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John -
When we delve into the imperative to dismantle the American Empire,
there's an unquenchable thirst for atonement. A reckoning with our
past that bleeds, wails, and suffers, especially when it comes to the
historical trauma inflicted upon our First Nations people, the Native
Americans.
This summer, the Supreme Court rendered its verdict
in Haaland v. Breckeen, scrutinizing the very bones of the Indian
Child Welfare Act—ICWA to you and me. A collective sigh went through
our community as the court upheld key provisions. But, still on the
table is this query: Does the statute's preference for Native adoptive
parents constitute an unconstitutional racial bias? Several non-Indian
adoptive parents made an argument against this provision. For now, the
court said they had no legal standing to bring their cases to the
Supreme Court.
Now, let me be unequivocally clear: a negative
verdict on the ICWA would have been a visceral leap backwards into the
belly of the paternalistic beast that is our colonial history! Yet, to
protect and nurture the culture, the spirit, the very essence of
Native peoples, we must also affirm the constitutional
preference for Native adoptive parents.
The ICWA emerged in 1978 as a moral counterpunch to
the grotesque practice of wrenching Native children from their
homes—putting them in foster care, boarding schools, or adoptive
families. All this was done in the demonic name of “assimilation,”
even when fit and willing relatives could take care of these children.
We can’t forget the harrowing annals of forced removal, of cultural
erasure, starting in the late 19th century, extending late into the
20th! Hundreds of thousands of Native children were plucked from their
communities, their names forcibly changed, their languages stifled,
and horrific abuses perpetrated against body and soul. Native American
children have been sent to way more Indigenous boarding
schools than previously
reported!
Although we've ended this genocidal extraction of
children, the colonial trauma still festers and mutilates Native
American families and communities. The government’s ongoing egregious
neglect of tribal sovereignty, of basic human needs like education and
healthcare, continues the cultural genocide of Native
Americans.
To channel Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's
not even past." The abyss of broken promises and treaties made to 8.75
million federally recognized, and countless unrecognized, Native
Americans—begs to be filled with truth and justice! Under a West
administration, those promises shall not only be remembered but
fulfilled!
We stand arm-in-arm, soul-to-soul with the
Indigenous people, those who have lost loved ones to the boarding
schools, those who suffer injustice both on and off the reservations.
And together, as a collective act of moral and spiritual audacity, we
shall dismantle the weapons of empire that blunt and deny our shared
humanity!
But first, we need help from you. Every dollar you
contribute to our campaign today will be used to organize people in
pursuit of making this dream of a just, caring, and generous nation a
reality.
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