The 50th anniversary of AIMs (American Indian Movement's) occupation at Wounded Knee is coming up, so the Lakota People's Law Project is leading another push to free an AIM activist who was wrongly convicted of killing two federal agents in 1975- Leonard Peltier. He was convicted on false evidence and false testimony and sentenced to two life sentences. He is now 78.

LPL has a formatted email up on their website now which you can personalize and send to Biden to ask for clemency. (Please personalize emails like this so it doesn't get filtered as spam. Just move some words around, add some, take some, you don't have to write a whole email.) Please pass this around.

Centuries before we had American Sign Language, Native sign languages, broadly known as “Hand Talk,” were thriving across North America. Hand Talk would be influential in the formation of American Sign Language. But it has largely been written out of history.

One of these Hand Talk variations, Plains Indian Sign Language, was used so widely across the Great Plains that it became a lingua franca — a universal language used by both deaf and hearing people to communicate among tribes that didn’t share a common spoken language. At one point, tens of thousands of indigenous people used Plains Indian Sign Language, or PISL, for everything from trade to hunting, conflict, storytelling, and rituals.

But by the late 1800s, the federal government had implemented a policy that would change the course of indigenous history forever: a violent boarding school program designed to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into white American culture — a dark history that we’re still learning more about to this day. Because of a forced “English-only” policy, the boarding school era is one of the main reasons we lost so many Native signers — along with the eventual dominance of ASL in schools for the deaf.

Today, there are just a handful of fluent PISL signers left in the US. In the piece above we hear from two of these signers who have dedicated their lives to studying and revitalizing the language. They show us PISL in action, and help us explore how this ancient language holds centuries of indigenous history.

Read more from Melanie McKay-Cody on the history of Plains Indian Sign Language: https://shareok.org/handle/11244/319767

Check out Lanny Real Bird’s videos:    / @lannyrealbird9015  

Much of the footage of the 1930 Indian Sign Language Council isn’t online, but check out some of it here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

Here are some original books we reference on sign talk: https://archive.org/details/indiansig...https://archive.org/details/indiansig...

The Smithsonian holds lots of photos and archives on Plains Indian Sign Language like this: https://www.si.edu/object/archives/co...

Sarah Klotz on how Native American boarding schools like Carlisle contributed to the loss of PISL: http://constell8cr.com/issue-2/the-hi.... She references archives that shows how students continued to use sign language like this one from the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center: https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/...

A group of "half-caste" children in Australia, stolen from their families to be raised separate from society.

A group of metís boys from the Congo, stolen from their families to be raised separate from society.

Native American children stolen from their families in Oklahoma to "civilize" them.

In every picture, the penguins are there.

We need to talk about US Indian boarding schools

We need to come together and acknowledge what was done to Native Americans in the name of "civilization."

Mass graves have been found in Canada, with surely others still to be found, and nearly all in the US remain to be located, but they are surely somewhere. What was done to these human beings in the name of ‘civilization’ is shocking. Be prepared: this involves the worst potential of our species. If you experienced childhood abuse of any kind, please take care. [click through for the rest]

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"We had to write once a month.... I remember we would say, 'Dear Folks, How are you? Fine, I hope.' All of us wrote the same thing when we wrote.... She wrote it on the board. We copied it. I can still see it. Dear Folks.' And I use to think, 'What are folks?' And 'How are you?' And the government saw that we mailed the letters."

Mary Pittman Parris, Clara Pittman Gatlin, and Ula Mae Pittman Welch about the censored letters they remember writing home from the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females

Listening to Our Grandmother's Stories by Amanda J. Cobb-Greetham (Chickasaw)

Excerpt from this NPR story:

A first-of-its-kind federal study of Native American boarding schools that for over a century sought to assimilate Indigenous children into white society has identified more than 400 such schools that were supported by the U.S. government and more than 50 associated burial sites, a figure that could grow exponentially as research continues.

The report released Wednesday by the Interior Department expands the number of schools that were known to have operated for 150 years, starting in the early 19th century and coinciding with the removal of many tribes from their ancestral lands.

The dark history of the boarding schools — where children who were taken from their families were prohibited from speaking their Native American languages and often abused — has been felt deeply across Indian Country and through generations.

Many children never returned home. The investigation has so far turned up over 500 deaths at 19 schools, though the Interior Department said that number could climb to the thousands or even tens of thousands.

A second volume of the report will cover the burial sites as well as the federal government's financial investment in the schools and the impacts of the boarding schools on Indigenous communities, the Interior Department said.

The department has so far found at least 53 burial sites at or near the U.S. boarding schools, both marked and unmarked.

The U.S. government directly ran some of the boarding schools. Catholic, Protestant and other churches operated others with federal funding, backed by U.S. laws and policies to "civilize" Native Americans.

From NPR News

At my third college, just before the turn of the century, they had a holocaust survivor and several Boarding school survivors come to speak one evening.  The things the Tribal Elders said about what was done to them still haunt me.  It was so visceral and terrible and definitely torture.  They did these things to children.

This is all well and good, but when will they start investigating the wrongful deaths of Native children at these prison schools?

Morally this is an obvious choice. The horrors of native"boarding schools" are only now being fully publicized and the stories which natives have always known, the survivor's stories are both terrifying and heartbreaking. The sheer scale of abuse, rape, and malicious neglect, and death of children is mind boggling. Even if you didn't care about native rights and the sovereignty and autonomy of native peoples, this is a(nother) fairly transparent ploy by big oil to be undermine native people and reduce their populations to ease the ability of big oil to claim and destroy native land in their short sighted spring to access and hoard every non renewable energy resource on the planet no matter the cost. So if you care about people, if you care about integrity, if you care about preserving history or land or culture, if you care about reparations to those historically oppressed slaughtered and erased, if you care about the climate, clean air, clean water, if you care about keeping families together when times are hard rather than ripping them apart, if you care about people more than corporations, if you are sick to death of bullshit Christian "save the children" lies being used as a rallying flag for hatred and genocide (anyone with an iota of Christian education would know Jesus doesn't side with oppressor and never sides with profit over people), if it makes you sick to your stomach to watch the US government continue to break promises and literal signed laws in favor of profit for over a hundred years, if you find it insulting that a big oil lawyer is representing the "Christian" couple pro bono and it expecting no one to see the connection, if you have any hope for the future, you should sign this petition, you should support natives. You should support the Indian Child Welfare Act. You should stop letting US politicians and literal whole branches of government always prioritize profit and corporations over people. We have taken so much from native people, and gained so much through knowledge willingly shared, they are owed far far more than something as simple as a signature on a petition, but it's a start.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2022/06/30/abortion-indigenous-peoples-reproductive-health

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is part of a long legacy of American Christian values being forced on Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples in the United States have only recently been able to assert their own religious ideas and practices. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978 after nearly 200 years of religious suppression by the United States government. This law guarantees that Indigenous people have a right to access religious sites, possess sacred objects, and have full freedom to worship and practice religious ceremonies. This includes reproductive health ceremonies.

Boarding schools run by Christian churches or the federal government also played a strong role in suppressing and criminalizing Native American cultures and religions. One impact that boarding schools had on Indigenous children and communities was loss of intergenerational cultural knowledge. The U.S. government is just beginning to address part of this history, as activists and members of Congress push for the passage of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act.

Revitalization of Indigenous Knowledge

Though Indigenous communities deeply suffered from the intentional destruction of our cultures and religions, there has been a vibrant resurgence in traditional ecological knowledge in our communities, including reproductive health care practices.

Indigenous people are revitalizing coming-of-age ceremonies that mark when someone begins menstruation, including Ojibwe berry fasts, a year-long period in which young people abstain from eating berries and learn from their elders, and Hoopa Valley Tribal Flower Dance ceremonies, which Cutcha Risling Baldy, a professor of Native American studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, calls “a tangible, physical, spiritual and communal act of decolonization.” Indigenous doulas and cultural birthing practices are also on the rise, with collectives popping up throughout Canada and the U.S.

In the days since the Supreme Court decision, several states with large tribal and urban Indian communities, including North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oklahoma, have passed or introduced laws that ban or severely restrict abortion. Indigenous people on reservations seeking medical abortions or contraceptive care already face barriers; medical abortions and even Plan B pills are rarely available on reservation Indian Health Service facilities, where many Native people receive health care. The recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will likely exacerbate these barriers to Western health care.

What remains to be seen is how the decision and resulting state laws that ban abortion will exacerbate barriers to utilizing traditional medicinal practices and Indigenous knowledge—and if this is a violation of Indigenous peoples’ centuries-old cultural and religious rights.

If you’re interested in this topic (and I think we all should be), this post is the link to the initial report of the investigation of Indian boarding schools that has been reported in the national media. A subsequent report will be issued, telling us more about the burial sites, among other things. If you read part or all of the embedded report, I promise you will vomit in anger or weep.

Here are some excerpts:

Ciricahua Apaches at the Carlisle Indian School, Penna., 188-?: as they looked upon arrival at the School. [Photograph]. (1885 or 1886). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.. 

Very early class of young boys with flags at the Albuquerque Indian School [Photograph]. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Albuquerque Indian School, 1947-ca. 1964 (most recent creator). (ca. 1895). National Archives (292873).

Blindfolded children stacking blocks at the Fort Yuma Indian Boarding School [Photograph]. (n.d.). Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe Photo Gallery, Ft Yuma Indian School Collection.

The Department found that between 1819 to 1969, the Federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 Federal schools across 37 states or then-territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii. Some individual Federal Indian boarding schools accounted for multiple sites. The 408 Federal Indian boarding schools accordingly comprised 431 specific sites.

Initial investigation results show that approximately 50 percent of Federal Indian boarding schools may have received support or involvement from a religious institution or organization, including funding, infrastructure, and personnel. As the U.S. Senate has recognized, funds from the 1819 Civilization Fund “were apportioned among those societies and individuals—usually missionary organizations—that had been prominent in the effort to ‘civilize’ the Indians.”13 The Federal Government at times paid religious institutions and organizations on a per capita basis for Indian children to enter the Federal Indian boarding schools that these institutions and organizations groups operated.

The Federal Indian boarding school system deployed systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to attempt to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children through education, including but not limited to the following: (1) renaming Indian children from Indian to English names; (2) cutting hair of Indian children; (3) discouraging or preventing the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages, religions, and cultural practices; and (4) organizing Indian and Native Hawaiian children into units to perform military drills.

The Federal Indian boarding school system predominately included manual labor of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children as part of school curricula, including but not limited to the following: livestock and poultry raising; dairying; western agriculture production; fertilizing; lumbering; brick-making; cooking; garment-making; irrigation system development; and working on the railroad system. 

Federal Indian boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing. The Federal Indian boarding school system at times made older Indian children punish younger Indian children. 

The Department’s investigation has already identified marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 different schools across the Federal Indian boarding school system. As the investigation continues, the Department expects the number of identified burial sites to increase. The composition of the approximate numbers of identified burial sites to date is as follows: • Marked burial sites – 33 • Unmarked burial sites – 6 • Both marked and unmarked burial sites present at a school location – 14 The Department will not make public the specific locations of burial sites associated with the Federal Indian boarding school system in order to protect against well-documented grave-robbing, vandalism, and other disturbances to Indian burial sites.

This report does not include an exhaustive list of all burial sites across the Federal Indian boarding school system, nor does this report identify the children who were placed in or attended Federal Indian boarding schools. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic limited the Department’s ability to access facilities containing important records relevant to this investigation. In addition, the Department was operating under a series of continuing resolutions from October 1, 2021, until the FY 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act (P.L. 117-103) was enacted on March 15, 2022. The absence of specific appropriations limited the scope of the Department’s ability to carry out some of the research needed for this investigation. Lastly, this report does not analyze the connection between the Federal Indian boarding school system and present-day experiences of people in Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Villages, and the Native Hawaiian Community across the United States. 

Driving factors behind getting student enrollment in Indian Boarding Schools

This infographic Shows The driving factors behind getting student enrollment in Indian boarding schools can vary, but some common factors like Globalization, Diversity, Technological Integration, Alternative Learning Models, and Focus on Student Well-Being.