Appeals court hears case on adoptions of Native Americans

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Kevin Mcgill, Associated Press Updated 11:54 am CDT, Wednesday, March 13, 2019



Photo: Mike Simons, AP
IMAGE 1 OF 4
FILE - In this Aug. 6, 2013, file photo, Veronica, 3, a child at the center of an international adoption dispute at the time, smiles in a bathroom of the Cherokee Nation Jack Brown Center in Tahlequah, Okla. A federal law that gives preference to Native American families in child welfare proceedings involving Native children is facing a significant legal challenge. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law didn’t apply in a South Carolina case involving Veronica because her Cherokee father was absent from part of her life. (Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP, File)


NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court in New Orleans is hearing arguments Wednesday on a 1978 law giving preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving Native American children.

A federal district judge in Texas last year struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act in a victory for opponents, including adoptive parents, who say it is racially motivated and unconstitutionally discriminatory.

Backers of the law, including numerous tribes and the federal government, say that if the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds that decision, many Native American children will be lost to their families and tribes.

"Plaintiffs talk a good game about the 'best interests' of Indian children, paternalistically contending that they know better than Indian families and tribes what is best for their children," attorneys for four Indian groups supporting the law said in briefs filed ahead of Wednesday morning's arguments before a three-judge 5th Circuit panel: Judges Jacques L. Wiener Jr., James L. Dennis and Priscilla Owen.

Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Appeals-court-hears-case-of-on-adoptions-of-13684225.php

[turbinetree]

1. I guess the 5th Circuit should be asked and give a lecture on what happened in Carlise, PA

when the Natives were shipped to that school............................in the late 1800's, they (Natives) were stripped of their culture first and foremost , you know, they had to get haircuts if they were a boy, and the girls were made to wear shirts, and if they didn't they were beaten, and if they wanted to wear Native clothes, they were denied food, nice white society culture values, and when the kids went back to the culture they brought that BS with them.

In Native culture, they never beat the kids back in the day, but now that the genocide is almost complete, not quite there yet ........but the white's think they "know better"..........................go f**cking figure



Let see Jacques Loeb Wiener Jr. is Bush appointee along with Priscilla Richman Owen, (and she is member of the Federalist Society, oh boy...........)

James L. Dennis is appointed by Bill Clinton

[Judi Lynn]

2. The schools intended to totally depersonalize the children, to remove every reminder of their lives

from the world they left, to erase them, basically.

I don't know what kept these young people from going mad. What a shock, a trauma, a sin against their spirits.

After seeing your post, I did a quick check to find a photo of a young person from a school, as I had seen many photos of these abused people, and found this Wikipedia article immediately:

American Indian boarding schools

. . .



and this one:



The article doesn't come close to describing the hell the students faced the moment they arrived, it's really santized but it does say at the end of the article that sometimes the authorities "farmed out" these young people to make them earn their keep by working for white landowners. From where I sit, this is slavery, by all means. Here's the paragraph:

By controlling the environment and perspective of young Native Americans, the American government used non-reservation boarding schools as a cost-benefit alternative to military campaigns against Western Native Americans. The assimilation of young Native American children eliminated a generation of warriors that potentially posed a threat to US military. These schools also found an economic benefit in the children through their labor. Children often were forced to undertake laborious tasks in order to fund employment, and during the summers, children were "leased" to work on farms or in the household for wealthy families. Amnesty International argues, "In addition to bringing in income, the hard labor prepared children to take their place in white society—the only one open to them—on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools

People need to know far more about this, about all of it, instead of seeing Native people as "savages" the US had to murder so there could be "progress."

Thanks, turbinetree.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Anyone interested in seeing formal pictures taken of Native people before they were forced out,

please take the time to look for images taken by a man who spent his entire adulthood, nearly, traveling across the country gathering portraits from various people in different places before things got so much worse for them. His name is Edward Sheriff Curtis, and there are multiple volumes of his photographs, and they are all listed in the Library of Congress, as well.

















ETC.

Why they should have stripped them of their whole identities is a shocking crime against humanity, on top of the fact these were only the survivors of a vast bloody slaughter lasting almost forever.