Will Supreme Court Hear Challenge to Bedrock Law on Native American Families?
In Brackeen v. Haaland, white adoptive parents argue they were discriminated against; Indigenous rights’ leaders say the sovereignty of tribes is at stake
BY NANCY MARIE SPEARS
Young women carry a banner leading the annual Memorial March to Honor Lost Children, Nov. 21, 2018, in Sioux City, Iowa. Photo: Taylor Grote, Honeywave MediaAs the Canadian government pays out billions of dollars in reparations to Indigenous families torn apart by foster care, a case up for consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to strip legal protections from U.S.-born Native American children, families and tribal communities.
At stake in the Brackeen v. Haaland case is the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, bedrock legislation passed to combat cultural genocide and the devastating history of Native children forcibly sent to boarding schools and the homes of white adoptive families. Modeled after other treaty obligations between tribal nations, the law known as ICWA requires the foster care system to take extra measures before separating Indigenous children from their families and tribes.
The Supreme Court may soon decide whether that law is constitutional. If it is struck down, there could be dire impacts on Native communities. Even with the added legal protection of ICWA, America’s Indigenous children are three times more likely to be taken into foster care than white children, according to federal statistics.
“We fear the possibility of returning to a pre-ICWA environment where Native children and families are removed in even larger numbers than they are now, with even fewer protections and little recourse for them or their families,” Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the Oregon-based National Indian Child Welfare Association wrote in an op-ed for The Imprint after an earlier ruling.
In the case now before the Supreme Court, the state of Texas and a white, evangelical Fort Worth couple, Jennifer and Chad Brackeen, challenge the constitutionality of the 1978 law, saying it grants preferential treatment based on race.
The Brackeens argue that ICWA challenged their right to adopt a Navajo toddler from foster care by discriminating against them because they are white and non-Native, a violation of their rights as foster parents under the 14th Amendment and laws guaranteeing protection from racial discrimination. While Texas is a petitioner in the Brackeen’s case, plaintiffs include the states of Indiana and Louisiana, as well as two other white families who’ve fostered or adopted Native children.
The Brackeens are backed by a powerhouse legal team with interests in their case that appear to go far beyond one family’s right to adopt, taking aim at the very right of tribal nations to exist. The Gibson Dunn law firm has brought several other cases against ICWA, and has pursued the Brackeen case even after the couple was granted the right to adopt the Navajo boy, who is known as “A.L.M.” in court documents.
The Brackeens and their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment by The Imprint.
But in 2019, the Texas state attorney general’s office posted a YouTube video titled “Meet the Brackeen Family” In the video — an unusual post about a private family’s adoption case by a top prosecutor in a rough-and-tumble Republican state — Chad Brackeen describes turning to foster care as “a calling from God.”
In the interview with Ken Paxton, a Republican who has been Attorney General since 2015, Chad Brackeen said he and his wife were blocked from adopting the Navajo boy because the Indian Child Welfare Act “said the Natives had the ultimate say as to what his placement will be.”
The couple said taking the boy from his loving home of a year would disrupt his attachment to the Brackeen family — something they view as more devastating than his separation from tribe, language, culture and kin. The Brackeens are pursuing the case even after a lower court granted the adoption, to help other families like them, they said. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton interviews the Brackeens about their joint challenge of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The ‘Gold Standard’ of child welfare law
In briefs filed in opposition to the Brackeen case, A.L.M.’s Navajo Nation and three other tribes denounce the effort to overturn ICWA. Their supporters are numerous. By last count, 25 states and the District of Columbia, 180 tribes, 35 Native American organizations and 10 child welfare and adoption agencies and the influential Casey Family Programs have filed amicus briefs opposing the legal challenge. Just one state so far has filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court critical of ICWA.
In a statement last month, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., Morongo Band of Mission Indians Chairman Charles Martin, Oneida Nation Chairman Tehassi Hill, and Quinault Indian Nation President Guy Capoeman described ICWA as “lauded by child advocates as the gold standard in child welfare,” a law upheld by courts for more than four decades.
“Yet we continue to see opponents challenge the law in order to undermine its crucial protections for Indian children in the adoption and foster care system,” the tribal chiefs wrote. “We fight for ICWA because we know the importance of keeping our children connected to their families, tribal communities, and heritage. The Indian Child Welfare Act has been defended by both Republican and Democratic administrations. It is a fundamental, non-partisan law and we look forward to the Supreme Court once again upholding its constitutionality.”
U.S. courts have repeatedly affirmed that the 1978 law is not based on race, but on the rights of tribes as political entities and sovereign nations. The backdrop of the argument is the unique relationship and treaty relations between tribes and the U.S. government, agreements that require the federal government to uphold the rights of tribal children who come into foster care. The law came about in response to forced assimilation and family separation that threatened tribal people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Supporters of ICWA argue the best interest of American Indian children is maintaining strong connections to their cultural roots, whether that means reuniting with their birth parents or moving in with relatives or other tribal families. Those ties are essential, they say, to maintaining children’s mental, physical and spiritual well-being.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous woman to serve as a U.S. cabinet secretary, became the named defendant in the Brackeen case upon being confirmed to her position by President Joe Biden.
Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, has been outspoken on Indigenous rights since her first days in office. She has ordered a federal investigation into Indian boarding schools, launched a search for unmarked graves like the thousands found recently in Canada, and even declared the word “squaw” a derogatory term, ordering replacement names for hundreds of valleys, lakes and creeks.
What’s behind the Brackeen case
In her yearslong investigation for the podcast “This Land,” Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle revealed deep ties between the Brackeens’ legal team and interests that went well beyond child welfare — a far larger network working to diminish tribes’ rights as sovereign nations. Their legal support comes from interests far removed from an otherwise run-of-the-mill family law case, including the conservative Goldwater Institute think tank, corporate lawyers whose firm represents global corporations including Walmart, Chevron and Amazon and the gaming industry. Attorneys on the Brackeen legal team have argued “reverse discrimination” in numerous previous cases involving affirmative action, voting rights and racial integration programs such as school busing, “This Land” revealed.
Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association: “We fear the possibility of returning to a pre-ICWA environment.” Photo courtesy of Kastelic.Nagle’s reporting team also found a money trail funding the legal strategy that aimed to take down ICWA, one she described as ultimately aiming not for child welfare systems but a far larger gain. In an October interview with The Imprint Weekly, Nagle described how much is at stake if ICWA is struck down by the highest court as race-based discrimination — everything from gaming on tribal land to Indian health care systems, hunting and fishing rights.
“ICWA is the first in a series of dominoes,” she said. “This lawsuit is about way more than the children. The case has become a Trojan horse.”
For now, all eyes on ICWA
According to surveys conducted in 1969 and 1974 by the Association on American Indian Affairs, as many as 35% of Indigenous children were permanently removed from their families by the federal government and child welfare agencies, the brutal aftermath of genocidal practices over centuries. ICWA became law at a time when at least 1 in 4 Native children were being taken into foster care.
The Canadian government has confronted a similarly tortuous past, pledging to pay First Nations children and families $31.5 billion in compensation for harm caused by three decades of wrongful foster care separations. Canada has similarly revealed more than a thousand unmarked graves of children on former Indian boarding school sites.
ICWA was this country’s attempt to begin repair of the generational harm it inflicted on Indigenous communities. It stipulates that tribes have standing in foster care cases involving their children, and must be notified and included in children’s legal proceedings.
If an Indigenous child is removed from their parents following allegations of neglect or abuse, officials must give first preference to tribes and prioritize a placement with the Indigenous child’s relatives or another Native family. It also requires local agencies to provide what is called “active efforts” to support family reunification, a standard that is higher than in most child welfare cases, which require only “reasonable” efforts. Active efforts in ICWA cases include providing parents with drug and alcohol treatment, counseling, domestic violence prevention as well as practical, basic items they may need such as diapers or money for electricity bills. This practice of active efforts is what led to ICWA being widely considered “the gold standard” in child welfare.
ICWA is not always adhered to in courts across the country, and there’s no national tracking of compliance. It is supposed to apply in all cases involving children who are enrolled or eligible for enrollment in tribes. Those fighting the Brackeen case argue an ICWA case is based on a child’s citizenship of a sovereign nation — a political designation — not a racial category.
White ‘discrimination’ affirmed in lower courts
The Brackeen case has had a tangled legal pathway through the courts.
In 2017, Chad and Jennifer Brackeen — together with state attorneys general in Texas, Louisiana and Indiana — sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and former Secretary Ryan Zinke to challenge ICWA on grounds that the law was race-based and therefore made it harder for the couple to adopt the Navajo child they had been fostering.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a President George W. Bush-appointee writing for the Northern District of Texas court, agreed ICWA was a race-based law. He also ruled that it violated constitutional protection from “commandeering,” which prevents the federal government from forcing states to enforce federal law.
Two years later, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed ICWA in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi as constitutional.
But the plaintiffs requested the case be heard by the full appellate court panel of justices. And in April 2021, the Fifth Circuit ruled again. In a complicated and divided 325-page opinion, the justices upheld important aspects of ICWA, but agreed to strike several key provisions, most significantly the “active efforts” requirement.
The court deadlocked on the ICWA provision requiring that extended relatives and members of the child’s tribe be considered “preferential placements.” And it ruled unconstitutional the ICWA requirement that a “qualified expert witness” testify when child welfare agencies seek to place Indigenous children into foster care, or to terminate their parents’ rights. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a review of that Fifth Circuit decision.
If ICWA is upheld in Brackeen, the federal law will remain in place.
If some parts or the entirety of ICWA is found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the impact would be far-reaching.
Misty Flowers, a member of the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska and executive director of the Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Coalition, said “it is quite scary to think about what would happen to our Indigenous families if ICWA no longer existed.”
But Flowers said she takes solace in the many defenders of the landmark law.“This is not the first time that ICWA has been challenged and attacked and this isn’t going to be the last time either,” she said. “But the thing is, we can all come together and be united. I can sleep better at night knowing that we have amazing people that are out there and we have tribes that are banding together.”
In Brackeen v. Haaland, white adoptive parents argue they were discriminated against; Indigenous rights’ leaders say the sovereignty of tribes is at stake
BY NANCY MARIE SPEARS
Young women carry a banner leading the annual Memorial March to Honor Lost Children, Nov. 21, 2018, in Sioux City, Iowa. Photo: Taylor Grote, Honeywave MediaAs the Canadian government pays out billions of dollars in reparations to Indigenous families torn apart by foster care, a case up for consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to strip legal protections from U.S.-born Native American children, families and tribal communities.
At stake in the Brackeen v. Haaland case is the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, bedrock legislation passed to combat cultural genocide and the devastating history of Native children forcibly sent to boarding schools and the homes of white adoptive families. Modeled after other treaty obligations between tribal nations, the law known as ICWA requires the foster care system to take extra measures before separating Indigenous children from their families and tribes.
The Supreme Court may soon decide whether that law is constitutional. If it is struck down, there could be dire impacts on Native communities. Even with the added legal protection of ICWA, America’s Indigenous children are three times more likely to be taken into foster care than white children, according to federal statistics.
“We fear the possibility of returning to a pre-ICWA environment where Native children and families are removed in even larger numbers than they are now, with even fewer protections and little recourse for them or their families,” Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the Oregon-based National Indian Child Welfare Association wrote in an op-ed for The Imprint after an earlier ruling.
In the case now before the Supreme Court, the state of Texas and a white, evangelical Fort Worth couple, Jennifer and Chad Brackeen, challenge the constitutionality of the 1978 law, saying it grants preferential treatment based on race.
The Brackeens argue that ICWA challenged their right to adopt a Navajo toddler from foster care by discriminating against them because they are white and non-Native, a violation of their rights as foster parents under the 14th Amendment and laws guaranteeing protection from racial discrimination. While Texas is a petitioner in the Brackeen’s case, plaintiffs include the states of Indiana and Louisiana, as well as two other white families who’ve fostered or adopted Native children.
The Brackeens are backed by a powerhouse legal team with interests in their case that appear to go far beyond one family’s right to adopt, taking aim at the very right of tribal nations to exist. The Gibson Dunn law firm has brought several other cases against ICWA, and has pursued the Brackeen case even after the couple was granted the right to adopt the Navajo boy, who is known as “A.L.M.” in court documents.
The Brackeens and their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment by The Imprint.
But in 2019, the Texas state attorney general’s office posted a YouTube video titled “Meet the Brackeen Family” In the video — an unusual post about a private family’s adoption case by a top prosecutor in a rough-and-tumble Republican state — Chad Brackeen describes turning to foster care as “a calling from God.”
In the interview with Ken Paxton, a Republican who has been Attorney General since 2015, Chad Brackeen said he and his wife were blocked from adopting the Navajo boy because the Indian Child Welfare Act “said the Natives had the ultimate say as to what his placement will be.”
The couple said taking the boy from his loving home of a year would disrupt his attachment to the Brackeen family — something they view as more devastating than his separation from tribe, language, culture and kin. The Brackeens are pursuing the case even after a lower court granted the adoption, to help other families like them, they said. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton interviews the Brackeens about their joint challenge of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The ‘Gold Standard’ of child welfare law
In briefs filed in opposition to the Brackeen case, A.L.M.’s Navajo Nation and three other tribes denounce the effort to overturn ICWA. Their supporters are numerous. By last count, 25 states and the District of Columbia, 180 tribes, 35 Native American organizations and 10 child welfare and adoption agencies and the influential Casey Family Programs have filed amicus briefs opposing the legal challenge. Just one state so far has filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court critical of ICWA.
In a statement last month, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., Morongo Band of Mission Indians Chairman Charles Martin, Oneida Nation Chairman Tehassi Hill, and Quinault Indian Nation President Guy Capoeman described ICWA as “lauded by child advocates as the gold standard in child welfare,” a law upheld by courts for more than four decades.
“Yet we continue to see opponents challenge the law in order to undermine its crucial protections for Indian children in the adoption and foster care system,” the tribal chiefs wrote. “We fight for ICWA because we know the importance of keeping our children connected to their families, tribal communities, and heritage. The Indian Child Welfare Act has been defended by both Republican and Democratic administrations. It is a fundamental, non-partisan law and we look forward to the Supreme Court once again upholding its constitutionality.”
U.S. courts have repeatedly affirmed that the 1978 law is not based on race, but on the rights of tribes as political entities and sovereign nations. The backdrop of the argument is the unique relationship and treaty relations between tribes and the U.S. government, agreements that require the federal government to uphold the rights of tribal children who come into foster care. The law came about in response to forced assimilation and family separation that threatened tribal people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Supporters of ICWA argue the best interest of American Indian children is maintaining strong connections to their cultural roots, whether that means reuniting with their birth parents or moving in with relatives or other tribal families. Those ties are essential, they say, to maintaining children’s mental, physical and spiritual well-being.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous woman to serve as a U.S. cabinet secretary, became the named defendant in the Brackeen case upon being confirmed to her position by President Joe Biden.
Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, has been outspoken on Indigenous rights since her first days in office. She has ordered a federal investigation into Indian boarding schools, launched a search for unmarked graves like the thousands found recently in Canada, and even declared the word “squaw” a derogatory term, ordering replacement names for hundreds of valleys, lakes and creeks.
What’s behind the Brackeen case
In her yearslong investigation for the podcast “This Land,” Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle revealed deep ties between the Brackeens’ legal team and interests that went well beyond child welfare — a far larger network working to diminish tribes’ rights as sovereign nations. Their legal support comes from interests far removed from an otherwise run-of-the-mill family law case, including the conservative Goldwater Institute think tank, corporate lawyers whose firm represents global corporations including Walmart, Chevron and Amazon and the gaming industry. Attorneys on the Brackeen legal team have argued “reverse discrimination” in numerous previous cases involving affirmative action, voting rights and racial integration programs such as school busing, “This Land” revealed.
Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association: “We fear the possibility of returning to a pre-ICWA environment.” Photo courtesy of Kastelic.Nagle’s reporting team also found a money trail funding the legal strategy that aimed to take down ICWA, one she described as ultimately aiming not for child welfare systems but a far larger gain. In an October interview with The Imprint Weekly, Nagle described how much is at stake if ICWA is struck down by the highest court as race-based discrimination — everything from gaming on tribal land to Indian health care systems, hunting and fishing rights.
“ICWA is the first in a series of dominoes,” she said. “This lawsuit is about way more than the children. The case has become a Trojan horse.”
For now, all eyes on ICWA
According to surveys conducted in 1969 and 1974 by the Association on American Indian Affairs, as many as 35% of Indigenous children were permanently removed from their families by the federal government and child welfare agencies, the brutal aftermath of genocidal practices over centuries. ICWA became law at a time when at least 1 in 4 Native children were being taken into foster care.
The Canadian government has confronted a similarly tortuous past, pledging to pay First Nations children and families $31.5 billion in compensation for harm caused by three decades of wrongful foster care separations. Canada has similarly revealed more than a thousand unmarked graves of children on former Indian boarding school sites.
ICWA was this country’s attempt to begin repair of the generational harm it inflicted on Indigenous communities. It stipulates that tribes have standing in foster care cases involving their children, and must be notified and included in children’s legal proceedings.
If an Indigenous child is removed from their parents following allegations of neglect or abuse, officials must give first preference to tribes and prioritize a placement with the Indigenous child’s relatives or another Native family. It also requires local agencies to provide what is called “active efforts” to support family reunification, a standard that is higher than in most child welfare cases, which require only “reasonable” efforts. Active efforts in ICWA cases include providing parents with drug and alcohol treatment, counseling, domestic violence prevention as well as practical, basic items they may need such as diapers or money for electricity bills. This practice of active efforts is what led to ICWA being widely considered “the gold standard” in child welfare.
ICWA is not always adhered to in courts across the country, and there’s no national tracking of compliance. It is supposed to apply in all cases involving children who are enrolled or eligible for enrollment in tribes. Those fighting the Brackeen case argue an ICWA case is based on a child’s citizenship of a sovereign nation — a political designation — not a racial category.
White ‘discrimination’ affirmed in lower courts
The Brackeen case has had a tangled legal pathway through the courts.
In 2017, Chad and Jennifer Brackeen — together with state attorneys general in Texas, Louisiana and Indiana — sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and former Secretary Ryan Zinke to challenge ICWA on grounds that the law was race-based and therefore made it harder for the couple to adopt the Navajo child they had been fostering.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a President George W. Bush-appointee writing for the Northern District of Texas court, agreed ICWA was a race-based law. He also ruled that it violated constitutional protection from “commandeering,” which prevents the federal government from forcing states to enforce federal law.
Two years later, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed ICWA in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi as constitutional.
But the plaintiffs requested the case be heard by the full appellate court panel of justices. And in April 2021, the Fifth Circuit ruled again. In a complicated and divided 325-page opinion, the justices upheld important aspects of ICWA, but agreed to strike several key provisions, most significantly the “active efforts” requirement.
The court deadlocked on the ICWA provision requiring that extended relatives and members of the child’s tribe be considered “preferential placements.” And it ruled unconstitutional the ICWA requirement that a “qualified expert witness” testify when child welfare agencies seek to place Indigenous children into foster care, or to terminate their parents’ rights. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a review of that Fifth Circuit decision.
If ICWA is upheld in Brackeen, the federal law will remain in place.
If some parts or the entirety of ICWA is found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the impact would be far-reaching.
Misty Flowers, a member of the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska and executive director of the Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Coalition, said “it is quite scary to think about what would happen to our Indigenous families if ICWA no longer existed.”
But Flowers said she takes solace in the many defenders of the landmark law.“This is not the first time that ICWA has been challenged and attacked and this isn’t going to be the last time either,” she said. “But the thing is, we can all come together and be united. I can sleep better at night knowing that we have amazing people that are out there and we have tribes that are banding together.”
Haaland’s Bold Initiative to Revisit the Tortuous Past of U.S. Boarding Schools for Native Americans, and Alumni Reflections
‘Take that, government,’ some former students reveal their extraordinary strength in healing
BY NANCY MARIE SPEARS
Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced an initiative to revisit the grim history of Indian boarding schools in June.In June, when the nation’s first Native American Cabinet secretary ordered
a long-overdue investigation into the thousands of Indigenous children the U.S. government sent to boarding schools over a century, she revealed generations-long personal ties to the schools’ brutal legacy.
Relatives of Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland were among those forcibly removed from their families and taken to the federally run schools to be “culturally assimilated.” Writing of her family’s experience for The Washington Post, Haaland said her maternal grandparents were “stolen” from their families when they were just 8 years old. They lived away from their parents, their communities and their culture until they were 13.
“Many children like them never made it back home,” wrote Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico.
Interviews with former boarding school students and their descendants living in the Southwest reveal nuanced memories that run the gamut — from deep trauma and loss, to those who said they gained some valuable lifelong skills at the schools.
Constance Fox, who is Cheyenne and Arapaho and a Bureau of Indian Affairs self-determination advisor, is an alumnus. She praised Haaland’s efforts and thinks her investigation shows goodwill from the government to further understand the traumas her ancestors suffered — memories that still persist in Indian Country.
“Moving forward, closure cannot begin to occur without acknowledging the painful history,” Fox said. “But it is hopeful to begin the healing process for the families and tribes impacted.”
Haaland’s ongoing Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative announced in June will involve close consultation with tribes and result in a final report due in April. The initiative will take stock of the past, beginning with the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 and running through the 1960s, when the U.S. enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting boarding schools nationwide.
At the schools, children were doused with DDT upon arrival, coerced into “re-education” and endured physical abuse for speaking their tribal languages or practicing their traditions. Parents could not visit their children and a countless number “perished and were interred in unmarked graves,” the Interior Department reported.
Now, although they are much changed and attendance is not forced, some boarding schools for Native children still exist.
According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, there are 15 Native American schools that are still boarding, down from hundreds in 29 states that were run by government and religious institutions. Oklahoma once led the nation with 83 boarding schools, some of which remain open today. Arizona once had 51 schools.
Constance Fox. Photo courtesy of Fox.Among them is Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where Fox once attended. She calls Riverside today “a whole different place,” with advanced courses, upgraded buildings and a good athletic program. For parents whose children need the structure and security of a residential program, she said this option is a good one, and — far from the experiences of the past — she said the school allows Native culture to be celebrated, in a safe learning environment.
“I have friends that have kids and grandkids that go to boarding schools and it’s because they want to,” Fox said, noting that many send children to escape discrimination and alienation in public schools they would otherwise attend. “Being around their Native people makes them want to do better and want to succeed. So, I think that’s a dynamic that has changed over the years.”
Fox attended Concho Indian Boarding School from 3rd through 8th grade, and graduated from Riverside Indian School in 1984 as valedictorian. She holds a bachelor’s degree in tourism management from Northeastern State University and a master’s degree in education from the University of Oklahoma.
Now a resident of Yukon, Oklahoma, she has been employed in various positions with the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly three decades, mostly in the area of self-determination — a field focusing on contracting with tribes for government programs, services and projects and providing oversight and technical assistance.
Fox said boarding schools — specifically the employees that she said practically raised her — helped shape her passion for self-determination and her career.
“What at the time was negative to me ended up really being positive,” she said. “I learned so much about self-responsibility, and that came from the dorm parents, teachers, and other people who worked at both Concho and Riverside.”
Haaland’s federal initiative to revisit the schools’ darker pasts followed the discovery of more than 1,200 unmarked graves at two shuttered boarding schools in Canada’s British Columbia and Saskatchewan provinces. The Interior secretary said learning of that discovery made her “sick to her stomach,” and she vowed to uncover any unmarked graves in this country. The Interior appears to be preparing for the worst.
The review of the federal boarding schools that operated from 1819 to 1969 aims to gather enrollment records, vital statistics, correspondence, maps, photographs and administrative reports. “Particular emphasis” will be placed on “potential burial sites,” and “unidentified human remains,” the Interior Department explained. For those long-forgotten victims, sitework will focus on “exhumation and repatriation.”
Patty Talahongva reporting for Indian Country Today in April. Photo courtesy of Talahongva.Yet even against that looming backdrop, the capacity for continued strength is on display throughout Indian Country, a reporter found. There are numerous instances revealing remarkable transformation and healing from the boarding school era.
Hopi journalist Patty Talahongva — now the executive producer of newscasts by Indian Country Today, a national nonprofit Indigenous affairs digital news publication — said she got her start in journalism at the boarding school she attended in Phoenix, Arizona in 1978 and 1979. While Talahongva said she knows about the brutal history of her grandparents’ boarding school experiences, the year she spent at Phoenix Indian High School was different. Children were allowed to speak their languages freely. Cultural customs were celebrated, not suppressed. The overall experience, she said, made her more independent.
“People want to cling to this idea that it was always, always bad,” Talahongva said. “I would say there’s always good in whatever story, no matter how bad it got.”
As illustration, she noted that in April 2020, amid the devastation of the early pandemic, Indian Country Today launched its earlier newscasts from the Phoenix school campus, a place where students in her grandparents’ generation weren’t always encouraged to succeed.
“Those kids who went to school in that building were never encouraged to go to college, get a degree, or do whatever they wanted to do,” Talahongva said. “They were certainly never encouraged to become anchors and producers. I can hear our relatives laughing. It’s like, ‘take that, government. We’re using the building you put up to hold us down, and we’re broadcasting to the world.’”
Haaland, who identifies her family roots in New Mexico dating back 35 generations, is carrying on a similar legacy. Last month, the Interior secretary formally declared “squaw” a derogatory term, ordering replacement names for hundreds of valleys, lakes, creeks and other areas on federal lands.
In a sign of how Haaland has already altered the federal agency she leads, her department’s recent order to halt “legacies of oppression,” called the word “squaw” an ethnic, racial and sexist slur for Indigenous women.
In writing about her family’s history with boarding schools, Haaland has described recording her grandmother’s memories of being ripped from her home and taken to a boarding school. She said a priest “gathered the children from the village and put them on a train,” describing the loneliness and longing for family she would later endure. “It was an exercise in healing for her,” Haaland described, “and a profound lesson for me about the resilience of our people, and even more about how important it is to reclaim what those schools tried to take from our people.”
A version of this story was originally published by Gaylord News, a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
https://gaylordnews.net/7244/news/native-american/alumni-support-haalands-boarding-school-initiative-boarding-schools-were-a-learning-experience/
BY NANCY MARIE SPEARS
Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced an initiative to revisit the grim history of Indian boarding schools in June.In June, when the nation’s first Native American Cabinet secretary ordered
a long-overdue investigation into the thousands of Indigenous children the U.S. government sent to boarding schools over a century, she revealed generations-long personal ties to the schools’ brutal legacy.
Relatives of Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland were among those forcibly removed from their families and taken to the federally run schools to be “culturally assimilated.” Writing of her family’s experience for The Washington Post, Haaland said her maternal grandparents were “stolen” from their families when they were just 8 years old. They lived away from their parents, their communities and their culture until they were 13.
“Many children like them never made it back home,” wrote Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico.
Interviews with former boarding school students and their descendants living in the Southwest reveal nuanced memories that run the gamut — from deep trauma and loss, to those who said they gained some valuable lifelong skills at the schools.
Constance Fox, who is Cheyenne and Arapaho and a Bureau of Indian Affairs self-determination advisor, is an alumnus. She praised Haaland’s efforts and thinks her investigation shows goodwill from the government to further understand the traumas her ancestors suffered — memories that still persist in Indian Country.
“Moving forward, closure cannot begin to occur without acknowledging the painful history,” Fox said. “But it is hopeful to begin the healing process for the families and tribes impacted.”
Haaland’s ongoing Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative announced in June will involve close consultation with tribes and result in a final report due in April. The initiative will take stock of the past, beginning with the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 and running through the 1960s, when the U.S. enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting boarding schools nationwide.
At the schools, children were doused with DDT upon arrival, coerced into “re-education” and endured physical abuse for speaking their tribal languages or practicing their traditions. Parents could not visit their children and a countless number “perished and were interred in unmarked graves,” the Interior Department reported.
Now, although they are much changed and attendance is not forced, some boarding schools for Native children still exist.
According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, there are 15 Native American schools that are still boarding, down from hundreds in 29 states that were run by government and religious institutions. Oklahoma once led the nation with 83 boarding schools, some of which remain open today. Arizona once had 51 schools.
Constance Fox. Photo courtesy of Fox.Among them is Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where Fox once attended. She calls Riverside today “a whole different place,” with advanced courses, upgraded buildings and a good athletic program. For parents whose children need the structure and security of a residential program, she said this option is a good one, and — far from the experiences of the past — she said the school allows Native culture to be celebrated, in a safe learning environment.
“I have friends that have kids and grandkids that go to boarding schools and it’s because they want to,” Fox said, noting that many send children to escape discrimination and alienation in public schools they would otherwise attend. “Being around their Native people makes them want to do better and want to succeed. So, I think that’s a dynamic that has changed over the years.”
Fox attended Concho Indian Boarding School from 3rd through 8th grade, and graduated from Riverside Indian School in 1984 as valedictorian. She holds a bachelor’s degree in tourism management from Northeastern State University and a master’s degree in education from the University of Oklahoma.
Now a resident of Yukon, Oklahoma, she has been employed in various positions with the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly three decades, mostly in the area of self-determination — a field focusing on contracting with tribes for government programs, services and projects and providing oversight and technical assistance.
Fox said boarding schools — specifically the employees that she said practically raised her — helped shape her passion for self-determination and her career.
“What at the time was negative to me ended up really being positive,” she said. “I learned so much about self-responsibility, and that came from the dorm parents, teachers, and other people who worked at both Concho and Riverside.”
Haaland’s federal initiative to revisit the schools’ darker pasts followed the discovery of more than 1,200 unmarked graves at two shuttered boarding schools in Canada’s British Columbia and Saskatchewan provinces. The Interior secretary said learning of that discovery made her “sick to her stomach,” and she vowed to uncover any unmarked graves in this country. The Interior appears to be preparing for the worst.
The review of the federal boarding schools that operated from 1819 to 1969 aims to gather enrollment records, vital statistics, correspondence, maps, photographs and administrative reports. “Particular emphasis” will be placed on “potential burial sites,” and “unidentified human remains,” the Interior Department explained. For those long-forgotten victims, sitework will focus on “exhumation and repatriation.”
Patty Talahongva reporting for Indian Country Today in April. Photo courtesy of Talahongva.Yet even against that looming backdrop, the capacity for continued strength is on display throughout Indian Country, a reporter found. There are numerous instances revealing remarkable transformation and healing from the boarding school era.
Hopi journalist Patty Talahongva — now the executive producer of newscasts by Indian Country Today, a national nonprofit Indigenous affairs digital news publication — said she got her start in journalism at the boarding school she attended in Phoenix, Arizona in 1978 and 1979. While Talahongva said she knows about the brutal history of her grandparents’ boarding school experiences, the year she spent at Phoenix Indian High School was different. Children were allowed to speak their languages freely. Cultural customs were celebrated, not suppressed. The overall experience, she said, made her more independent.
“People want to cling to this idea that it was always, always bad,” Talahongva said. “I would say there’s always good in whatever story, no matter how bad it got.”
As illustration, she noted that in April 2020, amid the devastation of the early pandemic, Indian Country Today launched its earlier newscasts from the Phoenix school campus, a place where students in her grandparents’ generation weren’t always encouraged to succeed.
“Those kids who went to school in that building were never encouraged to go to college, get a degree, or do whatever they wanted to do,” Talahongva said. “They were certainly never encouraged to become anchors and producers. I can hear our relatives laughing. It’s like, ‘take that, government. We’re using the building you put up to hold us down, and we’re broadcasting to the world.’”
Haaland, who identifies her family roots in New Mexico dating back 35 generations, is carrying on a similar legacy. Last month, the Interior secretary formally declared “squaw” a derogatory term, ordering replacement names for hundreds of valleys, lakes, creeks and other areas on federal lands.
In a sign of how Haaland has already altered the federal agency she leads, her department’s recent order to halt “legacies of oppression,” called the word “squaw” an ethnic, racial and sexist slur for Indigenous women.
In writing about her family’s history with boarding schools, Haaland has described recording her grandmother’s memories of being ripped from her home and taken to a boarding school. She said a priest “gathered the children from the village and put them on a train,” describing the loneliness and longing for family she would later endure. “It was an exercise in healing for her,” Haaland described, “and a profound lesson for me about the resilience of our people, and even more about how important it is to reclaim what those schools tried to take from our people.”
A version of this story was originally published by Gaylord News, a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
https://gaylordnews.net/7244/news/native-american/alumni-support-haalands-boarding-school-initiative-boarding-schools-were-a-learning-experience/
Oklahoma’s tension with tribes attracts attention of western states
Nancy Marie Spears
March 3, 2022
While Oklahoma remains in a power struggle with its 39 tribes on criminal jurisdiction and whether Native American reservations still exist, some Western states have been collaborating with their tribes for years.
In New Mexico, the state supreme court laid the foundation in 2006 for what has become known as the McGirt decision, the Oklahoma case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Muscogee reservation had never been dissolved.
Jerri Mares, the New Mexico Attorney General’s legislative affairs director, said New Mexico’s Supreme Court held in a 2006 case that New Mexico did not have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes occurring on reservations there.
“While New Mexico will undoubtedly feel an impact of the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision in the future, New Mexico case law has already established a framework for who can exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed by members of Indian tribes in Indian Country,” Mares said.
Oklahoma courts have since ruled under McGirt that the reservations of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Seminole and Quapaw tribes were never dissolved by Congress.
Robert J. Miller, an Arizona State University College of Law professor, said his own tribe’s 14,000-acre reservation of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe in Oklahoma could potentially be re-recognized under McGirt.
Miller said Arizona had by far the most Indian Country within its borders until McGirt re-recognized reservations for Oklahoma tribes. Arizona is made up of 27% Indian Country, while Oklahoma now comprises 43% Indian Country.
“There’s no state making the same arguments Oklahoma is,” Miller said. “Oklahoma’s acting like this is the end of the world. Yes, 43% is a pretty big deal and it’s a shock to the system. I called this case a bombshell and it was a bombshell for the feds, the state and the tribes.”
But Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has been in conflict with Oklahoma tribes beginning with casino gaming compacts in 2019, a year before the July 2020 McGirt ruling. In 2021, he went toe-to-toe with the tribes over hunting and fishing compact costs and the expiration of gaming compacts.
Stephen Greetham, Chickasaw Nation’s senior counsel, said “there’s no ambiguity left to be reasonably argued,” in the applications of the law.
Greetham said that in his experience working with his team, Stitt only wants to work with the tribes under a framework of rolling back McGirt, “and the tribes aren’t going to do that.”
“Each one of those states (outside Oklahoma) has been dealing with this for quite a long time,” Greetham said. “They have invested, built, and structured their law enforcement systems in order to deal with the law as it is. What Oklahoma is doing, instead of working with the tribes and working with the law as it is, it’s continuing arguments to try to say ‘no, not us, we’re different.’ It doesn’t work that way.”
Oklahoma’s attorney general on Thursday indicated there might be room for dialogue with the state’s tribal nations.
“The Attorney General has had constructive conversations with tribal leaders and looks forward to more in the future,” the Oklahoma Attorney General office’s communication director Rachel Roberts said. “Our office will continue to endeavor to work with the Indian Nations toward meaningful solutions that benefit all Oklahomans.”
Oklahoma’s position isn’t totally unique, according to Monte Mills, a University of Montana Federal Indian Law professor who said state and local concerns over tribal rights and their impact on non-tribal citizens are often at the core of state-tribal conflicts.
“That’s not to say there haven’t been conflicts over whether the state exerts authority or taxes certain people within reservation boundaries,” Mills said. “Those have continued, but that basic question about whether the reservations exist hasn’t been an issue here recently like it has in Oklahoma.”
Alexander Skibine, professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, pointed to continued disputes about reservation boundaries for the Ute Tribe.
“Although McGirt is only relevant to Oklahoma in the immediate future, disputes about reservations’ boundaries or disestablishment have affected a number of states,” Skibine said. “Here in Utah, the state has had a long history in refusing to cooperate fully with federal rulings concerning reservation boundaries.”
Skibine said Utah was refusing to accept Ute reservation boundaries as established by federal courts.
Miller said there also are a number of Supreme Court cases in which Arizona was litigating against the tribes. In 1959 and 1973, the state was involved in suing individual tribal members in state court as well as a case where the state tried to tax a Native woman’s salary who lived on the Navajo reservation. Arizona, he said, has learned to recognize tribes for what they are: an equal body of government.
“The state (Arizona) recognizes tribal governments as constitutionally recognized governments and you have to deal with them the same as you deal with other states or you deal with a city or a county,” Miller said. “There’s a lot of obligations on the tribes in Oklahoma now that they didn’t have before. Most of them are working very diligently to absorb these new powers. They’re cooperating with the feds, they want to cooperate with the state. Will the state?”
March 3, 2022
While Oklahoma remains in a power struggle with its 39 tribes on criminal jurisdiction and whether Native American reservations still exist, some Western states have been collaborating with their tribes for years.
In New Mexico, the state supreme court laid the foundation in 2006 for what has become known as the McGirt decision, the Oklahoma case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Muscogee reservation had never been dissolved.
Jerri Mares, the New Mexico Attorney General’s legislative affairs director, said New Mexico’s Supreme Court held in a 2006 case that New Mexico did not have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes occurring on reservations there.
“While New Mexico will undoubtedly feel an impact of the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision in the future, New Mexico case law has already established a framework for who can exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed by members of Indian tribes in Indian Country,” Mares said.
Oklahoma courts have since ruled under McGirt that the reservations of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Seminole and Quapaw tribes were never dissolved by Congress.
Robert J. Miller, an Arizona State University College of Law professor, said his own tribe’s 14,000-acre reservation of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe in Oklahoma could potentially be re-recognized under McGirt.
Miller said Arizona had by far the most Indian Country within its borders until McGirt re-recognized reservations for Oklahoma tribes. Arizona is made up of 27% Indian Country, while Oklahoma now comprises 43% Indian Country.
“There’s no state making the same arguments Oklahoma is,” Miller said. “Oklahoma’s acting like this is the end of the world. Yes, 43% is a pretty big deal and it’s a shock to the system. I called this case a bombshell and it was a bombshell for the feds, the state and the tribes.”
But Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has been in conflict with Oklahoma tribes beginning with casino gaming compacts in 2019, a year before the July 2020 McGirt ruling. In 2021, he went toe-to-toe with the tribes over hunting and fishing compact costs and the expiration of gaming compacts.
Stephen Greetham, Chickasaw Nation’s senior counsel, said “there’s no ambiguity left to be reasonably argued,” in the applications of the law.
Greetham said that in his experience working with his team, Stitt only wants to work with the tribes under a framework of rolling back McGirt, “and the tribes aren’t going to do that.”
“Each one of those states (outside Oklahoma) has been dealing with this for quite a long time,” Greetham said. “They have invested, built, and structured their law enforcement systems in order to deal with the law as it is. What Oklahoma is doing, instead of working with the tribes and working with the law as it is, it’s continuing arguments to try to say ‘no, not us, we’re different.’ It doesn’t work that way.”
Oklahoma’s attorney general on Thursday indicated there might be room for dialogue with the state’s tribal nations.
“The Attorney General has had constructive conversations with tribal leaders and looks forward to more in the future,” the Oklahoma Attorney General office’s communication director Rachel Roberts said. “Our office will continue to endeavor to work with the Indian Nations toward meaningful solutions that benefit all Oklahomans.”
Oklahoma’s position isn’t totally unique, according to Monte Mills, a University of Montana Federal Indian Law professor who said state and local concerns over tribal rights and their impact on non-tribal citizens are often at the core of state-tribal conflicts.
“That’s not to say there haven’t been conflicts over whether the state exerts authority or taxes certain people within reservation boundaries,” Mills said. “Those have continued, but that basic question about whether the reservations exist hasn’t been an issue here recently like it has in Oklahoma.”
Alexander Skibine, professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, pointed to continued disputes about reservation boundaries for the Ute Tribe.
“Although McGirt is only relevant to Oklahoma in the immediate future, disputes about reservations’ boundaries or disestablishment have affected a number of states,” Skibine said. “Here in Utah, the state has had a long history in refusing to cooperate fully with federal rulings concerning reservation boundaries.”
Skibine said Utah was refusing to accept Ute reservation boundaries as established by federal courts.
Miller said there also are a number of Supreme Court cases in which Arizona was litigating against the tribes. In 1959 and 1973, the state was involved in suing individual tribal members in state court as well as a case where the state tried to tax a Native woman’s salary who lived on the Navajo reservation. Arizona, he said, has learned to recognize tribes for what they are: an equal body of government.
“The state (Arizona) recognizes tribal governments as constitutionally recognized governments and you have to deal with them the same as you deal with other states or you deal with a city or a county,” Miller said. “There’s a lot of obligations on the tribes in Oklahoma now that they didn’t have before. Most of them are working very diligently to absorb these new powers. They’re cooperating with the feds, they want to cooperate with the state. Will the state?”
Tribal law enforcement officials say McGirt strengthening public safety systems in Indian Country
Nancy Marie Spears
November 2, 2021
Oklahoma tribal public safety officials say the U.S. Supreme Court’s McGirt ruling is strengthening momentum for improvements to public safety infrastructure in their police departments.
The Choctaw and Muscogee nations have hired additional public safety officers and are entering into more cross-deputization agreements with tribal, state and federal agencies.
Choctaw Public Safety has hired 30 additional public safety officers since application of the McGirt decision on the Choctaw reservation, according to Michael Hall, the tribe’s executive director of public safety. The nation now employs 80 officers to patrol the 11,000-square-mile reservation.
The Choctaw Nation also has entered into cross-deputization agreements with 68 state, federal and local law enforcement agencies, Hall said.
The tribe has reported an influx in calls to police since McGirt.
“I think they’ve almost doubled because when you really stop and reality check on it and think of it prior to McGirt, it’s almost like a light switch was flipped on,” Choctaw Chief of Police Jesse Petty said.
McGirt came out of a July 2020 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark McGirt v. Oklahoma case, affirming the Muscogee Nation’s Reservation boundaries. The decision confirmed that under the Major Crimes Act, tribes have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes on Indigenous lands.
Muscogee Nation Director of Communications Jason Salsman said the McGirt decision necessitated building the capacity of the tribe’s police force.
“We have increased our Lighthorse tribal police department budget, doubled our officers, included more facilities in our master plan, and have added a mobile command unit used in collaborative efforts with fellow agencies for work in the field where we have several on the ground,” Salsman said.
The Muscogee Nation now has more than 75 officers on patrol — in pre-McGirt days, those numbers were in the 40s.
Cross-deputization agreements with neighboring police agencies by the Muscogee Nation have gone from 39 to more than 60 agreements, Salsman said.
Cross deputizations “are the key component” to maintaining public safety in the Muscogee Nation, Salsman said. The agreements essentially create widespread policing across the reservation no matter what agency a law enforcement officer is with.
Salsman said the tribe actively pursues and relies on cross-deputization agreements staying in place to maintain consistent policing on the tribe’s lands.
“They are extremely helpful in the immediate because it allows us to keep the peace while having the time needed to build resources and greater infrastructure,” Salsman said.
Hall said cross-deputizing in Choctaw Nation helps strengthen the knowledge and capabilities of people operating under the agreements when it comes to dealing with policing in tribal territory.
“I’d say it’s a plus rather than a hindrance,” Petty said. “Having the ability to work together through departments within the communities Choctaw Nation is spread out through, the way I see it playing out is it’s an ability for everybody to combine resources.”
Salsman said he thinks the McGirt decision “bolsters every aspect of law enforcement on our reservation.”
“It calls on us to all pull together and work for the good of our reservation, our communities and our state,” Salsman said. “There are more opportunities to have more police, more resources and more funding when we all combine. A post-McGirt world has allowed us to do that.”
Indian law attorney Kevin R. Kemper said the jurisdictional issues in Indian Country prosecutions existed long before McGirt and related decisions affirmed reservation boundaries among Oklahoma tribes and gave tribes jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed on tribal lands.
Kemper said that around 1990-1991, there was a homicide in a small town in southern Oklahoma where he lived. He said he heard “loud commotion and sirens” from a nearby bar about a block from his house. He said he later learned a stabbing had occurred.
“A Chickasaw man was accused of knifing someone else,” Kemper said. “He fled to tribal lands so that a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent would arrest him and not the local sheriff. So we’ve had these jurisdictional issues for a long time.”
While McGirt-related issues do exist in other states, it’s more focused on Oklahoma’s Indian Country, Kemper said.
“I become frustrated when I hear rhetoric, implying that McGirt is just freeing a bunch of violent criminals,” Kemper said. “That’s not how it is playing out in the real world. The federal government and even some tribal governments are going after people that are accused of violence most aggressively.”
McGirt, Kemper said, invites state, federal and tribal officials to work together as Oklahomans to respect the rights of everyone.
Salsman said the Muscogee Nation’s plans for public safety upgrades include more officers, more cross-deputation agreements, more prosecutors, investigators, judges and courtrooms and better facilities for the Lighthorse Police.
“There has never been a greater opportunity to make our people safer, with more,” Salsman said.
November 2, 2021
Oklahoma tribal public safety officials say the U.S. Supreme Court’s McGirt ruling is strengthening momentum for improvements to public safety infrastructure in their police departments.
The Choctaw and Muscogee nations have hired additional public safety officers and are entering into more cross-deputization agreements with tribal, state and federal agencies.
Choctaw Public Safety has hired 30 additional public safety officers since application of the McGirt decision on the Choctaw reservation, according to Michael Hall, the tribe’s executive director of public safety. The nation now employs 80 officers to patrol the 11,000-square-mile reservation.
The Choctaw Nation also has entered into cross-deputization agreements with 68 state, federal and local law enforcement agencies, Hall said.
The tribe has reported an influx in calls to police since McGirt.
“I think they’ve almost doubled because when you really stop and reality check on it and think of it prior to McGirt, it’s almost like a light switch was flipped on,” Choctaw Chief of Police Jesse Petty said.
McGirt came out of a July 2020 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark McGirt v. Oklahoma case, affirming the Muscogee Nation’s Reservation boundaries. The decision confirmed that under the Major Crimes Act, tribes have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes on Indigenous lands.
Muscogee Nation Director of Communications Jason Salsman said the McGirt decision necessitated building the capacity of the tribe’s police force.
“We have increased our Lighthorse tribal police department budget, doubled our officers, included more facilities in our master plan, and have added a mobile command unit used in collaborative efforts with fellow agencies for work in the field where we have several on the ground,” Salsman said.
The Muscogee Nation now has more than 75 officers on patrol — in pre-McGirt days, those numbers were in the 40s.
Cross-deputization agreements with neighboring police agencies by the Muscogee Nation have gone from 39 to more than 60 agreements, Salsman said.
Cross deputizations “are the key component” to maintaining public safety in the Muscogee Nation, Salsman said. The agreements essentially create widespread policing across the reservation no matter what agency a law enforcement officer is with.
Salsman said the tribe actively pursues and relies on cross-deputization agreements staying in place to maintain consistent policing on the tribe’s lands.
“They are extremely helpful in the immediate because it allows us to keep the peace while having the time needed to build resources and greater infrastructure,” Salsman said.
Hall said cross-deputizing in Choctaw Nation helps strengthen the knowledge and capabilities of people operating under the agreements when it comes to dealing with policing in tribal territory.
“I’d say it’s a plus rather than a hindrance,” Petty said. “Having the ability to work together through departments within the communities Choctaw Nation is spread out through, the way I see it playing out is it’s an ability for everybody to combine resources.”
Salsman said he thinks the McGirt decision “bolsters every aspect of law enforcement on our reservation.”
“It calls on us to all pull together and work for the good of our reservation, our communities and our state,” Salsman said. “There are more opportunities to have more police, more resources and more funding when we all combine. A post-McGirt world has allowed us to do that.”
Indian law attorney Kevin R. Kemper said the jurisdictional issues in Indian Country prosecutions existed long before McGirt and related decisions affirmed reservation boundaries among Oklahoma tribes and gave tribes jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed on tribal lands.
Kemper said that around 1990-1991, there was a homicide in a small town in southern Oklahoma where he lived. He said he heard “loud commotion and sirens” from a nearby bar about a block from his house. He said he later learned a stabbing had occurred.
“A Chickasaw man was accused of knifing someone else,” Kemper said. “He fled to tribal lands so that a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent would arrest him and not the local sheriff. So we’ve had these jurisdictional issues for a long time.”
While McGirt-related issues do exist in other states, it’s more focused on Oklahoma’s Indian Country, Kemper said.
“I become frustrated when I hear rhetoric, implying that McGirt is just freeing a bunch of violent criminals,” Kemper said. “That’s not how it is playing out in the real world. The federal government and even some tribal governments are going after people that are accused of violence most aggressively.”
McGirt, Kemper said, invites state, federal and tribal officials to work together as Oklahomans to respect the rights of everyone.
Salsman said the Muscogee Nation’s plans for public safety upgrades include more officers, more cross-deputation agreements, more prosecutors, investigators, judges and courtrooms and better facilities for the Lighthorse Police.
“There has never been a greater opportunity to make our people safer, with more,” Salsman said.
Oklahoma tribes’ Freedmen descendants hopeful for increased care by Indian Health Service
Jackson Perryman, great-grandfather of Sharon Lenzy-Scott, was an original Dawes enrollee. Perryman’s father, Sandy Perryman, came to Indian Territory about 1829. (Provided)
October 28, 2021
Freedmen descendants in Oklahoma tribes are hoping to see an increase in healthcare access and eligibility by the Indian Health Service.
One Freedmen activist group is continuing the battle for equal healthcare access and citizenship rights, while Seminole Freedmen first denied healthcare from their tribal clinic were declared eligible this month by Indian Health Service (IHS).
The directive to serve Seminole Freedmen came after IHS denied COVID-19 vaccines to Freedmen descendants.
“Personnel at the Wewoka clinic and other IHS facilities in Oklahoma have been informed they should provide services to Seminole Freedmen who present at their clinics and hospitals,” an IHS statement reads.
Freedmen descendants are descended from emancipated slaves who were owned or intermarried with the Five Tribes — Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole — whose societies included enslaved and freed African-Americans.
Freedmen activist group Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band has a lawsuit pending in the district court of Muscogee Nation for recognition as citizens of the tribe, an effort to restore rights to citizenship which includes access to healthcare owed to all tribal citizens.
“Three judges have recused themselves” from the case against Muscogee Nation, Band leader and founding member Rhonda Grayson said. They await a judge assignment.
Grayson, who is of Muscogee and Chickasaw Freedmen descent, said the group and others have worked with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and her staff on the Freedmen issue. Waters is leading efforts to hold tribes accountable in honoring the 1866 treaty.
Proposed language in House Resolution 5195 would require the government to withhold housing funds from tribes violating 1866 treaties giving Freedmen tribal citizenship, Grayson said.
The group is also working with U.S. Rep. Danny Davis from Illinois’ 7th district on HR 4637, legislation calling on the U.S. to sever ties with Muscogee Nation until it restores Freedmen descendants’ rights.
Cherokee and Seminole Freedmen descendants are eligible for care at all IHS facilities, Rear Adm. Travis Watts, Oklahoma City Area Indian Health Service director, said in a statement.
“All new patients and those re-establishing their care within an Indian health systems healthcare facility are required to provide documentation to prove they are enrolled in or descended from a federally recognized tribe,” Watts said.
Chickasaw Nation was the only tribe of the Five Tribes that refused to acknowledge Freedmen as citizens, as a result of the 1866 treaties with the United States. Chickasaw Freedmen were never granted citizenship, and would be ineligible for IHS services because they cannot prove membership or descent.
Choctaw and Muscogee nations reorganized under Oklahoma’s Indian Welfare Act more than 30 years ago, disenrolling Freedmen from being tribal members.
Cherokee Nation remains the only one of the Five Tribes fully recognizing Freedmen descendant citizens, following the 2017 ruling Cherokee Nation v. Nash. Seminole Nation does enroll Freedmen descendants, but they don’t receive full benefits of citizenship.
Cherokee Freedmen descendant Marilyn Vann — president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association — said intertribal discussion about Freedmen inclusion is a complex topic, part of history some would rather omit.
Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band member Za Smith, who is of Muscogee, Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen descent, said a lack of education on the Freedmen’s contributions to tribes isn’t the only thing at issue: a history of having to fight for limited resources in minority communities is a factor in keeping Freedmen and Indigenous folks at odds.
“I absolutely don’t agree with the tribes not allowing Freedmen into the tribes, but I do understand it’s hard for the tribes to overcome their fear of having to share limited resources and choose to embrace others,” Smith said.
Smith said she’s the first person born in her family who wasn’t born into slavery or apartheid, legal segregation in the U.S.
The idea of history being far removed is simply untrue, Smith said.
Sharon Lenzy-Scott, who is descended from Muscogee and Cherokee Freedmen and is a member of the Muscogee Freedmen Band, said she doesn’t understand “oppressing” people whose ancestors were part of the removal period.
“They are oppressing the people that were actually helping them at that time,” Lenzy-Scott said.
Lenzy-Scott started her advocacy for Freedmen fighting for Muscogee citizenship from her maternal side.
Lacking societal understanding on how intertwined histories of African and Indigenous peoples really are, Smith says, is important for America to remember.
“Black people in America have inspired movements across this globe when it comes to freedom and human and civil rights,” Smith said.
She said she doesn’t understand why tribes do not embrace Freedmen. Smith said what’s especially hard is the dichotomy of being Black in America: you are only allowed to be one thing.
Grayson said she continues to fight for the Freedmen cause in part because of how the Muscogee Nation’s disenrollment in 1979 affected her great-grandmother, America Cohee, Dawes Roll #4661, who was disenrolled from Muscogee Nation a year before her death.
Muscogee Freedmen descendant Eli Grayson said stories he heard growing up about his African and Indigenous ancestors inform how he thinks about “being Creek” today.
“My dad has always told us, Creeks are not a race of people, it’s a political construct,” Eli Grayson said. “That’s why we have a government, … a constitution, that’s why we’re sovereign. All those things relate to a political society, not race.”
Because tribes can make sovereign decisions regarding citizenship for Freedmen descendants, Eli Grayson said tribal sovereignty itself has become “a dirty word,” to Freedmen descendants in Oklahoma.
“When Black Freedmen descendants hear the words tribal sovereignty today, they don’t think it is a good thing,” Eli Grayson said. “They think it’s the knee on their necks.”
Grayson said when Freedmen of Indian Territory hear the words tribal sovereignty, they often hear the words used by Southern states, “state rights,” used by governors to mistreat African-Americans.
Essentially, they hear that states — and tribes — have sovereign rights to treat their African-descended people the way they want to. That includes access to healthcare.
“They don’t hear something good, because it’s been used, lately in the last century, as a batting rod or a bat to beat them, instead of something used to be responsible for them,” Eli Grayson said.
Nancy Marie Spears, a Gaylord News reporter based in Washington, is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Gaylord News is a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. For more stories from Gaylord News visit GaylordNews.net.
Freedmen descendants in Oklahoma tribes are hoping to see an increase in healthcare access and eligibility by the Indian Health Service.
One Freedmen activist group is continuing the battle for equal healthcare access and citizenship rights, while Seminole Freedmen first denied healthcare from their tribal clinic were declared eligible this month by Indian Health Service (IHS).
The directive to serve Seminole Freedmen came after IHS denied COVID-19 vaccines to Freedmen descendants.
“Personnel at the Wewoka clinic and other IHS facilities in Oklahoma have been informed they should provide services to Seminole Freedmen who present at their clinics and hospitals,” an IHS statement reads.
Freedmen descendants are descended from emancipated slaves who were owned or intermarried with the Five Tribes — Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole — whose societies included enslaved and freed African-Americans.
Freedmen activist group Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band has a lawsuit pending in the district court of Muscogee Nation for recognition as citizens of the tribe, an effort to restore rights to citizenship which includes access to healthcare owed to all tribal citizens.
“Three judges have recused themselves” from the case against Muscogee Nation, Band leader and founding member Rhonda Grayson said. They await a judge assignment.
Grayson, who is of Muscogee and Chickasaw Freedmen descent, said the group and others have worked with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and her staff on the Freedmen issue. Waters is leading efforts to hold tribes accountable in honoring the 1866 treaty.
Proposed language in House Resolution 5195 would require the government to withhold housing funds from tribes violating 1866 treaties giving Freedmen tribal citizenship, Grayson said.
The group is also working with U.S. Rep. Danny Davis from Illinois’ 7th district on HR 4637, legislation calling on the U.S. to sever ties with Muscogee Nation until it restores Freedmen descendants’ rights.
Cherokee and Seminole Freedmen descendants are eligible for care at all IHS facilities, Rear Adm. Travis Watts, Oklahoma City Area Indian Health Service director, said in a statement.
“All new patients and those re-establishing their care within an Indian health systems healthcare facility are required to provide documentation to prove they are enrolled in or descended from a federally recognized tribe,” Watts said.
Chickasaw Nation was the only tribe of the Five Tribes that refused to acknowledge Freedmen as citizens, as a result of the 1866 treaties with the United States. Chickasaw Freedmen were never granted citizenship, and would be ineligible for IHS services because they cannot prove membership or descent.
Choctaw and Muscogee nations reorganized under Oklahoma’s Indian Welfare Act more than 30 years ago, disenrolling Freedmen from being tribal members.
Cherokee Nation remains the only one of the Five Tribes fully recognizing Freedmen descendant citizens, following the 2017 ruling Cherokee Nation v. Nash. Seminole Nation does enroll Freedmen descendants, but they don’t receive full benefits of citizenship.
Cherokee Freedmen descendant Marilyn Vann — president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association — said intertribal discussion about Freedmen inclusion is a complex topic, part of history some would rather omit.
Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band member Za Smith, who is of Muscogee, Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen descent, said a lack of education on the Freedmen’s contributions to tribes isn’t the only thing at issue: a history of having to fight for limited resources in minority communities is a factor in keeping Freedmen and Indigenous folks at odds.
“I absolutely don’t agree with the tribes not allowing Freedmen into the tribes, but I do understand it’s hard for the tribes to overcome their fear of having to share limited resources and choose to embrace others,” Smith said.
Smith said she’s the first person born in her family who wasn’t born into slavery or apartheid, legal segregation in the U.S.
The idea of history being far removed is simply untrue, Smith said.
Sharon Lenzy-Scott, who is descended from Muscogee and Cherokee Freedmen and is a member of the Muscogee Freedmen Band, said she doesn’t understand “oppressing” people whose ancestors were part of the removal period.
“They are oppressing the people that were actually helping them at that time,” Lenzy-Scott said.
Lenzy-Scott started her advocacy for Freedmen fighting for Muscogee citizenship from her maternal side.
Lacking societal understanding on how intertwined histories of African and Indigenous peoples really are, Smith says, is important for America to remember.
“Black people in America have inspired movements across this globe when it comes to freedom and human and civil rights,” Smith said.
She said she doesn’t understand why tribes do not embrace Freedmen. Smith said what’s especially hard is the dichotomy of being Black in America: you are only allowed to be one thing.
Grayson said she continues to fight for the Freedmen cause in part because of how the Muscogee Nation’s disenrollment in 1979 affected her great-grandmother, America Cohee, Dawes Roll #4661, who was disenrolled from Muscogee Nation a year before her death.
Muscogee Freedmen descendant Eli Grayson said stories he heard growing up about his African and Indigenous ancestors inform how he thinks about “being Creek” today.
“My dad has always told us, Creeks are not a race of people, it’s a political construct,” Eli Grayson said. “That’s why we have a government, … a constitution, that’s why we’re sovereign. All those things relate to a political society, not race.”
Because tribes can make sovereign decisions regarding citizenship for Freedmen descendants, Eli Grayson said tribal sovereignty itself has become “a dirty word,” to Freedmen descendants in Oklahoma.
“When Black Freedmen descendants hear the words tribal sovereignty today, they don’t think it is a good thing,” Eli Grayson said. “They think it’s the knee on their necks.”
Grayson said when Freedmen of Indian Territory hear the words tribal sovereignty, they often hear the words used by Southern states, “state rights,” used by governors to mistreat African-Americans.
Essentially, they hear that states — and tribes — have sovereign rights to treat their African-descended people the way they want to. That includes access to healthcare.
“They don’t hear something good, because it’s been used, lately in the last century, as a batting rod or a bat to beat them, instead of something used to be responsible for them,” Eli Grayson said.
Nancy Marie Spears, a Gaylord News reporter based in Washington, is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Gaylord News is a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. For more stories from Gaylord News visit GaylordNews.net.
Hearing set in suit against Comanche tobacco shopsA hearing is scheduled Thursday on a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the tobacco shops owned by the Comanche Nation brought by a former business partner.
G.J.S. International Inc. filed a lawsuit on Sept. 30 with the Court of Indian Offenses claiming members of the Comanche Nation Smoke Shop Board of Managers illegally dissolved Exotico Puros and kept the profits from the business. Exotico was the G.J.S. company that partnered with the Comanche Nation. The parties went into business together in 2011 to sell cigars and tobacco products at the tribe’s business locations and its four casinos. The partnership was dissolved by the tribe in 2016, according to court documents. The contract states both parties must consent before the company can be dissolved, but Exotico Puros never consented to dissolution, said Brian Stevens, treasurer of the company, who identifies himself as a brand creator on his LinkedIn page. During an October Comanche Nation business committee meeting, Chairman William Nelson Sr. told tribal members, “this alien company from Chicago, Illinois … they’re wanting $84 million of your money.” Stevens said Exotico Puros recorded more than $1 million in monthly sales on average during the partnership. The Comanche Nation has filed a motion in the Court of Indian Offenses to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds of sovereign immunity and lack of jurisdiction. The tribe also claims the cigar company’s lawsuit exceeds the statute of limitations. In the lawsuit, the Stevens brothers now allege the Comanche court system, which dismissed the company’s original lawsuit in 2018, was illegally established. A constitutional amendment was never passed to establish a court, and the nation’s constitution still contains no mention of a judiciary branch or court despite having an operational court system. Wallace Coffey, predecessor to the Comanche’s current chairman, told the Lawton Constitution in 2004 that establishing a court system would require a constitutional amendment. In addition to damages to the business, Stevens said he and his brother are seeking in excess of $1 million each for damages the tribe’s business committee allegedly never paid them. Gaylord News is a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Nappy Roots: Black-owned bookstore becomes a site for advocacy, activism |
Nappy Roots Books, one of two Black-owned bookstores in Oklahoma City and one of four Black-owned bookstores in the state, has managed to stay afloat despite challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Entering its third year of operation, Nappy Roots Books has taken a hit to its already slim sales margin, said store owner Camille Landry. The effects of the virus forced Nappy Roots to close temporarily in February. It reopened in June, but the store, and its sales, haven’t been the same since.
This story was reported by Gaylord News, a Washington reporting project of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma.
“When it became obvious that it would be risking people’s lives, literally, to bring them into the store, I just stopped doing it,” Landry said. “And the fact that I am a 70-year-old woman with pre-existing conditions means that it wasn’t too hot an idea for me either.”
Nationwide, there are 78 Black-owned bookstores, excluding international stores and stores run by museums and similar institutions, said Troy Johnson, founder of the African-American Literature Book Club. Tulsa has two: Mocha Books and Fulton Street Books & Coffee. In September, Belle Books, Boutique & More opened along Northeast 23rd Street in Oklahoma City.
Although she didn’t think it was exactly the right time to reopen in June, Landry said she had paid as much rent as she could out of her own pocket and either had to reopen the store or close it entirely.
Located at 3705 Springlake Drive on OKC’s northeast side, Nappy Roots is funded by Landry and her husband’s Social Security checks. Landry also refers to it as an art gallery, gathering space and community center.
Banbose Shango and Camille Landry, owners of Nappy Roots Books in northeast Oklahoma City, stock books. (Photo provided)Landry said Nappy Roots has stopped hosting gatherings that bring significant numbers of people into the store, but they are using the parking lot to hold events outdoors.
The store hosted Oklahoma City’s first African American Storytelling Festival on Oct. 10 in the parking lot. A panel of Indigenous women presented a discussion to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Oct. 12. On Oct. 31, the store hosted a free Get Out to Vote hip-hop concert where voters marched to the Election Board to cast their absentee ballots.
Nappy Roots is a kaleidoscope of cultures and perspectives. The store carries Black literature and progressive literature from a range of demographics, with books from authors across all races and sexual orientations. The store offers children’s books and half-priced nonfiction and fiction works.
“We carry books by, for and about other communities that face marginalization in the USA and globally,” Landry said.
The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano sits on one shelf. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is on another. An American Sunrise by U.S. Poet Laureate and Oklahoman Joy Harjo appears on the counter. Black Economics by Jawanza Kunjufu rests on the lobby table. So does the History of the U.S. by Oklahoma’s own Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Nappy Roots also consistently puts work by local authors on its shelves.
Oklahoma City Councilwoman Nikki Nice encourages the crowd to register by Friday to be eligible to vote in the June 30 primary election on May 31, 2020. (Michael Duncan)Landry, a Chicago native with a lifetime of political activism under her belt, has used her store as a vessel for advocacy in diversity and inclusivity. She said many of the initiatives that originated from the bookstore began as things that would gnaw at her. Her husband, Banbose Shango, said she has always been that way.
“Well, if it was any different, I would be disappointed,” Shango said. “But I’ve known this woman since 1966, ‘67. And she has always been consistently politically active.”
Nappy Roots has “stirred the pot” on a range of issues, Landry said, from housing and gentrification to education, racism and oppression.
“Fact of the matter is, I’m really an introvert,” Landry said. “I’m happy in this chair with a book, and not in front of a microphone.”
Homelessness was an issue close to home for Nappy Roots. Landry said many homeless people were sleeping on sidewalks and benches outside the store after closing hours. When the community center across the street started providing food to the homeless, that effort only increased the number of people sleeping near the store.
Landry posted a message on Facebook inviting others concerned about homelessness on the city’s northeast side to a meeting at the bookstore, and through that, the Northeast Coalition on Homelessness was created.
“There have been a couple of other initiatives just like that, where I’ve said, ‘Somebody needs to do something about this, but I’m somebody, you know? Why not?’” said Landry.
While the store itself has experienced some short-lived problems with racially motivated violence, Landry said the effect of racism in her own life as a Black female business owner has been more subtle.
“So here’s the thing about institutionalized racism,” Landry said. “Nobody told me, ‘No, we won’t give you a business loan because you’re a Black woman.’ Nobody has told me, ‘No, I’m not going to support you because you’re a Black woman.’
Landry’s store has become a safe haven for people to share ideas and come together for activism efforts.
Landry’s friend Lazara Gonzales said the owner uses her store to empower all minorities. Minority youth have gone to Landry, wanting to do something about an issue, and she lets them use the store as a space to create that change.
“She supports just about everyone,” Gonzales said. “And she empowers people, and she does it selflessly. There’s no method behind it, she just does it to do it. She talks the talk and walks the walk and has never changed in the three years I’ve seen.”
Sache Primeaux-Shaw, the president of Young Democrats of Oklahoma, said Landry is always available if organizations need her help for a project or to host an event. Landry and Primeaux-Shaw also served on the board of Black Lives Matter OKC, which held a rally against racism and police violence outside Nappy Roots on May 31.
“Her place [was where] we would have some meetings,” Primeaux-Shaw said. “Not just BLM, but any other type of activist group or initiative, they would come to Nappy Roots. And that would kind of be like the mothership meeting place.”
For Landry, it’s like connecting the dots to determine the cause.
“I do have a voice, and I will use the voice,” she said. “But I tried to use it in terms of building community, and then in sustaining community. That’s my impetus for this place being here.”
(Correction: This article and its headline were updated at 5:48 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 1, to reflect the existence of Belle Books, Boutique & More in Oklahoma City.)
KIOWA TURMOIL: Kiowas seek to impeach Chairman
Tribal Chairman Matthew Komalty faces impeachment for handling of CARES Act funds, plus other charges, and a recall election
Kiowa Tribe officials during early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. (photo courtesy of the Kiowa Tribe)
The Kiowa Tribe chairman is facing impeachment over his handling of coronavirus relief funds by the tribe’s 7-member legislative branch.
The mishandling of the money, distributed by the federal government through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, is one of five “constitutional violations” the tribe’s chairman, Matthew Komalty, will be facing. The public hearing is set to take place at 10 a.m. on July 30 at the tribal headquarters in Carnegie, Oklahoma, 80 miles west of Oklahoma City.
In addition to the CARES Act funding expenditures, Komalty is charged with wrongful termination of Kiowa gaming employees, failing to go through the proper process on the annual tribal audit, failing to ensure that the tribe’s treasurer was properly bonded, salary increases given without approval, and the wrongful and unapproved appointment of an executive director, said Angela McCarthy, speaker of the tribe’s legislature.
“We have to only find him impeachable on one of the charges...and our basic stance is that we're doing on behalf of the people, protecting our people,” McCarthy said. “We’re their voice, and this is one of their only recourse.”
The Kiowa Constitution outlines that impeachment requires a unanimous vote by all seven legislators. If there’s a unanimous vote, Komalty’s impeachment and removal from office is effective immediately. Vice Chairman Rhonda Ahhaitty replaces Komalty for the duration of the four-year term, and would be responsible for selecting the vice chairman.
The seven tribal legislators unanimously approved proceeding with the Komalty’s impeachment on June 23.
At the same time, Komalty is looking at a potential recall election to vote him out. The recall petition was launched on June 20, only three days before the legislature voted to impeach him. The tribe’s members need to collect 1,511 signatures by Sept. 23 to force the recall election. There are approximately 14,100 total enrolled members of the Kiowa Tribe, according to Freida Satepeahtaw, director of the tribe’s COVID-19 response program.
To recall the chairman from office, the amount of signatures obtained on the petition must be the same amount as the number of votes of the election from when Komalty took office. The election commission then would host a special election for the recall. And votes for the recall must either match or be higher than the amount signed on the recall petition in order for the recall to be passed through the vote of the Kiowa Indian Council.
“There is no basis for any of these charges,” Komalty told Gaylord News.
If Komalty is impeached, all funds from the CARES Act spending would be temporarily halted until it can be voted on by the Kiowa Indian Council. Komalty said this would “place all tribal members in jeopardy” and delay distribution of the financial assistance to members for months.
“When I took office, my two priorities were to take care of our school children and take care of our elders,” Komalty said. “I have a background in education, I was raised by my grandpa and grandma, so that's where I come from.
“I told my son and daughters the other day, when I pass away, all I want on my headstone is that ‘he cared’. And that's what we do, we care. Everybody here has got big hearts and that's all we care about is our people,” he said.
McCarthy said that this is not the first time the impeachment of Komalty has been discussed within the Kiowa Tribe legislature since Komalty was first elected in 2017.
However, this is the first time it has been put through the beginning stages of the process.
Komalty’s possible impeachment and recall from office marks 10 years of turmoil in tribal leadership. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had refused to recognize the results of Kiowa tribal elections until Komalty’s in 2017. The BIA intervened in the tribe’s 2015 election after “four years of broken government” within the tribe, a move the tribe fought.
Kiowa elder J.T. Goombi, however, questions Komalty’s transparency on allocating the CARES Act money.
“Did he (Komalty) get out here and say, here, we got money and here’s what we plan to do with it? That’s not there. So that’s become a big problem. It wasn't until he (Komalty) got his impeachment charges, and his recall charges, that he started publicizing the things that he was going to do and try to do,” Goombi said.
“You don't wait till you get in trouble and then start publicizing all the good stuff that you learned to do. It’s a little after the fact. From my perspective, that’s the way I see it,” Goombi said.
The biggest thing that would help the tribe, according to Goombi, is a forensic audit. A forensic audit will identify the origin of the funding, anybody that had access to it, and it would identify all of the weaknesses in operating policies while suggesting changes to the policies, Goombi said.
“I think if we can get our forensic audit done that'll give us a starting place; anything less than that, we're just gonna be spinning our wheels and looking bad for the next 20 years,” Goombi said. “The Bible says, you build your house on solid ground, you’ll stand. Up to now, we've gotten where we've been building on sand. And you know what comes with that.”
WRITER'S NOTE --
This is the story that was published on most news sites, but I have written a much deeper look into the issue; see the full, unpublished story here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18e_ArW8SpUHNReLiBimEOOOTLxSLNr6Day1QZUKFWn4/edit?usp=sharing
The mishandling of the money, distributed by the federal government through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, is one of five “constitutional violations” the tribe’s chairman, Matthew Komalty, will be facing. The public hearing is set to take place at 10 a.m. on July 30 at the tribal headquarters in Carnegie, Oklahoma, 80 miles west of Oklahoma City.
In addition to the CARES Act funding expenditures, Komalty is charged with wrongful termination of Kiowa gaming employees, failing to go through the proper process on the annual tribal audit, failing to ensure that the tribe’s treasurer was properly bonded, salary increases given without approval, and the wrongful and unapproved appointment of an executive director, said Angela McCarthy, speaker of the tribe’s legislature.
“We have to only find him impeachable on one of the charges...and our basic stance is that we're doing on behalf of the people, protecting our people,” McCarthy said. “We’re their voice, and this is one of their only recourse.”
The Kiowa Constitution outlines that impeachment requires a unanimous vote by all seven legislators. If there’s a unanimous vote, Komalty’s impeachment and removal from office is effective immediately. Vice Chairman Rhonda Ahhaitty replaces Komalty for the duration of the four-year term, and would be responsible for selecting the vice chairman.
The seven tribal legislators unanimously approved proceeding with the Komalty’s impeachment on June 23.
At the same time, Komalty is looking at a potential recall election to vote him out. The recall petition was launched on June 20, only three days before the legislature voted to impeach him. The tribe’s members need to collect 1,511 signatures by Sept. 23 to force the recall election. There are approximately 14,100 total enrolled members of the Kiowa Tribe, according to Freida Satepeahtaw, director of the tribe’s COVID-19 response program.
To recall the chairman from office, the amount of signatures obtained on the petition must be the same amount as the number of votes of the election from when Komalty took office. The election commission then would host a special election for the recall. And votes for the recall must either match or be higher than the amount signed on the recall petition in order for the recall to be passed through the vote of the Kiowa Indian Council.
“There is no basis for any of these charges,” Komalty told Gaylord News.
If Komalty is impeached, all funds from the CARES Act spending would be temporarily halted until it can be voted on by the Kiowa Indian Council. Komalty said this would “place all tribal members in jeopardy” and delay distribution of the financial assistance to members for months.
“When I took office, my two priorities were to take care of our school children and take care of our elders,” Komalty said. “I have a background in education, I was raised by my grandpa and grandma, so that's where I come from.
“I told my son and daughters the other day, when I pass away, all I want on my headstone is that ‘he cared’. And that's what we do, we care. Everybody here has got big hearts and that's all we care about is our people,” he said.
McCarthy said that this is not the first time the impeachment of Komalty has been discussed within the Kiowa Tribe legislature since Komalty was first elected in 2017.
However, this is the first time it has been put through the beginning stages of the process.
Komalty’s possible impeachment and recall from office marks 10 years of turmoil in tribal leadership. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had refused to recognize the results of Kiowa tribal elections until Komalty’s in 2017. The BIA intervened in the tribe’s 2015 election after “four years of broken government” within the tribe, a move the tribe fought.
Kiowa elder J.T. Goombi, however, questions Komalty’s transparency on allocating the CARES Act money.
“Did he (Komalty) get out here and say, here, we got money and here’s what we plan to do with it? That’s not there. So that’s become a big problem. It wasn't until he (Komalty) got his impeachment charges, and his recall charges, that he started publicizing the things that he was going to do and try to do,” Goombi said.
“You don't wait till you get in trouble and then start publicizing all the good stuff that you learned to do. It’s a little after the fact. From my perspective, that’s the way I see it,” Goombi said.
The biggest thing that would help the tribe, according to Goombi, is a forensic audit. A forensic audit will identify the origin of the funding, anybody that had access to it, and it would identify all of the weaknesses in operating policies while suggesting changes to the policies, Goombi said.
“I think if we can get our forensic audit done that'll give us a starting place; anything less than that, we're just gonna be spinning our wheels and looking bad for the next 20 years,” Goombi said. “The Bible says, you build your house on solid ground, you’ll stand. Up to now, we've gotten where we've been building on sand. And you know what comes with that.”
WRITER'S NOTE --
This is the story that was published on most news sites, but I have written a much deeper look into the issue; see the full, unpublished story here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18e_ArW8SpUHNReLiBimEOOOTLxSLNr6Day1QZUKFWn4/edit?usp=sharing
Coronavirus VS Small Farmers:
three Oklahoma farmers tell their story
The current crisis that our nation and our world is experiencing right now is not an agricultural one. |
The coronavirus crisis has forced small Oklahoma family farms to quickly adjust their business model. The statewide shelter-in-place order, coupled with farmers markets maintaining their status as an “essential business” have created new avenues of business practices that farmers say may have gone unexplored if the farmers markets had closed entirely.
The impact of this forced change in sales strategy has had unexpected consequences for an Oklahoma farmer. Maria Rose and her husband Daniel own Grassroots Ranch, a livestock farm out of Porter, OK. In light of the Covid-19 crisis, Grassroots Ranch currently offers next-day contactless delivery six days per week of grass fed beef, forested pork, free range chickens and free range eggs, Rose said. According to Rose, Grassroots’ customer base has doubled since the crisis began, and they are doing “five times the work” to meet the demands of filling the high volume of online orders. “Over the weekend (when lockdown began), we had 350% of the orders than we were doing the week before,” Rose said.. “So from Friday to Monday, our world has changed.” She said her farm and several other farms across the state are working to meet an unexpected demand that emerged among citizens: people are using farmers markets as their grocery store more than ever as typical grocery chains struggle to keep food in stock. Small farms have an advantage in this new climate. They can take their product from the farm to people’s tables, meaning they can supply a new need for groceries in a world where restaurants have been closed. “Something I've tried to keep bringing up is that the current crisis that our nation and our world is experiencing right now is not an agricultural one,” Rose said. “People are going to grocery stores and they're seeing empty shelves and that causes panic and that causes this illusion of food insecurity. And it's really a supply issue because we've relied on a system for so long that has so many in-betweens.” Small farms are not only gaining additional support from new customers and higher sales during this difficult time.The Sierra Club is also taking some measures to see how they can best support small farms during this time. Johnson Bridgwater, Director of the Oklahoma chapter of Sierra Club, said before the covid-19 outbreak, his organization supported small farms over large corporations by sharing customer business contacts, promoting small farms through in-person events and word of mouth, and working with Oklahoma legislation to push for bills and policies that would help the small local farmers. Bridgwater said he sends a weekly update to Sierra club members on the status of current state legislation, even in light of social distancing measures. Although some of these measures are now on hold due to the coronavirus, Bridgwater said the organization still plans to do what it can to promote small farms in Oklahoma. Two specific pieces of legislation that the Sierra Club is keeping a close eye on a bill that would allow more renewable solar energy in the state, which may affect small farmers as they could use new, sustainable resources to maintain their farms. The club is also trying to get Oklahoma to adopt an in-stream flow policy, which relates to water usage limits on farms. Oklahoma is not the only place seeing changes in the small farming business model. The farmers market in Chicago created a virtual farmers market to help support local farms. With China being a massive trade supplier to farmers in the U.S., the virus is causing a drop in trade with China, negatively impacting the profits of Illinois farmers, who are seeing less profits on their crop trades to China due to the virus. Additionally, many small farmers whose sales depended on partnerships with restaurants are now seeing a massive drop in income as restaurants across the state (and the nation) close down. Farmers as far as Maryland and Vermont are also transitioning their business model to be more suited for selling directly to customers. Rose is not the only farmer in Oklahoma finding a new niche in the small farming world. Two other Oklahoma farmers, Carrie Chlebanowski and Chad Ward, are also facing similar challenges. Rose said there is a “pervasive fear” that her newly doubled customer base will not last after the effects of the virus are over. She said her concern is that customers are only using their service as a last resort until it is safe to go back to restaurants and public grocery stores. “They just know that they're too afraid to go to the grocery store, and whenever they go, things are out, so they've kind of been forced into a customer relationship with us whether or not they are valuing our product,” Rose said. “There's definitely this undertone of ‘This is necessary for now, but the second I can go back to Walmart safely I'm going to buy from Tyson.’” Looking forward, Rose said they are projecting to maintain about 60% of their new customers.. She is also anticipating opening up regional shipping for her business once the more immediate demand for local, Oklahoma-based delivery subsides. Rose said that Grassroots Ranch is prioritizing scaling up in a responsible way and maintaining sustainable and long term practices since they, along with everyone else, do not know what the future holds for them or their business. “Farmers are still out here, we're still raising your food,” Rose said. “Everything is going to be just fine. |
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