Post date: Mar 09, 2018 6:26:43 PM
article idea
Native Students as Second Generation Child Welfare Policy Survivors
Many of us have heard of the Indian boarding schools with their many abuses. Federal funding for these institutions began in 1882 (though funding for explicitly assimilationist policies for Native children goes back at least to the Civilization Fund Act of 1819), and continued through the 1970s. We still live with the effects of the boarding schools. Mark Charles, for example, contents that the posture and politics of many tribal governments reflect the trauma of boarding school survivors who run them.* *[We should acknowledge it as a complicated mixed bag, however. In my family, as with ]
As bad as this is, I suspect assimilationist child welfare policies are having a much greater impact on our student generation.
Consider some statistics. in South Dakota, one study showed AI children in foster care at a rate 16 times higher than other children. An AI child in Washington state was 19 times more likely to be adopted out. Between 1958 and 1968, the Indian Adoption Project alone (collaboration of BIA and Child Welfare League of America) targeted Native children and placed nearly 400 in adoptive homes outside of their tribes. A study presented to congress in 1974 found that 25 to 35 percent of Indian kids in some states had been removed from their homes by the child welfare system, and found widespread culturally uninformed and unjustified removals, all of which resulted in 85% placement in non-Native foster homes and 90% of resulting adoptions to non-Native parents. Let that soak in for a moment. It is astonishing.
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978 attempted to put a stop to this, but consider where these pre-1978 children are now. Are they enrolled? Do they know their Indian grandparents? Do they know their heritage? Their children are at our colleges and universities now. I suspect that this is a factor in students great longing to reconnect with a past from which they have been severed.
I don't know the answers to these questions. Maybe someone does. The numbers alone, however, should indicate an enormous pressure behind the dam. I suspect it is already bursting in the lives of many students.
GOD IS RED
Vine Deloria's work largely amounts to a relentless diatribe against Christianity, which functions as a foil to the virtues of Indian religions (he does believe that religion is consequential, even vital). Deloria is well-read, brilliant, ofttimes insightful, and (in my opinion) ultimately fails to provide a vision of a way forward on his own (anti-Christian) terms. So, I don't feel particularly interested in trying to take on his primary thesis. However, I'm finding a lot of wheat among the chaff in this book. He makes many points worth thinking about.