The Complex Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools & Contemporary Child Welfare Systems
by Patrice Kunesh
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
— ”
Introduction: The Valise
Nellie Two Bear Gates (1854-1935), whose Dakhóta name Maȟpíya Boǧáŋwiŋ means Gathering of Clouds Woman, was known as a masterful artist whose beautiful bead work illustrated the transformation of Native lifeways in the late 19th century.[1] Her father was Yanktonai Chief Two Bear (Mahto Nunpa), a courageous leader of the Sioux and survivor of the Whitestone Hill Massacre.[2] At the age of seven, Nellie was sent to a Catholic boarding school in St. Joseph, Missouri, where she endured an unhappy eleven-year separation from her family. When she returned home to what had become the Standing Rock Reservation, she deeply embraced her Dakhóta culture, speaking only her Native language. Nellie and her husband Frank Gates raised their large family at Standing Rock.
In January 1888, the year before North Dakota would become a state, their middle daughter Josephine, my great-aunt, was born on Battle Creek in Dakota Territory. When she was nine years old, Josephine was sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where she was trained in domestic skills. Upon her graduation in 1909 at the age of twenty-one, her mother Nellie presented her with a beaded valise, a small suitcase, depicting the 1863 Battle of Whitestone Hill on one side and the Lakota’s last buffalo hunt in 1882, two momentous losses of life and livelihood for the Lakota people that Nellie had witnessed.[3]
Josephine was a classmate of Jim Thorpe and another student from Standing Rock, my grandfather’s brother Colvin Kelly. While Josephine did well in her studies and training, Colvin did not. His report cards indicate that he was often sick and received mediocre grades. He also ran away from Carlisle several times. After they returned to Standing Rock, Josephine and Colvin married and had several children.[4]
Like her mother, Josephine strongly embraced her Native culture and community. Soon after she returned home from Carlisle, she was given the name Wachinoyapi Win, which means The Tribe Looks to Her for Help Woman. Josephine lived up to her name, becoming a tenacious fighter for the rights of her people. In 1946, she became the first woman leader of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
Both Josephine and grandfather humbly led their people through treacherous times of enormous change and desperate conditions—Two Bear through the bloodshed of war and transition to the reservation, and Josephine through debasing bureaucracy and poverty. For a filing cabinet in her office, Josephine used a large packing box that once held government food rations. Her briefcase was a patched cloth bag, which she carried all the way to Washington, DC to wrestle funds from lawmakers.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about Josephine, Nellie, and all of my relatives as I reflect on the fact that, for the first time in our nation’s history, Indian Country’s collective trauma from boarding schools is under investigation. US Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, member of Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American cabinet secretary, recently released a preliminary report on the history of Federal Indian Boarding Schools. Secretary Haaland is committed not only to pursuing the facts on this devastating chapter of US history, but also to seeking justice for Native peoples and finding ways to “assist with healing the generational trauma caused [by this] racist and genocidal policy.”[5]
Secretary Haaland’s grandparents attended such institutions, as did four generations in my family.[6] Most likely, nearly every Native family in the United States shares similar experiences. We have all, individually and collectively, been deeply affected by government-induced family separation.
Removing Native children from their families has become normalized and systemic—it is done bureaucratically through child welfare systems, court proceedings, and social services. Despite the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, Native children are overrepresented in state foster care at a rate 2.66 times greater than their proportion in the general population. This means that although Native children are just one percent of all children in the US, they are 2.7% of all children who are placed outside their homes in foster care.[7]
National Indian Child Welfare Association (October 2021), Disproportionality in Child Welfare: Fact Sheet.
In several states, Native children as a percentage all children in foster care is shockingly high: South Dakota, 57%; Alaska, 53%; North Dakota, 39%; Montana, 34%; Minnesota, 27%.[8] Behind these statistics are the heavy burdens of historical trauma and grave injustices carried by generations of Native people.
How is it that the crisis of Native family separation is still ongoing forty years later, and that contact with child welfare systems has become a routine part of growing up for most Native children? New research is shedding light on the depth of the trauma endured through forced Native family separations, how that trauma is carried into future generations, and the link between historical trauma and disparities Native people encounter across legal and social systems. There is much work to be done—in courts and Congress and with public agencies and private philanthropy—to fund more research and services, develop a new generation of advocates to advance the cause of Native children and families, and heal wounds and restore well-being.
Indian Boarding Schools and Native Child Removals
The roots of today’s Native child welfare crisis can be traced to the earliest history of this country in its quest of manifest destiny.[9] Government officials, business magnates, and social reformers, often acting in concert, promoted policies aimed at breaking up Native families as a means of coercing assimilation into the dominant society and taking Native lands and resources. Boarding schools, one of the most aggressive assimilation devices, directly contributed to the cultural annihilation and upheaval of generations of Native families.[10]
“[O]n the whole government practices may be said to have operated against the development of wholesome [Indian] family life. Chief of these is the long continued policy of educating the [Indian] children in boarding schools far from their homes, taking them from their parents when small and keeping them away until parents and children become strangers to each other. The theory was once held that the problem of the [Indian] could be solved by educating the children, not to return to the reservation, but to be absorbed one by one into the white population.
”
Between 1819 and 1969, the federal government operated 357 residential schools across the country. One of the most prominent was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded by Richard Henry Pratt in 1879. Pratt’s motto, “Kill the Indian, and save the man,” foretold the horrific deprivations and abuse Native children would suffer in these institutions. Carlisle became the model for other government operated schools where girls were taught domestic skills, while boys were trained for industrial jobs. In 1900, 20,000 Native children were enrolled in boarding schools. Twenty-five years later, 60,000 Native children, representing nearly 83% of all Native children, were attending federally funded boarding schools.[11]
Boarding schools were not the only way Native children were removed from their families. They were kidnapped, targeted by religious organizations,[12] pursued for adoption into white families, and manipulated by state child welfare systems.[13] The US government was complicit in many of these efforts. One of its most dishonorable programs was the Indian Adoption Program (IAP), which institutionalized Native child removals at both the federal and state level. [14]
The Bureau of Indian Affairs funded and promoted the IAP for almost ten years (1958 to 1967). This overtly racialized program, implemented in conjunction with the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), was responsible for the removal of hundreds of Native children in western states and their placement with non-Native families in eastern states.[15] The IAP and CWLA used shameful tactics to attract more adoptive families, often misrepresenting Native families and culture, with messages such as “unwed Indian mothers, deviant extended families, and hopelessly impoverished and alcoholic parents,”[16] to reinforce the notion that Native children would be better off being raised in a non-Native family.[17]
Native families continued to be targeted through the 1970s. Encouraged by the IAP, state child welfare systems implemented similar adoption programs and tactics. Native parents regularly came under scrutiny by state and county social workers who found reservation conditions appalling[18] and misunderstood cultural norms about the central role of grandparents and extended families in caring for the children. Sadly, countless Native children were removed in cases where family poverty and kinship care were confused with neglect.
By 1978, the year the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was enacted, these federal and state programs had extracted a huge toll on Native families, creating a crisis of “massive proportions.” More than a third of all Native American and Alaska Native children were no longer living with their families; instead, they had been adopted or were living in institutions or foster homes, with 85% of them placed with non-Native families.[19] Shocked by such staggering numbers, Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, the lead advocate of federal protections for Native children, declared that the “wholesale separation of Indian children from their families is perhaps the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today.”[20]
ICWA was a landmark federal law that provided tribal governments critical tools to exercise sovereignty and keep Native children connected to their families and cultures. It established enhanced protections at every stage of state child welfare proceedings and is considered the gold standard for culturally appropriate services in child welfare matters.[21] Many states have incorporated ICWA-based protections into their child welfare procedures and court systems. Despite these enhanced procedures, all is not well—Native children continue to be removed at significantly high rates today.[22] What has improved, however, is our understanding of how Native families today still carry generations of unresolved grief and how that trauma manifests in the disparate outcomes Native people face in institutions responsible for their care and well-being.
Connecting boarding school trauma to disparities in the child welfare system
Historical trauma
According to the research of social scientist Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, the collective phenomenon of historical trauma stems from centuries of disastrous federal policies targeting tribal lands and Native families. “Indigenous peoples of the Americas have experienced devastating collective, intergenerational massive group trauma and compounding discrimination, racism, and oppression.”[23] The breadth and influence of Brave Heart’s work cannot be overstated—in theorizing pathways about the transmission of large-scale collective traumas to present-day descendants of survivors, her research has broken new ground, driven international conversations about trauma among Indigenous people for the past two decades, and launched a new field of interdisciplinary research.
The term “historical trauma” is the specific loss and trauma that Native people have experienced over time, described as the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations including one’s own lifespan.”[24] The traumatic events suffered by previous generations—the sweeping loss of land, people, and culture and the forced separation of families—create pathways that result in subsequent generations becoming susceptible to higher risk of experiencing mental and physical distress, much like post-traumatic stress disorder. Biological, social, and environmental factors further contribute to the transmission of cross-generational cycle of trauma.[25]
Recent studies have extended Brave Heart’s theory of historical trauma into empirical research on historical trauma symptoms.[26] Their findings establish a through-line from the events that caused historical trauma to current symptoms related to this inter-generational loss,[27] as well as to structural inequities that have reinforced discriminatory practices and negative outcomes.
For example, in 2004, researchers working with Native elders designed a methodology to measure historical trauma in Native Americans by identifying the characteristics of loss and then the association between that trauma and current dimensions of related symptoms.
Whitbeck, L.B., Adams, G.W., Hoyt, D.R., and Chen, X.C. (2004). “Conceptualizing and Measuring Historical Trauma Among American Indian People,” American Journal of Community Psychology.
Such innovative modeling and methodologies, which provide a meaningful framework to evaluate the influences of historical trauma today, confirm that federal assimilation policies “are not truly ‘historical’ in the sense that they are now in the past. Rather, they are ‘historical’ in the sense that they began a long time ago.”[28]
Systemic Disparities
Another thread of research ties the high rates of Native child removals today to the long history of forced assimilation through family separation. These studies provide critical insights into the geographies of institutional disparities and the magnitude of inequalities that Native people carry with them as they confront the child welfare system. Knowing where and how Native families encounter trauma will help us design better interventions and improve the care and treatment of Native children and families—and ultimately preserve family units. Two studies stand out for their data analysis methodologies and findings.
In American Indian and Alaska Native child welfare system contact across U.S. States: magnitudes and mechanisms (2021),[29] Frank Edwards and Theresa Rocha Beardall examined two sets of national data over five years (2014 – 2018) to determine the contemporary exposure of Native children and families to various forms of child welfare system contact (investigation, substantiations, removals, placement settings, and termination of parental rights). From the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), a voluntary reporting system on cases of alleged child maltreatment reported to a state or local child welfare hotline and investigated, they documented the entry point and frequency of Native family separation in state and local child welfare systems. Case files from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) were used to measure the frequency of family separation into the foster care system at state and local levels. Their findings provide more granular details about the distressing patterns in Native child encounters and outcomes in child welfare systems.
Native infants under one year of age face the highest risks of child welfare system contact. While that risk tends to be highly variable across states, there is a clear regional pattern in inequalities in the exposure of infants to child protection investigations. For example, the risk of investigation for Native infants is the highest in Alaska, where 19.5 percent of Native children were investigated by children protection services. Three other states had infant investigation risk levels 10 percent or higher: Minnesota, Montana, and Oklahoma. Native children generally have much higher investigation rates than do white children, but those “inequalities are pronounced” in Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Oklahoma, Wisconsin.
These regional patterns were also found in foster care placements and termination of parental rights. Nationally, Native children are “treated categorically differently than white children when it comes time to make a decision about removal into foster care.” Regionally, Native infants are at “exceptionally high risk” in the Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest where 3 percent of all Native infants were placed into foster care (these states include Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington). By comparison, white infants face a similar risk in only one state, West Virginia. While in foster care, Native children are highly likely to be placed in a non-Native/non-relative setting and to experience their parents having their rights terminated.
A study published earlier this year expounded on the disproportionality of Native representation in child welfare systems and the experiences of Native youth in foster care through socio-demographic, physical and mental health, and foster care/placement factors.[30] This national population study also used AFCARS data to examine Native proportionality in child welfare systems as well as health and well-being factors. Significant differences between Native and non-Native youth were found in all domains—overall Native children experienced greater disparities in each domain and were disproportionately over-represented at all stages of the child welfare system compared to non-Native children (findings from each domain and stage are discussed).[31]
These studies validate through rigorous scientific data analysis that historical trauma is an ongoing serious risk to Native wellness and well-being. Native children are disproportionately likely to come into contact with child welfare systems and disproportionately likely to be removed. Bias and cultural misapprehension in the child welfare systems may be a factor, although child welfare systems today are not intentionally disrupting Native families in furtherance of a colonial enterprise.
Nevertheless, the practical reality is that current child welfare outcomes are indistinguishable from the pre-IAP and ICWA era and are directly related to the traumas of the past, particularly from forced family separations endured in boarding schools. When a Native family encounters the child welfare system, collective memories of historical suffering are activated, ensuring the perpetuation of intergenerational trauma and compounding the trauma caused by family disruption and child removal. The most necessary intervention is one that heals the wounds and resolves the hurt.
While understanding levels of risk for removal and foster care placement in child welfare systems adds critical information to our knowledge base, there are still yawning gaps in what we do not know, highlighting the need for more complete information on Native children in national databases and for deeper research into state child protections systems. Furthermore, we know very little about the foster care practice with Native children in tribal court systems and social services programs. Tribal nations exercise considerable influence in the protection of Native children and the preservation of Native families both on and off the reservation. Given the fluidity of Native families moving between urban and rural communities,[32] more information about reservation-based child welfare systems would help our understanding of these multijurisdictional experiences and advance discussions about equity and accountability to ICWA. Nevertheless, even with these gaps, what we do know now is actionable.
Action is needed
What does this look like for Native children across the country? The grim takeaway is that contact with the child welfare system has become a routine part of growing up. Moreover, the crisis of Native family separation is ongoing.
Advocacy and action are needed to reform institutions and systems that have been instruments of harm in the past and restore the balance for the future. Several recommendations from policy and child welfare experts have been shared in previous essays published on the NNCTC blog, including the following:
Promote tribal sovereignty
Address child poverty
Mitigate maltreatment/neglect propensity with family advocates
Redirect foster care funding to Native families and community services
Recruit Native foster families, both on and off the reservation
Incorporate trauma-informed care and treatment in all social services
Recommendations for institutions that may, in the absence of conscious action, perpetuate social inequality tend to be organized around three principles:
Build intentional relationships and partnerships that promote responsiveness and empathy
Hold community interviews to explore issues from multiple social vantage points
Cultivate research and scaffold sociological studies
As to what such research should entail, the Casey Family Programs and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, as well as numerous national organizations, researchers, and individuals with lived experiences in the child welfare system, have created a Research Agenda for the 21st Century on Child Welfare that would help improve the lives of our most vulnerable youth and families. Recognizing that the roots of disproportionality are structural, reflecting widespread inequities in the material conditions of life and in systems that hoard opportunities for the advantaged and deny them to those who are already disadvantaged, their proposed research agenda is bold and far-reaching:
Research on child welfare prevention and response is not limited to the child protection system. It includes every system and support families may touch—housing, income, health, justice, mental health, substance abuse treatment—all of which have known inequalities particularly for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx families. When child neglect is identified, it is often grounded in poverty, mental health, or substance misuse problems and rather than continuing to be reactive, we believe the root causes of these problems needs to be mitigated.
Conclusion
I did not have the privilege of knowing Josephine personally, but I have learned much about her life through our wide network of relatives. Her mother’s gift of the lovingly sewn beaded valise is a fitting symbol of all the things Josephine carried for herself and her people—an inheritance of unfathomable pain and suffering from war, forced separations, and poverty, but also an enduring legacy of courage, generosity, wisdom, humility, and determination. No matter how heavy or burdened it became, the valise always had room for other journeys filled with daring hopes of healing and justice. Healing is tender work and should be situated in the return to cultural knowledge and belonging, the connective tissues that carry us through trauma, intact and resilient.
For Native children and families who have carried the pain of generations, rectifying historical injustices will require historic restitution. Secretary Haaland has promised truth and healing and to lay down a foundation for future reparation. Changing policies and institutional practices will not be easy or may be even enough, but it is necessary—and was foretold by another great Native leader.
In 1876, the Lakota chief and spiritual leader Sitting Bull, Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, contemplated the future of his people. Despite his victory against the US army at the Battle of Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull realized that his people would face more violence and grave hardship. He also knew that protecting Native American children was the only way to protect the future of his tribe. His appeal then is equally relevant and necessary today: “Let us put our minds together and see what kind of future we can build for our children.”
About PATRICE
Of Standing Rock Lakota descent, Patrice H. Kunesh is the founder of Peȟíŋ Haha Consulting, a social enterprise committed to fostering social and human capital and pursuing economic equity in Native communities. Previously, Patrice established and led the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and has held appointments as the Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development at the US Department of Agriculture and as the Deputy Solicitor for Indian Affairs at the US Department of the Interior. In addition, she served as in-house counsel to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and on the faculty at the University of South Dakota School of Law. Patrice began her legal career at the Native American Rights Fund and recently returned to NARF as the major gifts officer.
This essay is the third in a series that the NNCTC is publishing to coincide with the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative’s activities. We highly recommend that you read the Initiative’s introductory report here. The essay was commissioned by the National Native Children’s Trauma Center with support from Casey Family Programs, a national operating foundation dedicated to improving the lives of America’s most vulnerable children. The findings and conclusions presented are those of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Casey Family Programs.
These topics are painful and may cause distress. If you feel yourself in need of continued support, please reach out for help. Do so in whatever way feels most appropriate to you: traditional healing, talking to someone you know and trust, getting connected to mental health services, or calling or texting 988. Please know that there are many people across Indian Country who share your pain.
Additional Resources on Structural Inequities
These studies link historical trauma with structural inequities, providing evidence of how disparate treatment leads to poorer outcomes for Native people in multiple socio-economic domains.
The Generational Impact of Racism on Health: Voices from American Indian Communities (Feb. 2022) – Intergenerational effects of structural inequities in nearly every policy regarding Native nations and peoples have “left American Indians and Alaska Natives at the margins of health and the health care systems.”
Structural Racism in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Moving Forward (2021) – Staggering rates of infection and mortality in Native communities are “unconscionable” and rectifying inequities must include medical ethics, health disparities, and human rights.
Examining the Impact of Structural Racism on Food Insecurity: Implications for Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disparities (Apr. 2020) – 25% of Native peoples remain consistently food insecure and the relationship between race/ethnicity and food insecurity is “clearly intertwined with other established determinants of food insecurity including poverty, unemployment, incarceration, and disability.”
A Call to Action: Structural Racism as a Fundamental Driver of Health Disparities: A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association (Dec. 2020) (the intersection between social determinants of health and poor health disparities is rooted in structural racism, particularly for Native people, and commits to “transforming the conditions of historically marginalized communities, improving the quality of housing and neighborhood environments, advocating for policies that eliminate inequities in access to economic opportunities, quality education, health care,” and accelerating research on the multiple domains of racism).
Structural racism and health inequities in the USA: evidence and interventions (April 2017) (interconnected institutions, with historical linkages to oppression against people of color, Black and Native, mutually reinforce inequitable systems (housing, education, employment, social services, health care).
Examining the Theory of Historical Trauma Among Native Americans (Oct. 2014) (linking neurological functioning and cross-generational trauma transmission to elucidate how historical traumas continue to impact Native people today and providing guidance on the practice of trauma informed care).
Conceptualizing and Measuring Historical Trauma Among American Indian People (June 2004) – empirically establishes link between historical trauma and symptoms of emotional distress in contemporary generations, concluding that losses exacted from federal assimilation policies “are not truly ‘historical’ in the sense that they are now in the past. Rather, they are ‘historical’ in the sense that they began a long time ago.”
Footnotes
[1] Nellie’s beaded valises and other beadwork are recognized as beautiful and meaningful works of art and history.
[2] In 1863, the US Army attacked Nellie’s village of Whitestone, killing as many as 300 Native people in “the bloodiest battle ever fought on North Dakota soil.” Her family survived the Whitestone Massacre and Chief Two Bear moved his family to Standing Rock. Five years later, Two Bears signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie (also known as the Sioux Treaty of 1868), which established the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills.
[3] Josephine’s granddaughter, author Mona Susan Kelly Power, wrote a moving personal account of her grandmother’s life and leadership, along with photographs of her at Carlisle, with beaded valise, and standing among her male council members as the Tribal Chairwoman. See “Josephine Gates Kelly: Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Leader,” On Second Thought, Think Indian issue, North Dakota Humanities Council, Mar. 1, 2011. See also, Curt Moen, “Did you know that …: First tribal chairwoman fighter for Indian Rights,” Fargo Forum, Mar. 27, 2010.
[4] Josephine’s children would attend the Bismarck Indian School and her great granddaughter would attend Harvard University and write powerful stories about the wisdom of the old ways.
[5] Along with Secretary Haaland’s initiative to examine the “Troubled Legacy of Federal Boarding School Policies,” legislation has been introduced to create a truth and healing commission around American Indian boarding school tragedies. (H. R. 5444, 2021; S. 2907, 2021).
[6] The Cumberland County Historical Society has published a remarkable compilation of information about Carlisle derived from the school’s archives. The materials include student accounts, photographs, and a list of 8,300 Native students at Carlisle (not a complete or total listing of students), including my relatives. Sioux. See Linda F. Witmer, he Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania 1879-1918, Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 2002, and online at Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, a resource of Dickenson College. For a brief description of the Hampton Institute’s educational programs for Native Americans, see Booker Evans, “Hampton Institute and the assimilation of Native Americans and African Americans,” Educ 300: Education Reform, Past and Present, Trinity College, Hartford CT, April 24, 2012.
[7] By comparison, Caucasian/White children are underrepresented nationwide at a rate of 0.93 times lower than their proportion of the general population. Disproportionality in Child Welfare Fact Sheet, The National Indian Child Welfare Association.
[8] Frank Edwards and Theresa Rocha Beardall, “American Indian and Alaska Native child welfare system contact across U.S. States: magnitudes and mechanisms, SocArXiv (Apr.1, 2021).
[9] The practice of removing Native children from their homes predates the creation of the United States. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire Building, 47 (1980). The practice continued with the new federal government through policies aimed at territorial dispossession and cultural eradication. Two early examples are the Civilization Act of 1819, 3 Stat. 516-17 (Mar. 3, 1819), and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, 4. Stat. 11 (May 26, 1830). The former, a precursor to boarding schools, funded religious schools for the purpose of “introducing among [Indian tribes] the habits and arts of civilization.” See Margaret D. Jacobs, “The Habit of Elimination: Indigenous Child Removal in Settler Colonial Nations in the Twentieth Century,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America 189-207 (Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, & Alexander Laban Hinton eds. 2014). The latter policy instigated the dreadful Trail of Tears, also known as the “journey of injustice,” which culminated in the forced displacement of more than 60,000 Native Americans from their ancestral lands in the southeast to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma over a period of two decades.
[10] The history of Native American boarding schools in the United States has attracted new attention and investigation into former boarding schools, including Canadian government-funded schools. See, e.g., Maile Arvin, “Native Hawaiians are Confronting the Legacies of ‘Indian Board Schools,’” Truthout, May 26, 2022; Adam Duxter, “What happened at Minnesota’s 21 Native American Boarding Schools? Unpacking a Complex History,” CBS Minnesota, May 20, 2022; Mark Walker, “Report Catalogs Abuse of Native American Children at Former Government Schools,” The New York Times, May 11, 2022; Mary Annette Pember, “A History Not Yet Laid to Rest,” The Atlantic, Nov. 24, 2021, and “Death by Civilization,” Mar. 8, 2019; Matt Reynolds, “Human rights violations at American Indian boarding schools must be investigated,” ABA Journal, Aug. 10, 2021; Colleen Connolly, “These Native historians are compiling what we know about boarding schools,” Minnesota Reformer, Aug. 9, 2021; Claire Cleveland, “Legacy of Indigenous Boarding Schools in Colorado Includes Unmarked Graves and Generational Scars,” Colorado Public Radio News, Aug. 2, 2021.
[11] The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition website provides a comprehensive account of this history. In addition, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940, Univ. of Nebraska Press (2000); Nick Estes, “The U.S. stole generations of Indigenous children to open the West,” High Country News, Oct. 14, 2019; and Preston S. McBride, “A Lethal Education: Institutionalized Negligence, Epidemiology, and Death in Native American Boarding Schools, 1879-1934”(2021).
[12] For instance, the Latter Day Saints Placement Program removed as many as 2,000 Hopi and Navajo children every year from their reservations, placing them in Mormon homes throughout the country. Patrice H. Kunesh, “The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978: Protecting Essential Tribal Interests,” 60 U. Colo. L. Rev. 131 (1988).
[13] I offered brief historical accounts of Native child removal in “Protecting Essential Tribal Interests,” and “Borders Beyond Borders: Protecting Essential Tribal Relations Off Reservation Under the Indian Child Welfare Act,” 15 N. Eng. L. Rev. (2007), including the legislative history of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, in which Congress heard testimony about how state social workers often pathologized reservation conditions and viewed Indian reservations as categorically unacceptable places to raise children, culminating in the removal of Native children without due process. Indian Child Welfare Program: Hearings Before the S. Sub. Comm. on Indian Affs., 93rd Cong., 2d Sess., 19-20 (1974).
More recently, in the Teen Vogue series Fostered or Forgotten, Ruth Hopkins relates the story of Lost Bird, an infant found under her mother’s frozen body after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Lost Bird was adopted by the military leader who led the assault, Gen. Leonard Colby, but her life “was difficult and marred with rejection and abuse….” “How Foster Care Has Stripped Native American Children of Their Own Cultures,” Teen Vogue, May 22, 2018.
Historian Nick Estes recounts the federal government’s military strategy of attacking children to enable the conquest of land by destroying the family and therefore Native nations. Why is the US right suddenly interested in Native American adoption law?, The Guardian, Aug. 23, 2021.
[14] The Adoption History: Indian Adoption Project, University of Oregon (2012) (uoregon.edu).
[15] The Adoption History: Indian Adoption Project. Events around removing Native children in the 1960s have been described as “a black market adoption racket” in Indian children. See Rex Weyler, Blood of The Land, The Government and Corporate War Against The American Indian Movement 149 (1982).
[16] Margaret D. Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s,” 37 Am. Indian Q. 136, 144 (2013).
[17] Fifty years later, CWLA director Shay Bilchik formally apologized for the organization’s participation in the widespread removal of Native children from their homes, stating “No matter how well intentioned and how squarely in the mainstream this was at the time, it was wrong; it was hurtful; and it reflected a kind of bias that surfaces feelings of shame, as we look back with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” See Karen Balcom, “The Logic of Exchange: The Indian Child Welfare League of America, the Adoption Resource Exchange Movement and the Indian Adoption Project, 1958-1967. Adoption & Culture, 1(1), 5-67 (2007). In addition, see note 10 for Margaret Jacobs’ extensive analysis of the collusion between the BIA and CWLA to promote the IAP using deceptive rhetoric of suffering children and unfit families in “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s.”
The false narrative and pathologizing of Native families continue today, particularly in challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act. Law professor Sarah Deer and her colleagues have collected and traced this disparaging campaign against Native identity and tribal sovereignty. Sarah Deer, Elise Higgins, Thomas White, “Editorializing ICWA: 40 Years of Colonial Commentary,” The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance (UCLA), 7(1) 2022.
[18] A recurring theme in federal Indian policy is the destruction of tribalism and dismantling the reservation system. One of the most damaging was the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act of 1887, 24 Stat. 388 (Feb. 8, 1887), in which Congress authorized the division of communally held tribal lands into individual parcels called allotments. More than two-thirds of reservation lands were lost through allotment and sale to white settlers. With settlers pouring in, tribal lifeways were permanently altered and conditions on reservations drastically deteriorated. Forced to address such appalling neglect, Congress commissioned a study of reservations across the country. The result was an extensive investigation into 40 years of failed federal Indian policies and a detailed report exposing pernicious levels of poverty, disease and high death rates, and severely inadequate and deteriorating housing. The Meriam Report: The Problem of Indian Administration (1928), was the first government study to demonstrate with extensive data that federal Indian policy in the 19th century had resulted in a travesty of social justice to Native Americans. The federal government continues to neglect its responsibilities to Native American tribes. A recent report issued by the US Commission on Civil Rights entitled Broken Promises: Continuing Federal Funding Shortfall for Native Americans, finds that federal funding levels are woefully inadequate to provide for education, public safety, health care and other services required by treaties and federal laws. See, Report of the US Commission on Civil Rights (December 2018).
[19] House Report No. 95-1386, 95th Cong., 2d Session, 1978. See also, Troy R. Johnson, “The state and the American Indian Tribe: Who gets the Indian child?” Wicazo Sa Review, 14(1), 197-214 (1999).
[20] Hearing on Establishing Standards for the Placement of Indian Children in Foster or Adoptive Homes, To Prevent the Breakup of Indian Families, And for Other Purposes, H.R. Rep. 95-13896, at 9, 95th Cong., 2d Sess. (1978).
[21] See, “Indian Child Welfare Act principles: The gold standard of child welfare practices.” Casey Family Programs (2019).
[22] The high rate of removing Native children is drawing some attention, at least in Montana. Earlier this year, a regional newspaper commented on the state legislature’s performance audit of the Montana child welfare system and its high removal rates, particularly of Native children, opining that the system “is not about children and does not promote their welfare. Perhaps now … lawmakers will face up to the harm done by Montana’s dubious distinction, child removal capital of America.” See, “The audit proves it: Montana is the child removal capital of America, and that’s bad for children,” Richard Wexler, Daily Montanan (Jan. 16, 2022).
[23] See Brave Heart, “Integrating the impact of historical trauma in the treatment of Native American Indian women,” In Racism in the lives of women: Testimony theory and guides to anti-racist practice, J. Adleman, & G. Enquidanos (eds.) New York: Haworth Press (1995); Brave Heart, “The return to the sacred path: Healing the historical trauma and historical unresolved grief response among the Lakota through a psychoeducational group intervention,” Smith College Studies in Social Work, 68, 287–305 M. (1998); Brave Heart & DeBruyn, L, “The American Indian Holocaust: Healing historical unresolved grief,” American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research, 8, 60–82 (1998); Braveheart-Jordan & DeBruyn, L., “So she may walk in balance; Brave Heart, “Gender differences in the historical grief response among the Lakota,” Journal of Health and Social Policy, 10, 1–21 (1999); Brave Heart, “Oyate Ptayela: Rebuilding the Lakota Nation through addressing historical trauma among Lakota Parents, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 2, 109–126 (1999); Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Chase, J., Elkins, J., Altschul, D., “Historical trauma among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: concepts, research, and clinical considerations,” J. Psychoactive Drugs, 43(4):282-90 (Oct-Dec 2011). *Special note of recognition for co-author, Josephine Chase, the granddaughter Josephine Gates Kelly.
[24] The reaction to this massive disruption and loss, which Brave Heart calls the historical trauma response, often includes survivor guilt, depression, PTSD symptoms, physical symptoms, psychic numbing, anger, suicidal ideation, and fixation to trauma, among other features and behaviors. While the scope and scale of historical trauma response among Native population today is difficult to ascertain, diligent researchers have created a matrix to trace the relationship between historical trauma and current condition. Les B. Whitbeck, Gary W. Adams, Dan R. Hoyt, and Xiaojin Chen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Historical Trauma Among American Indian People,” Am. J. of Comm. Psychology, 33(3-4):119-30 (June 2004).
[25] For example, parenting and communication styles and cultural signals. See, Kathleen Brown-Rice, “Examining the Theory of Historical Trauma Among Native Americans; Michelle M. Sotero, “A conceptual model of historical trauma: Implications for public heath practice and research,” Journal of Health Disparities research and Practice, 1(1), 93-108 (2006).
[26] Kathleen Brown-Rice, “Examining the Theory of Historical Trauma Among Native Americans,” Oct. 15, 2014.
[27] Les B. Whitbeck, Gary W. Adams, Dan R. Hoyt, and Xiaojin Chen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Historical Trauma Among American Indian People,” Am. J. of Comm. Psychology, 33(3-4):119-30 (June 2004).
[28] Whitbeck et al. at 128.
[29] Frank Edwards and Theresa Rocha Beardall, “American Indian and Alaska Native child welfare system contact across U.S. States: magnitudes and mechanisms, SocArXiv (Apr.1, 2021). Web.
[30] Claudette Grinnell Davis, Allison Dunnigan, Bailey B. Stevens, “Indigenous-centered racial disproportionality in American foster care: a national population study,” Journal of Public Child Welfare, (Jan. 2022).
[31] Mandated reporting of suspected child abuse or neglect is a critical entry point into child protection systems. Sociologist Kelley Fong’s research makes important contributions to understanding how mandated reporting in family interactions with healthcare, educational, and social service systems impact families, finding that CPS concerns rarely prompted mothers to avoid systems wholesale. Throughout their system participation, however, mothers concealed their hardships, home life, and parenting behavior from potential reporters. Reporting systems also serve as vital sources of support for disadvantaged families, and thus mothers’ concealment of information could preclude opportunities for services and reinforce a sense of constraint or limitation in families’ institutional interactions. Kelley Fong , Concealment and Constraint: Child Protective Services Fears and Poor Mothers’ Institutional Engagement, Social Forces, 97:4, 1785-1810 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soy093.
[32] Native population centers are multidimensional. They are urban, see Indian cities: histories of indigenous urbanization, Eds. Kent Blansett, Cathleen D Cahill, and Andrew Needham, University of Oklahoma Press: Norman (2022): 70% of Native people in the US have lived in cities at some point in the past 50 years; and they are rural, see Native America x Rural America: Tribal Nations as Key Players in Regional Rural Economies, Miriam M. Jorgensen and Joan Timeche, in Investing in Rural Prosperity, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (2022): approximately 70% of all tribal citizens live on and near reservations, tribal lands that largely are located far from urban cores.
