Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Barriers to a Better Education

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

By the 1960s and early 1970s, activist movements across the country had begun to call for better national policies to support minority groups and the government made attempts to some of the wrongs of the past. But it didn’t always lead to success. So let’s dive in, and talk about the gap between the government’s policy intentions for Native American communities and its not-so-effective execution. Note: We would like to issue a content warning for this episode. Some parts of this episode may not be suitable for younger audiences. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and KariMarisa Anton Thank you to our guest K. Tsiannina Lomawaima and some of the music in this episode was composed by indigenous composer R. Carlos Nakai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to Episode 8 in our series, Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America. Dr. Corey Still, who studies Native American educational policies, writes, as Native people, we are the only demographic in the United States that the federal government has a moral obligation to educate, a trust responsibility to provide adequate resources for Native-serving programs, which include education, in exchange for the land and resources tribes ceded years ago. And yet, the result of this trust responsibility to our students has been laden with decades of destructive federal policy.

That doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of the government's attempts to right some of the educational wrongs of the past, so let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In 1946, Congress created an independent agency, the Indian Claims Commission. Its purpose was to listen to tribal claims of broken treaties and lands taken by the U.S. government without compensation to determine redress or repayment. When President Harry Truman signed the bill to create the Indian Claims Commission, he also offered a, let's say, non-apology for the treaty agreements the government had broken. He said, it would be a miracle if in the course of these dealings, the largest real estate transaction in

history, we had not made some mistakes and occasionally failed to live up to the precise terms of our treaties and agreements with some 200 tribes. But we stand ready to submit all such controversies to the judgment of impartial tribunals. We stand ready to correct any mistakes we have made. The ICC may have been created with some good intentions, but it was 1946 and there was a growing restlessness to solve the Indian problem once and for all. The government was ready to embrace the idea of backing off from their ties with tribes, tribes they wanted to pay out and move from reservations and into American cities. According to one report, if the government could settle their claims with tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs would need half the funding they were currently receiving.

The Indian Claims Commission helped cross their T's and dot their I's. They wanted finality, one last payout. They wanted finality, one last payout. But it took 22 years for the ICC to hear all the claims and award $1.3 billion to 176 different tribes in compensation for lost territory. It broke down to about $1,000 a person. The Bureau of Indian Affairs put some of the money in trust accounts for the tribes so they could monitor how it was spent, and some of it was awarded straight to individuals as an incentive to leave reservations and begin the integration process. Before the Indian Claims Commission was established, there had been a long-standing, as in over 100 years old, court of claims. The way that the arrangement between the

Native tribes and the United States was set up was that the tribes were considered domestic dependent nations. Not sovereign nations, but a more legally murky category. When treaties were negotiated, they were supposed to be done in good faith, with the understanding that neither party was going to break the terms, but there was no clause written in them for what to do when that good faith was broken. So because the tribes, these domestic dependent nations, were dependent on the U.S. legal system for redress, they had to get permission from Congress to actually sue the federal government and bring their claims to court. out of nearly 200 submitted claims, the court awarded damages in 29, and the majority of the remaining 160-some-odd cases had been dismissed on technicalities. The Indian Claims Commission continued the practice of requiring people to jump through multiple hoops just to have a chance to be

heard in court. Claims had to fit into at least one of the five following categories. Tribes or tribal members had to first prove that a treaty had been deliberately violated or that their constitutional rights were violated, or that both parties were subject to the legal jurisdiction of the United States government, or fraud, duress, a mistake, or unconscionable consideration, which basically means that the U.S. didn't pay fair market value for the lands that they took, or if the U.S. took land without paying for it, or the claim had to be based on fair and honorable dealings that weren't recognized by any existing rule of law. And if your eyes glaze over and your brain turned to mush while you're listening to

that, you're not alone. Part of the barrier to making a claim was simply not being able to understand the language or interpret how it would apply to a case. Also problematic, and probably intentionally so, was that the tribes didn't have the money they actually needed to file claims. And what really seemed to be beyond the scope of the government's comprehension was that it was demanding that tribes place monetary value on sacred elements of their culture and religion, which ran counter to how they themselves placed value on who they were and what they practiced. Initially, following the passage of the Indian Claims Commission Act in 1947, all claims had to be submitted by 1952, or within five years. But tribes couldn't afford to hire legal teams, so the deadline was extended

to 1957. And then it was extended again and again until it finally expired in 1978. In 1955, the Indian Claims Commission ruled that the 7,000 or so members of the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche tribes were entitled to a settlement of over $2 million for the lands taken from them 55 years earlier. But the ruling was only one hurdle. Subtracted from many settle amounts were gratuities, or government aid that was given to them while they were on the reservation. or government aid that was given to them while they were on the reservation. Those amounts were often steep, $90,000, $100,000. One tribal councilman said he wasn't giving it up without a fight.

He said gratuities would not have been necessary for the Indians on the reservation had it not been for the government in the first place. The case was appealed a few more times by both parties for errors over interest and timelines. Claims like this often took years, which was hard on tribes who saw the payout dwindle in steep legal fees or even travel fees with council members traveling to and from Washington, D.C. So what does the Indian Claims Commission have to do with boarding schools? That answer is twofold. If tribes had their money tied up in claims,

it meant that there was less money available to create educational programming for the tribe's children. They needed more money owed to them by the government to improve educational opportunities, but they had to spend money to have a chance of getting more money. And as we learned in the last episode, by the 1950s, the government had termination policies in place, which ended federal assistance in an attempt to get Native populations to integrate with the mainstream culture. The education of Native children suffered. They suddenly found themselves thrown into public school systems around the country. By the tail end of the 1960s, the dropout rate for Native students was double that of non-Native students. The government needed to address the issue. First, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson

signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. If you're an educator, you're probably pretty familiar with this. The act was designed to support low-income, minority, and disadvantaged students, and one of its provisions was that it needed to be amended and reauthorized every five years. By 1968, an update to the law included Title VII, which recognized the needs of students who spoke limited English, including Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaskan Native students. School districts got federal funding to develop programs that promoted bilingual education. In other words, the need for educational experiences that both pushed students to academic success and preserved their cultural identities through language was supported through law by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Title VII has evolved with each new reauthorization, and today it continues to subsidize programs for Indigenous students. In 1967, Congress approved and authorized the Labor and Welfare Subcommittee, led by Robert F. Kennedy, to conduct an investigation into Native American education. Not just boarding school education, but education as a whole. As boarding schools began to shut their doors, more Native students attended day schools on reservations or integrated public schools, and the investigation was going to look into all of it. But Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968, so the Senate pushed back the deadline of the report to 1969. At the helm was Senator Ted Kennedy, who took over his brother's chairman of the subcommittee position. Similar to the work on the Merriam Report that was conducted in the 1930s, subcommittee members under the direction of Ted Kennedy traveled to a dozen different states and had conversations with former and current students. A high number of those they interviewed had been

through the boarding school system. At first, the team went in wanting to learn about a few general concerns, basically how badly students were damaged by the federal boarding school system and how that trickled out to impact their communities. They also hoped to determine what the Bureau of Indian Affairs was going to need to do in order to start some course corrections on Native American education. While they worked, the 10 subcommittee members quickly reorganized their focus into five areas of concern for the future of Native education. education. First, the boarding schools themselves and how they had so effectively eradicated culture from generations of Native communities. Schooling that was meant to civilize children, stripped them of any sense of their Native heritage and belonging to their tribal communities, which if you've been listening, you know was the goal all along.

So these students were Americanized at school. And if they were lucky enough to survive and return home after they graduated, they were essentially fish out of water. Some weren't even able to communicate with their families because they spoke only English and had been forced to get up their native tongue at a young age. I think across communities, it is easy to see the damage done over generations by simply not having generations at home. There's an awful lot. It's one thing to talk about, here's what the schools, the boarding schools inculcated. The flip side, the cost may not be so transparently obvious. If a child starting from, let's say, age seven spends five to eight years away from home,

what are they not learning about their community, about their family history, about their community, about their family history, about achieving real fluency in their language, about participating in religious life, about learning about environmental stewardship in a particular place at a particular time. There's so much that's not being learned, that's not perhaps being transmitted intergenerationally. That is a huge, huge impact, and it's really difficult to quantify. It's sometimes even difficult to qualify. Second, they focused on the disparity between educational styles where Native children went to school. Most Native cultures and their reservation day schools taught cooperative work, but the boarding school and public school systems

emphasized the need for competition. It was American individualism, everyone for themselves, versus a collective approach. Students were left with a clash of cultures. approach. Students were left with a clash of cultures. Third, it was rare that a school curriculum taught native history, languages, or culture. And in boarding schools and in integrated public schools, classes were taught in English. So in addition to learning about subjects that didn't seem relevant to their lived experiences, native students first had to learn enough English to even understand the more complex topics they were required to study, which meant that Native students fell behind. For students in integrated classrooms, the achievement gap widened as students got older, which contributed to their high dropout rate. Fourth, it was difficult to attract high quality

teachers to the often subpar school systems. 99% of teachers were non-native, and for those who taught in areas with high native populations, over a quarter of them anonymously reported that they would prefer to teach elsewhere. School administrators were, quote, stagnant and lacking imagination. They were also collectively older, with an average age of 58. And I'm not saying that older administrators can't be amazing administrators, no. But what the report focused on was the idea that many of them had little motivation to promote or hire younger talent with fresh ideas onto their leadership teams, and the students' education suffered because of it. Again, Dr. Lomawema on who traditionally taught in these schools. taught in these schools. Often women, often from the East Coast or the eastern part of the Midwestern U.S., often very religious, educated women who were sincerely motivated by a desire to help. A number of those women left memoirs, and a number of those memoirs talk about the

difficulty those women had adjusting to the very authoritarian system that made up the federal school system. So they were subject to strict discipline as well as students were, and many of them really had a hard time with that. I think there's a kind of another class of teachers and workers because, I mean, these were called schools, and workers because, I mean, these were called schools, but these institutions were not only schools in the narrow sense that many Americans think of. Oh, well, you teach academic content in a classroom. That was a minimal part of these schools because students were being trained for labor. So there's farmers, there's trades instructors, there's people running the kitchens where students were employed. So there's a number of federal workers here, and this is also true in the church schools, who just didn't follow that narrow definition of teachers.

And many of those people, because the pay scales were significantly less than in comparable jobs in public schools or kind of training institutions, you didn't tend to attract the highest caliber of worker. And this is something that federal records attest to. They had a tough time recruiting, especially for schools that were very rural, on reservations or off reservations in very isolated communities where a non-native worker would have very limited opportunities. For example, if they were single, to make marriageable partners or to have a social life outside of the other folks working for the school. So there are a number of factors that conspired to make recruiting

quality workers and teachers very challenging. Fifth, parents of Native students had consistently voiced their concerns about their children's safety and the quality of the education that they were getting, and they wanted the ability to have more say in the curriculum, but they lacked a voice and lacked political support to achieve these goals. The subcommittee published their research on the state of American Indian education in 1969. They called it Indian education, a national tragedy, a national challenge. In the report, they outlined their findings and their recommendations for change. In the foreword, Senator Ted Kennedy wrote, Indian children, more than any other minority group, believe themselves to be below average in intelligence. What are the consequences of our educational failure? What happens to an Indian

child who is forced to abandon his own pride and future and confront a society in which he has been offered neither a place nor a hope. Our failure to provide an effective education for the American Indian has condemned him. The same year, Native American educators met at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars at Princeton University, and they developed a new organization, the National Indian Education Association, which was incorporated a year later in Minneapolis. The purpose of the organization was to focus on Native American needs of students, educators, and the larger Native community. The findings of the subcommittee, coupled with the development of the National Indian Education Association, led Senator Ted Kennedy, in his role as chairman of

the subcommittee, to propose amending a higher education bill to include specific conditions for the benefit of Native education. It passed the Senate in the fall of 1971. The Department of Health Education and Welfare bulked at the cost of the new programs outlined in the Bills Act and argued that they overlapped with the financial assistance provided by other government programs. But the Indian Education Act, or IEA, of 1972 was a done deal. It created new regulations for school districts that served Native American students. It called for the development of Native American curriculum and services by local education agencies that had either more than 10 Native students or more than 50% Native enrollment. What the curriculum should look like was left open.

It was left open because the act called for American Indian and Alaska Native parents to form advisory boards for federally operated boarding schools and for public schools that have programs for American Indian students. Native parents, for the first time in a long time, were given back their right to be involved in the decisions surrounding their children's education. The IEA also provided funding for school meals, eyewear, and dental work for Native children and buses to get them to and from school. It was a turning point for Native education because it took steps to improve the quality of education in a way it hadn't before by actually considering the specific cultural needs

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Just recently, on June 15, 2023, when they ruled on the Holland v. Brackeen case, the Supreme Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, which created a hierarchy of priorities when a Native American child is placed for adoption or into foster care. Priority must be given to kinship placements, meaning placements within a child's own family. If that's not possible, then priority must go to someone in a child's tribe. And if that's not available, priority must be given to someone from a different Native American tribe. Only if none of these placements are available can a child be placed with non-native foster or adoptive parents. The case stemmed from a white family, Todd and Jennifer Brackeen, who after hiring lawyers and fighting the tribe were able to adopt a Native American child.

When the little boy's half-sister was born after his adoption was finalized, the Bratkins sought to adopt her too. The little girl's great aunt, a tribal member, was willing to adopt her, and according to the ICWA priority placements, the baby should have been placed with her. the baby should have been placed with her. Instead, the Bratkeens fought the placement, and a Texas judge ordered that the Bratkeens and the baby's aunt needed to share custody with the baby visiting the reservation for extended periods during the summer. Neither party was satisfied with this outcome, as ICWA does not allow for a child to be placed with non-native parents when a native placement is available, and the Brakeens did not want to share custody with anyone. Eventually, a Texas judge struck down ICWA as unconstitutional, and the case made its way up to the Supreme Court. The Navajo appealed on the grounds that the Indian Child Welfare Act legally gives the tribe

the right to fully care for the child, and the Brakeens appealed on the basis that they were being discriminated against because they were not Navajo. The Supreme Court rejected the claims that ICWA was unconstitutional and upheld the federal law. ICWA began in the 1970s when government reports like the Kennedy report we just talked about called out the damage done by the practice of the boarding school system to separate Native children from their families and tribal communities. Because even after boarding schools shut down, Indigenous family separations happened at extremely high rates. In his opinion written to uphold ICWA, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch framed the need for the act and its continued protections by reminding the court of the atrocities of the boarding school system,

which took children away from their tribal cultures based on the foundation of killing the Indian to save the man. From the beginning, boarding schools would not have survived without governmental support. Gorsuch reminded the court that when indigenous families resisted sending their children, they were forced by being denied food until they gave in. In other words, hand over your kids or starve. On some reservations, authorities would simply round up and steal away the children. Most boarding schools may have shut their doors in the 1960s and 70s, but the practice of removing Indigenous children from their tribes and families still

reached staggering rates. The Association of American Indian Affairs did studies in 1969 and again in 1974, and both showed that an alarming 25 to 35 percent of all Indian children had been separated from their families and placed not in schools this time, but in foster homes, adoptive homes, or institutions. And 90% of those placements were in off-reservation, non-Indian homes. homes. Imagine any other group in which 25 to 35 percent of its children were forcibly removed from their parents. Native children were still being separated from their families and their culture. Why? According to one report, 99% of cases involving Indigenous children being removed from their homes and tribes rested on vague grounds such as neglect or social deprivation. did not have a background in Native cultural values and social traditions, visited reservations, and penalized Indigenous parents for conditions that were out of their control, like poverty,

or poor housing, or lack of modern plumbing, or overcrowding. They took children, claiming that it was what was best for their welfare. Literally, it was the exact kind of thinking that had landed children into boarding schools, right? White outsiders decided that parents in tribal communities were unfit to care for their children and to be saved, those children had to be placed under the care of white adults. One three-year-old Sioux child was removed from her family on the state's belief that an Indian reservation is an unsuitable environment for a child. So think about it. Tribes had long been forced onto reservations, and then in the termination period, their government support that had been promised to them ended, and then the government blamed Indigenous families for raising their children

in an unsuitable environment. To make matters worse, most of the Indigenous parents could not afford lawyers, and the separations were carried out without due process. Children were taken without any way for parents to get them back. And once they were taken, they were given to non-Native families to be fostered or adopted. Because even well through the 1960s, even with all the research that proved the opposite, that old boarding school mindset was still dominant. Native children were better off in the care of white Americans. Between the late 50s and late 60s, the Bureau of Indian Administration and the Child Welfare League of America encouraged the adoption of Native American children by non-Native families

through the Indian Adoption Project. The Bureau considered the project so successful that in 1966 they put out a press release about it. It began. And this is not a joke. One little, two little, three little Indians, and 206 more, are brightening the homes and lives of 172 American families, mostly non-Indians, who have taken the Indian waifs as their own. But of course, the project was a success for those who were pulling the strings. For Sandy Whitehawk, who was adopted out to a white family, her life was irrevocably changed. She said, My adoptive mother constantly reminded me that no matter what I did, I came from a pagan race whose only hope for redemption was to assimilate to white culture.

Alarmed by the fact that history was repeating itself, the staggering statistics of removal, and the heartbreaking stories, Native American rights advocates pushed the federal government to pass the Indian Child Welfare Act. Many were Indigenous social workers who took on a massive five-year study on Indigenous child welfare and organized the effort to make changes. They shared countless stories of bias against tribal communities in the welfare system, like Goldie Denny, who spent her career helping tribes fight the removal of their children. But after she lost yet another case in which a Navajo couple was denied custody of their grandchild, who was instead placed in a non-Navajo home, she joined the Association on American Indian Affairs to advocate for federal policy changes. The Indian Child Welfare Act was proposed in 1974, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs voicing their strong opposition.

Indian Affairs voicing their strong opposition. Four years later, in 1978, ICWA was passed by the 95th Congress, who specified that extraordinary measures must be taken by state and federal authorities to keep Indigenous children with their families and tribal communities. The law was absolutely influenced by the century of federal policy that separated children from their families in order to send them to boarding schools and civilize them. It was, finally, a legal course correction to the programs that had denied indigenous children access to their families, their tribes, their culture, and their traditions. Cyrus Benn, tribal chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, expressed the importance of ICWA by saying, culturally, the chances of Indian survival are significantly reduced

if our children, the only real means for the transmission of the tribal heritage, If our children, the only real means for the transmission of the tribal heritage, are to be raised in non-Indian homes and denied exposure to the ways of their people. Under ICWA, a child's tribe has a right to intervene at any point in a proceeding to place a child in foster care or terminate parental rights. It sounds cut and dried, but like a lot of laws and regulations, the reality is not that easy. Even 45 years later, as we've seen with Holland v. Brackeen, the act still faces regular challenges in court and red tape from welfare agencies. It means that families are still being affected by the removal of their children from tribal communities. Social services complain that there are not enough Indigenous foster families, which is why so many Native children are still placed in non-Native homes.

But that doesn't always track. In a year when hundreds of children were placed in non-Indigenous foster homes, the Pine Ridge Reservation had 20 ICWA-qualified foster homes stay empty. And it takes months, years even, in court for some tribal families to be reunited. Suzanne Crow, a member of the Lakota and Dakota Sioux tribes, fought to get custody of her grandchildren when they were removed from their home in 2007. Suzanne said the process reminded her of her days at a boarding school where she was sent at just five years old. She said back then she cried for three days and then started praying. She said that she prayed and

prayed and prayed for her grandmother to come and get her, to find her and take her home. mother to come and get her, to find her and take her home. For 12 years, I prayed, she said. It never happened. 50 years later, Suzanne prayed for her grandchildren to be released from foster care and returned to the family. Attorney B.J. Jones said that the state court system is so hard for grandparents to crack, and sometimes it's hard to really identify what the reasons are. We have the government being the grandparents, and the government doesn't have a good track record of taking care of Indian kids. Historically, that's been disastrous. It's been a nightmare. Suzanne Crowe worried about her grandchildren's welfare because she remembered how she felt.

She said, all those years, those 12 years in boarding school, not once did I get to be who I was supposed to be. Not once did I get to speak Lakota and see my grandma. They took our genetic thinking and turned it inside out. And then, who are you? After three years in foster care, Suzanne's grandchildren were released to the custody of their stepfather. She visits them as often as possible, trying to instill their indigenous culture in them. I think their culture is what's going to save them, she said. It's what saved me. I think their culture is what's going to save them, she said. It's what saved me. In his June 2023 opinion supporting ICWA, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, Often, Native American tribes have come to this court seeking justice,

only to leave with bowed heads and empty hands. But that is not because this court has no justice to offer them. Our Constitution reserves for the tribes a place, an enduring place, in the structure of American life. It promises them sovereignty for as long as they wish to keep it. In adopting the Indian Child Welfare Act, Congress exercised that lawful authority to secure the right of Indian parents to raise their families as they please, the right of Indian children to grow in their culture, and the right of Indian communities to resist fading into the twilight of history. All of that is in keeping with the Constitution's original design. Dr. Lomao-Ima, speaking broadly here, says this. This is information that's really crucial to our understanding of our own nation.

This is U.S. governance. This is U.S. civics. This is U.S. history. We can't understand our nation without understanding the processes that have gone on in their relationships with Native nations and individuals. Next time, we'll talk about what the U.S. government has been doing to reflect and understand the effects of our evolving relationships with Native nations and the atrocities that occurred in the boarding schools. I'll give you a hint. The apologies and corrections have been slow to come, and the things we've buried deep into the back corners of our shared history have been sometimes devastating to uncover. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you soon. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you soon. Thank you to our guest scholar Kate Cianina Lomawema and to composer R. Carlos Nakai,

a Native American musician who provided some of the music you heard in today's episode. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And this episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you enjoyed this episode, we would love to have you leave us a rating or review or to share on social media. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon.