[News] Where are the Indigenous children that never came home?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-where-are-the-indigenous-children-that-never-came-home-carlisle-indian-school 



  Where are the Indigenous children that never came home?

Nick Estes and Alleen Brown - Sept. 25, 2018
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/This story was done in collaboration with /The Intercept 
<https://theintercept.com/>/. /

When Yufna Soldier Wolf was a kid, she was made well aware of why her 
family members only spoke English, and why they dressed the way they 
did. Her grandfather and other elders used to recount their experiences 
at boarding schools, where the government sent hundreds of thousands of 
Indigenous children, from nearly every Indigenous nation within U.S. 
borders, to unlearn their languages and cultures. “A lot of them were 
physically abused, verbally abused, sexually abused,” she said.

At the center of the stories were the children who never came home from 
the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where her grandfather was a 
student. “My grandpa used to say, ‘Don’t forget these children. Don’t 
forget my brother — he’s still buried there,’” Soldier Wolf said. She 
promised that she would remember.

The school, which opened in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and closed 
its doors 100 years ago, this month, was the United States’ most 
notorious Indian boarding school and the starting point for more than a 
century of child removal policies that continue to tear apart Indigenous 
families today. Carlisle, and hundreds of federally funded boarding 
schools like it, were key to the U.S. government’s project of destroying 
Indigenous nations and indoctrinating children with military discipline 
and U.S. patriotism.

It was Soldier Wolf’s closeness to her family and their stories of abuse 
at the school that inspired her to become the Northern Arapaho tribal 
historic preservation officer and work on the return of the children 
lost at Carlisle.

In June, after about a decade of back-and-forth with the U.S. Army, 
which owns the Carlisle property, Soldier Wolf stood present as Little 
Plume, the last of three Northern Arapaho children buried there, was 
exhumed and sent back to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The 
remains of two others, 14-year-old Horse and 15-year-old Little Chief, 
Soldier Wolf’s great uncle, had been returned the previous August.

The Northern Arapaho Tribe is the first to succeed in bringing home 
children interred at Carlisle’s military cemeteries — but it won’t be 
the last, and Carlisle is only the tip of the iceberg.

A coalition of Indigenous organizations — including the National 
Congress of American Indians, which represents 250 Indigenous nations, 
the International Indian Treaty Council, the Native American Rights 
Fund, and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition 
— has turned to the United Nations to demand that the U.S. government 
“provide a full accounting of the children taken into government custody 
under the U.S. Indian Boarding School Policy whose fate and whereabouts 
remain unknown.”

After unsuccessful attempts to obtain such information directly through 
Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Bureau of Indian 
Education, the coalition members hope that pressure from the U.N. 
Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances will make the 
difference. An appeal could require the U.S. to report on the statuses 
of missing Native boarding school children every six months.

“Our greatest hope is to start to raise awareness about this part of 
American history, but also to get some acknowledgement and 
accountability from the U.S. government,” said Christine Diindiisi 
McCleave, executive officer for the Boarding School Healing Coalition. 
“The fact that they haven’t willingly done that is disrespectful and a 
human rights violation.”

The Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Education, 
did not respond to a request for comment.

Those pushing for the U.N. filing and the return of children’s remains 
acknowledge that it’s only a beginning — a full accounting of Carlisle’s 
legacy would mean reforming child welfare systems that continue to 
separate Native children from the land and their communities. Although 
Carlisle and the boarding schools like it have closed, child removal is 
an enduring reality for many Native families and their nations. “It’s 
always worked for colonizers worldwide, you take the children and you 
break the family tie,” said Madonna Thunder Hawk, a boarding school 
survivor who now works for the Lakota People’s Law Project advocating 
Indian child welfare reform in South Dakota. “If we’re fighting for the 
land, we’re also fighting for our future,” Thunder Hawk said of her 
community in Cheyenne River. “Who is going to be on the land? We’ve got 
to keep our children.”

*AT CARLISLE, KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN*

For Carlisle’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, an Indian fighter who once 
served with George Armstrong Custer, the boarding school was another 
battlefront of the Indian wars. Pratt devised the school’s curriculum of 
“kill the Indian, save the man” from his experiments in forced education 
on Cheyenne, Caddo, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche prisoners of war at 
Fort Marion, Florida, in the early 1870s. The prison experiments 
impressed Indian reformers in Congress, who authorized the Bureau of 
Indian Affairs to take control of the Carlisle Barracks to build the 
nation’s first off-reservation boarding school.

As Pratt assembled Carlisle’s first class of students, Commissioner of 
Indian Affairs Ezra Hayt ordered him to take children from the Lakotas 
because of their “hostile attitude toward the government.” Hayt hoped to 
pressure the Lakotas, and other western Indigenous nations, into opening 
millions of acres of treaty-protected territory for white settlement. 
“The children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people,” 
wrote Pratt of his first Carlisle recruitment mission at the Rosebud and 
Pine Ridge agencies in Dakota Territory.

 From the 1880s through the 1920s, conditions at boarding schools were 
especially terrible — and deadly. “Routinely, you have students begging 
for clothes and food,” said Preston McBride, a University of California, 
Los Angeles Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation about health 
conditions in the schools. “There were students sharing spoons and cups 
in dining halls, sharing bath water,” he added. “Once a disease hit, it 
rapidly spread.”

The schools tended to send sick kids back to their families — many died 
en route or within days of arriving home. When students did die in the 
schools, McBride said, records show that at times the area Indian agent, 
rather than the family, was informed of the death. Runaways were common, 
and for children thousands of miles from home, finding their way back 
would have been practically impossible.

Indeed, determining exactly how many children might have disappeared 
after they were sent to boarding school is no simple task. “It’s really 
hard to give an estimate to anything related to boarding schools — 
because the government doesn’t even know how many children went through 
them,” McBride said. He estimates those who disappeared number in the 
thousands.

*FROM BOARDING SCHOOL TO FOSTER CARE*

Thirty-five years after Carlisle closed, when Sandy White Hawk was 18 
months old, she was adopted out to a white missionary family who 
promised to “save” her from a life of poverty and abuse on the Rosebud 
Reservation, where she was born. White Hawk did not escape either in her 
adopted family, and the problems were compounded by a deeper sense of 
loss over who she was as an Indigenous person.

White Hawk compares her experience as an adoptee to that of her brother, 
who was sent away to boarding school. “Adoption and boarding schools 
were about stripping Native people of who they were,” she said. 
Throughout the 20th century, the two worked in tandem.

After World War II, social workers picked up where boarding schools like 
Carlisle left off, placing children into state foster care or adopting 
them into white families. The child sweeps dovetailed with federal 
termination policy, which aimed to assert state jurisdiction over Native 
lands and relocate Native people off-reservation. In 1957, Utah 
Republican Sen. Arthur V. Watkins, a termination advocate, characterized 
the approach as a “freeing of the Indians from special federal 
restrictions on the property and the person of the tribes and their 
members,” which held them back from “the full realization of their 
national citizenship.”

Once relocated to cities and enrolled in public schools, families came 
under increased surveillance by state officials and children once again 
became targets for removal. The practice became so routine that by the 
early 1970s, according to a report by the Association on American Indian 
Affairs, more than a quarter of Native children nationwide had been 
taken from their families. As Amy Lonetree, a history professor at the 
University of California, Santa Cruz, put it, “Every single Indigenous 
family in the post-World War II era lived with the threat of child removal.”

The practice was particularly acute in states like Minnesota, and today, 
it has hardly subsided. “We have the highest rate of Indigenous child 
removal in the United States,” White Hawk, now an Indian child welfare 
advocate living in Minnesota, said of the state’s foster care system. In 
2016, the Star Tribune reported that although Native children made up 
less than 2 percent of Minnesota’s population, they accounted for a 
quarter of children in foster care*.*

Advocates like White Hawk say that while healing from the past is 
important, stopping contemporary forms of Indigenous family separation 
is just as urgent. In recent years, the Goldwater Institute, a powerful 
libertarian think tank based in Phoenix, has led multiple legal attacks 
on the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, charging that the legislation — 
which requires judges and social workers to preserve Native families 
when possible — does not ensure equal protection under the law because 
it is based on “race.” ICWA, however, was established to protect 
children who are members of tribes or whose biological parents are 
members of tribes in an effort to combat the history of places like 
Carlisle and the role foster care and adoption agencies play in 
continuing to remove Native children from their families.

To White Hawk, keeping Native families together today is also about 
shifting resources from the foster care system to affordable housing, 
especially in cities like Minneapolis, which is experiencing a housing 
shortage. “We have always known what we need, but we have not had 
resources,” she said. Instead of providing effective housing assistance 
to keep Native families together, the state’s money goes into the foster 
care system. “It’s a shame that money would go to a stranger to foster 
an Indian child and not to preserve the Indian family, which is the 
heart of ICWA.” According to state statutes, Minnesota foster parents 
can earn anywhere from $650 to $2,410 per child per month, depending on 
the number of children under their care and a child’s special needs.

*FIGHTING BACK*

In the face of Carlisle’s sweeping legacy, returning some of the 
children who were taken is a remarkably arduous small step. There is a 
lack of legal clarity around whether the Native American Graves 
Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which governs the return of 
property or human remains to Native communities, could be successfully 
applied to a military institution like Carlisle. So far, only individual 
descendants, not Indigenous nations, have attempted to appeal for the 
return of Carlisle students’ remains. Nations interested in bringing 
home children have to track down individual family members — a huge 
problem for kids who entered the boarding school as orphans.

McBride acknowledged that no investigation could give a complete account 
of all the missing children, because records are so inconsistent. But if 
researchers were able to access the voluminous material that does exist, 
archived by the federal government and individual schools, they could 
help bring closure to some families and communities — and obtain 
important official acknowledgement of the system of child removals that 
forms a key piece of the nation’s foundation.

According to Andrea Carmen, the executive director of the International 
Indian Treaty Council, the U.S. government’s failure to account for 
missing Native boarding school children is “an ongoing human rights 
violation under international law.” The organizations are currently 
assembling the U.N. submission, which will include testimony from tribes 
and individuals whose children were lost.

After the children buried at Carlisle came home, Soldier Wolf resigned 
her position as the Northern Arapaho tribal historic preservation 
officer. “I felt I’ve run this path,” she said. The return of her 
relative Little Chief was more than a gesture to her grandfather; it was 
about offering her own children a different set of possibilities that 
didn’t include “this sad story of we never got our uncle back,” she 
said. “Because we got him back.”

/Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, is an assistant 
professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. Alleen 
Brown is a reporter for /The Intercept 
<https://theintercept.com/>/ focused on environmental justice issues./


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