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href="https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-where-are-the-indigenous-children-that-never-came-home-carlisle-indian-school">https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-where-are-the-indigenous-children-that-never-came-home-carlisle-indian-school</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Where are the Indigenous children that
never came home?<br>
</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Nick Estes and Alleen Brown
- <span class="pubdate">Sept. 25, 2018</span></div>
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<p><i>This story was done in collaboration with </i><a
href="https://theintercept.com/" target="_blank"
data-linktype="external"
data-val="https://theintercept.com/">The Intercept</a><i>.
</i></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>The Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of
Indian Education, did not respond to a request for
comment.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>AT CARLISLE, KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>FROM BOARDING SCHOOL TO FOSTER CARE</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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<strong>.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>FIGHTING BACK</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><em>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 </em><a
href="https://theintercept.com/" target="_blank"
data-linktype="external"
data-val="https://theintercept.com/">The Intercept</a><em> focused
on environmental justice issues.</em></p>
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