THE SLIDE PROJECTED ON THE screen offered a list of imperatives: Take Territory, Take Natural Resources, Take Sovereignty . . . The image was part of a lecture by Terry Cross, a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association. Cross was using the list to explain how colonialism works, as he addressed a conference put together by the First Nations Repatriation Institute.1 The meeting took place in a large, open room, with about fifty attendees seated around folding tables at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Saint Paul. The group included tribal members and leaders, community activists, officials of child-centered nonprofits, welfare workers, judges, and attorneys. The Repatriation Institute specializes in helping Native adoptees find their way home, so the most important people present, according to founder and conference organizer Sandra White Hawk, were adoptees who had come to share their experiences.
The preceding chapters of this book have laid out the manner in which Native people’s homelands, natural resources, sacred places, freedom, and safety have been compromised or destroyed over the years. We have looked at the ways in which these actions continue in the present day with the aid of federal agencies, state and local governments, and the corporations that cozy up to them. In Cross’s telling, this dismembering has usurped tribal sovereignty and attacked the spirituality of communities and individuals. Though the losses have tested indigenous identity over many years, the lifeways of the nation’s first people have remarkable staying power. The late David McAllester, an anthropology professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who studied Navajo and Comanche music, was fond of telling his students that culture should not be understood as a fragile hothouse flower. Rather, he said, it is a weed that thrives in many settings and against all odds.
Yankton Sioux children play lacrosse on an historic fort’s parade ground, in southeastern South Dakota. “To save bullets, cavalrymen smashed our children’s heads with rifle butts,” said Yankton tribal member Kip Spotted Eagle. “Now, our children are transforming this place’s memories with laughter and joy.” (Stephanie Woodard)
To push forward the effort to sweep away tribal people, one more step was, and continues to be, necessary. The final entry on Cross’s slide was: “Take the Children.” “The last item is removal of the children to educate them in the language and worldview of the colonizer,” Cross told the conference. The strategy is reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt’s “pulverizing engine,” described in Chapter 1, but applied to children rather than land. Several Native adoptees at the conference recalled being separated from their families and the effect it had on their lives. White Hawk told the group that she was taken from her family as a toddler on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It was the mid-1950s. After decades of disconnection from her roots, along with what she remembered as continual warnings against turning into “a good-for-nothing drunken Indian,” she found her way home to family, culture, and identity.
White Hawk’s childhood experience had its beginnings in assimilation policies conceived in the previous century. Carl Schurz, a Union Army general who served as Interior Department secretary from 1877 to 1881, calculated that killing just one Indian in warfare was costing the federal government about a million dollars.2 Meanwhile, the emerging alternative—educating a Native child according to “white” norms in off-reservation boarding schools—would set the government back about $1,200 per child over eight years.3 Schurz realized there was a cost-cutting way to solve what was referred to in those days as the Indian problem; the federal government could give the tribes a choice—extermination or civilization. Another expert of the day declared, “We must either butcher them or civilize them.”4
If parents refused to relinquish their children, the Bureau of Indian Affairs withheld the food and money allocations the treaties had established in return for tribes ceding land. The idea of forcibly assimilating Native people had its roots in the 1600s but got underway in earnest in 1890.5 A witness later wrote about how students were recruited for the boarding schools: “The children are caught, often roped like cattle, and taken away from their parents, many times never to return.”6 In the clinical language of federal policymakers, this process was generally referred to as the “collection and transportation, and so forth, of pupils.”7
The boarding schools offered mainly vocational education.8 As Teddy Roosevelt directed Congress in 1901, “In the schools, the education should be elementary and largely industrial. The need of higher education among the Indians is very, very limited.”9 The government retained the administration of some schools, but many were parceled out to Protestant and Catholic denominations; in Chapter 1, we also saw this contradiction of the nation’s supposed separation of church and state in the evolution of Supreme Court decisions regarding indigenous peoples. Eradicating Native cultures and languages was paramount for the federal government, and it relied on churches to do this.
Since most Native children in those days were monolingual in their tribal language, or at least first speakers of it, it was literally pummeled out of them. Many children did not survive the beatings, crowded conditions, poor food, epidemics, and lack of medical care.10 Incomplete or lost records mean the number of Native children who died is unknown. Children often had compulsory assignments as domestic or farm workers for white families, essentially slave labor. A tribal member who was in her fifties when I spoke to her in 2012 remembered participating in harvesting and other fieldwork during elementary school. She was surprised when I asked whether her parents had given permission for this, or if she had ever been paid. “I never thought of it, but ‘no’ to both questions,” she responded.11
Sexual abuse was rampant in church-run schools, largely because the churches used the institutions as dumping grounds for clerics who had exploited youngsters elsewhere.12 (Sexual assaults may have been less common in the government-run schools, though there was plenty of physical abuse, according to former students I spoke to who had attended both kinds of institution.)13 Court documents for one lawsuit, brought by former students, included a 1968 letter to Catholic Church superiors from a priest at St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. After a chatty opening in which the priest reports that he has been “kinda busy” and that “all goes along quietly out here,” he mentions, almost as an aside, that a certain Brother Chapman has been “fooling around with little girls—he had them down the basement of our building in the dark, where we found a pair of panties torn.” Subsequent reports show that “Chappy” continued to abuse children for years, briefly became “a new man,” then relapsed into more “difficulty with little girls.”14
Any effect this abuse may have had on the children, physical or emotional, did not seem to come up. During the years I reported on former students’ sexual-assault allegations—approximately 2011–15—I viewed original documents, read testimony, and conducted interviews. I never saw any indication that staff believed they had a duty of care toward the students who were in their charge. Quite the opposite: a contemporary Catholic Church lawyer told me in 2011 that the plaintiffs who had filed the lawsuits were “trying to grab the brass ring” and “thinking that’s your ticket out of squalor.”15 The South Dakota courts eventually threw out the suits after the state legislature passed a bill called HB 1104 in 2010.16 The statute prohibited child-sexual-abuse claims against institutions by anyone over age forty. Since the schools had closed in the 1970s, most former students were in their fifties or older at that point. Their cases were neatly swept away.
Native former students in the Northwest and Alaska did reach a settlement with the Jesuits in 2011,17 and additional ex-students who had been in Montana schools did in 2014.18 The latter settlement was with the Diocese of Helena and the Ursuline Sisters of the Western Province. It included an offer of counseling by the Church. One plaintiff I interviewed regarded it as far too little, far too late, and even outlandish. “It’s absurd,” scoffed the plaintiff, whom the lawsuit listed as John Doe to protect his privacy. “So, they’re going to get the rapists and abusers together and put them in charge?”19
Trust was another victim of the assaults. “We lost trust in the priests and nuns,” said the John Doe plaintiff. “When we tried to tell family members, they didn’t believe us. How could they imagine religious people did such things? So we lost trust in our families. We victims wander the earth alone, bearing heavy burdens, with no place to put them down.”20 The lawsuits typically result in little money for individual plaintiffs, once any financial settlement is divided up and parceled out. Plaintiffs I asked about this said that they had not sued for the money but found that it was the only way they could create change. At least, John Doe said, lawsuits like the one he participated in meant a lower chance of children being abused in the future.21
Children ran away continually from the schools, so barred windows, locked classrooms and dormitories, and barbed-wire fences were common at the facilities. At Saint Paul’s Indian Mission on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, I was able to view the derelict buildings as well as photographs from decades past. The church had been surrounded by barbed wire during the boarding-school era, lest congregants make a run for it. Still, students managed to get out. “I was always trying to escape,” said one woman about another school. “We all did. We weren’t trying to get home because we didn’t know where that was. We were completely disoriented. We just took off and took our chances in the world, hitchhiking down the road. Then they’d find us and bring us back.”
Punishments meted out by the schools for running away and other supposed offenses were extreme. Interviews I did revealed that staff beat children with boards, sticks, and hoses; they threw them down stairs and locked them outdoors in winter; the teachers and others pulled children’s hair out by handfuls, shaved their heads, and withheld food.22 Tribal members on several reservations described so-called belt lines, in which children were lined up and made to whip others as they crawled by. One man said that no matter how painful his memories were of being hit, those of hitting other boys and seeing them beg for mercy were far worse.23 “They took away our sense of belonging to anyone, our opportunities to develop relationships,” said one woman. “But they could never take away the truth, that what they were doing was wrong.”24
This cataclysm, which took place over a century, roiled individual lives and devastated communities as succeeding generations were swept into a bizarre, sadistic world that lasted into the 1970s. “Isolated groups of vulnerable children, plus religious people in charge, equals abuse. It’s just a fact. I have not found a residential institution for Indian children where it didn’t happen, no matter the location or the denomination,” said investigator Ken Bear Chief, who is Gros Ventre, Nez Perce, and Nooksak. He worked for Tamaki Law Firm in Yakima, Washington, which brought several of the successful sexual-abuse lawsuits.25
During the mid-twentieth century, the schools began to be closed down or turned over to the tribes. The process paralleled other increases in tribal self-determination in those years. President Nixon was particularly helpful. In his 1970 Special Message to Congress, he denounced the so-called termination policy of the 1950s and 1960s, which had destroyed certain tribes legally and economically in order to force their members to assimilate. Nixon also advocated for protection of sacred sites and the tribal takeover of programs that served their members in health, economic development, education, and other areas.26 In 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act reversed constraints and outright bans on Native religious observances.27
WHILE THE BOARDING SCHOOLS WERE fading away, other ways to separate Indian children from their families were coming into focus: adoption and foster care. In 1969 and 1974, Association on American Indian Affairs surveys showed that as many as 35 percent of Indian youngsters had been removed from their homes, with almost all of them placed in non-Native foster homes, adoptive homes, or group settings.28 Owing to the professionalization of social work over the course of the twentieth century, child-welfare workers began to replace the clergy, police, and soldiers who once showed up to take tribal youngsters. The federal Indian Adoption Project and the prestigious Child Welfare League of America were key groups behind this policy. Later, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America took over the program.
Some states had extreme disparities in the placement of Native children. Recognizing the crisis, the Association on American Indian Affairs collected research and testimony from experts nationwide and published it in 1977.29 In Minnesota, the statistics revealed, Native children were placed in foster care or adoption at a rate five times that of non-Native children. In Wisconsin, it was seventeen times higher. In Washington State, placements in foster care were ten times higher, and the adoption rate was nineteen times greater. Child-welfare workers often tricked, bullied, or physically forced Native parents to relinquish their children, with no regard for due process.30 In an essay in the book, South Dakota’s Democratic congressman, James Abourezk, accused the federal government of allowing state agencies “to strike at the heart of the Indian community by literally stealing Indian children.”31
Throughout Indian country these days, young Natives participate avidly in their heritage cultures. Bridgette Mongeon of Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, rehearses with the virtuosic Zuni dance group Soaring Eagle; the musicians are Howard Lesarlley, left, and Arlen Quetawki Jr. This troupe may be profoundly traditional, but it also has a YouTube channel, 505soaringeagle. (Joseph Zummo)
“People may know about the boarding-school era and how bad it was,” said White Hawk. “But few know that the subsequent adoption era even existed.”32 Those she invited to the conference I reported on in Saint Paul were determined to change that. They wanted to share what had happened and to understand better the legal, social, and personal devastation it had wrought. “A few small studies of adult adoptees have been done, and we’re just learning how to talk about what happened,” White Hawk told the group. “We need think tanks and conferences and scientific research to explore what occurred and how it affected us.” That understanding will inform current Indian child-welfare cases, as when courts consider returning a child to his or her family or terminating parental rights. “When experts take the stand to testify in a child-welfare hearing,” White Hawk said, “they need academic backup to explain the relationship between suicide and being disconnected from your culture, let’s say. The courts want PhD-level research to back up what we tell them.”33
“Lost bird” is a term often used to refer to the children. It recalls one of the earliest Indian adoptees: a baby girl who survived the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre in the shelter of her mother’s frozen corpse. She was subsequently claimed as a trophy by an army officer. He took her home as a kind of living curio and named her Lost Bird. Newspaper coverage of the massacre and its aftermath made Lost Bird a celebrity. However, her fame did not save her from a fate that was a harbinger of what was to come for too many Native adoptees.34
In her new home, Lost Bird experienced intolerance and isolation, and her adoptive father apparently abused her sexually. When she rebelled as a teenager, she was shipped back to her birth family, where she no longer fit in. After a stint in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, two disastrous marriages, one of which left her with syphilis, and the loss of three children, Lost Bird was felled by influenza in 1920. “Throughout her life of prejudice, exploitation, poverty, misunderstanding, and disease, she never gave up hope that one day she would find out where she really belonged,” wrote Renée Sansom Flood in her biography, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota.35
At repatriation events White Hawk has organized, modern-day adoptees recount their dramatic life journeys, sometimes for the first time. “The stories vary from the most abusive to the most beautiful, but that’s not the point,” White Hawk said. “Even in loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are. Love doesn’t provide identity.”36
“I’m an angry Indian,” Roger St. John, of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, in North and South Dakota, told the conference in Saint Paul. “I’m more than glad to tell you I’m pissed off. I was the youngest of sixteen children, grabbed at age four, along with three older brothers—no paperwork, nothing. The other kids in my family escaped because they took off.” Soon, St. John and his siblings were in New York City. The year was 1966, and it was Thanksgiving. “We were in the newspaper, along with lots of good talk about the holiday and adoption. We were brought up without our culture, which took a terrible toll on our lives. I grew up angry and miserable. If I ever got hurt, it wounded me to my soul, because I felt no one was there for me,” said St. John, a forty-nine-year-old truck driver with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.
When St. John turned eighteen, or aged out of the adoption system, his parents turned him out—a fate I heard from several adoptees. Suddenly at loose ends, some adoptees joined the armed forces, as St. John did. Others ended up on the street or in prison. As an adult, St. John found his birth mother and reconnected with his adoptive parents. “They were so young,” he said of the latter, “in their twenties, when a priest convinced them to adopt four Sioux boys from South Dakota. It was too much—for all of us.”
Almost any personal or family setback, from minor to serious, could precipitate an Indian family losing a child. When I interviewed adoptees from several reservations, two said they were separated from their families after hospital stays as young children, one for a rash, the other after contracting tuberculosis. A third was seized at the home of his babysitter; he recalled her being punched and knocked over in the process. A fourth said that he was taken after his father died, though his mother did not want to give him up. A fifth described being snatched, along with siblings, because his grandfather was a medicine man who would not abandon his traditional ways.
I sat with one extended family on a South Dakota reservation and listened to stories about several siblings, who were then middle-aged and older adults. It was late afternoon, and the sun slanted in through the living room windows, sinking in the western sky as they methodically recounted how every child had been removed from the family, temporarily or permanently. Their experience bridged the boarding-school and adoption eras. The older ones had been sent to residential schools. The youngest was an adoptee, who had tracked down his birth family through a series of lucky connections. As with St. John’s family, no home studies or comparable investigations had apparently been done to support his removal. Nor did the families appear to have been offered help for any perceived problems. “I have questions, but there are no records,” the adoptee said. “I lost my culture and my relatives. There should have been something to protect me as a child. Why did the state do what it did?” His sister-in-law answered, “Because they could.” In a separate interview, another tribal member explained, “We Indians had no way to stop white people from taking our kids. We had no rights.”
Then, and even now, Native families do not receive the assistance they need to get back on their feet. “Non-Native families experiencing adversity may get a wide range of aid,” said Danialle Rose, of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. She is a clinical social worker who runs the Medicine Voice Healing Center in Hot Springs, South Dakota. “Native families don’t know to ask for help and, in my observation, aren’t told.”37
In 1978, Congress tried to check the flood of Native children from their families by passing the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. The law was intended to protect Native children, preserve their families, and promote the stability of tribes.38 ICWA allows federally recognized tribes to intervene when agencies want to remove children who are, or are eligible to become, members under the tribe’s rules; it also allows child-welfare cases to be transferred to tribal court. ICWA requires agencies to make active efforts to ascertain whether youngsters are Native, to provide services to Native families so they can avoid losing their children, and to reunify families when their offspring have been taken. Revelations about the large number of Native children who had been separated from their families were central to getting the law passed. However, the numbers remain extreme today. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, in 2013 American Indian and Alaska Native children had the highest rate of representation in foster care, increasing over recent years even as other groups saw declines.39
Indian child-welfare expert Frank LaMere is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and director of Four Directions Community Center, in Sioux City, Iowa. He is involved in state and national policy matters and advocates for individual families. “I sit in on many meetings to determine the fate of Native families—along with judges, lawyers, social workers, and others involved—and I observe that they do not apply objective standards,” LaMere said. “If one standard were applied to all, Native children would go home more often than not. Time after time in these meetings, the Native parent has solved the issue—typically alcohol or drugs—that caused the children to be taken away. The parent proudly announces, ‘I’ve been sober for twenty-two months,’ or what have you. We all congratulate them on their new wellness. After that conversation dies down, a social worker inevitably says, ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ and raises a long-resolved issue, from literally twenty years ago, or something new.”
LaMere recalled that at one meeting he attended, a social worker announced that she had found dirty dishes in the sink during her last visit to the mother’s home. “She said the mother therefore shouldn’t get her kids back. I became unglued. I stressed that the mother didn’t lose her children over dirty dishes, and they couldn’t be kept from her for this reason. I deal with this kind of thing every single week.”40
“Native families have to prove their worth in order to keep their children, or to become legal guardians of a relative’s children,” said Danialle Rose. “In contrast, Caucasian families are worthy until proven unworthy. This is an important distinction, and I don’t think it’s understood or even talked about.”41
Terry Yellow Fat called it the criminalization of poverty. He was a child-welfare official of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, in South and North Dakota, when I spoke to him in 2012. He pointed out that approved Native foster homes sat empty, while tribal children were overwhelmingly placed in non-Native facilities. Yellow Fat and other South Dakota tribal officials noted another alarming trend. In the state, the “other” category for Native children in care—those who died, ran away, or were transferred to correctional or mental-health facilities—had grown from 6.9 to 32.8 percent per year over a recent decade. “The emotional and cultural damage to our children is enormous,” said Yellow Fat. “I had one case earlier this year in which a young child said, ‘I’ll kill myself if I can’t go home.’ That child is back with us and is doing well, but others stay in the system until they age out at eighteen. At that point, they’re lost, they don’t fit in anywhere, and many end up on the streets, on drugs.”
“Vicious” was how Yellow Fat described state welfare workers. “Their attitude is, ‘They’re just Indians.’ Why? Why? We’re human. So many tribal members have come forward to say they lost their children, sometimes years ago, and don’t know where they are. Wakan injan—our children are sacred. We must take care of them.”42
“We can’t be afraid to use words like genocide,” Anita Fineday told the repatriation conference in Saint Paul. She is from the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and a director of Indian child-welfare programs at Casey Family Programs. “The endgame, the official federal policy, was that the tribes wouldn’t exist. A lot of federal laws don’t make sense, laws resulting in the checkerboarding of reservations and so on, but they were passed anyway because no one thought the tribes would continue to exist.”
The financial incentives for removing Native children are high. The billions in federal dollars disbursed annually on behalf of all fostered and adopted children—Native and non-Native—are parceled out among state agencies, foster and adoptive parents, group homes, research projects, law firms, and other entities. They, in turn, make purchases, hire employees and independent contractors, pay taxes, and engage in other economic activity that has local and regional impact. The multibillion-dollar private adoption industry is another beneficiary of the increased availability of children. Bottom line, adoption and other child-welfare services are worth some $14 billion annually for all population groups in this country.43
When Native children are disproportionately taken, the greater numbers mean more money for all concerned. In reporting on ICWA issues in 2011, National Public Radio asked former South Dakota governor William Janklow, now deceased, how important the federal child-care funds were to his state. His answer was unequivocal. “Incredibly important,” he responded. “Look, we’re a poor state. We’re not a high-income state. We’re like North Dakota without oil. We’re like Nebraska without Omaha and Lincoln. We don’t have factories opening here, hiring people at high-wage jobs.”44
“Our children feed the system,” said LaMere. “They will continue to do so, because the funding is set up that way. Those who work for the system won’t speak up. Beyond that, many social workers and courts nationwide feel they know better than we do about what’s good for our children. It remains for Native people to speak up. We must keep blowing the whistle on the child-welfare system to local, state, and national lawmakers. Only then will we have a chance to keep our families intact.” According to LaMere, nothing will change “until someone feels uncomfortable. That includes us. It is hard to confront those who control the systems that control our lives, but we must. Our children and their futures are in jeopardy. We have a long way to go, but we will prevail.”45
According to Ken Bear Chief, the end result of taking Native children from their families is unresolved personal and community-wide grief. On reservations, he observes much loss-related dysfunction, including alcoholism, divorce, and spousal abuse. This is often referred to as historical trauma, because the pain is passed down by means of damaged identities and relationships that can be perpetuated when the survivors form their own families. Danialle Rose described the difficulty Native children can have when they return home. “They’re mistrustful in public situations,” she said. “Before they were placed in foster care or a residential setting, they went to powwows but now have forgotten how to dance, for example. If returning children were taken when they were at school, they may be afraid to go there again. Even children who have never been removed from their families may be fearful when they see an unknown vehicle because they know about the possibility of being taken away.”
Still, Rose said, she had also observed Native adults who had had a very difficult time in adoptive and foster settings yet had managed to move on to full, productive lives. “It was a rough road for them, especially during their teen and early adult years, but some had done it nevertheless,” she said. “They were strong, and they had extensive community support.”46
The pain cannot be cured with quick-fix programs, according to Terry Cross. He has examined locations in Canada where the suicide rate was highest and found that they included places where the culture had been most disrupted. Confronted with the question of whether to start with a suicide-prevention or other individual-aid program or to begin with the community as a whole, with self-governance help, for example, he decided the latter was the essential first step. Balance had to be restored in the community; then they could move on to working on the symptoms of imbalance, such as suicide and other individual issues.
Linear thinking—see a problem, apply a simple solution—is ineffective, Cross told his audience at the repatriation conference. “Mainstream society’s services are so fractured. Medical doctors get the body, psychologists get the mind, judges get the social context, and clergy get the spirit. But, in fact, we are all whole people, and real solutions have to address that.” Cross described the indigenous sweat lodge ceremony as a way of caring for the whole person while reconstituting the traditions and the community. The ceremony involves groups of participants, teachers, stories, and protocols for how to conduct oneself, he noted. “You sweat, and you experience aromatic herbs, which heal the body. You participate in prayers and songs, which are in the realm of spirit, and when you come out, you have moments of clarity that are aspects of mind,” Cross said.
Running counter to these improvements is the vigor with which some states and adoption agencies continue to pursue Native children and families. In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of the Oglala and Rosebud Sioux Tribes and individual tribal members.47 The complaint sought a ruling that would compel courts in Pennington County, which encompasses Rapid City on the western side of South Dakota, to provide prompt and meaningful hearings when Indian children in the county are removed from their homes.
The lawsuit followed a sixteen-month ACLU investigation that found that Pennington County’s courts routinely prevented Native parents facing custody hearings from being represented by lawyers, from seeing the affidavits of those making abuse or neglect claims against them, from cross-examining their accusers, and from introducing evidence on their own behalf.48 According to the ACLU, the state triumphed against Indian parents in 100 percent of cases. As an example, the hearing for tribal plaintiff Madonna Pappan, her husband, and their two children lasted about sixty seconds. During the hearing, the court did not permit the Pappans to see the complaint that state officials had lodged against them. At the end of the Pappans’ lightning-fast court appearance, the judge entered an order asserting that taking their children was “the least restrictive alternative available.”49
The federal judge hearing the ACLU’s case ruled on behalf of the Native plaintiffs in December 2016, saying that violating their rights was the defendants’ only consistent policy. While the ACLU victory—which the state is appealing—may alleviate some of the aforementioned problems, it is not specifically about individual issues, according to ACLU senior staff attorney Stephen Pevar. Instead, the lawsuit is about systemic change and constitutional rights. The Supreme Court has long held that when the government takes anything from you, even your driver’s license or your furniture, you get a full accounting, contends Pevar. “If it’s true in those cases, it’s certainly true when government takes your children,” he said.50
In 2017, after a two-year comment period, the Bureau of Indian Affairs clarified ICWA regulations—including those protecting the Native family unit, a tribe’s right to determine its own membership, and Native parents’ right to counsel—and made them more easily enforceable. To counter this, powerful adoption-industry groups and conservative organizations have brought a spate of lawsuits challenging ICWA.51 Most suits claim that the law interferes with states’ rights to make child-welfare decisions and/or that the law amounts to racial discrimination against Native children. So far, federal courts have dismissed or rejected the suits. In 2017, an Arizona district court dismissed a suit by ICWA opponents and warned them that lawsuits should be “based on actual facts before the court, not on hypothetical concerns”; the court said any effort to amend the suit would be “futile.”52 Also in 2017, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a foster family that wanted to prevent the transfer of a Native foster child staying with them to her own relatives.53
These lawsuits are usually accompanied by energetic public-relations campaigns. Fevered press coverage presents Native families and homelands as no place to raise a child, regardless of the facts of any particular case. A coalition of prominent Native organizations is pushing back with information and legal assistance for tribes and parents who are trying to keep Native families together. The group calls itself the ICWA Defense Project. Participants include the National Congress of American Indians, National Indian Child Welfare Association, Native American Rights Fund, and ICWA Appellate Project at Michigan State University College of Law.54
“FOREVER IS A LONG, LONG time / So I will forever remember you.” The refrain floated over a November 2013 grieving ceremony on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. About seventy-five people had gathered for a meal and remembrance in a meeting room of the tribe’s hotel in Mobridge, South Dakota. The singer of the song said she had composed her plaint for relatives lost to suicide—a son, a nephew, a niece, and cousins, in deaths stretching back to the 1970s. Tribal member Veronica Iron Thunder, who survived her own suicide attempts, sang a traditional Lakota song intended to restore damaged spirits. In a slide show, the beautiful, smiling faces of those lost to suicide slid across the screen, radiating hope. Almost all were in their teens and twenties.
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report in 2016, the suicide rate for Natives aged fifteen to twenty-four was not only the highest in the nation, it had climbed steadily over the fifteen years between 1999 and 2014.55 The phenomenon has been marked not just by high rates of actual deaths but by clusters of copycat suicides and attempts. During one visit I made to Standing Rock, I was sitting in on a district council discussion when word arrived that a child in a nearby village had killed himself. The councilors fell silent, and one explained quietly to me that they were braced for the news that more children would do the same. “It can feel like wartime,” said Diane Garreau, a child-welfare official on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, just south of Standing Rock, in South Dakota. “I’ll see one of our youngsters one day, then find out a couple of days later she’s gone.” The tragedies ripple through reservations, which are essentially small towns. “People are overwhelmed,” said Garreau. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I just can’t go to another funeral.’”56
Native youth carry heavy burdens. They may experience not just separation from their families, but also extreme poverty, hunger, and health disparities. Diabetes rates are high in tribal communities, and untreated mental illnesses such as depression are common. There may be few jobs, even part-time or after-school ones. Bullying and peer pressure pile on more trauma during the vulnerable teen years. Community-wide grief stems from the loss of land, language, and more, a study reported in 2011.57 Said Garreau, “Our kids hurt so much, they have to shut down the pain. Many have decided they won’t live that long anyway, which in their minds excuses self-destructive behavior, like drinking—or suicide.”
When suicide is common, it can become an acceptable solution as burdens build up, according to Alex Crosby, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC’s injury-prevention center: “If people run into trouble—a relationship problem, a legal problem—this compounds the underlying risk factors, and one of the options is suicide.”
“It crosses your mind,” said Jake Martus, who is Alaska Native. “I’ve never acted on suicidal thoughts, but they’ve been there my entire life. It’s sad, it’s shocking, but in our communities it’s also somehow normal.” Martus, who is a patient advocate at a Native medical center, said suicide is so frequent among his people, he wondered, “Is it in our blood?” He recalled that behind his dad’s suicide were overwhelming memories of sexual abuse by his village’s Catholic priest. The term “historical trauma” did not make sense to Martus. “It was genocide,” he said. “They set us up to kill ourselves. The point of all the policies was ‘take them out.’”58
In some communities, suicide is so common that children—boys in particular—dare each other to try it. They may not be depressed, but simply responding to a challenge. Part of the difficulty is boys misunderstanding the warrior tradition that informs Native male identity, according to Alvin Rafelito, who is Ramah Navajo and a former director of his community’s health and human services department. “We have a prayer that describes a warrior as someone who goes the distance spiritually for his people. Nowadays, that ideal has been reduced to fighting and violence. In teaching kids to be modern warriors, we have to convey the term’s full, traditional meaning.”59
For many men, their activities as providers have also shifted dramatically as they hold down jobs rather than hunt and fish, said Yup’ik storyteller and elder mentor Keggulluk (pronounced kuth-look). That, in turn, means critical life lessons are hard to come by. He recalled that his grandfather once told him, “Those who don’t listen die young.”60 In the unforgiving North of old, a hunter stayed alive from moment to moment by listening to elders, fellow hunters, the natural world, and his own instincts. He was sensitive to subtle clues that made the difference between a successful hunt and losing his life under the ice or in an avalanche.
The practical side of the attentiveness was matched by a metaphysical component that Keggulluk called spiritual listening: “This is a huge part of what’s missing nowadays for our young people. The onslaught of outside information fights with what’s running in their veins. The contrast between life here on the tundra and elsewhere is staggering. When our young people go away to school, they find new models for success and learn things that are not relevant at home. This can cause raging conflict.”
The federal government funds tribal suicide-prevention programs, and tribes have declared states of emergency and set up crisis-intervention teams. Throughout Indian country, even very young children are included in prevention activities. “On Pine Ridge, our kindergarteners can tell you about how Daddy hung himself. They go to wakes and funerals. Suicide has become normal to them,” according to Yvonne “Tiny” DeCory, who directed the Sweet Grass Project, a tribal suicide-prevention program, when I met her on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 2013.61 The only choice is to face the crisis square on, with frank words and compassion. “We start talking to them about this in preschool,” DeCory said. “We have to end the silence and walk out of the darkness together.”
Hayes Lewis was cocreator of the Zuni Life Skills Development curriculum,62 one of the first suicide-prevention school- and community-based programs designed specifically for Native Americans.63 The lesson series includes coping skills like stress management, as well as role-playing for dealing with suicide threats. It was created in the late 1980s in response to then-rising youth-suicide rates at Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. After the curriculum was put into place in 1991, youth suicide stopped almost immediately, according to Lewis’s collaborator, Stanford University education professor Teresa LaFromboise. Fifteen years later, the Pueblo’s schools shelved the program, which had apparently achieved its goal. Suicides crept back, and the shocked community asked Lewis to resume the post of school superintendent and reestablish the curriculum.
When I interviewed Lewis at the Pueblo in 2012, he had been doing just that over the past two academic years. When the Zuni school system ended its program, its officials did not realize “how fragile the peace was” and how much vigilance was required to maintain it, according to Lewis. He added that many activities (“a school camping trip, a traditional dance group”) could qualify as suicide prevention.
Former Zuni Pueblo superintendent of schools Hayes Lewis talks about cocreating the Zuni Life Skills Development curriculum, a suicide-prevention program designed for Native Americans. (Joseph Zummo)
When Diane Garreau’s sister, Julie, asked Cheyenne River kids what would make things easier for them, the response was overwhelmingly, “a safe place to have fun.” Julie Garreau and other adults created the Cheyenne River Youth Project, a busy after-school facility where children listen to elder storytellers, play basketball, and tend a two-acre organic garden. They get healthy meals and homework help. They study in a library, go online in an internet café, stage fashion shows, and organize local beautification projects. “Everything we do—from serious to seemingly frivolous—is about letting our kids know we care,” said Julie Garreau. Social scientists agree that the key is weaving the child into the community and supporting cultural connections.64
In Alaska, it was a moose that made the difference. Keggulluk65 was setting up a camp in northern Alaska with the help of an at-risk teen. The youngster had been abusing alcohol and gas-huffing, that is, inhaling gasoline fumes, which causes hallucinations and brain damage and can be fatal. The teen was on track to become one of the many Alaska Natives who kill themselves each year, a rate at least three times the national average. “It’s a grueling, nonstop battle to save our youth,” said Keggulluk, who is also known as Earl Polk.
Area tribes had put together a suicide-prevention camp. For several days, the kids would live in the wilderness and benefit from its lessons. On a cool, clear September morning, Keggulluk and the at-risk teen began putting up tents and hauling wood and water to prepare for the arrival of fifteen more campers. The plan was for several days of songs, dances, traditional games, storytelling, and outdoor activities like hunting and fishing. Suddenly, an enraged bull moose appeared and charged Keggulluk. The youngster grabbed a hunting rifle and took aim. “Don’t miss!” Keggulluk shouted. The teen fired.
When the smoke had cleared and the moose was on the ground, the youngster said, “I thought you were going to lecture me on gas-huffing.” “I will,” promised Keggulluk, “but we had to take care of this other thing first.”
For the teen, the shock of simultaneously killing his first moose, saving a man’s life, and provisioning his community in the manner of his ancestors put him on the road to recovery, said Keggulluk. “It was a spiritual moment, an honorable moment. As the young man took care of the dying animal in our way, pouring water from his own mouth into the moose’s, the animal breathed his last breath, and the young man felt it go through him. It was a blessing.”
The youngsters referred to the camp may have abused alcohol or drugs, experienced domestic violence or neglect, suffered from fetal alcohol effects, or been a bullying perpetrator or victim. “We aren’t told why a youth is referred to us, though it often comes out in the safe space the camp gives them,” said another organizer, Evon Peter, who is Neetsaii Gwich’in and Koyukon and is now a vice chancellor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.66 I asked Peter why the children needed to be in traditional camps, engaging in heritage activities, with just Natives present. “These interactions are about being ourselves in unguarded moments, not as we’ve been told to be by outsiders,” he responded. “It’s not so much what we adults say as how we are that’s important—how we interact, how we solve problems. That is the real lesson.”
Alvin Rafelito was hopeful. He was standing in a Ramah Navajo community garden, surrounded by ripening heirloom crops—bushy, low-growing Navajo corn plants, yellow squashes, scarlet tomatoes and chilies. He observed that Native people and their traditions endure, despite centuries of depredations and violence. “Look at our history,” Rafelito said. “It’s been survival of the fittest. We’re the smartest and the toughest anyone can be. Our message to our kids should be, ‘We’re okay.’”