From “Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future” by Patty Krawec – Broadleaf Books The sterilization of Native women in the United States and Canada goes back to the early twentieth century, when concerns about population control combined with eugenics. Policies began to target women who were seen to …
Removal of Indigenous children from their families was so widespread that in Canada, it was given the name Sixties Scoop: the scooping of Indigenous children from their homes with little investigation before reaction. The Indigenous children scooped from their homes were adopted out to families as far away as Europe and New Zealand, echoing the …
The scooping of Indigenous children from their homes Read More »
Just as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Dawes Act of 1887 were used to strip Native tribes of their land and force massive migrations that cleared the way for white land ownership, Reconstruction in the United States ensured that land remained in white hands. Immediately after the Civil War, some of the …
Slavery was abolished, but the beliefs that justified it were not. Read More »
Military aggression took many forms. Two examples, separated by about thirty years, capture and in some ways bookend the ethnic cleansing of the West. Remember that earlier in the nineteenth century, the area west of the Mississippi was considered Indian Country. This was where the tribes had been relocated to, with the promise that they …
Indian boarding schools were an attempt by the governments of the United States and Canada to change the language, religion, and social structure of Indigenous societies and homogenize everyone into the same way of thinking and living. Although these schools predate the UN Genocide Convention by over fifty years, they meet the criteria of that …
By the late 1800s, most Indians, those whose tribes were recognized by state or federal governments, had disappeared from the American landscape into their reservations. It would not be long before their children would disappear too – taken from those reservations into federally funded and mandated boarding schools. In 1891, a new law allowed US …
Through various proclamations, treaties, and removals, we disappeared from the land and into towns and Indian Country and finally reservations. We disappeared in fiction and film, becoming two-dimensional characters, populating shows from the Lone Ranger to the X Files, who either threaten white settlement or, like Tonto, exist only to help the white man. We …
There are many ways for Indigenous peoples to disappear. Read More »
