My ances­tor may have obtained his life and his free­dom, but he nev­er rejoined Nava­jo soci­ety. His lan­guage and even his name — he was called San­ti­a­go San­tis­te­van — became Span­ish, and all threads of Nava­jo cul­ture were lost in my family.

My great-great-grand­fa­ther was brought into Taos, a city in what is now New Mex­i­co, as a young Nava­jo boy around 1860. Slav­ery would soon be abol­ished, but at the time indige­nous bondage was wide­spread. He was pur­chased — a typ­i­cal price would have been 100 dol­lars — by Don Juan San­tis­te­van, a Span­ish man whose set­tler fam­i­ly had been in the region since at least the ear­ly 1700s. San­tis­te­van had just lost his only son, and raised the Nava­jo boy as part of the family.

The destruc­tion of Native cul­tures has tak­en many forms through­out our country’s his­to­ry, from Man­i­fest Des­tiny to min­ing oper­a­tions, from blan­kets laced with small­pox to aggres­sive polic­ing. Accord­ing to the Cen­ter on Juve­nile and Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, Native Amer­i­cans are the racial group most like­ly to be killed by law enforce­ment. But the dis­place­ment and assim­i­la­tion of Native chil­dren is just as much a part of that his­to­ry — and it didn’t end with my great-great grandfather.

From the late 1800s through the mid-1900s, indige­nous chil­dren across the coun­try were placed in board­ing schools meant to assim­i­late them into white cul­ture, a prac­tice that pro­lif­er­at­ed through­out the coun­try. Abuse was com­mon prac­tice in these insti­tu­tions. Richard Hen­ry Pratt, who in 1879 found­ed one of the first such schools in Carlisle, Penn­syl­va­nia, phrased his goals quite blunt­ly: ​“Kill the Indi­an in him, and save the man.”

Con­fronting Painful Truths

Denise Alt­vater was born in 1959, a Pas­samo­quod­dy child in Maine. She and her sis­ters were tak­en from her home by child wel­fare ser­vices when she was sev­en years old and forced into fos­ter care, where she recalls being raped, starved and forced to sleep among rats. She even­tu­al­ly end­ed up in a kinder fos­ter home, but even there she was dis­cour­aged from speak­ing of her her­itage. Alt­vater now works in the field of indige­nous child wel­fare, but reen­ter­ing the tribe has been a long and often excru­ci­at­ing process. She has been sui­ci­dal at times, and strug­gled with her own per­son­al rela­tion­ships. ​“I wasn’t the best par­ent,” she told me. ​“I didn’t know how to be a parent.”

Geno­cide, as defined in the Unit­ed Nations’ 1948 Con­ven­tion on the Pre­ven­tion and Pun­ish­ment of the Crime of Geno­cide, includes ​“forcibly trans­fer­ring chil­dren of the group to anoth­er group” when done ​“with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a nation­al, eth­ni­cal, racial or reli­gious group.” This (and oth­er def­i­n­i­tions) unde­ni­ably applies to our nation’s his­to­ry with indige­nous peo­ples. Less acknowl­edged is that, accord­ing to a June report out of Maine, the cul­tur­al geno­cide con­tin­ues today.

That report, titled ​“Beyond the Man­date: Con­tin­u­ing the Con­ver­sa­tion,” zeroes in on what might be evil at its most banal: the intri­ca­cies of child-wel­fare laws. ​“Beyond the Man­date” shows that Native chil­dren are dis­pro­por­tion­al­ly put into fos­ter care or put up for adop­tion, often tak­en in by non-Native fos­ter fam­i­lies unwill­ing or unable to pre­serve the child’s lan­guage and heritage.

Sad­ly, this prob­lem is not unique to Maine. As Truthout recent­ly report­ed, over half of South Dako­ta chil­dren in fos­ter care are indige­nous, despite indige­nous chil­dren mak­ing up only 15 per­cent of the youth pop­u­la­tion. And near­ly nine in ten of these were in non-Native fos­ter homes.

But while oth­er states face sim­i­lar issues, Maine’s ​“Beyond the Man­date” is the first report on indige­nous child wel­fare in the Unit­ed States to be cre­at­ed by a ​“truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion com­mis­sion” (TRC) — the Maine Wabana­ki-State Child Wel­fare Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion.

The TRC mod­el arose in Latin Amer­i­ca in the 1980s but was pop­u­lar­ized in post-apartheid South Africa. While some crit­i­cize these com­mis­sions for being unable to enforce real account­abil­i­ty, pro­po­nents argue that an hon­est appraisal of injus­tice can be a rad­i­cal first step towards change.

The Peo­ple of the Dawn

There are four Wabana­ki tribes liv­ing in Maine, pri­mar­i­ly in the state’s north­ern half: the Pas­samaquod­dy, who have two reser­va­tions, the Maliseet and Penob­scot, who have one each, and the Mic­mac, who have no for­mal reser­va­tion in Maine but own land and a cul­tur­al cen­ter in Aroos­t­ook Coun­ty. The TRC’s report comes at a time of high ten­sions between these tribes and the Maine government.

The Pas­samaquod­dy and the Penob­scot announced on May 26 that they would be remov­ing their del­e­gates to the Maine state leg­is­la­ture. In a tra­di­tion dat­ing back to the 1800s, these tribes had sent a non-vot­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive to Augus­ta, Maine’s cap­i­tal, to dis­cuss and pro­pose pol­i­cy. ​“Our hope is that one day the state will … val­ue the tribes as sov­er­eign part­ners and engage in a rela­tion­ship of mutu­al respect,” said Matthew Dana, the Pas­samaquod­dy rep­re­sen­ta­tive, as report­ed in the Port­land Press Her­ald. ​“Until then, we sim­ply must decide our own future.” (The non-vot­ing Maliseet rep­re­sen­ta­tive will remain, and the Mic­mac do not have a representative.)

In April, Gov. Paul LeP­age had rescind­ed his own 2011 exec­u­tive order requir­ing that Native peo­ples be direct­ly con­sult­ed on state pol­i­cy that affects them. This deci­sion came amidst con­tro­ver­sy over indige­nous fish­ing rights and local water qual­i­ty. To the four remain­ing Wabana­ki tribes, these issues bode ill for the future.

The Penob­scot Nation is cur­rent­ly in a legal bat­tle with Maine over hunt­ing and fish­ing rights along the Penob­scot Riv­er. (Cent­pacrr / Wik­miedia Commons)

The ances­tors of the Wabana­ki, mean­ing ​“Peo­ple of the Dawn” or ​“Peo­ple of the Dawn­land,” have inhab­it­ed present-day Maine and adja­cent ter­ri­to­ries of present-day Cana­da (a region they call Wabanahkik, or ​“Dawn­land”) since the retreat of the glac­i­ers some 12,000 years ago. Maine is heav­i­ly forest­ed even today, and Wabana­ki econ­o­my and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty are con­nect­ed to the state’s woods and rivers. At one time there were over 20 Wabana­ki tribes, and an esti­mat­ed 32,000 indi­vid­u­als. From 1616 to 1619, more than three in four died. This near extinc­tion was most­ly due to Euro­pean dis­ease, though more direct con­flict with Euro­pean humans also played a role.

For the next 400 years, Wabana­ki rela­tions with the British Crown and the U.S. gov­ern­ment remained fraught with dis­trust and con­fronta­tion. Colonists placed boun­ties on Wabana­ki scalps, kicked them off of their land and attempt­ed — with vary­ing suc­cess — to replace their tra­di­tion­al Earth-cen­tered spir­i­tu­al­i­ty with Chris­tian­i­ty. When the assim­i­la­to­ry board­ing schools spread across the con­ti­nent, Maine was no exception.

In Cana­da, indige­nous peo­ple filed mul­ti­ple class-action law­suits over the country’s Indi­an res­i­den­tial schools, which were sim­i­lar in intent and effect to the U.S.’s board­ing schools, and the last of which closed in the 1990s. In addi­tion to some finan­cial repa­ra­tions, these law­suits led to the cre­ation of a TRC (which also released a report this June) to facil­i­tate the heal­ing process. Thou­sands gath­ered for a week of events in Ottawa coin­cid­ing with the report, which end­ed with 94 spe­cif­ic rec­om­men­da­tions for rec­ti­fy­ing this his­toric injus­tice, some sym­bol­ic (apolo­gies from the gov­ern­ment and the pope, and includ­ing ​“Treaties with Indige­nous Peo­ples” in the Oath of Cit­i­zen­ship) and oth­ers more mate­r­i­al (reforms to the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and increas­es in edu­ca­tion­al funding).

Not quite 300 gath­ered in Hebron, Maine, for the Wabana­ki-State TRC’s clos­ing cer­e­mo­ny, and the event lacked the nation­al atten­tion of its Cana­di­an coun­ter­part. But unlike many TRCs this one did not seek only to reme­di­ate and recov­er from the crimes of the past, but also to con­front an ongo­ing tragedy — res­i­den­tial schools may have closed, but the Maine fos­ter care sys­tem still discriminates.

‘Oh my God! … I’ve been an agent of genocide’

The Indi­an Child Wel­fare Act (ICWA), passed by Con­gress in 1978, grant­ed trib­al child wel­fare pro­grams more author­i­ty in deal­ing with native kids. The goal was to lim­it the state’s abil­i­ty to take native chil­dren out of their homes, and thus ​“pro­mote the sta­bil­i­ty and secu­ri­ty of Indi­an tribes and families.”

In Maine, such leg­is­la­tion was bad­ly need­ed. In Aroos­t­ook Coun­ty, home to a band of the Mic­mac Peo­ple, 30 per­cent of Native chil­dren were in state fos­ter care in 1972. Statewide, indige­nous chil­dren were put in fos­ter care at rates 25 times high­er than oth­er chil­dren that year. The TRC was unable to obtain pre­cise data on the giv­en jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for tak­ing these chil­dren away, but the com­mis­sion points the fin­ger at ​“insti­tu­tion­al racism,” ​“his­tor­i­cal trau­ma” and ​“con­test­ed sov­er­eign­ties and juris­dic­tions between the state and the tribes.” While the report does not delve into this, indige­nous peo­ple across the coun­try face high rates of pover­ty, unem­ploy­ment, incar­cer­a­tion and sub­stance abuse.

ICWA helped, but it was no cure-all, and for years Maine reg­u­lar­ly brushed the leg­is­la­tion aside. In 1999, a joint state-trib­al ven­ture sought to address the inad­e­qua­cy of the state’s ICWA com­pli­ance. This work­group pre­pared and deliv­ered a train­ing ses­sion for child ser­vices work­ers, explain­ing both what ICWA meant and why it was nec­es­sary. As part of this train­ing, they record­ed and showed a video of Alt­vater shar­ing her own hor­rif­ic expe­ri­ence with­in the child wel­fare sys­tem. The ICWA Work­group would even­tu­al­ly become Maine-Wabana­ki REACH, an orga­ni­za­tion intend­ed to seek solu­tions and help both Native and non-Native com­mu­ni­ties under­stand the issue.

The idea for a TRC first sur­faced in 2008. The pro­pos­al grew out of a series of ​“painful dis­cus­sions about priv­i­lege and racism,” says REACH co-direc­tor Esther Attean, who is half Wabana­ki and a mem­ber of the Pas­samaquod­dy tribe. Under­stand­ing the role past trau­ma and per­sist­ing prej­u­dice still play in trib­al-state inter­ac­tions, the group felt a TRC might be able to bring much of this his­tor­i­cal bag­gage to light.

Attean, Alt­vater and oth­er Wabana­ki spent two years pur­su­ing the idea, and in Feb­ru­ary 2011 pre­sent­ed a dec­la­ra­tion of intent for a TRC to the state. The dec­la­ra­tion received push­back — which Attean sees as a sign of ​“respect for the process,” a depar­ture from the norm in which trib­al peo­ple are ​“pla­cat­ed” out of ​“polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” — and in May they went back to work to rewrite the dec­la­ra­tion, this time with the state play­ing an active role.

In June 2012, Gov. LeP­age and five Wabana­ki chiefs (between them rep­re­sent­ing all four remain­ing tribes) signed a Man­date for the Maine Wabana­ki-State Child Wel­fare TRC. The fact that both sides — the state and the tribes — had mutu­al­ly endorsed the com­mis­sion is unique among TRCs.

Once the five com­mis­sion­ers — two of whom are Native, though none of whom are Wabana­ki — had been cho­sen, they spent 27 months research­ing and prepar­ing their report. They used data from Maine’s Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices (DHHS) and col­lect­ed 159 state­ments — 95 from Native peo­ple and 64 from non-Natives.

This process was not easy. The TRC was ​“build­ing a plane as we were fly­ing it,” remem­bers Attean. The work required ​“decol­o­niz­ing your mind and your heart. It takes a lot of trust and a lot of love … At many points in the process the com­mis­sion and REACH bumped heads — we bumped up about white priv­i­lege and racism like you wouldn’t believe.”

While the going was stress­ful, Attean is ​“very pleased” with the final prod­uct. The sta­tis­tics are trou­bling: Native chil­dren were 5.1 times more like­ly to be tak­en by child ser­vices over the last 13 years as non-Native chil­dren, and as late as 2012, Maine placed half of the Wabana­ki chil­dren in its care into non-Native house­holds. The commission’s find­ings are sum­ma­rized into 16 points at the end of the report, as well as 14 rec­om­men­da­tions for the future: Infringe­ments on Native sov­er­eign­ty must be reined in, fund­ing must be more acces­si­ble for Native child wel­fare and fos­ter homes, ICWA com­pli­ance must be strength­ened and the real­i­ty of geno­cide must be acknowl­edged and worked through. It is now REACH’s task to help the state and the tribes to imple­ment these proposals.

Read­ing the doc­u­ment, it becomes appar­ent that con­scious mal­ice is only one com­po­nent of the predica­ment. There are sto­ries of active­ly racist fos­ter par­ents who phys­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly abuse Native chil­dren, caus­ing last­ing harm by pro­hibit­ing chil­dren from learn­ing their indige­nous lan­guage or mak­ing them ashamed of their her­itage. But sim­ple igno­rance can be at least as dev­as­tat­ing as direct malev­o­lence. DHHS work­ers were not trained in ICWA com­pli­ance for decades, and many had nev­er con­sid­ered the spe­cial cul­tur­al needs of Wabana­ki chil­dren. ​“Oh my God!” one DHHS work­er remem­bers think­ing dur­ing a long-over­due ICWA train­ing. ​“I’ve been an agent of genocide.”

ICWA, if imple­ment­ed cor­rect­ly, would keep Native chil­dren out of the state sys­tem and with­in their tribe when­ev­er pos­si­ble. But the com­mis­sion found that before 1999, no con­cert­ed effort had been made by the state to explain ICWA reg­u­la­tions to child wel­fare work­ers, and even now more could be done to impart the law’s significance.

From 2006 to 2009 up to 53 per­cent of chil­dren did not have their Native ances­try ver­i­fied, mean­ing a num­ber of Wabana­ki chil­dren were thrust into the state sys­tem with­out ICWA pro­tec­tion. A DHHS work­er (state­ment-providers were not iden­ti­fied by name in the report) spoke of sim­ply assum­ing that white-look­ing chil­dren were white, with­out ask­ing whether they had Wabana­ki heritage.

ICWA also pri­or­i­tizes plac­ing chil­dren with rel­a­tives, rec­og­niz­ing that for many indige­nous cul­tures (includ­ing the Wakan­abi), extend­ed kin net­works are impor­tant in child rear­ing. The DHHS, on the oth­er hand, oper­at­ed under a dif­fer­ent premise: mul­ti­ple work­ers recall hear­ing that ​“the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” If the state found a parent’s child­care to be inad­e­quate, it was assumed that the parent’s rel­a­tives were also untrust­wor­thy, and chil­dren were usu­al­ly moved into entire­ly dif­fer­ent (often non-Native) fam­i­lies. A for­mer trib­al judge reflect­ed that this dis­lo­ca­tion ​“can be more dam­ag­ing to the child than the rea­son that the depart­ment got involved in the first place.”

Alt­vater, after years of reflect­ing on her own life and lis­ten­ing to oth­er people’s sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences, would agree. ​“I real­ly believe the num­ber one trau­ma … was the fact that peo­ple were tak­en from their homes,” she says. ​“Didn’t mat­ter if you went to a good home or a bad home, if you were tak­en in a good way or a bad way — their entire lives, they nev­er felt like they belonged anywhere.”

‘Nations With­in a Nation’

Accord­ing to the report, ​“pre­cise bound­aries of self-gov­ern­ment, sov­er­eign­ty and juris­dic­tion were left unde­fined” by Maine’s legal sys­tem, ​“a sit­u­a­tion that has since cre­at­ed legal, social, eco­nom­ic and racial fric­tion.” Child wel­fare laws vary in how they affect each tribe, and dif­fer on both sides of the Maine-Cana­da bor­der. While offi­cial­ly Maine respects Wabana­ki juris­dic­tion, one trib­al judge com­ment­ed that in prac­tice Maine seems ​“to believe that the [Wabana­ki] nation is not a nation, that it is a munic­i­pal­i­ty and it’s still under their author­i­ty. And as long as that con­tin­ues, there are going to be problems.”

The trib­al child wel­fare ser­vice, accord­ing to one social-ser­vices direc­tor, makes more of an effort to keep chil­dren with their fam­i­lies than the DHHS does. The trib­al courts — which out­siders orig­i­nal­ly treat­ed as a joke — strive to be more humane and atten­tive than the state, and make a point of rec­og­niz­ing the parent’s dig­ni­ty. ​“The val­ue of a per­son is still present even if they have a sub­stance abuse issue,” one judge remarked. ​“The tribe’s con­cept of peo­ple is so much health­i­er than in the state court.”

But more often than not it is the state that has the final say. The Mic­mac and Maliseet do not have their own court sys­tem (which the TRC rec­om­mends should change), and the courts of the Penob­scot and Pas­samaquod­dy only apply to trib­al mem­bers who live with­in their ter­ri­to­ry. Maine gov­ern­men­tal work­ers strug­gle to rec­on­cile them­selves to the idea of ​“nations with­in a nation,” and the bureau­crat­ic hur­dles of ICWA are seen as a has­sle rather than a nec­es­sary protection.

There are 8,000 remain­ing Wabana­ki in Maine (out of a total pop­u­la­tion of over a mil­lion), and the num­ber is decreas­ing. The state decides who is Indi­an (and thus who deserves ICWA pro­tec­tion) by ​“blood quan­tum,” sim­ply crunch­ing num­bers based on fam­i­ly her­itage. Many in the tribes, on the oth­er hand, would pre­fer to self-define their own cul­ture and mem­ber­ship. A non-Native trib­al attor­ney put the issue bleak­ly: ​“If blood quan­tum is the deter­min­ing fac­tor, even­tu­al­ly the math is that … some of the tribes will become extinct.”

This hon­esty and forth­right­ness is what makes the mov­ing tes­ti­monies of ​“Beyond the Man­date” so nec­es­sary and com­pelling. Through their words the Wabana­ki peo­ple become not mere­ly num­bers or an admin­is­tra­tive bur­den, but a vibrant com­mu­ni­ty fight­ing to sur­vive, watch­ing their future slow­ly and method­i­cal­ly ripped away, quite lit­er­al­ly, by the state. As TRC Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Char­lotte Bacon puts it, ​“Since this issue con­nects so inti­mate­ly to what many of us hold dear­est, we can­not pre­tend that what hap­pens to any child in this state does not in some way mat­ter to all of us who love our families.”

But this is more than just a com­mu­ni­ty los­ing its chil­dren. While the details of the TRC’s report are unique to Maine and the Wabana­ki, it is one chap­ter in a broad­er sto­ry that rings true across the con­ti­nent, from Taos, New Mex­i­co, to Carlisle, Penn­syl­va­nia. In Feb­ru­ary the Bureau of Indi­an Affairs released new guide­lines meant to improve ICWA, and more and more states are real­iz­ing the harm caused by their child wel­fare services.

In many Native com­mu­ni­ties geno­cide is not a thing of the past, but an every­day strug­gle. The vis­cer­al nature of this trau­ma is per­haps stark­est in an anec­dote from a for­mer Wabana­ki health direc­tor: After a severe ice storm in 1998, the tribes received sub­stan­tial dona­tions of blan­kets. No one would take them. Gen­er­a­tions lat­er, the mem­o­ry of small­pox was still too fresh.

The past has not left an easy lega­cy for the present, but one Wabana­ki chief, not iden­ti­fied in the report, is hope­ful about the lega­cy we can leave the future. Rather than focus on demand­ing rights, he argued, the Wabana­ki must offer their alter­na­tive world­view and val­ue sys­tem as the basis for poten­tial solu­tions to the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis. While the dom­i­nant cul­ture wreaks hav­oc on the liv­ing world, the eco­log­i­cal­ly con­scious Wabana­ki can ​“pro­vide a voice … to those yet to come.” The chief has found that this voice draws peo­ple to the indige­nous cause — Native view­points no longer just deserve to be heard, but are essen­tial to survival.

Not all Wabana­ki who were asked agreed to give state­ments to the Maine TRC. Some had hoped the com­mis­sion would have more teeth, with the capac­i­ty to levy repa­ra­tions, and oth­ers felt it was too soon for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Nonethe­less, the TRC’s report does man­age to give a voice to a group too often silenced in this coun­try. In its sober­ing pages, we dis­cov­er how eas­i­ly racism, igno­rance and the iner­tia of past injus­tice can fuel a con­tin­u­ing genocide.

Despite cur­rent ten­sions between Gov. LeP­age and the tribes, the issue of child wel­fare has been able to fos­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion in recent years. Attean hopes that Maine will adopt the TRC’s rec­om­men­da­tions, and more indige­nous chil­dren will retain their cul­tur­al her­itage — begin­ning to reverse a cen­turies-long geno­cide. Ide­al­ly, she says, the truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion process will serve as a mod­el for oth­er states and tribes.

Alt­vater has been shar­ing her sto­ry for well over a decade, and it hasn’t always been easy. But the commission’s con­clu­sions are val­i­dat­ing. ​“To me it legit­imizes things that we’ve been say­ing for a long, long time, and peo­ple just ignore and say just get over it.” The TRC’s report is dif­fi­cult to ignore, and the years of pain con­tained with­in are dif­fi­cult to get over. By look­ing the past in the eye, Maine and the Wabana­ki may have made it pos­si­ble to final­ly start mov­ing forward.

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