the Pope at the Vatican on Friday as Francis spoke of feeling "sorrow and shame" for the conduct of those who ran the schools.
"I also feel shame ... sorrow and shame for the role that a number of Catholics, particularly those with educational responsibilities, have had in all these things that wounded you, and the abuses you suffered and the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values," he said.
"For the deplorable conduct of these members of the Catholic Church, I ask for God's forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart, I am very sorry. And I join my brothers, the Canadian bishops, in asking your pardon."
Francis also said he hoped to visit Canada "in the days" around the church's Feast of St. Anne, which falls on July 26.
Dene National Chief Gerald Antoine, one of the lead delegates, compared hearing the apology to the experience of walking through the snow and seeing fresh moose tracks.
"That is the feeling that I have, because there is a possibility," he said moments after the apology.
"Today is a day that we've been waiting for and certainly one that will be uplifted in our history."
Read Pope Francis's full remarks, apology for abuses by some Catholic Church members in residential schools
An apology from the Pope without actions means 'nothing': Manitoba residential school survivors
Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said survivors and their families will all have different perspectives on the apology.
"Today we have a piece of the puzzle," he said. "We have a heartfelt expression from the church that was delivered by Pope Francis in an empathetic and caring way."
The apology comes at the end of a week of private separate meetings between the First Nations, Inuit and Métis delegations and the Pope about the Roman Catholic Church's role in Canada's residential school system.
The Inuit delegation had also been pushing for the church to intervene in the case of fugitive Oblate priest wanted in Canada for sex crimes, and the First Nation delegates also urged the Pope to revoke centuries-old papal decrees used to justify the seizure of Indigenous land in the Americas by colonial powers.
Indigenous representatives have also been pushing the church to fulfil its compensation promises to residential school survivors and return Indigenous cultural artifacts.
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More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools between the 1880s and 1996, and more than 60 per cent of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.
ReplyDeletePrime Minister Justin Trudeau said he looks forward to the Pope's visit. He called the apology a step forward "in acknowledging the truth of our past."
"Today's apology will resurface strong emotions of hurt and trauma for many," he said in a media statement.
"We cannot separate the legacy of the residential school system from the institutions that created, maintained, and operated it, including the Government of Canada and the Catholic Church."
'Now the hard work starts' — former AFN chief
Antoine said Indigenous leaders should take part in planning the Pope's visit.
"We seek to hear his words. They also seek the words of apology at home," he said.
Former chief of the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine said the apology is not the end of "this long, tragic story about residential schools."
"Now the hard work starts," he told The Current's Matt Galloway.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission — which from 2008 to 2015 examined the record of Canada's residential school system — called for a papal apology as part of its 94 calls to action. The commission also urged all religious and faith groups to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and people.
Colleen Jacob, the former chief of Xaxli'p First Nation in British Columbia, wrote about her experience attending residential school in a letter to the Pope delivered during his private meeting this week with Assembly of First Nations delegates.
Jacob said she can still remember vividly the bus picking her up for the first time in 1974, when she was just seven years old.
She said she was dropped off and separated from her big brother.
"It was a big shock to me because back home I used to follow him everywhere," Jacob said. "I would cry when he wouldn't take me."
The Pope has issued other apologies in recent years. He travelled to Bolivia in 2015, where he asked for forgiveness for the church's crimes against Indigenous people during Latin America's colonial era. On a trip to Ireland in 2018, he offered a sweeping apology for the crimes of the Catholic Church in Ireland, saying church officials frequently failed to respond with compassion to the many abuses children and women suffered over the years.
The Anglican, Presbyterian and United Churches have apologized already for their roles in Canada's residential school system.
see multiple videos and photos at this link:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pope-francis-responds-indigenous-delegations-final-meeting-1.6404344
Haida residential school survivor alleges defamation from priest
ReplyDeleteCalgary court to decide whether proposed class action lawsuit by Elder Sphenia Jones will go ahead
by Aaron Hemens · LJI Reporter · CBC April 22, 2024
A Haida elder and residential school survivor is leading a proposed class action lawsuit against the Catholic Church and one of its priests over what she alleges are "false and deeply hurtful" denialist comments.
Sphenia Jones is scheduled to appear in a Calgary courtroom on Monday after filing a statement of claim against Edmonton priest Marcin Mironiuk, the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton, and the Oblate Fathers of Assumption Province.
Jones is alleging that remarks Mironiuk made during a mass service in 2021 — in which he reportedly described the evidence of potential unmarked graves at residential schools as "lies" and "manipulation" — are defamatory against herself and other survivors who have spoken out about deaths at the institutions.
She is proposing a class-action lawsuit, but the defendants from the church are asking that application to be struck down. The court is now set to decide whether it will move forward.
Mironiuk, speaking in Polish, reportedly said during the service that "we are in the presence of lies here in Canada," according to a translation from CBC, and that Indigenous children "were dying from natural causes and were buried in regular cemeteries, and that's why we're living now in a great lie."
Mironiuk also told the congregation he visited the former Kamloops Indian Residential School without disclosing he was a priest and asked to see "mass graves," according to the same translation.
The archdiocese apologized for Mironiuk's remarks, calling the comments "thoroughly unacceptable" and placing the priest on indefinite administrative leave. But Jones said words can't describe the hurt she felt.
"When he said that," Jones said, "that hit me; in the gut, in my heart, so badly. It was like he was directly talking to me."
Jones is from the Haida Nation and survived the former Edmonton Residential School.
If the lawsuit moves ahead, she plans to take a boat and train-ride journey similar to the one she was forced to take more than 60 years ago on her way to residential school.
"When I was in the residential school, when they used to punish us, they always used to say, 'Nobody is going to believe you,'" said Jones. "I used to say, 'I'm going to tell.'"
'I want it to go around the world'
A special chambers brief for the case said Jones "brings this claim in defamation, on behalf of herself and the proposed class of residential school survivors who like her have spoken out about deaths at residential schools."
The brief details allegations that Mironiuk's "false and deeply hurtful assertions" have "viciously maligned" these survivors.
"To Ms. Jones and too many of her fellow residential school survivors, these vicious and defamatory statements, left unchecked, risk cruel fulfilment of what they were told as children, and that for too long held true: you will not be believed," the document states, in part.
"Justice demands that the claim be allowed to proceed to ensure that residential school deniers such as Rev. Mironiuk be held fully accountable for the additional and ongoing harms they inflict, and to vindicate the reality of residential schools that has long been carried on the shoulders of the survivors."
In their application to strike the claim, the defendants said the statements did not refer to Jones and the proposed class of people is "not ascertainable or identifiable."
A statement from the Oblate Fathers of Assumption Province issued on Wednesday said "while acknowledging he made statements about the site in Kamloops, Fr. Mironiuk has expressed publicly that he did not put into question the existence of any graves," and added that he didn't mean to cause harm to survivors.
"[Mironiuk] has acknowledged that the school has .... (continued below)
... a hurtful reality for some of its attendees and laments any loss of life which occurred," the statement added.
ReplyDelete"Fr. Mironiuk personally pledged further to advance truth and reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians and had educated himself about this issue even further."
The Oblate Fathers of Assumption Province's statement said it wants to strike down Jones's lawsuit "on the basis that it fails to disclose a cause of action."
The Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton declined to comment since the case is before the court system.
According to Jones, the Catholic Church had requested to settle her claim — which she opened last year — out of court, but she refused.
"I want it to go around the world. I want [survivors] to talk about what happened to them," she said. "If I settle out of court, it would be just like me asking for the money, and that's it.
"I don't want no damn money."
'It's all going to be healed'
Jones was 11 years old when she was taken from her home on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off British Columbia's North Coast, and transported by boat and then train to the Edmonton Residential School.
Opened in 1924, the institution was operated by the United Church of Canada in 1925 until the school's closure in 1966.
Court documents say Jones "was rounded up along with dozens of other children from Haida Gwaii by federal officials, who threatened their parents with jail if they did not give up their children."
"The children were put on a train, which stopped multiple times to pick up other children from communities along the route. Several children did not survive the journey to Edmonton."
Jones said she recalls being placed in a boxcar to look after Indigenous babies, who were all "crying really hard." While at the school, Jones says she remembers witnessing the deaths or disappearances of other children, something that continues to haunt her.
"She saw where they were buried, along the fence — an area now overgrown with trees. One of her fellow students, Eddie Hans, was made to bury many of the children," the court briefing document alleges.
Jones said she was given the task of looking after babies who were tied up in iron cribs, who she remembers were "all of the sudden" gone one day.
"Years later, I found out that my cousins buried so many babies in Edmonton," said Jones, now 80.
According to the court documents, she had a classmate named Vicki Stewart who allegedly "died after being hit in the head with a wood implement by one of the nuns."
"On reporting the incident, Ms. Jones was punished, told to keep quiet, and told nobody would believe her," the document alleges. "... Ms. Jones had to prepare her body by wrapping her in a blanket."
Jones says she and a friend were also punished for sharing their cultures. She said she had three fingernails yanked off, after her hands became swollen from chemicals that she was forced to use to scrub cement floors with a toothbrush. She recalls other children having teeth pulled without anesthesia.
"I still hear the babies screaming in my head. To this day. I can't get that screaming out of my head," she said.
"I feel like this journey that I'm going on … I'm going to feel a lot better after this. My healing journey will be ended by then."
Jones said planning to recreate the journey she took as a child — this time to try to find justice — will help her as she hopes she can "talk directly to this preacher and the church."
"By the time I'm done with this, I'm not going to be in the pain that I was in the beginning. It's all going to be healed. And the only reason I can say that is because there's going to be a lot more people coming out and saying what happened to them," she said.
"They're not going to be afraid to speak up now."
see links, photos and video embedded in this article at:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida-elder-residential-school-survivor-defamation-catholic-priest-1.7178863
B.C. residential school truths were exposed in her 1st book. Her sequel shows there is more to say
ReplyDeleteTsqelmucwílc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School—Resistance and a Reckoning to be released this fall
by Courtney Dickson · CBC News · September 03, 2022
The Secwepemc term Tsqelmucwílc (pronounced cha-CAL-mux-weel) loosely translates to "we return to being human" and is considered a testament to Indigenous healing and renewal.
The term has also been borrowed for a new book by author and researcher Celia Haig-Brown that delves into the experiences of residential school survivors and how their lives continue to be affected by the horrors they faced at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Tsqelmucwílc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School—Resistance and a Reckoning is somewhat of a follow-up to a book Haig-Brown published in 1988, which, at the time, was a bit controversial.
The original story, Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, was one of the first books to detail the experiences of residential school survivors. At the time, publishers were skeptical about the book; the truth about the abuse suffered at the so-called schools was not widely accepted by those who were not affected by it.
But then, she met Randy Fred. Fred is a survivor of the Alberni Residential School on Vancouver Island and knew firsthand the truth to these stories.
A publisher with Tillicum Library Imprint, a division of Arsenal Pulp Press, Fred agreed to publish her first book — and wrote the foreword — something he did again for Tsqelmucwílc.
But over the past 35 years, Haig-Brown said, things have changed.
"People are more aware of what needs to be talked about."
When the T'kemlups te Secwepemc First Nation first announced its work to identify 215 possible burial sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021, Fred contacted Haig-Brown to encourage her to take another look at her decades-old text.
Haig-Brown said she was resistant at first and felt there was work being done by Indigenous people through various mediums that were accessible to the general public. However, she said, Fred insisted.
"When an Indigenous person tells me I must do something, I pay attention," she said.
Before writing the book, Haig-Brown sought express consent from the T'kemlups te Secwepemc First Nation.
"I think that there are many researchers who have not taken the time to build long-term relationships with the people with whom they do their work," Haig-Brown said.
"For me, that is an intricate part of — particularly as a white woman — doing work in an Indigenous community, to make sure that the relationships that I build are worthy of continuing in the eyes of the Indigenous people with whom I'm working."
With their consent, she got to work.
Haig-Brown reconnected with survivors and their families to gain more understanding of what they endured then and how those experiences have continued to affect them.
Some were excited to talk. Others, Haig-Brown said, were reluctant to bring up their painful pasts.
Now, Tsqelmucwílc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School—Resistance and a Reckoning has been published by Vancouver-based Arsenal Pulp Press, the company that printed the original version and will be released through the publisher on Sept. 27.
Fred said he hopes the book contributes to Canada's ongoing journey toward reconciliation.
"People have heard a lot about the truth," Fred said.
"I'm hoping that this new edition will spawn further conversation and help us get on that road to reconciliation."
See the links and photos embedded in this article at:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tsqelmucw%C3%ADlc-book-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6566703
Episcopal Church grapples with ‘transformative role’ in Native American residential schools
ReplyDeleteTwo commissions overseeing research into the denomination's part in the assimilationist schools are asking Episcopal bishops to grant access to archives in their regions and to recruit research assistants of their own.
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Religion News Service June 18, 2024
For most Native American children in the late 19th century and early 20th, education was neither a right nor a privilege. Indigenous children from Florida to Alaska were taken away, sometimes by force, to residential schools run by the government and often by denominations that operated under government contracts.
The aim of the education was to teach the children European American ways. Anything Indian, from language to clothing and dance, was forbidden. The system left a trail of trauma and death amid a quest for mass assimilation into white settler culture.
Now the Episcopal Church, which was involved in running at least 34 of the schools, has begun to reckon with the outsized role it played in this history. Last June, the church’s Executive Council allocated $2 million in a truth-seeking process aimed at documenting how Episcopal-run schools impacted lives for generations — and to explain why things happened as they did.
When Episcopalians gather next week (June 23-28) for their General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, a panel event will bear witness to boarding school legacies still impacting families and tribal communities. Meanwhile, two Episcopal commissions overseeing the research are asking bishops churchwide to grant access to archives in their regions and to recruit research assistants of their own.
The U.S. government operated or supported 408 boarding schools between 1819 and 1969, according to a 2022 Department of the Interior report under the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. “The United States pursued a twin policy: Indian territorial dispossession and Indian assimilation, including through education,” the report says.
How the Episcopal Church used its considerable influence in crafting that federal policy must be understood before restorative justice can occur, said the Rev. Lauren Stanley, a research commission member and canon to the ordinary for the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota.
“To simply say, ‘Yes, we participated in running schools’ without saying, ‘Because we helped formulate the policy’ denies truth, justice and the possibility of conciliation which we hope will lead to reconciliation,” said Stanley in an email.
In Canada, where a similar boarding school system is blamed for eroding Indigenous languages and cultures, a truth and reconciliation process led to a $6 billion settlement with tribes in 2006 and multiple major settlements since then. Pope Francis, visiting Canada in 2022, apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in what he called “cultural destruction and forced assimilation.”
But in the United States, where church records haven’t been made public and often aren’t digitized or consolidated, Americans aren’t being taught what happened. Studies show only a handful of states include the story of Native American boarding schools in their history curriculum standards.
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The research done already shows the Episcopal Church was no minor player in the boarding school system. The 34 known schools are far more than previously identified, but people involved in the research say the list is expected to grow.
ReplyDeleteBeyond the number of its schools, Episcopalians and their church “played a uniquely transformative role” in creating the federal government’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, according to Veronica Pasfield, a Native American researcher and archival consultant. Carlisle became the prototype for U.S. residential schools under Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer who’d fought Indians on the Great Plains. Episcopalians in the Dakotas reportedly helped recruit students for the school.
“Federal and Church power worked collaboratively to operationalize Indian policy via schools that removed children from home for indoctrination and extraction,” writes Pasfield in a May consulting proposal. She’s now helping guide the church’s boarding school research.
“Indigenous Episcopalians are leading the process to uncover and tell the story of Episcopal Church involvement in Indigenous boarding schools, and that work, as they note, is just beginning,” said Episcopal Church spokesperson Amanda Skofstad in an email. “An apology before thorough research and understanding would fall short of the truth-telling, reckoning, and healing we committed to as a church.”
What emerges, scholars say, could reframe the church’s self-understanding. A traditional view holds that missionary educators had good intentions: to help Native Americans survive and flourish among white settlers by embracing Christianity, learning to own property individually and developing marketable skills. But such assumed benevolence needs to be questioned, according to Farina King, associate professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma.
“It’s pulling down the narrative that was pushed for so long that these schools were all for the benefit of the people and the children,” said King, a citizen of Navajo Nation and author of “The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century.” “They were not what they pretended to be: for the good of Native peoples. They were really for the good of the dominating white American officials and Christian leaders.”
To grow enrollment at Carlisle, which garnered funding on a per-pupil basis, Pratt recruited Sioux students in South Dakota with high-pressure tactics and help from church leadership, according to historian David Wallace Adams in “Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928.”
Episcopalian titans of industry, including the Vanderbilts, Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan, also benefited from the policy that included schools, building “opulent mansions from the profits of their railroads and extractive businesses on lands recently cleared of Indian people,” writes Pasfield, whose great-grandmother attended Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School in Michigan.
“Indian boarding schools were tools for U.S. nation-building,” Pasfield writes. “They funded the reach and enhanced the wealth of Christian missions. As the archives show, boarding schools were a tool for dispossessing Indian families and impoverishing the future of Indian children and communities.”
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Some regard what happened through the schools as attempted genocide that merely traded the costly warfare of an earlier time for cultural erasure in schools. Leora Tadgerson, an Indigenous Episcopalian who chairs one of the commissions, refers to the boarding school period as “the genocidal era.”
ReplyDeletePearl Chanar, an Athabaskan tribal member and co-chair of one of the two commissions, believes it all needs to come out, no matter how complicated, shameful or mixed the history might be.
“In order for everyone to heal, number one: The church has to acknowledge and apologize for what happened,” said Chanar, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. “And number two: They have to do something about it. They can’t just receive the report, look at it and do nothing.”
Chanar attended a government-run boarding school in the 1960s, taking four flights on small aircrafts from her Athabaskan village of Minto, Alaska, to reach the island town of Sitka. With no phone available, the teenage Chanar wouldn’t speak to her parents again for nine months.
At Mount Edgecumbe High School, she made lifelong friends from all over Alaska and received an education that would have been impossible back home, where there was no electricity and no high school, though each summer Chanar went back for a season of “hunting, fishing and living off the land.”
Despite the benefits, boarding school could be “really lonely,” she recalled. Her Athabaskan language skills deteriorated and she missed taking part in traditional events such as a memorial potlatch with singing and dancing to honor deceased loved ones.
“Those things that we did in the village — we couldn’t do that anymore,” Chenar said.
Now, she wants everyone with a story to be heard. She wants land returned, especially if it came from Indians and is no longer used as a church school. And because boarding schools often buried children lost to tuberculosis outbreaks and other causes, she wants all their remains located, exhumed and returned to families.
“If we don’t do this work, then what will happen?” Chenar said. “Will they just remain out there and a shopping mall will be built over them? Somebody’s got to be their voice. And if nobody’s going to step up, then yeah. I’m here. I have a voice. I’ll speak for them.”
The quest is rife with challenges. Locating records in obscure archives will require tenacity. Layers of church bureaucracy could cause delays, Chenar said, if approvals take a long time to get. In most regions where records were sought in the past, access was denied, according to Tadgerson. Advocacy for the work and why it matters will be an ongoing priority.
But commission chairs say they’re encouraged by the bishops’ initial responses. Many have offered to help in whatever way is needed, Chenar said. Meanwhile, community talking circles and panels are cropping up to help get testimonies on record, according to Tadgerson.
“Now that so many individual churches and religious leadership stakeholders are choosing to listen and support survivors and their loved ones,” Tadgerson said in an email, “restorative justice research can begin.”
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
https://religionnews.com/2024/06/18/episcopal-church-grapples-with-transformative-role-in-native-american-residential-schools/
Supporting Survivors’ access to Residential School records
ReplyDeleteThe Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre receives about 120 requests a year for records related to Residential Schools.
By Amei-lee Laboucan | The University of British Columbia Magazine | June 17, 2024
Archives are a complex web of information and context.
Kim Lawson (MLIS'04), an Indigenous archivist and seasoned librarian at the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC), spends a lot of time sifting through archives in search of information about Residential Schools.
Lawson, who is a member of the Heiltsuk Nation and an intergenerational Survivor, researches questions from Survivors and their families, researchers at UBC and beyond, and other members of the general public.
Much of Lawson’s work at IRSHDC has supported Survivors and their families trying to access records in support of a claim for a class action lawsuit related to Day Schools in Canada, or for family members who are trying to find information about a relative who attended Residential School.
“That’s a really crucial type of request. It’s really one that we have in mind a lot,” said Lawson.
“One of the main reasons IRSHDC was created was to reduce barriers so that Survivors could find their own information instead of having to travel to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Manitoba or figure out which church archives had the record on their own. We’re here to help them navigate that complexity.”
On average, the IRSHDC receives about 120 reference requests a year. While some requests are straightforward, about 50 are complex and require hours of research over many weeks to fulfil.
“Questions from the media, usually about photo copyright, are often straightforward and easy to fulfil. Most of the substantive questions we receive are from Survivors,” said Lawson.
Searching for copies of records isn’t as easy as a “CTRL+F” search on a computer.
“A big part of the challenge is that for some of the schools, many records are very poorly described. It can mean looking at hundreds of pages at a time because there is very little information about what’s in a particular box of paper records or hundreds of pages on microfilm,” said Lawson.
It can also mean navigating big, complex archives like Library and Archives Canada, smaller community archives like Nanaimo Archives, or the archives of old shuttered newspapers with limited search information.
“When someone asks us for help, we often have a back-and-forth conversation to understand what the person is looking for. Most people will share partial information because they are working from memory or they’re seeking information for family,” said Lawson.
In some cases, Survivors and intergenerational Survivors are referred to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
“A big part of our work in research is creating and nurturing relationships with Survivors, communities, and other archivists and researchers,” said Clea Hargreaves (MAS'18), a research strategist at IRSHDC. “As so much of the information is still not public, and therefore only available on the back-end, a good deal of our work focuses on walking alongside requestors to make introductions and assisting Survivors and families with filling out third-party access forms, like at the NCTR, to gain access to the records they might be looking for. We also have numerous information-sharing agreements in place to work towards offering greater access to records across the board.”
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In other cases where little information is located or found, the reference team provides context as to why that is the case.
ReplyDelete“Sometimes the records someone is looking for aren’t kept with those of the particular Residential School. Operational records will be in government or church archives, but records of the school before being built might have been sitting in the superintendent’s office and may have been lost completely,” said Lawson.
Archives through a decolonial lens
The IRSHDC opened on April 9, 2018 to provide Residential School Survivors and their families and communities access to records gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).
As an affiliate site to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg, the collection at IRSHDC holds about 3,400 publicly available records about the Indian Residential School System in Canada.
The resources of IRSHDC are set up differently than other archives.
“IRSHDC’s collection is built through a decolonial lens by bringing together library, archive, and museum resources together, and is intended to disrupt the common understanding that documents are neutral or exactly as presented,” said Naomi Lloyd (PhD'11), IRSHDC’s senior systems metadata specialist.
“In other systems, you need to know a lot about the colonial structure of Residential Schools to get records for each school: which government agency funded or ran the schools, which church ran the schools, and how their names changed over time,” explained Lawson.
Instead, IRSHDC set up their collection to mirror how Survivors and community members would have interacted with the Residential School system.
“Right from the beginning, IRSHDC was focused on answering questions about particular schools, rather than focusing on the institutions that created the records,” said Lawson. “By placing the schools at the centre of how information is organized, the collections at IRSHDC are much closer to the Survivors’ experience. It decentres colonial agents and makes Survivors and their school experiences in their communities much more visible.”
This is reflected in the interactive digital wall in the gallery space. The wall includes a thematic nodes feature, which is a non-linear and non-hierarchical feature that allows visitors to view, browse, and learn about Residential Schools in a way that honours Indigenous ways of knowing. Each node includes a different topic related to the historical and ongoing oppression of Indigenous people because of Canadian policies.
Centring Survivors is also key to the physical space of the IRSHDC. The Elders Lounge on the top floor is a space for people to search records independently or alongside their family. It also has traditional medicine for those who would like to smudge, as does the gallery. In the gallery, people can research privately in individual kiosks. An area just outside the gallery gives them time and space if they need it due to the sensitive material of Residential Schools.
In partnership with the Indian Residential School Survivor Society, IRSHDC hosts wellness drop-ins on Wednesdays for Indigenous students, staff, and faculty as well as community members who would like to access cultural wellness supports.
Prioritizing the voices of Survivors still leaves room for accountability of the church and governmental organizations that ran Residential Schools.
“The government agencies that ran the schools are all still there. They’re not in any way invisible. They’re just not the door you have to walk through to find anything,” said Lawson.
Serving Survivors
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The driving purpose of the work at IRSHDC is to serve Survivors. Part of that work involves supporting Indigenous people, communities, nations, or organizations in recording their own oral testimonies or truths through the centre’s Oral Testimony Program (OTP).
ReplyDelete“The program was driven and initiated by communities, before the Centre opened. There were consultations with communities in British Columbia about what the IRSHDC would look like and what would be incorporated within that,” said David McAtackney (MLIS'16), OTP co-lead and research manager at IRSHDC.
“The Oral Testimony Program was created to record, preserve, and make accessible for future use the recordings and testimonies of those who attended and were the most directly affected: Survivors of Residential Schools and other institutions of colonialism,” said McAtackney.
Indigenous communities can borrow equipment to do their own recordings, or involve IRSHDC researchers. Recording is one of the very last steps in the OTP, with a considerable portion of the work focused on properly building relationships first.
“Heading into communities to immediately record is extractive and doesn’t take into consideration how communities want to participate in OTP,” said Kristin Kozar (MLIS'18), executive director of the IRSHDC and a proud member of the Hwlitsum First Nation, with familial ties to the Musqueam Indian Band, Penelakut Tribe, and Lummi Nation. “We aim to support and uplift communities, and a part of that is making sure they lead the way and are comfortable with us before doing any type of recording.”
Autonomy over records and any decisions about recordings within the OTP are entirely led by the Indigenous communities and individuals Kozar and McAtackney work with it on.
“As we were developing the Oral Testimony Program, we worked really hard with the UBC ethics board to ensure we are able to centre Indigenous people, communities, and Nations when doing oral testimonies,” said Kozar. “We were not willing to go forward with ethics unless we were able to have Indigenous communities lead this type of work.”
The ethics application, which was approved in April 2023 after a two-and-a-half-year process, ensured that communities could decide how they did the recordings, what was done with their recordings, how they were stored, and with whom the recordings would be shared — if anyone at all.
So far, the IRSHDC has done recordings with 11 communities through four different project partnerships. Kozar and McAtackney frequently travel to Indigenous communities and gatherings around BC to support people who engage with the OTP.
“With the Oral Testimony Program, communities decide how the information is stored and who has or doesn’t have access to the records,” said Kozar. “This is how you can be in service to Survivors, by letting the community guide and lead you.”
For Kozar, collaborating and partnering with Indigenous communities at UBC and beyond is foundational to her ongoing work at the IRSHDC to ensure Indigenous data sovereignty and advance truth and reconciliation.
“I am deeply committed to honouring Indigenous ways of knowing and continuing the heart work of supporting Survivors and their families,” said Kozar.
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
https://magazine.alumni.ubc.ca/2024/campus-community/supporting-survivors-access-residential-school-records
They took part in Apache ceremonies. Their schools expelled them for satanic activities
ReplyDeleteEducators on the Fort Apache Reservation have repeatedly condemned teens for participating in a sacred dance. It follows a pattern of Christian discipline begun more than a century ago
Nicolle Okoren with photographs by Trevor Christensen, The Guardian June 24, 2024
The way the school saw it, it was devil worship.
In October 2019, three teenage girls were punished for participating in a spiritual ceremony. Their Arizona school expelled two of them, and let the third off with a warning, citing their attendance as a violation of school policy and grounds for expulsion.
Caitlyn, now 18, says she and her friends were disciplined for participating in a Sunrise Dance, a traditional Native ceremony at the core of White Mountain Apache culture.
The Monday after the dance, Caitlyn’s parents told her to stay home that day. They had received a call from East Fork Lutheran school telling them not to send their daughter in. She didn’t know why. Then around noon, her mom got another phone call. The principal wanted to meet with Caitlyn, her parents and the local preacher. The principal and preacher also invited the two other girls and their families to their own private meetings with school leadership.
At the start of each meeting, the families were chastised for participating in the dance. Caitlyn remembers her mother telling the principal and preacher how hypocritical they were to say the Apache people were not praying to God. “In the Bible, God himself says to come to me in all sorts,” she argued. “The dance is also a prayer; it’s another way.”
The leadership of the school, on the Fort Apache Reservation, disagreed with that interpretation and used pictures of the event posted on Facebook as evidence for their expulsions.
The other two girls were immediately given letters of expulsion. Caitlyn was just given a warning. “I knew that I was already one of the principal’s favorites,” she says. “I think they just gave me a second chance, but they gave me a strong warning not to have a dance.”
For the first 12 years of her life, Caitlyn looked forward to having her own dance – a sacred coming-of-age experience celebrating the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s a great financial sacrifice for the family. Over four days, a girl’s community prays for her. They offer her gifts and witness her as she participates in rituals symbolizing her maturity and growth. A medicine man presides over the event, praying and singing with holy members of the community called Crown Dancers, who recite the creation story to the audience.
The idea meant the world to Caitlyn. But she didn’t have her own Sunrise Dance: if she were found out, she would be expelled from school immediately, a stain on on her permanent record that could affect her college opportunities.
At the time, her private school’s teachers were mostly white people who would often discuss the satanic nature of Apache traditions. When Caitlyn was in fifth grade, she was given an F on an art project for drawing the White Mountain Apache crest and including an eagle feather. An “A” student, she was devastated to be chastised this way. As Caitlyn remembers it, her teacher smiled and explained that this kind of project wasn’t allowed because it denoted “pagan worship”. Her father was furious but the family couldn’t do anything about it. It was what the girl and her family expected from the white people who worked on the reservation.
But these expulsions felt different. Watching other girls get publicly exiled from their school community meant that fear soon took root, cracking the foundation of Apache pride her family had worked to build beneath her.
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Caitlyn finished her eighth-grade year at East Fork Lutheran school and then moved on to a school off the reservation, but the damage was done. For the next four years, Caitlyn struggled to integrate into her Apache culture. She explained: “I didn’t allow myself to engage or talk about my culture,” she says. “Even after I graduated, I had that paranoia that I would get in trouble for talking about or participating in it.”
ReplyDeleteThree and a half years after the expulsions, in early 2023, nine women gathered in the front room of a small house on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation to talk about this pattern of expulsions.
In the middle of the room, two recording devices lay on opposite ends of the table. Abby, an older White Mountain Apache woman with her hair in a loose bun, hosted the evening. She sat down next to the black cast iron stove which had been lit hours before to keep the room warm and texted her sisters, Millie and Althea, who were coming.
Various women walked through her front door. Some were family members, others acquaintances. Nine women gathered to finally talk about what kept happening at East Fork Lutheran school.
Althea, the oldest of the sisters, spoke first. Two of her granddaughters were expelled from school in 2018 and 2019. She still has one of the school’s letters tucked away in a box in her house.
It states that these 13-year-old girls will only be allowed to return to school if they agree to confess in front of the Wels church, school and community that they were worshiping the devil when they took part in the Sunrise Dance. They must promise never to do it again.
Maria, a younger woman in her late 30s, was there to share a similar story. The school board found that she had also participated in what they considered a satanic ceremony. Her children were not allowed to return to school the next year. The school had decided to penalize the children for the perceived sins of their mother.
Astonishingly, this pattern of Christian discipline, started more than a century ago, had never stopped.
A ‘demonic manifestation’
The Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona spans 2,625 square miles – just a little larger than the state of Delaware, but with a population just over 14,600.
Based on our reporting and speaking with members of the tribe, there are over 80 churches on the reservation, representing 27 different Christian denominations. The tribe indicated that there was an official list the churches operating on the reservation but no list has been delivered.
East Fork Lutheran school was founded in 1951 by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (Wels), a religious group which has been active in Arizona since 1893 as part of its Apache Mission – an effort to convert “unreached tribes” to Christianity. This was one of many schools built on the reservation by Wels. The mission has shifted to now being focused on training Native American Christians to lead in the ministry and serve as missionaries to other Indigenous nations throughout the US and Canada.
The school is not unique in its dogma opposing traditional Indigenous practices; the vast majority of the churches on Apache land teach families who participate in traditional ceremonies that they’re damning themselves by worshiping the devil. The Whiteriver Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church, stated in its missionary handbook that Crown Dancers – those who help welcome the girl into womanhood during the Sunrise Dance – could be a “demonic manifestation”.
Since 2020, Wels has published 180 sermons on its YouTube channel, Native Christians. Thirty-one of the 190 videos – almost a fifth – include disparaging remarks about tribal practices including the Sunrise Dance or medicine men, including two completely dedicated to convincing the congregation of the evil within the Sunrise Dance.
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Only two Christian denominations operating on the reservation told me they do not include anti-traditional-Apache rhetoric in their sermons and ideology: the Catholic church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. Families on the reservation commonly have a similar understanding.
ReplyDeleteThe influence of this religious teaching throughout the community affects the tribal government as well. Less than half of the 11-person White Mountain Apache tribal council participates in Apache ceremonies, according to the councilmember Annette Tenijieth. She believes seven council people do not participate in Sunrise Dances or support the work of medicine men.
Apache families who send their children to the East Fork Lutheran school face a complicated choice. Some families do so because students in Christian schools are seen as more successful than those attending the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools down the road. Others simply value a Christian education, and feel that their children might get on the “right path” with that background.
Still, many families have their children participate in Native ceremonies, ignoring the school’s racist policies. They just hope they do not get found out by the teachers.
‘Mom, did you know you are worshiping false idols?’
“One would think that a story like this would be out of 1890, not 2024.”
When I talked to Dr Robert P Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a non-profit, non-partisan organization, he was dismayed that churches still teach against Indigenous tradition.
“It is worth noting that the posture being described comes from this conviction that European Christianity is the pinnacle of human civilization,” he said. “And anything other than that is inferior and worse religiously because it can lead you to eternal damnation.”
The Sunrise Dance is a celebration of puberty endowing girls with blessings from God and their community. It is one of the few Apache rituals that has survived the Indigenous genocide that resulted in the death of as many as 15 million Native Americans over the last 500 years.
The dance is sacred both because of its origin and the spiritual impact it has on a girl’s life.
Bruce Burnette, a White Mountain Apache medicine man – a spiritual leader endowed with traditional knowledge of healing – oversees these dances. Burnette explained:“It’s about the girl. The Sunrise Dance is not for today, not for tomorrow. It is fixing the room for her, fixing the road to success. The reason why it is so important is that a woman has got to be strong to move on the path to what she is going to become.”
According to Burnette, the dance came in a vision to an early medicine man. The ceremony has remained the same through the generations.
“The prayer that is put down for her is that it would be easy for her, that it would be comfortable for her in whatever she wants [to do],” Burnette said. “If she wants to go to military life, school, or look to find a job – everything will be there to be successful. That is the prayer that is put down.”
Maria’s crime, as the school saw it, was that she sponsored a Sunrise Dance – never mind that it took place on the weekend and off school grounds. In doing so, she helped welcome a friend’s daughter into adulthood and created a familial bond for the rest of her life, which is a huge honor. But just before the school year started, she received an email telling her that her children were not allowed to return.
Maria had sent her children to East Fork because she hoped a Christian education would harmoniously supplement the foundation of their Indigenous heritage and identity; she now realized that East Fork was extreme in its anti-traditionalism.
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She was devastated. During our interview, she cried as she explained the shame her daughters felt at not being allowed to go back to school. They were also nervous about being sent to the Bureau of Indian Affairs school, where the classes were bigger and they didn’t know anyone.
ReplyDeleteJust last year, the youngest of her three children attending the school came home from East Fork and asked: “Mom, did you know that when you go to Sunrise Dances, you are worshiping false idols?”
Maria was shocked. “Who told you that?” she asked.
“My teacher. She said watching the Crown Dancers is worshiping Satan.”
To hear this – and for her daughters to be told such insulting falsehoods – was mind-blowing. “Our ceremonies are what we were blessed with, our language, our everything,” Maria said. “Those are the things we were blessed with to be Apache people. So I try to explain it to them in a way where they understand: no, we’re not doing anything bad here. We’re not.”
Maria described feeling powerless – like she was hitting a wall in speaking to church leaders. (The Guardian received no answer from Wels after asking about Maria’s experience.)
All the while, her kids were wading in uncertainty about the nature of their cultural identities. Were they evil if they participated in ceremonies, or was it permitted? Who was right?
“I felt like the longer I kept them at the school, the more confused they were,” Maria said.
Still, she hoped to keep them there because the classroom setting was good. The student-to-teacher ratio was small. They received guaranteed attention by their teachers and a thorough education.
When it came time for registration, Maria did not receive any notification from the school. It finally notified her two weeks before the school year started that her children would not be invited back. She had to move them to the public school. “Now that they’re in a public school, and they’ve adjusted to it, they are more proud of their traditions or culture, they’re more proud of who they are,” she said.
A Wels spokesperson responded to requests for comment by saying, “Wels churches serve people by proclaiming the entirety of God’s message to us as presented in the Bible. Apache members, teachers and pastors have been faithful leaders as our Wels churches strive to present God’s truth among communities with their own valued religious practices. Wels has had a trusted partnership with members of the White Mountain Apache Tribe in sharing the message of the Bible dating back to 1893.”
Maria and her family no longer attend church. Though they are still devoted Christians, they’re not comfortable in that space. “Rather than giving a lecture about the Bible, the preachers bring it back to culture – ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this. You’re not supposed to be doing that,’” she explained.
Even the programs handed out at the beginning of the service have an unwelcome message written on the front: it states that if you have participated in a Sunrise Dance, you cannot take communion.
‘Kill the Indian in him, and save the man’
In August 2022, the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota voted to kick out a missionary from the Pine Ridge Reservation who was distributing anti-traditional proselytizing materials. The nation now requires all missionaries and religious groups to register and go through a background investigation before entering the reservation and working.
No Indigenous nations in Arizona have publicly enacted these same regulations for a myriad of reasons – one being the short-term welfare perks of having religious groups freely operating on the reservation. Religious groups bring in donations, food and clothes to a population impoverished by crippling racist policies and the psychological legacy of genocide and spiritual abuse. The price for these benefits can include being forced to let go of tradition and Indigenity.
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Tenijieth, the councilmember, explained that the White Mountain Apache Tribe is caught in a difficult position when it comes to expelling Wels from East Fork. “We can take that land back if we want to, but nobody has brought it up because there is a school there,” she explained. “Even though they are twisting the children’s minds, it is still a better school than others. We need to stand strong. Keep your language strong. Teach your children how to speak Apache … that’s the reason why we’re a sovereign nation.”
ReplyDeleteThere is a straight line between the beliefs that underwrote Christopher Columbus’s claims to the Americas and the current attitudes of religious leaders on the reservation.
Columbus modeled the essence of the 1493 papal decree the doctrine of discovery, which consecrated any “new” territory not yet inhabited by Christians for the Christian world. When Columbus landed in the Americas, he claimed it for both Catholicism and Spain, officially intertwining religion with real estate.
In 1845, the doctrine of discovery was reminted for the country’s largely Protestant population as the doctrine of manifest destiny – the spiritual right for new Americans to expand westward and claim all territory in the name of “progress”.
Year after year, new policies were drafted to ensure that the Indigenous nations already living westward would help keep pioneers who chose to cross the Mississippi River safe. Treaties were signed under the illusion that the US government would honor land rights and cultural identity.
But in 1883, the Office of Indian Affairs, within the Department of Interior, established the Code of Indian Offenses, making it illegal to participate in traditional ceremonies. It wasn’t until 1978, with the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, that participating in the Sunrise Dance was decriminalized.
The establishment of the Office of Indian Affairs paved the way for the 1887 Dawes Act, which divided tribal lands into allotments and included a provision that entitled religious organizations that worked with Indigenous people to keep up to 160 acres of federal land to support their missions.
To this day, these churches still draw from the spiritual legacies of Christian missions and receive funding from off-reservation congregations under that definition. Global Ministries of the United Methodist church spent over $11m in 2022 for missionary services. Wels spent $661,018 just for the Apache missions and over $23.5m for all missions, as laid out in its most recent report, from 2023.
Wels first came to Arizona in 1892, five years after the Dawes Act. When it was clear that exterminating the Apache people would not be possible, the federal government engaged Christian denominations working with the military to force the assimilation of the Indigenous people. RH Pratt, the superintendent of the first “industrial” boarding school under this policy, coined the term that embodied the philosophy behind these institutions: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Federal boarding school policy allowed the military to forcibly remove Apache children from their families and send them to industrial schools in an attempt to militarize and alter their identities. They were forbidden to practice their religion or speak their language, and reports of physical and sexual abuse were common. Many children never returned home.
If an Indigenous child was found outside during school hours, Indigenous police were appointed to snatch the child and deliver them to a school under the US military’s jurisdiction. If a parent sought to hide their child, they could be imprisoned or cut off from food and other necessary daily supplies.
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Apache children were kidnapped and taken as far as Pennsylvania, where they were forced to fully assimilate into Anglo-Christian society. Their clothes were burned, their language forgotten. Many children died of disease, neglect or abuse. And while the number of deaths is not yet known, it is believed that Apache children comprise a quarter of the graves at Carlisle Indian Industrial school.
ReplyDeleteTo think that 1800s attitudes towards Apache children have changed would be a mistake.
Outside of the Wels mission, volunteers of other denominations drive around in colorful buses and still pick children up throughout the reservation, whether on the side of the road or other public areas. They take them to play games and learn about their version of Jesus and then drop the kids off again where they found them hours before. Parents are not always told or asked permission.
Ministry members post on social media about the good they are doing by “be[ing] the hands and feet of Jesus to some of the most vulnerable kids in our nation”. They then post pictures of themselves surrounded by garbage, validating their projection of vulnerability on these families.
Referring to how white missionaries target communities of color and paint their converts as impoverished victims in need of Christianity, Jones, the Public Religion Research Institute founder, said: “I’ll put it as bluntly as I can. I think it’s because most white Christian denominations in this country have hardly begun to reckon with how white supremacy has become deeply embedded in our faith. So we perpetuate it, sometimes consciously but often unconsciously.”
He continued: “If you happen to be a Christian and of European extraction in some way, it’s a pretty powerful drug to think that your race and your religion were chosen by God and represent the pinnacle of human achievement. There’s power in asserting that vision. And at the end of the day, it’s about power. While we are beginning to see serious efforts to try to disentangle white supremacy from Christianity, that legacy still haunts us.”
As recently as 2022, the Wels leadership published an article directly translating the words of an early pastor from German to English detailing how Hitler’s regime united Lutheranism in Germany, although it does describe misgivings about how Hitler handled the rest of the country.
This article was featured in the quarterly magazine sent to all of their congregation members throughout the country.
‘That’s a stupid question. That is a white-person question’
Millie’s husband, Ramon Riley, the Apache cultural resource director at the White Mountain Apache Culture Center and Museum, attends the Catholic church and remains devoted to the traditions and rituals of his Apache identity.
I asked him how he reconciles his Christian faith with the history of violence upon the Apache people in the name of Jesus Christ.
He took a beat. “That’s a stupid question. That is a white-person question.”
His response, when pressed, encapsulates the huge gap in understanding about the religious binary white people operate in and the spiritual life Riley identifies with. “I have intergenerational historical trauma. I get through it by doing my sweat.”
Riley attends Catholic mass and then immediately does a ceremonial sweat. He finds solace in both practices and brings up the Catholic church’s repeated apologies for past wrongdoing.
In 1987, Pope John Paul II came to Arizona and made it clear that ceremony and tradition were not a threat to Catholicism. And in March 2023, Pope Francis repudiated the doctrine of discovery. On a 2022 tour of atonement in Canada, he said: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”
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When asked the same question about the relationship between Native traditional religion and Christianity, Tenijieth’s answer is similar: “God hears our prayers. Who are we praying to? We are praying to the same God as they’re praying to. White people cannot judge us, you know? Only God can judge us.”
ReplyDeleteShe explained that Christianity and traditional religion are the same: both worship the same God. She will defend her Christian beliefs as hard as she will defend her right to the protection of the Sunrise Dance.
Dr Greg Johnson, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, notes that many Christian traditions tout an all-or-nothing viewpoint. “Time and again, Native peoples have said, ‘You know what, we will re-engineer your Christianity to better suit our purposes. So even if you tell us it’s exclusive, even if you discipline us in a way, cut our hair, dress us, make us feel a certain way, we’re not done being Apache and we will make your Christianity do things you didn’t expect.’”
The morning of Good Friday, Father John Cormack, presiding priest of St Francis of Assisi Catholic church in Fort Apache, agreed to an interview in his office. His ministry – a rarity on the reservation – is an example of the weaving of Apache tradition into Christianity. The chapel is decorated in Apache symbols and sacred tools. When he collects written prayers, Father John uses Apache traditional burden baskets, canes and other ceremonial objects. Above the door are Eagle feathers, a sacred symbol of strength.
He’s known to attend Sunrise Dances and offer a prayer at the ceremony when invited to do so. “We encounter God in many, many ways. And each other in all these beautiful traditions,” he said.
Father John, who came from Castlebar, in Ireland, took on this role right before the pandemic hit. He grew emotional as we spoke, pausing throughout the conversation to consider the parallel of the British empire’s impact on Ireland and the US occupying the land of the Indigenous nations.
He cried over the shared injustice of his people and also the people he was serving. He cried over the sins of the past and present committed in the name of Christ.
“We have to always look for justice. Gandhi, in another country under British rule, said, ‘If it weren’t for Christians, I’d be a Christian.’ It’s difficult to talk about but no matter what, you should always seek justice for all of us. That is what Christ did.” (Gandhi was quoted as saying: “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.”)
Wels went as far as banning Millie from participating in communion because she sponsored a Sunrise Dance.
The Guardian reached out to each of the six Wels pastors preaching in the White Mountain Apache and San Carlos Apache Reservations separately to discuss their beliefs surrounding the Sunrise Dance and received no response.
Millie, Althea and Abby have spoken to their Wels pastor to ask why the church is becoming more determined in its anti-Indigenous ideology. In the past, the preachers did not actively scout out those who participated in Apache traditions and then cut them off from church services. They have received no substantial response.
Private schools operate as they choose, and there are no legal precedents, nor federal laws or policies, which could be used to protect Indigenous beliefs in this context. Even in public schools, Indigenous students and communities are still fighting in court to be allowed to wear traditional tribal regalia, traditional hairstyles, or tribal clothing, especially during high school graduation ceremonies.
‘We still have to use the white man’s weapon to keep what is rightfully ours’
When Naelyn Pike, of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, was just 14 years old, she moved from Mesa, Arizona, back to the San Carlos Apache Reservation.
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A few weeks in, a school friend pressured her to convert to Lutheranism, making her question whether she would go to hell if she did not convert and give up her traditional ways.
ReplyDeletePike, now 24, was shocked. As a young woman with an ancestry of activists and community leaders, Naelyn knew that to better serve her people, she needed to understand what these missions were teaching them.
Once she started college, she decided to take catechism lessons to better understand what her community was taught. She went to college in Mesa – three hours from the reservation – and drove back to the reservation on weekends to attend classes.
“I would go to church sometimes to see what it was like. The one thing I remember is one of the pastors had told the congregation, ‘It’s OK if you wear your camp dress, but it’s when you believe in it [as a spiritual or cultural act], you shouldn’t wear it. It’s OK to eat your fry bread, but it’s when you believe in eating the frybread that you shouldn’t eat it,” she said.
Naelyn was devastated. Following a visit to the church, she got in her car to make her way back to Mesa Community College, but made one sacred stop at Oak Flat, a swath of land in the Tonto national forest of utmost sanctity. It is believed to be the largest copper deposit in North America, and the federal government wants to transfer it to Resolution Copper, a mining project owned by the mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP.
That day, Naelyn walked towards the mesa and, through her sadness and heartbreak, she prayed for her people.
“There’s so many missionaries or organizations that come in thinking that they can [teach the Apache people that living in their culture is wrong] because now we’re the shadow in this country. We’re the dust underneath the carpet. We’re the people that are never seen, even though we’re the First People. There’s this whole idea that we’re people of the past, we’re not people of the present or the future.”
On 1 March 2024, the ninth circuit court of appeals ruled 6-5 in favor of Resolution Copper. The decision is expected to be appealed to the US supreme court in the upcoming months.
The court’s decision will be largely dependent on the interpretation of the 1852 treaty of Santa Fe, and was signed by representatives of the US government and various Apache leaders, including Chief Mangas Coloradas.
More than 170 years later, Mangas Coloradas’s direct descendant Michelle Colelay sits at a table with three of her four daughters and her husband, Chester, a descendant of another great chief, Chief Alchesay.
“We’re still fighting,” she said. “We still have to use the white man’s weapon to keep what is rightfully ours, so we are fighting in court. What are they going to do with it? It doesn’t have any meaning to them, except monetary. They wouldn’t allow us to go into their homes and take whatever we wanted. So why would they do the same to us? In many different ways. It is hurtful. It is frustrating.”
When the Colelays’ first daughter was six or seven years old, she asked her parents if it was true what she was learning at the Wels church, that participating in traditional ceremonies was tied to the devil.
After that Sunday, they never went back to the Wels church.
“We tell our stories to our kids. We want them to feel it, see it, live it, and be part of it,” Chester said. “When the Spirit gets to you, you can either be at the river, on top of the mountain, praying in front of your house, inside a church, it could be at a Sunrise ceremony. Wherever the spirit catches you is where you belong. That’s where God is at. God is not just in church. God is everywhere.”
Through it all, the Colelay family said, “we’re still here.
“We’re still surviving. And we are always Apache first.”
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/24/apache-students-school-reservation
First Nation, Catholic Church agree on residential school truths
ReplyDelete'Residential school system did do great damage,' archbishop says
by Courtney Dickson · CBC News · June 26, 2024
Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc and the Vancouver and Kamloops arms of the Catholic Church have released the details of a signed document agreeing to a historical record acknowledging the harms caused by residential schools and the role the church played.
On Easter Sunday, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, Diocese of Kamloops and the First Nation gathered to sign a Sacred Covenant outlining how it will work with the First Nation toward reconciliation.
"The signing of this sacred covenant is a step in the right direction," Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Kúkpi7 Rosanne Casimir said during a news conference on Wednesday.
"We all need to rebuild our relationships at every level and walk this journey together."
Archbishop J. Michael Miller said the church intends to work with Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc on a path to healing.
Agreed upon truth
The largest part of the Sacred Covenant is a set of agreed-upon truths about the history of the institution.
The covenant reads:
"The Catholic Church now recognizes that the consequences of Indian Residential Schools were profoundly negative and have had a lasting and damaging effect on Aboriginal culture, heritage, and language. While some former students have spoken positively about their experience at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, these stories are overshadowed by tragic accounts of the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children, and their separation from their families and communities, including Secwepemc, Sylix, Nlaka'pamux, and St'át'imc Nations."
Additionally, it says that regardless of what comes to light in the future, the Catholic parties agree that separating children from their families was harmful and "violates Catholic social teaching."
The covenant also contains a commitment from both parties to take further action to honour those truths and reconciliation, including memorials for children forced to attend residential schools, mental health support and collaboration on the ongoing investigation into what happened at the institution.
This comes after Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation shared that preliminary findings from a ground-penetrating radar survey found what is described as some 200 potential burial sites on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021.
"Elders and survivors have always spoken of children dying and disappearing while at the school," Casimir said.
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Residential schools were often underfunded and overcrowded, and according to the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), the education offered was poor.
ReplyDeleteChildren forced to attend residential schools were punished for speaking their own languages and engaging in other cultural practices, the NCTR says. Many suffered verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students.
"The schools hurt the children," the NCTR says on its website.
"Children were deprived of healthy examples of love and respect. The distinct cultures, traditions, languages, and knowledge systems of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples were eroded by forced assimilation."
The Kamloops Indian Residential School was in operation from 1890 to 1969, when the federal government took over administration from the Catholic Church to operate it as a residence for a day school until it closed in 1978.
"The residential school system did do great damage to the language, customs, traditions in this community, and we see the ongoing impact of that today," Miller said.
"The church was wrong in how it complied in implementing a government colonialist policy which resulted in the separation of children from parents and their families."
Template for other agreements
The last action in the covenant is a plan to pass on this work to other First Nations and dioceses.
Both Casimir and Miller are hopeful other Indigenous and Christian communities across the country will establish relationships and take steps toward reconciliation.
"We encourage all Catholics and indeed all Canadians to learn more about the ongoing challenges faced by Indigenous people," Miller said.
Casimir said she believes the covenant sets a precedent for other communities.
"It takes everybody at every level to be walking that path and journey together," she said.
"I would encourage others to also build and establish those relationships, to be able to take those meaningful steps."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BAps-te-secw%C3%A9pemc-catholic-church-sacred-covenant-1.7247437
History of residential school cemeteries is evidence of genocide, interlocutor says
ReplyDeleteKimberly Murray issues historical report, an 'antidote to denialism,' as she works toward final report
by Brett Forester · CBC News · July 03, 2024
WARNING: This article contains images of residential school pupils in cemeteries.
The history of residential school burial sites is evidence of crimes against humanity that could in theory be prosecuted, the special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked burials says.
Kimberly Murray, a federally appointed official tasked with recommending a new framework for the treatment of these sites, outlines the conclusion in a report released Wednesday.
"The histories of the cemeteries that were located at former Indian residential school sites are evidence of genocide and mass human rights violations," says the report, titled Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience.
"The lack of care given to Indigenous children during their lives at Indian residential schools carried over to their deaths and burials."
The historical review says government policies prioritized saving money over the humane treatment of the children who died, their families and communities.
"Government and church officials made decisions and created policies that led to the deliberate desecration of the burial sites of Indigenous children. At times, these officials even actively participated in these desecrations," the report says.
"Through both their actions and failures to act, the government and church entities created the crisis of missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials that survivors, Indigenous families, and communities are facing today."
In an interview, Murray said the report is meant as a companion to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report on missing children and unmarked burials. The difference is that the interlocutor's report reproduces evidence like historical records and images.
The goal is to counter denialism by demonstrating there were cemeteries, where children were sometimes made to work, at residential schools and other institutions, Murray said.
"This is meant to be an evidentiary piece of the genocide and the crimes against humanity that supplements, complements and supports what the survivors have been saying for decades," she said.
Murray was appointed in 2022 with a mandate recently extended to October 2024. She doesn't expect the federal government to respond officially to this report, as it doesn't convey her final recommendations.
A spokesperson for Justice Minister Arif Virani responded to an interview request with a statement.
"We will take the time to give proper consideration to the Special Interlocutor's recommendations as we await her final report expected this fall," wrote spokesperson Chantalle Aubertin.
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree was not available for an interview and also responded by statement.
"We acknowledge the profound pain that this report brings to light and recognize the ongoing trauma experienced by Indigenous Peoples as a result of these atrocities," wrote spokesperson Matthieu Perrotin, when asked if the minister accepts Murray's conclusion.
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Perrotin thanked Murray for the additional piece of work and said the government is committed to supporting communities doing this work, having already supported 145 commemoration and search projects totalling $216.5 million as of June 19.
ReplyDelete'Antidote to denialism'
Murray highlighted three images in the report that she described as highly sensitive. The faces of children in the photos are blurred in the report to hide their identities.
One of them shows roughly two dozen children gathered in the cemetery at Dunbow Industrial School, also known as St. Joseph's, in southern Alberta. In that photo, the children stand amid wooden crosses marking what could be children's graves.
"Many children were buried in the institution's graveyard; in some cases, children were buried two to three in one coffin. Children who were forced to work in the Dunbow cemetery are seen in a photograph from 1918," the report says.
Another photo shows children carrying a casket led by a priest in Carcross, Yukon, circa 1930s. Public records suggest some children who died at Chooutla Indian Residential School along Nares Lake in Yukon were buried in the Carcross cemetery, the report says.
Another picture shows children kneeling over, and possibly tending to, a grave in the Kenora residential school cemetery in 1941.
"That was a difficult decision whether to put those photos in, because they're very triggering," Murray said.
"But as we say in the description, it's like an antidote to denialism."
The office will be making the case in its final report that "many of these children were disappeared" in the legal sense.
"And so what does that mean? That means that the state has an obligation to access and facilitate access to the truth," she said.
"Enforced disappearance is an ongoing crime. It continues until you know the fate of the children. And we don't know the fate of all the children at this point."
But, she added, the records do show the manner in which some were buried.
"We're finding, as you read the report today, that they are in mass graves, they are in common graves, they are in cemeteries, in unmarked mass graves," she said.
"They are on the site of Indian residential schools. There's no disputing the evidence that was hidden away in the archives."
Murray also stressed the issue reaches far beyond residential schools, encompassing institutions like Indian hospitals, sanitoriums and reformatories where pupils were taken.
She pointed to the example of the Cecil Butters Memorial Hospital in Austin, Que., where the report says "several Indigenous children died," and "many are buried in unmarked and mass graves in and around the former site" of the hospital.
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/interlocutor-kimberly-murray-historical-report-1.7253567
Growing Residential School Denialism Is an Attack on Truth
ReplyDeleteHow to identify it, and how to push back against dangerous false claims.
by Crystal Gail Fraser, The Conversation July 4, 2024
Crystal Gail Fraser is an associate professor in the department of history, classics and religion and the faculty of Native studies at the University of Alberta.
In 2021, three short years ago, #CancelCanadaDay was trending on social media following announcements about thousands of unmarked graves at the former sites of Indian Residential Schools across Canada.
Today, research is expanding on the history of child institutionalization and death at these residential schools. However, there is also a disturbing and harmful movement to deny the truth of residential school history. It is important that we counter these harmful and factually incorrect narratives with truths based on survivors’ experiences.
Since 2015, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has been carrying out critically important knowledge gathering, including accessing previously undisclosed church and government records.
Today, there are other national mechanisms in place to advance this work, such as the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, or NAC, and the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.
There are also new ways to share research and learn about the work that others are doing. These include NAC’s community events, the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor’s national events, the annual Indigenous History and Heritage Gathering and various regional events across the country.
Survivors recount their experiences
Survivors have been at the forefront of these initiatives. For decades — long before national interest or acknowledgment — they have been sharing their oral histories, trying to educate the Canadian public about what happened at residential schools.
We have heard first-hand experiences of trauma, violence, heartache and death at institutions operated by Christian churches and funded by the Canadian government. Survivors have also told incredible stories of strength, adversity and defiance in the face of this genocide.
I sit on the National Advisory Committee. It includes Indigenous studies scholars, archivists, archeologists, forensic scientists, former police investigators, health workers, survivors, Elders and Knowledge Keepers. We are available to provide expertise and guidance to those communities and First Nations wishing to undertake this difficult work. A part of our approach is to ensure that the voices of survivors are always central.
Persistent denialism
Despite all efforts, there are loud and persistent voices trying to turn back the clock to a time when survivors were silenced, and Canada’s history was told through the lens of anti-Indigenous racism and white supremacy.
People who engage in denialism say things like residential schools “weren’t that bad” or that the extent of student death at these institutions has been “blown out of proportion.” Denialists might argue survivors are lying about the various forms of child abuse at the hands of Christian missionaries and that Indigenous Peoples should be grateful to have received an education. They point to the plight of historical Canadian settlers to undermine this genocide.
Scholars Sean Carleton and Daniel Heath Justice have written of how denialism is about denying what happened at residential schools, but also about rejecting and misrepresenting basic facts. They offer eight ways to identify residential school denialism.
At the core of denialism is deception. People who engage in residential school denialism seek to call irrefutable historical facts into question. They either ignore or soften the actions of both churches and governments in Canadian history.
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Worst of all, denialism seeks to silence survivors and discredit their experiences. Survivors are vital members of our community. They are Elders, Knowledge Keepers, leaders and treasured diduus and didiis (grandmothers and grandfathers).
ReplyDeleteCanada’s History Society and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation co-authored the document “Listening to Survivors” for people to better understand the importance of survivors’ voices and experiences.
To disregard or undermine survivors’ experiences and knowledge is one example of how denialism persists in contemporary times. It is underpinned by racist beliefs that Indigenous Peoples are inferior, inept, incapable and backwards when compared with white settlers or European societies. This ideology was the main driver of settler colonialism in Canada and was used to justify the creation of the residential schooling system and other harmful policies.
It is hardly surprising that this practice continues. Academic disciplines, such as history and anthropology and others, have long dismissed the words and experiences of Indigenous Peoples. Archives that house the documents historians rely on exclude the perspectives of the people who experienced this genocide, since records were largely created by settler missionaries, Indian agents, teachers and administrators.
Teaching about residential schools
Although there is now a wide body of public information about residential schools, many people continue to have limited knowledge about them. That provides fertile ground for denialists to spread lies.
As a university educator, I see these people in the classroom. They are all ages and genders and come from many backgrounds. Some are Indigenous themselves.
Indeed, there is a misconception that intergenerational survivors know exactly what our relatives and family members experienced. However, because of residential school trauma, these stories are sometimes not shared, even in our own communities.
Some people did not learn anything about residential schools before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or received a shallow overview in high school. There are also newcomers to Canada who may have a history of colonialism in their home countries but do not know the Canadian story.
People who have limited knowledge about the history of residential schools are not denialists, but they can be at risk of accepting denialist propaganda without realizing it.
Quashing denialism
One of the ways that denialism manifests is by calling for Indigenous Peoples to provide proof of genocide at residential schools. For denialists, survivors’ experiences, backed by evidence, are not enough.
They want us to exhume bodies. This talking point falsely suggests that we don’t already have enough proof of the genocidal intent and outcomes of the schools. There is the danger that this rhetoric will pressure communities to move at an uncomfortable pace or lead governments to sever support when there aren’t immediate and concrete results.
But even if we exhumed the bodies of our ancestors, would that be enough? Denialists would likely find another way to call Indigenous truths and evidence into question.
At the NAC, one thing that is clear from our conversations with community is that every aspect of research related to residential schools is complex, multi-faceted and onerous. This work requires a high level of trauma-informed care and consideration for the impacts on survivors and their families.
Families and communities continue to search for answers about the children who never came home. The best way to counter denialism is to support Indigenous Peoples in this difficult and ongoing journey so the truth of residential schools can be told as fully and accurately as possible, and so our communities and families can find healing through this process.
to see the links embedded in this article go to:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/07/04/Growing-Residential-School-Denialism/
At Least 973 Native Children Died in the US’s Abusive Boarding School System
ReplyDeleteThe Interior Department’s investigative report also issues recommendations but stops short of calling for reparations.
By Mary Annette Pember & Stewart Huntington, ICT July 31, 2024
The U.S. Department of the Interior released its final investigative report Tuesday on the ugly history of federal Indian boarding schools, calling for a formal apology from the U.S. government and ongoing support to help Native people recover from the generational trauma that endures.
The second — and concluding — report from the department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative also calls for return of lands that once housed the boarding schools, and construction of a national memorial to honor the children who were separated from their families and forced to attend schools that sought to wipe out their culture, identity and language.
The overarching theme of the boarding school initiative report and recommendations is that of healing for Indian Country, with a list of specific ways the federal government can tangibly assist tribal nations and peoples. It also reported that hundreds of additional children are now known to have died at the boarding schools and that additional burial sites had been discovered.
“The federal government — facilitated by the department I lead — took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, said in a statement released with the report.
“These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair,” said Haaland, who became the first Native person to be included in a presidential cabinet when she was tapped by President Joe Biden to lead the department.
“The Road to Healing does not end with this report – it is just beginning,” she said.
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During a press conference Tuesday afternoon outlining the report’s findings, Haaland appeared to choke up when discussing the impact the schools have had on Native families, including her own.
ReplyDelete“History has shaped our nation and … for too long it’s been swept under the rug,” she said. “All while communities grapple with the undeniable fallout of intergenerational trauma. I’m so proud of the strength of our team, our accomplishments here today, and where this initiative will lead us. We are here because our ancestors persevered. It is our duty to share their stories.”
The report and its recommendations were authored by Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community.
“For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children,” Newland said in a statement.
“This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations – that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways,” Newland said. “It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”
Ruth Anna Buffalo, president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), said the report is a good step but that more research and effort are needed.
The coalition has led efforts to bring the facts of the boarding school era out of history’s shadows, focusing its efforts on the people most impacted by the schools — especially the Native ancestors who died at the schools but remain uncounted.
“The report is important for the families of those directly affected, for those left with no answers,” said Buffalo, a citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation. “It’s a heavy topic that deserves to be handled with love and care. … Our ancestors were very spiritual people and I find it hard to comprehend how they were treated in such a way.”
The wounds of the era hit home for Buffalo and her family.
“Unfortunately, it’s a common thread for the First Peoples of these lands,” to have personal, lived experience with boarding school-era trauma, she said. “There is much more work that needs to be done.”
Hundreds More Deaths
The Department of the Interior’s final report of the Federal Boarding School Initiative largely makes good on promises from its initial report issued in May 2022, which called for continuing the investigation into the scope of the federal boarding school system.
Haaland’s initiative and the launch of the investigation in 2021 represented the first official U.S. effort to acknowledge the existence of the boarding school era and its negative impact on Native peoples.
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The initial report for the first time included historical records of boarding school names and locations, and the first official list of burial sites of children who died at the schools.
ReplyDeleteThe latest report, which officials said included a review of more than 100 million pages of documents, expands on those findings to report that student deaths at boarding schools are nearly double what had previously been reported, increasing from an estimated 500 to 973.
The estimated number of identified boarding schools also increased, from 407 to 417, and the number of “other” institutions such as orphanages and asylums with similar missions of assimilation increased from 1,000 to 1,025.
Researchers verified the identity of 18,624 students who attended boarding schools from 1819 to 1969, and identified 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at schools versus 53 sites shared in the first report.
The report also estimates that the U.S. government budgeted more than $23 billion, converted to 2023 U.S. dollars, on the federal boarding school system.
Notably, the latest report contains additional findings and recommendations that are more specific than those found in the past document, and in all cases, authors stated that the actual numbers in all categories will likely increase as research continues.
The latest report comes as Congress is making progress on legislation in the House and Senate that would create a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies with authority to investigate not just federal schools but also private and church-run schools.
Deb Parker, chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, noted that the introduction to the report is a letter from Newland that cites an incident in which the U.S. military took 104 Hopi children from their families and sent them to boarding school. The U.S. Cavalry then returned to arrest 19 Hopi leaders as prisoners of war after they refused to send any more children.
“This is just one incident of hundreds or thousands,” said Parker, Tulalip Tribes. “[But] when one amplifies this across the country, it tells a horrific story. It’s devastating not only to children but also to communities and their families.”
Parker said NABS has been interviewing boarding school survivors across the country as part of a project with the Department of the Interior, funded by the Mellon Foundation and Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“The stories are mostly devastating in nature,” she said. “It’s so concerning that for so many, this is the first opportunity they have had to tell their stories and receive some sort of acknowledgement of the pain they’ve endured.”
She continued, “We are reeling from these stories and trying to understand our next steps. I believe this second volume of the DOI report is incredibly important in helping guide us in taking these next steps. It’s important to listen to survivors and hear their recommendations directly…. I think we’re headed in the right direction.”
https://truthout.org/articles/at-least-973-native-children-died-in-the-uss-abusive-boarding-school-system/
Investigation finds at least 973 Indigenous children died in U.S. government boarding schools
ReplyDeleteReport calls for a formal apology from the U.S. government
The Associated Press · July 31, 2024
At least 973 Indigenous children died in the U.S. government's abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by Interior Department officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.
Based on available records, the Department concludes at least 973 documented child deaths occurred across the federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and 1969. The investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white society.
The findings don't specify how each child died, but officials said the causes of death included disease and abuse. Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said.
The findings follow a series of listening sessions held by Haaland over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted harmful and often degrading treatment they endured at the hands of teachers and administrators while separated from their families.
"The federal government took deliberate and strategic action through boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures, and connections that are foundational to Native people," Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country's first Indigenous Cabinet secretary, said in a Tuesday call with reporters.
"Make no mistake," she added, "This was a concerted attempt to eradicate the quote, 'Indian problem' — to either assimilate or destroy Native peoples altogether."
'A forgotten history'
In their initial findings two yeas ago, officials had estimated more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died at the schools. The federal government passed laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools, which were still operating in the 1960s.
The schools gave Indigenous children English names, put them through military drills and forced them to perform manual labour, such as farming, brick-making and working on railways, officials said.
Former students shared tearful recollections of their experience during the listening sessions in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Alaska and other states. They talked about being punished for speaking their Indigenous languages, getting locked in basements, and having their hair cut to stamp out their identities. They were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and the withholding of food. Many left the schools with only basic vocational skills that gave them few job prospects.
Donovan Archambault, 85, the former chairman of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, said beginning at age 11 he was sent away to boarding schools where he was mistreated, forced to cut his hair and prevented from speaking his language. He said the experience led him to drink alcohol heavily before he turned his life around more than two decades later. He never talked about his school days with his children until he wrote a book about the experience several years ago.
"An apology is needed. They should apologize," Archambault told The Associated Press by phone Tuesday.
"But there also needs to be a broader education about what happened to us. To me, it's part of a forgotten history."
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Haaland said she was personally "sorry beyond words," but there should also be a formal apology from the federal government. She didn't say if she would press President Joe Biden to issue one.
ReplyDeleteInterior Department officials also recommended that the government invest in programs that could help Indigenous communities heal from the traumas caused by boarding schools. That includes money for education, violence prevention and the revitalization of Indigenous languages — on a scale commensurate with government spending on the schools, agency officials said.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the institutions received federal money as partners in the campaign to "civilize" Indigenous students, according to the new report.
Truth and Healing Commission proposed
By the 1920s, most Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 children — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
"These are stolen generations of children," said Deborah Parker, CEO for the Minnesota-based group.
"It's about time the federal government speak so honestly and candidly about the impact."
Haaland said her own grandparents were "stolen from their parents, culture and communities" when they were eight years old and forced to live in a Catholic boarding school until they were 13. Others who went to schools were as young as four, she said.
More than 200 schools supported by the government had a religious affiliation, federal officials said. The boarding school coalition has identified more than 100 additional schools not on the government list that were run by churches, with no evidence of federal support.
U.S. Catholic bishops in June apologized for the church's role in trauma the children experienced. And in 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church's co-operation with residential schools in Canada. He said the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
Legislation pending before Congress would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to further document past injustices related to boarding schools. The legislation would give the commission authority to subpoena people for evidence.
But Catholic bishops pushed back against giving that subpoena power in a letter to lawmakers last week. Members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote that the commission should "avoid an adversarial posture" since they are willing to co-operate.
to see the photos and links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/us-boarding-schools-interior-report-1.7281319
Secwépemc-led documentary ‘Sugarcane’ wins directing award at Sundance
ReplyDeleteThrough multiple stories, the film tells the history of the St. Joseph’s Mission — from painful truths about genocide to the love that persists within families
By Dionne Phillips, IndigiNews, February 2, 2024
A Secwépemc-led documentary examining the former St. Joseph’s Mission and its ongoing impact has been recognized with an award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Sugarcane had its world premiere on Jan. 20 at Sundance, where co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie also won the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary.
The directors were joined on stage at the premiere by Julian’s father Ed Archie NoiseCat, Williams Lake First Nation Kúkwpi7 Willie Sellars and St. Joseph’s Mission investigators Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing, who are all featured in the documentary.
Sugarcane is rooted at the Sugarcane Reserve near Williams Lake, focusing on the stories of people who are affected by the notorious residential “school” that operated between 1891 to 1981.
Notably, the documentary reveals truths about infanticides that took place at the institution — something that’s long been discussed by survivors who have spoken of an incinerator at the “school.”
The Sundance award jury called Sugarcane “an important voice for truth and healing.”
“Benefiting from sensitive cinematography, careful producing, and editing that interweaves multiple narratives, these directors helped illuminate the urgency of history and the interconnected, multi-generational crimes experienced by a community,” the jury’s citation said.
‘The decision to participate felt completely straightforward’
Co-director Kassie said she started work on the film after evidence of 215 unmarked graves was found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) in 2021.
“I just felt gut-pulled, I felt an urgency to help platform this story and make sure that people’s voices were heard,” she said in an interview with IndigiNews.
With a background in investigative journalism and filmmaking, Kassie has covered atrocities in areas such as Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Turkey.
“I had never turned my lens on my own country’s horrors to its first peoples,” she said.
While she was researching, Kassie found an article discussing an upcoming investigation at the St. Joseph’s Mission (SJM) on the Sugarcane reserve. The SJM was run by the Catholic order the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Along with all the “schools” in “Canada” and the “United States,” it was designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into colonial society.
In her first talk with WLFN Chief Sellars, Kassie recalled, he commended the Creator’s timing and said the council recently discussed having their investigation documented. From that point, Kassie was invited into the community.
Kassie began collaborating with NoiseCat after that talk — the two were already friends, and she knew him as an incredible storyteller, leader and historian of the Secwépemc region. NoiseCat is a member of the Tsq̓éscen̓ First Nation (Canim Lake Band).
“So for nearly three years, we lived alongside our participants, feeling the rawness of their pain and bearing witness to the bravery in their resilience, while documenting a vibrant world in a moment of historic reckoning,” the directors said in a joint statement.
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With personal stories at its core, Sugarcane is groundbreaking in how it unveils a deeper layer of history within the “schools” — as the first work to document “a system of infanticide,” according to Kassie.
ReplyDeleteEyewitness testimonies, police records, and articles from the Williams Lake Tribune all serve as evidence for this horrifying practice at SJM.
The documentary and this focus unexpectedly hit very close to home for NoiseCat, whose father had been rescued from the “school’s” incinerator soon after he was born. Throughout the film, NoiseCat gains insight on this incident while he and his father find themselves trying to heal throughout the process.
While NoiseCat’s story was never intended to be featured in the documentary, he explains the grace given by everyone involved and a spiritual moment with SJM investigator Belleau while in the SJM barn that led to his inclusion.
“Once we had gathered, she invoked the ancestors and the spirits of the children. She called on us, and on me specifically, to help tell this story and bring those spirits, those children, home,” he said in a statement.
“From that moment, the decision to participate felt completely straightforward.”
The documentary is filmed with stunning shots of the landscape within Sugarcane and beyond, utilizing shadows and lighting to emphasize the stories.
In one scene, the sun peeks through the SJM barn walls, dimly illuminating NoiseCat and Belleau as they examine writing and carvings on the walls of the children’s names, numbers that identify them at the “school,” and countdowns until they could return home.
Through the documentary, survivors recount their first-hand experiences of a cultural genocide and of their enduring culture that they continue to pass on to their families.
Belleau, a featured member of the documentary as an Elder and investigator, experienced the St. Joseph’s Mission firsthand, as she attended for four years.
In a meeting with other survivors where they are discussing the staff that they remember at the “school,” Belleau is a comforting presence when emotional stories are told.
“It’s okay to cry,” she says to the group. These words served as more than a reminder to the group but to the viewers as well.
As a leader in the community and survivor of the residential “school,” the late Chief Rick Gilbert also has a constant presence throughout the documentary. In 2022, Gilbert attended the Pope’s first apology at the Vatican in Italy.
During this visit he met with Louis Lougen, the superior general with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the same group who ran the St. Joseph’s Mission. The emotional encounter is met with prolonged silence from Lougen as Gilbert recounts the abuse endured at the “school.”
Along with these survivor interviews, the investigation team conducted a geophysical investigation around SJM which uses methods such as ground-penetrating radar to survey the land. Working closely with contractors and WLFN’s own archaeology company ensured cultural practices were followed throughout the investigation.
During phase one of the investigation, which was focused on the areas immediately around the “school,” 93 reflections were discovered. SJM investigator Spearing spoke on the findings from phase two which broadened the search and displayed 66 more reflections.
These reflections, “display characteristics indicative of potential human burials,” she said.
Since completing phase two, WLFN has purchased the land where SJM sits and will eventually look into possible excavation after ensuring it is safe for ceremony.
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Showcasing the truth behind archival footage
ReplyDeleteThe 1962 CBC documentary Eyes of the Children, which was filmed at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, portrays the children as happy students who are learning from the “school” staff — this archival footage is used in the film as contrast with the real stories told by the SJM survivors.
Kassie said the CBC documentary shows the audience how these “schools” were portrayed to society at the time, in a way that was vastly different to the actual cruelty that the children were experiencing.
“We just were floored by it and knew that if we could find a way to use it … in juxtaposition with the lived experiences of our protagonist that it could be extremely powerful,” she said.
The filming and editing grew with the stories, with NoiseCat saying the discovery of more archival footage which advertises Indigenous children to adopt showed the deeper layer of cultural genocide.
“[The commercial] helps put a point on the fact that there really was almost like a market for, you know, adopting Indigenous children who were themselves a product of this cultural genocide and, at least at St. Joseph’s Mission, a system of infanticide,” he said.
NoiseCat explained that the documentary also included scenes from the Kamloopa powwow, which show his Kyé7e supporting his dancing, and an Elders’ dance where everyone is smiling and socializing. He said he wanted to showcase breaking the cycles of pain and intergenerational trauma that originated due to the residential “schools.”
“We really wanted to capture that enduring spirit that exists in our Secwépemc communities and all indigenous communities, because that is ultimately bigger and greater than the harm and the evil inflicted by the residential schools,” he said.
“It’s a story about the love that persists in our families and in our community.”
NoiseCat added that Indigenous people live a family oriented lifestyle, which is “core to who we’ve always been since time immemorial.”
“And I think that it’s a really beautiful, wonderful thing,” he said.
Kassie explains how the film, shot over 150 days, created endless extra footage from their time with the community.
“We had so many incredible narratives and stories and there wasn’t room for all of them,” she said.
“So letting go of incredible material was really difficult.”
Kassie explained how the final documentary was the product of many tried iterations to immerse the audience into the community and throughout constant work with their team, they successfully brought the narratives together.
NoiseCat agreed, noting that with this being his first film, the collaboration in all aspects was a fulfilling personal and creative experience.
“It’s just been an incredible journey with the community and our team to create something that everyone felt really spoke truth and was a rewrite of history,” Kassie said.
to see the photos and links embedded in this article go to:
https://indiginews.com/arts/secwepemc-led-documentary-sugarcane-wins-directing-award-at-sundance
‘Designed to tear families apart’: a shocking film exposes abuse and infanticide
ReplyDeleteDevastating documentary Sugarcane reveals horrifying stories from controversial Indigenous residential schools
by Veronica Esposito, The Guardian August 9, 2024
Residential schools for Indigenous children have been a stain on the histories of both the United States and Canada, and although steps have been taken in making amends with the past, the new documentary Sugarcane reveals just how much of the process still remains incomplete.
These schools operated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, with Canada’s last residential school only closing in 1997, and they have been referred to as sites of attempted cultural genocide against Indigenous people. For many children, attendance at these schools was compulsory, forcing them to travel far away from their homes, where they were systematically separated from their language and culture and suffered various forms of abuse. Attendance at these schools has been linked to serious mental health consequences, including elevated rates of depression, substance use and suicide.
New light was recently shed on the level of atrocities that occurred at residential schools when in 2021 it was revealed that potential unmarked graves had been discovered on the site where the former Kamloops Indian residential school once stood. It was this news that spearheaded the creation of the documentary Sugarcane, which investigates the residential school St Joseph’s Mission.
The revelations of Sugarcane are many, but perhaps the most shocking one is the evidence that the film-makers bring forth that infanticide was practiced at this school, where the bodies of children of women abused by Catholic priests were incinerated on school grounds. As it turns out, this horrific discovery has serious implications for co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat, whose father, Archie, may have been the only survivor of these events. Julian makes the courageous decision to place himself into the movie, and we see father and son slowly work through years of estrangement and decades of history to learn the facts about how Archie came into this world.
NoiseCat’s is possibly the most compelling of the four entwined narratives that the movie follows, which include Chief Rick Gilbert, who travels to the Vatican seeking redress for the church’s actions, investigator Charlene Belleau, who painstakingly pieces together exactly what happened at the school, and Chief Willie Sellars, who has organized and led the inquiry into the school’s history.
Although the residential schools have had an immense impact on NoiseCat’s family, he shared with me in a video interview that for much of his life he knew virtually nothing about his grandmother’s experiences there as a young girl. During summers visiting with her, she would offer the strange story of how she and her fellow female students would say to one another “the black bear is coming” whenever they saw one of the school’s priests or nuns. “All I got from my grandmother was this very cryptic accounting of her experience at the residential school,” NoiseCat told me, “where she said that the people who were supposed to be looking out for us were predators.”
NoiseCat’s story about his grandmother indicates the larger silence surrounding these schools, even within the Indigenous community, and this is one of the reasons why this documentary is so important. According to NoiseCat, Sugarcane contradicts the popular view among many in the media that residential schools are well-known and thoroughly discussed within the Indigenous communities. “Every time I heard this,” he told me, “I thought, ‘This doesn’t ring true to my experience.’”
Indeed, when NoiseCat and his co-director, Emily Kassie, attempt to discuss the schools within the community, they are largely met with silence.
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As the film explores, part of the trauma faced by Indigenous people is that the things they suffered at the schools left them speechless, without a language to discuss the events, or people with whom they could share their experiences. One of the keys to processing and overcoming this past is to learn to talk about it, and for those who suffered to tell the story in their own terms. Both in terms of constructing this narrative, and in encouraging others to do so, Sugarcane is a powerful intervention for the health of the community.
ReplyDeleteOne of the strengths of Sugarcane is how NoiseCat and and Kassie let this reality make its presence felt throughout their documentary. The movie plunges viewers right into the heart of the story, preferring the texture of the lived experience of the Indigenous people over a more straightforward accounting of exactly what happened. “Jules and I talked a lot about what the silences meant, and also reflecting the pacing of this world,” Kassie told me. “This is really what the world feels like, and it was very important to us that it felt representative of what we were seeing and feeling.”
Because of these choices, Sugarcane is a movie that moves at a very deliberate pace. This may challenge some viewers accustomed to punchier rhythms, although this choice gives space to the silences that continue to permeate the community, and it makes the few words that do eventually escape feel hard-earned and substantial. “We didn’t want to tell a story from 10ft away,” Kassie said. “We wanted to tell it from people living it.” This makes Sugarcane extremely effective at reflecting the larger challenges still faced by the Indigenous community as it begins the long, difficult work of confronting its trauma by piecing together the story and speaking about what happened at residential schools.
As the film also makes clear, this is very much an ongoing story. When Gilbert heads to the Vatican to have an audience with a bishop, he does receive an apology but responds that this is not enough: noting that the Bible says that apologies are only the first step in righting a wrong, he tells the bishop: “There have been apologies, but nothing has happened.”
This nothing is a significant part of the systematic failure that traumatized the attendees of the residential schools. Sugarcane notes how attempts were made at the time to report that children were being abused at the schools, but these reports fell on deaf ears. The attempted infanticide of NoiseCat’s father was reported to the police but nothing ever happened. “This was reported to the police, along with records of other victims,” Kassie said, “like finding a body of a baby in a shoe box, and other accounts of babies being taken and forced into adoptions. Nothing was done to follow up on these crimes.” In fact, as Sugarcane reports, the only person to face any criminal liability was the baby’s mother, who was sentenced to a year in jail for neglect of her child.
It is too late for many of the Catholic priests who abused children in the residential school system to be held accountable, but simply sharing the truth of what happened can still have a powerful healing effect. NoiseCat has discussed how screenings of the film often end with audience members experiencing catharsis, and the film documents how the process of being involved with this project has helped many process and overcome their trauma.
“This film is also about the resilience and the love of the community and the families that you see here,” said NoiseCat. “They have endured in spite of how these schools were designed to tear families apart.”
to see the photos, links, and trailer embedded in this article go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/09/sugarcane-review-residential-schools
Native Boarding Schools Were Genocidal — Healing Starts With Telling the Truth
ReplyDeleteTrue healing must center the Indigenous ways of being that these genocidal institutions tried to extinguish.
by Abaki Beck, Yes! Magazine September 8, 2024
When I was in middle school, at a majority-white public school in Montana, I was given an assignment to interview a grandparent about their childhood. The questions were designed to help us better understand what we did and did not have in common with each other.
When I interviewed my maternal grandmother, I asked her whether there was ever a bully at her school. Her answer surprised me; she said she was the bully. “I always had soap in my mouth,” she said, punished for “talking back” to her teachers—and punished for speaking her first language: Blackfeet.
My grandmother was a student at the St. Ignatius Mission and School, a church-run, assimilationist boarding school on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. She told me stories about the horrific punishments she endured simply for being Blackfeet and about her classmates who were buried on the school grounds.
Unfortunately, my grandmother’s story is not an anomaly. Instead, her experience is representative of generations of genocidal federal policy. Beginning in 1801, more than 500 assimilative boarding schools operated across the United States, including 408 government-run schools in operation between 1819 and 1969. During this time, multiple generations of my family attended boarding school, including 12 people I’m directly descended from on my maternal side: my grandmother, all four of my great-grandparents, and seven of my eight great-great-grandparents.
Boarding schools were part of an intentional, genocidal policy aimed at “civilizing” Native people and eradicating our nations, communities, cultures, languages, religions, and family ties. Indigenous families were either forced or coerced to send their children to boarding schools. Families who refused were denied the money or goods paid to them in exchange for land, as designated in treaty agreements. This coercion was enshrined in an 1893 code that allowed the secretary of the interior to “withhold rations, clothing and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who refuse or neglect to send and keep their children of proper school age in some school a reasonable portion of the year.”
Indigenous children were often taken to schools far away from their homes because, as John B. Riley, an Indian school superintendent, said in 1886, “only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated.” My grandmother first attended St. Ignatius Mission, which is about 200 miles south of her home on the Blackfeet Reservation. She later attended the Chemawa Indian Training School in Oregon, 700 miles west of home and two states away.
Once at school, children experienced what the Department of the Interior described as “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies.” Before kids as young as age 6 stepped foot in a classroom, their long hair — culturally significant for many tribes — was cut to imitate white hairstyles. They were also required to wear military, non-tribal clothing as uniforms, and they were required to speak English — a language many didn’t speak at home.
It is important to reframe what we mean by “school.” These were sites of exploitation and cultural genocide, not places where Native children were educated. The dominant narrative about boarding schools often excludes or de-emphasizes the role of forced labor, or what some scholars conceptualize as human trafficking. Many of my family’s stories about boarding school are about working rather than being educated. In fact, unpaid labor was the goal.
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A 2022 report by the Department of the Interior, the first ever to examine the extent of federal boarding schools in the U.S., highlighted the breadth of unpaid labor Native children performed at school: “lumbering, working on the railroad — including on the road and in car shops, carpentering, blacksmithing, fertilizing, irrigation system development, well-digging, making furniture including mattresses, tables, and chairs, cooking, laundry and ironing services, and garment-making, including for themselves and other children in Federal Indian boarding schools.”
ReplyDeleteMy family members performed other unpaid duties: My grandmother’s brother worked as a butcher and a barber, while my great-grandpa worked as a rancher. Some children were also taken out of school to perform unpaid labor in the surrounding community. In California, thousands of Native children were unpaid indentured servants on white ranches, farms, hotels, and households.
A 1928 report by the Institute for Government Research on the social and economic conditions of Native peoples, known as the Meriam Report, notes that Indian boarding schools violated child labor laws in most states. And though it was released 12 years before my grandmother was born, the findings did not lessen the impact of her experience at boarding school.
In addition to robbing children of their cultural and linguistic identities, boarding schools had other devastating impacts. Children were beaten and sexually abused. They experienced overcrowding, food deprivation and nutritional experimentation, and widespread infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
They were forcibly separated from the love and connection and support and validation of their families and communities. They spent years working as unpaid laborers without receiving an education that could aid them after graduation. Some children died before ever having the opportunity to become parents or eventually elders. These experiences have left generational wounds on survivors, their families, and broader Indigenous communities that continue to hurt to this day.
Agenda of Assimilation
Boarding schools were just one part of the federal government’s efforts to eradicate tribal nations. As boarding schools sought to eliminate tribal languages, religions, and cultures among Native children, the federal government passed policies making these cultural practices illegal in Native communities. In 1883, the Code of Indian Offenses banned tribal religious practice. The Indian Religious Crimes Code was reversed in 1934, but it wasn’t until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 that all legal restrictions on practice were lifted. Still, issues remain today, particularly when it comes to accessing sacred sites and practicing tribal religions in prison. In 1887, the use of tribal languages was banned in schools; this was not reversed until the 1990 passage of the Native American Languages Act, or NALA.
The General Allotment Act of 1887 also had devastating economic, cultural, and political consequences for tribal communities. The act converted communal tribal land into private property and turned individual Native men into private property owners. Tribal landowners were forced to make land agriculturally productive, even in areas where the land was not suitable as such, and the U.S. government assessed their success, or lack thereof. This assimilative tactic drastically shifted, or attempted to shift, Native peoples’ relationship to the land at the same time that their children were being removed from their homes and forced to labor for white people.
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The impacts of boarding school and these policies can be understood through the lens of historical trauma, a term conceptualized by Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Ph.D., a Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota social worker, in 1995. Historical trauma is the idea that intergenerational, compounded trauma has measurable impacts on the mental health of the descendants of traumatic events, including the forced separation of Native children from their families.
ReplyDeleteA 2004 study that asked Native participants how often they thought about historical losses, such as the seizure of land and boarding schools, found that “perceptions of historical loss are not confined to the more proximate elder generation, but are salient in the minds of many adults of the current generation.” This generational trauma has impacted how families interact with each other: My grandmother didn’t teach my mother Blackfeet because she didn’t want her to be discriminated against for speaking English with a Blackfeet accent.
Boarding schools have also impacted the physical health of Native Americans: Research suggests that boarding school survivors are more likely to have chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, and arthritis, than Native people who didn’t attend boarding school.
Boarding schools have also had other material impacts on Native communities. The jobs students were training for often did not match jobs available back home, making it difficult to find meaningful employment after leaving school. Today, Native people continue to face higher rates of poverty and unemployment, and lower rates of homeownership compared to white people. Native children also continue to be removed from their homes, and are disproportionately impacted by child welfare reports, investigations, and out-of-home placements.
Native people know that the legacy of boarding schools continues to impact our communities’ physical health, mental health, housing and economic stability, educational attainment, parenting and family functioning, cultural knowledge, and more. And yet, there has been limited storytelling — in media, academic research, and government reports — that measures these impacts.
Contemporary Truth Telling
For many people in Indian Country, it is quotidian to share stories about boarding schools. Boarding schools are openly discussed in my family: My grandma, and great-grandma when she was alive, spoke about their time as students, about their friends who died of poisoning from the lye in the soap placed in their mouths, and about the labor they performed. I grew up having family picnics on the grounds of the boarding school my great-grandmother attended; her grandmother is buried in the school’s cemetery.
Over the past 50-plus years, there have been a handful of federal government programs attempting to reckon with the tragedy of boarding schools. In 1969, a decade after my grandmother left boarding school, a scalding report titled “Indian Education: A National Tragedy — a National Challenge” illuminated the disastrous impacts of boarding schools, noting that they were “a failure when measured by any reasonable set of criteria.” In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, was passed, which prioritized placing Native children with family members and tribal members before placing them with non-Native families.
ICWA notes that “there is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children.” Advocates for the bill recognized that removing Native children from their families—through both boarding schools and the child welfare system—had devastating impacts on both the children and their broader communities.
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In 1990, NALA passed, allowing the use of tribal languages in schools for the first time since the late 19th century. These legal efforts focused on ensuring Native children stayed connected to their families and cultures but stopped short of collecting testimony from boarding school survivors.
ReplyDeleteIn recent years, there has been increased media attention paid to boarding schools, notably after mass graves were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada in 2021. There’s also been in-depth reporting in national newspapers about the extent of sexual abuse in boarding schools in the U.S., and an episode of Reservation Dogs, a hit FX show that aired for three seasons from 2021 to 2023, about the traumatic impacts of residential schools.
Since Deb Haaland, a descendant of boarding school survivors, became secretary of the interior in 2021, there has been a surge of federal interest in truth telling from boarding school survivors and their descendants. In 2021, after decades of advocacy from tribes and Native organizations, the Department of the Interior launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which included an extensive federal report on the impacts of boarding schools, the first-ever inventory of federal boarding schools, and the collection of testimony from boarding school survivors.
Part of the initiative is the Road to Healing project, launched in 2022, in which Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland toured the U.S. to collect testimony from hundreds of boarding school survivors. Boarding school survivors and their descendants were also invited to publicly speak about their experiences. For some survivors, this was their first time speaking about their boarding school experiences. Each event had trauma counselors and break rooms to support survivors.
The Department of the Interior is also funding the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, to continue to gather testimony from boarding school survivors over the next few years and create a public oral history repository. These efforts will ensure that the stories and experiences of survivors are preserved for future generations and, survivors hope, help hold the U.S. accountable for the atrocities perpetrated.
Survival and Resistance
On the legislative front, advocates are pushing for the passage of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, which was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2023 and the U.S. House in 2024. Truth and reconciliation efforts are not an uncommon response to violence like cultural genocide. Dozens of states across the globe have attempted truth and reconciliation efforts. Some consider Argentina’s 1983 National Commission on the Disappeared to be the first major effort, though the 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission: South Africa, led by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, is perhaps the most well-known. There have been a handful of commissions focused on the impacts of colonialism, including one in Australia and one in Maine examining the placement of Wabanaki tribal children into foster care since the 1970s.
The truth and reconciliation effort that may most closely mirror what is being proposed in the U.S. is Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the legacy of Indian residential schools, which is a result of the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. Like the U.S., the Canadian government and Christian churches operated assimilationist boarding schools for Indigenous youths in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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This commission was not the Canadian government’s first attempt to support boarding school survivors. In 1998, it established the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which distributed $515 million to Indigenous community initiatives that addressed impacts of residential schools until federal funding was cut in 2010. After the truth and reconciliation lawsuit, the commission interviewed more than 6,500 witnesses between 2007 and 2013. In December 2015, they released a document with 94 calls to action, ranging from adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a model for reconciliation to providing stable funding for community-based alternatives to incarceration for Indigenous peoples.
ReplyDeleteHowever, progress to fulfill these calls to action has been slow. The Yellowhead Institute, which tracked progress of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission over five years, noted that at the rate the Canadian government was moving, it wouldn’t finish implementing the calls to action until 2081.
An unintended consequence of the commission has been the growth of boarding school “denialism” among non-Indigenous people in Canada. In a 2023 interim report from the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, the increase in denialism was identified as a top 12 concern held by boarding school survivors, descendants, and families. For example, after mass graves of 215 children were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021, some people, including political commentators, priests, and Danielle Pierce, the premier of the province of Alberta, downplayed the news as a media hoax. Some denialists went so far as to bring shovels to the Kamloops site to “see for themselves” if children were indeed buried there.
Denialism is the final “stage of genocide” in Genocide Watch’s 10 stages of genocide, a widely used policy tool developed by Gregory Stanton, Ph.D. This increase in denialism necessitates the importance of storytelling. Truth and reconciliation — or in the case of the U.S. bill, truth and healing — is not a panacea for the material and psychological impacts on individuals, communities, and families. But allowing people to tell their stories is an important step. If passed, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act would establish a commission tasked with investigating the genocidal practices of boarding schools and would require the federal government to hold public hearings with survivors, their families, and communities to help create this document.
The commission would also attempt to make a record of the number of children who attended federal boarding schools; document the number of children who were abused, went missing, or died in federal boarding schools; and outline the ongoing impacts of boarding schools on survivors and their families. As Native communities throughout the country continue to record their stories — and the Truth and Healing bill advances through Congress — many questions remain.
What does it mean for the same government that created these violent policies to lead a so-called “healing” process mere decades later? Does the focus on reconciliation rather than healing focus too much on perpetrators and those who benefit from colonialism “coming together” with those they harmed, versus focusing on support of victims and survivors? Is truth telling inherently beneficial to the truth teller? Or might it be traumatic for people to share their stories without tangible action coming from it?
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Boarding school survivors and tribal communities have made one thing clear: A nuanced reckoning of the expansive, intergenerational impacts of boarding schools is absolutely necessary, and tribally driven solutions based on Indigenous healing — not government or church abdication — must be centered.
ReplyDeleteWhen my grandmother’s older sister passed away in 2020, my family got access to 30 pages of scanned files from Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, which they both attended. In these files are report cards, notes on her medical needs, comments from teachers, and other correspondence. One report card includes a “citizenship” section, which lists her “good” behavior (one item, “dragging mattress down hall in dust”) and “poor” behaviors (12 items, including “did not go to church”). Throughout the scanned documents are references to the sisters’ supposedly “unstable life” at home on the reservation.
Further down in the files is a scanned letter from my great-grandparents written on Nov. 10, 1954. On one side is a letter asking that their daughters, my grandmother and her sister, be sent home on the train. They were 14 and 15. “You send them home this week” is the last sentence, written in pencil with each word underlined in blue ink. On the back, they wrote the train schedule from Salem, Oregon, where the boarding school was, to Browning, the main town on the Blackfeet Reservation. They also sent train fare. The next page is the response from the principal of the school. “We are at a loss to understand just what your intention is in the matter,” she wrote. But by Nov. 15, 1954, they were both withdrawn from the school.
Native people have always resisted colonialism and fought to protect our families, communities, cultures, and nations. When my grandmother and her sister were at boarding school, their parents tried to be actively engaged in their children’s lives — and worked proactively to get them back. When tribal religions were illegal, my family continued to practice, pray, and hold ceremonies.
As I am writing this, wild mint, yarrow, bee balm, white sage, and sweet grass that I collected last night with my mother are drying in my room. I’ll use them for medicinal teas and smudging throughout the year, and we’ll gather more next summer. My family continues to gather, prepare, and use Blackfeet plant medicine. Despite policies intentionally trying to obliterate our culture, my relatives still passed down this ancestral knowledge and love.
We are running out of time to capture the vital stories of boarding school survivors. My grandma is the last living boarding school survivor in my family; her parents and her siblings who attended boarding school have passed away. Advocates say the impacts on parenting, family relationships, and tribal communities and economies — both psychological and very material — need to be part of the conversation to truly understand the impacts of boarding schools and the contemporary disparities and injustices still facing Indigenous communities today.
Boarding schools took a lot away from my family. Truth telling is one step toward government and church accountability, public education, and perhaps most importantly, helping families like mine rebuild what was taken from us for future generations. Truth telling can help us rebuild our relationships to each other, strengthen and revitalize our cultural practices, and begin to heal, on our own terms, from the ongoing violence of colonization.
This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine.
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https://truthout.org/articles/native-boarding-schools-were-genocidal-healing-starts-with-telling-the-truth/
Biden apologizes for past U.S. policy on boarding schools for Indigenous children
ReplyDelete'It's long, long, long overdue,' president says
The Associated Press · October 25, 2024
U.S. President Joe Biden formally apologized on Friday to Indigenous people in the United States for the government's role in the abuse and neglect of children sent to federal boarding schools in order to assimilate them into white society.
At least 973 Native American children died in the abusive boarding school system over a 150-year period that ended in 1969, according to an Interior Department investigation that called for a U.S. government apology.
The same investigation said that death toll was likely a conservative estimate.
"The federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened — until today. I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did," Biden said at the Gila Crossing Community School in the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Laveen, Ariz., outside Phoenix.
"It's long, long, long overdue. Quite frankly, there's no excuse this apology took 50 years to make," he added. "The federal Indian boarding school policy and the pain that it has caused will always be a mark of shame, a blot, on American history."
At least 18,000 children, some as young as four years of age, were taken from their parents and forced to attend the schools. Biden said the boarding school era was a "horrific chapter" of which Americans should be "ashamed."
"I say this with all sincerity: This, to me, is one of the most consequential things I've ever had an opportunity to do in my whole career as president of the United States," Biden said at the podium before delivering his apology. "It's an honour, a genuine honour, to be in this special place on this special day."
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, launched the investigation into the boarding school system, and joined Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president as he delivered the speech.
"It will be one of the high points of my entire life," Haaland said on Thursday.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of the Indigenous children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or for the U.S. government's actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Peoples.
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to "civilize" Indigenous people in the U.S. ended in 1978 after the passage of a wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children.
In Canada in 2008, then-prime minister Stephen Harper issued an apology to former students of the residential school system across the country. Harper made the apology in the House of Commons, with Indigenous leaders and survivors as witnesses.
The speech has since been translated into seven Indigenous languages.
The U.S. government has offered apologies for other historic injustices, including to Japanese families it imprisoned during the Second World War. When he was president, Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to compensate tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.
In 1993, then-president Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Indigenous people in Hawaii for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But the gestures did not create pathways to reparations for Black Americans.
It's unclear what action, if any, will follow Friday's apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands.
to see the links, photos and videos embedded in this article go to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/biden-apology-residential-schools-1.7363368
Apology long overdue for U.S. Indian boarding schools, says former student
ReplyDelete'It’s a start,' says 74-year-old Navajo Nation member Rosie Yellowhair
by Brett Forester · CBC News · October 25, 2024
A former student of assimilationist federal Indian boarding schools in the U.S. says Friday's presidential apology was long overdue.
"They should have done it years ago," said Rosie Yellowhair, 74, a member of the Navajo Nation originally from Steamboat, Ariz..
"I'm glad he did that, and I hope there is programs for people that have been hurt from it."
Yellowhair attended boarding schools from age four all the way through Grade 12, including the Steamboat, Keams Canyon and Phoenix boarding schools.
She recalled feeling lonely and trying to run away, being banned from speaking Navajo and suffering punishments that included having to scrub floors with a toothbrush, stand in the corner holding books and being physically hit in the ears.
The apology is a good first step but now there needs to be an effort to help people heal, said Yellowhair.
"I think it's a start," she said.
U.S. President Joe Biden formally apologized to Native Americans on Friday for the "sin" of the government-run system, which for decades forcibly separated children from their parents.
"It's a sin on our soul," Biden said in a visit to the Gila River Indian Community on the outskirts of Phoenix.
"Quite frankly, there's no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make."
Biden spoke of the abuses and deaths of Native American children that resulted from the U.S. government's policies, noting that "while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing" and that great nations "must know the good, the bad, the truth of who we are."
"I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did," Biden said.
"The federal Indian boarding school policy — the pain it has caused will only be a significant mark of shame, a blot on our record history. For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books, not taught in our schools."
At least 973 Native American children died in the boarding school system over a 150-year period that ended in 1969, according to an Interior Department investigation that called for a U.S. government apology earlier this year.
At least 18,000 children, some as young as four, were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them.
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Cody Groat, an assistant professor at Western University in London, Ont., said U.S. presidential apologies are extremely rare, making this an important development in U.S. presidential history.
ReplyDelete"The beginning of the apology was very effective and really did address the sincerity of the matter at hand," said Groat.
"But I think towards the end of the apology, he began to ruminate a bit on his career, which almost diluted the apology to some extent."
Groat, a member of Six Nations of the Grand River whose grandparents were forced to attend the Mohawk Institute residential school in Brantford, Ont., said the U.S. and Canada have an interconnected history of Indigenous child removal policies.
Over more than a century in Canada, an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools, which were government-funded, church-run institutions similarly designed to strip children of their languages, cultures and family ties.
U.S.-Canada connections
In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the system and the harm it caused, acknowledging it was intended "to kill the Indian in the child."
That phrase, or at least the sentiment, is believed to originate with American military captain Richard H. Pratt, founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
"All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man," Pratt said in a 1892 speech.
The clearest link between the two systems is seen in something called the Davin report, said Groat.
In the late 19th century, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald appointed politician and journalist Nicholas Flood Davin to investigate the U.S. system. In his 1879 report, Davin praised the American policy of "aggressive civilization" through which the U.S. removed children from their homes and placed them in boarding schools, recommending Canada establish a similar system.
"Those were some of the policies that they saw reflected through American schools that they could incorporate into a more comprehensive Canadian system," said Groat.
Harper's apology preceded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which concluded in 2015 that residential schools were a form of cultural genocide. Yellowhair said the U.S. should establish a similar commission.
Groat said the locating of potential unmarked burials at the former Kamloops residential school in British Columbia in 2021 played a role in encouraging a reckoning south of the border.
"I don't think that the federal boarding school [investigation] would have happened without the significant international conversation regarding identification of unmarked graves," he said.
to see the links, photos and videos embedded in this article go to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/presidential-boarding-schools-apology-1.7364180
Biden Apologizes for Native American Boarding Schools That Aimed to Exterminate Indigenous Culture
ReplyDeleteDemocracy Now October 28, 2024
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
President Biden has formally apologized for government-run Native American boarding schools, which separated Indigenous families and sought to exterminate Indigenous culture. He’s the first U.S. president to ever do so. Biden issued the apology Friday while visiting the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, where Democrats are vying for the support of Native communities, a crucial voting bloc that could swing the results of next week’s election. This was Biden’s first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation in his four-year term. He spoke for a few seconds before he was interrupted by an Indigenous protester.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The federal Indian boarding school policy and the pain it has caused will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history. For too long this all happened, with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books —
PROTESTER: Yeah, what about the people in Gaza?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: — not taught in our schools.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hey, get out of here!
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Let her talk. Let her talk.
PROTESTER: [inaudible] every promise for our people. How can you apologize for a genocide while committing a genocide in Palestine? Free Palestine! Free Palestine!
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Get out of here!
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: No, no, let her go. There’s a lot of innocent people being killed. There’s a lot of innocent people being killed, and it has to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. government operated hundreds of boarding schools from 1819 to 1969 where children reported horrific physical, sexual and psychological abuse. An Interior Department investigation this year found nearly a thousand Indigenous children died while at these schools. Biden was joined Friday by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first-ever Native American cabinet secretary, member of the Pueblo of Laguna whose grandparents were forced to attend boarding schools.
INTERIOR SECRETARY DEB HAALAND: Tens of thousands of Indigenous children as young as 4 years old were taken from their families and communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government and religious institutions. These federal Indian boarding schools have impacted every Indigenous person I know. Some are survivors. Some are descendants. But we all carry the trauma that these policies and these places inflicted.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Deb Haaland and President Biden, speaking at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.
For more, we go to Raleigh, North Carolina, where we’re joined by Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective.
Nick, thanks so much for joining us again on Democracy Now! Can you talk about the significance of this apology, the first American president to do so, and what you are calling for?
NICK TILSEN: Absolutely. I mean, I think this is one of the most historic moments in the history of this country in its relationship with Indian people. And to be clear, this moment was really created and led by the leadership of Secretary Deb Haaland and her team there at the Department of Interior. And what this has meant and means for Indian Country is that we hope that this is a beginning of an era of repair, a repair between the United States government and the Indigenous people, the First People of this land.
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And as monumental as this apology is, we have to embrace the complexity of this moment. We have to embrace the complexity of this moment and lean towards action, too, because it can’t be an apology that’s on empty words. And they’ve been making great strides at the Department of Interior by investing into Indigenous education and by investing into research to further know and understand what has happened, you know, with Indian boarding schools. But we need more of that.
ReplyDeleteAnd so, some of the things that we’re calling on is just a few things that President Biden can do before he leaves office to follow up on this. One of those calls to action is rescinding the Medals of Honor that were given to the 7th Cavalry at the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. To rescind those Medals of Honor would be a way to invoke healing.
The other thing that we’re calling upon is, you know, America’s longest-living Indigenous political prisoner in American history is a boarding school survivor, and his name is Leonard Peltier. And so, we’re calling upon President Biden for executive clemency for Leonard Peltier.
We also want to see this administration, and actually future administrations, invest into unprecedented levels of investing into Indigenous language, culture and education, because it was the education that was weaponized and used as a mechanism to assimilate our people. And as a result of that, so many Indigenous languages were lost. And so, now we’re calling upon Biden to invest into unprecedented levels of Indigenous education and languages.
And then, lastly, what we want to see Congress do is we want to see Congress pass the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission bill, because that bill would make sure that the truth and healing work that is currently underway can be supported for the long haul, far into the future, because it’s not one apology that can fix this. This is hopefully the beginning of a new era of repair and healing between Indigenous people and the United States government.
AMY GOODMAN: So, on the issue of Leonard Peltier, there is also another incredible connection, because Leonard Peltier was a survivor of the residential boarding schools, wasn’t he, Nick?
NICK TILSEN: Absolutely. You know, he was in the boarding schools, in — he was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, and —
AMY GOODMAN: In North Dakota?
NICK TILSEN: South Dakota. And so, he was in that boarding school, taken from his home. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were survivors of boarding school. They came out of that era, and then they resisted. And so, Leonard Peltier is part of that resistance. And so, it’s an incredibly reflective thing to think about, that America’s longest-living Indigenous political prisoner, who is incarcerated right now at the age of 80 years old in maximum-security prison, is actually a boarding school survivor. And so, that’s why, you know, if we want —
AMY GOODMAN: Imprisoned in Florida. I remember asking President Clinton on Election Day 2000 if he would consider granting clemency for Leonard Peltier, which he said he was weighing at the time. That was almost a quarter of a century ago.
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NICK TILSEN: Yeah, that was almost a — I mean, and here we are now, you know? And so, we are continuing to push. We’d like to see, you know, executive clemency for Leonard Peltier. And I think that one of the ways that this can happen is that Biden can give executive clemency to Leonard Peltier by humanizing him and recognizing Leonard Peltier is a survivor of boarding schools. And he just apologized for the impact of boarding schools. And the freedom that Leonard Peltier was fighting for was to break free of those things that happened by the impact of boarding schools on Native communities and Indigenous communities. And so, this is a profound opportunity. And it’s a way — it’s a way for President Biden to take action, you know, in a huge issue that would impact throughout Indian Country.
ReplyDeleteAMY GOODMAN: Nick, before we go, I want to ask you about the Native American vote in this country. The apology was made in Arizona. You have a very close race in Montana between Tim Sheehy and Senator Tester. The role of the Native American vote, not only there but in this country?
NICK TILSEN: Well, the Native American vote has the ability to swing this election in key swing states. And so, Native American vote does matter and has the ability to impact this election. What we want to see is we want to see more action. If the Democrats want the vote of Indian people, we want them to stand with us, not only — not only on issues like the apology around boarding schools, but we also want them to stand with us in the solidarity that we have calling for a ceasefire in Palestine. And both of those things are true to us. And they don’t automatically get our vote. The Democrats don’t automatically get the vote of Native people. They must stand with us. And we stand in deep solidarity with the Palestinian people for freedom and for justice and for liberation and for — and we call for a ceasefire. And so, what we want is the progressives to stand with Indian people. And that’s how you earn an Indian vote.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Nick Tilsen, what would you demand of a President Trump, if he is elected president, and a President Harris?
NICK TILSEN: Both of them, one, this apology that was made on behalf — it was made on behalf of the United States government. So, our expectation is that whoever is the president, Harris or Trump, that they have absolutely, unequivocally, they have to follow through on commitments that they’ve made for truth, healing and reconciliation.
Secondly, we want to see a ceasefire now. We want the — as people who have survived the American genocide, we want to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people. We want to work towards a more peaceful movement in the world. And we want to continue to fight for the return of Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands.
And these are demands to both of these administrations, because this entire democracy is built on the stolen lands of Indigenous people. So, this is what we’re calling for at this time in history: you know, unprecedented levels of investment into Indigenous languages, the return of Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands, and a ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: Nick Tilsen, we want to thank you so much for being with us, founder and CEO of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. He’s speaking to us at a conference from Raleigh, North Carolina.
see the video of this interview at:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/28/biden_residential_schools