IRELAND

King Cattle and Direct Provision

By Donal O’Kelly

July 25, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Giuseppe Milo - Three irish cows. Flickr.



Let me start with, like An tAthair Peadar O Laoghaire in Mo Scéal Féin, the Irish text book for the Intermediate Certificate in the 1970s, with one of my first memories. An tAthair Peadar O Laoghaire recounted a scary meeting with a cross goose down the lane from his house when he was three. I remember the roaring cattle herded down the North Circular Road in Dublin, from the market in Prussia Street to the Birkenhead cattle boat, when I was about three.

The smell of cow dung was ever-present in Phibsborough in 1960s Dublin. There was a brown coating of shite down the middle of the North Circular, squashed by cars, buses and vans when the cattle were gone on their way. In 1952, a government-commissioned study on economic development from the New York firm Stacy May opened with the line “In the Irish economy, cattle is king”.[i] It was a smart-ass nod to the catch-phrase “cotton is king”, coined almost a century earlier by swaggering South Carolina slave-holding Congressman James Hammond,[ii] a pithy reference to the enormous impact the enslavement-based US cotton industry had from the 1820s on rich-world industrial development. Hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants were familiar with the impoverished conditions of working in the cotton-mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, a contrived British spjn-off benefit of the forced labour of millions of enslaved Blacks in the southern United States, that has really only been officially admitted in the past few years. Among them was Michael Davitt from Straide in Mayo, later leader of the Land League, who lost an arm as a child worker in the cotton mills after the family were evicted and their home legally ‘tumbled’ by state agents in 1847. In Hammond’s electoral base of Charleston South Carolina, one-eighth of the population was Irish in 1820, at the start of King Cotton’s reign. The Irish emigrants, like the short-horn dual purpose cow, had been herded to the boat for England (or anywhere) by economic circumstances and for political refuge, including from genocidal starvation 1847-1849 through British government policy that reduced the population of Ireland by one-quarter.

Where were the lowing cattle of Doyle’s Corner coming from? They came from the big rancher fattening farms in nearby counties like Meath, Westmeath and Offaly to the Dublin cattle market. Where did they come from before that? They came from the poorer parts of Ireland, where small farmers didn’t have enough land to feed cattle beyond one year old. They had to be sold to someone who had the land to fatten them. Pauric Colum’s poem A Drover, published in the Anthology of Irish verse in 1922, is a lyrical description of the process, incisive in its own way, opening with the lines:-

To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford
Go my cattle and me.


When Fianna Fáil came to power under De Valera in 1932 they carried the weight of many small farmers’ hopes of escape from dire poverty. The Economic War 1932-38, when Britain imposed tariffs on Irish imports scuppered that hope (diverting Irish export favoured-nation efforts to Germany for Hitler’s accession to power in 1933). The wartime arrangement with Britain, like turning on a tap of willing and desperate human labour for more than 250,000 Irish to work as economic migrants in vital armaments and industrial, road and airstrip sites throughout Britain, provided postal orders of salvation back home to destitute farming families. The British Ministry of Labour set up a disinfecting, delousing and transport centre in Dublin that fast-tracked labour to where it was needed for the war effort in the UK within 24 hours. There was no choice involved and no negotiation, the prospective labourer was legitimised only by the work visa handed to him or her on arrival at destination. Republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell wrote in the literary magazine The Bell in 1941: ‘There should be only one attitude towards the migrant – to smooth his going and coming, and make his journey cheap.’[iii]

In 1947, with Churchill out of power and no longer positioned to penalise Ireland for wartime neutrality, the ready cheap labour channel from Ireland to Britain intensified, with the Irish enjoying favoured status over potential workers from British colonies who possessed darker skin pigment. The Irish government, at the request of the Labour-led British government, delayed declaring Ireland a republic until after passage of the 1948 British Nationality Act, lest white-led dominions such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa would take Ireland’s lead and leave the British Commonwealth, as Ireland did in April 1949.

The UK Nationality Act of 1948,[iv] drafted when British imperialism was falling apart, is a supreme example of racialised legislation without mentioning skin colour, a skill perfected by the British policy making elite since the mid 17th century.[v] The vicious trans-Atlantic slave trade fuelled for more than two centuries the British industrial revolution, while policy making elites such as Sir William Petty forcibly suggested that Ireland should be literally a vast cattle ranch for feeding Britain’s industrial workforce. In 1685, in his A Treatise of Ireland, commissioned by King James II, he proposed the transportation of a million people from Ireland to the UK, where they would live ‘in more elegant company and variety of entertainments’, leaving 300,000 behind as herdsmen and dairywomen to help ‘breed and feed six million of beefes of 3-years-old a piece’. This was designed after what Petty framed as five hundred years that had made Ireland ‘for the most part, a diminution and a burthen, not an advantage, to England.’[vi]

The reduction to national ranch advised by Petty largely came to pass. I heard the frightened bovine roars and saw the dripping snouts and the horns low between the Mater and Mountjoy when I was three, with my mother’s tense grip on my hand as the scutter splashed onto the slippy granite kerb.

De Valera, far from lifting the pressure on small farmers, in 1947 placed a cap of 25 acres on the land available for farmer support – at least 30 acres was needed to viably raise cattle beyond one year old. So Colum’s drovers were still driving young heifers to be fattened and herded down to the boats when I was three.

Decades later, they shipped the live cattle exports to Libya instead of Birkenhead, in HGVs instead of by shank’s mare along the North Circular. In the 1980s, Libyan refugees were destined to be surreptitiously carpetbagged and deported home rather than be granted refugee status or even leave to remain. “Get real” said the policy making elites, “cattle barons have billions riding on this live cattle trade with Gaddafi, and we’re not going to jeopardise it for some poor divil’s human rights.” That was until that poor divil was Marey Gutrani, who came to Ireland on a student visa in 1983. That was the year Taoiseach Charlie Haughey visited Tripoli and met Gaddafi, with the pair reaching agreement on live exports, which led to Libya becoming Ireland’s single biggest market for cattle. This peaked at €90m a year in the early 1990s.[vii] In 1992 Marey Gutrani, after 18 months in Mountjoy and Wheatfield prisons, managed to pursue his case to be recognised as a refugee according to UN definition right up to the Supreme Court, where Stacy May’s 1952 report summary prevailed: “in Ireland, cattle is king.” At the direction of the executive and with the connivance of the judiciary and the apparent disinterest of the legislature, the Irish state would parcel up and deliver Gutrani to Baldonnel Aerodrome, to be despatched at the behest of Ireland’s economic interests to their favoured live cattle buyer, Gaddafi’s Libya.[viii] But he resisted. He refused to buckle under. He fought off the deportation crew. He defied Stacy May ‘cattle is king’ smart-assery. He insisted on being a human with rights.

At the time, successive Irish governments had not even bothered to ratify the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, signed by Ireland in 1956. So a refugee had no legal backup except a document called the Von Arnim Letter, signed in 1985 by a mid-rank Department of Justice civil servant and the head of the UNHCR London office, which proved in many cases not worth the paper it was written on. This state of affairs wasn’t rectified until 2000 in a raft of legislative and regulatory measures, including the introduction of the Direct Provision system of accommodation for asylum seekers.

*

Come on up Henry Street in Dublin city centre with me, past the side door of the GPO where my da used to work, past Woolworths on the left hand side, the hawkers are shouting their wares, ‘Fifty pence the bunch of bananas’, ‘get the last of the Cheeky Charlies’, and there’s Dunnes Stores on the right hand side. It’s just after nine o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 19th July 1984, and inside the store a woman with two Outspan grapefruits in her basket is approaching the tills. She doesn’t know that the shop workers’ trade union, IDATU (Irish Distributive and Administrative Trade Union) passed a motion the previous Saturday that their members would refuse to handle South African produce on account of the apartheid regime in power there. She plonks her basket down at 21-year-old Mary Manning’s till. Mary tells her that because of an instruction from her union, she’s unable to register the sale of South African goods.[ix]

Within a half an hour, Mary Manning and nine colleagues were out on the footpath. The Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strike would last almost three years, culminating in a ban on the import of South African agricultural goods to Ireland, and eventually in the EU. When Nelson Mandela came to Ireland in June 1990 after his release from prison, the first people he wanted to meet were the ten Dunnes Stores strikers, all in their teens or early twenties when they stood in solidarity with the oppressed black people of South Africa.

On Saturday 20 July 2024 Mary Manning, forty years later, stood on a platform in Dublin for the Palestine solidarity demonstration outside Dáil Éireann, calling for boycott of Israeli produce in protest against the apartheid regime genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, ongoing for more than nine months.

I was near the back of the crowd of 40,000, holding a banner for Leitrim Palestine Support Group. Holding it with me was a young man from Gaza, we’ll call him Hassan. He wasn’t holding it for any particular reason, he was just lending a hand. We got talking. Hassan came to Ireland last September on a student visa and began his studies. He had to apply for refugee status when the Israeli army carpet-bombed Gaza and invaded with ground forces. For his application to be processed, he had to move into Direct Provision accommodation. The Irish government simultaneously announced they would no longer guarantee accommodation for single male international protection applicants.[x] This was in direct contravention of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention Ireland has signed like almost every state.

He was “lucky” to be placed in a twenty-four bed dormitory in the Red Cow Hotel at Ireland’s most famous roundabout in the west of Dublin city. There are currently more than 2,000 homeless international protection applicants, mostly in the Dublin region, offered tents to sleep in, but nowhere to pitch them that is both safe and legal. And new Taoiseach Simon Harris even indicated tents would not be provided anymore. There are regular highly-publicised ‘clearances’ of tents from the banks of the Grand Canal, near the International Protection Office.[xi] Journalists counted the number of tents pitched every morning and dutifully published them, like recording stock levels, or crime levels. The reasons for pitching there are obvious:- you can stick tent-pegs into a grassy bank, it’s softer to sleep on than concrete and there is safety in pitching next to others. This was construed as “shanty towns” by the local residents association.[xii] New applicants don’t know the recent history, with their gifted tent bundled in their arms, yet political leaders tend to infer there is a conspiracy by single male asylum seekers to subvert by cunning tent-pitching local government bye-laws.

Last week eight tents were slashed and thrown into the River Liffey at midnight at City Quay.[xiii] The fifteen occupants fled to Pearse Street Garda Station for their safety. Hassan has been in the 24-bed dorm at Red Cow for seven months. It’s reminiscent of the workhouse governmental philosophy enshrined in the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838. For six months, Hassan was forbidden to work. Up until 2017, Ireland, uniquely in the EU, imposed a work ban on asylum seekers. Then the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the ban unconstitutional. Those thousands of people who endured enforced idleness in overcrowded conditions often for many years were not offered the prospect of any reparation. Hassan’s refugee legal aid solicitor damped down his inquiries about the delay in processing with a perfunctory “Gaza is not a priority of the IPO”. This upset Hassan very much. Perhaps trauma-training is not a priority for over-burdened refugee law solicitors. Over 100,000 Ukrainians were assumed to be refugees when they fled Russian bombardment in 2022, and were granted the fast-track procedure of temporary protection, with full right to work. The world has seen the relentless bombardment of Gaza, now being downplayed by the rich world media, yet refugee status is questioned. On Monday 22 July (yesterday at time of writing) 81 people were killed in an Israeli bombing in Khan Younis[xiv], but it’s not even mentioned on the BBC website. Hassan cannot get home whether he wants to or not; Israel has sealed Gaza. Why is he waiting interminably to be quizzed to attain refugee status?

*

For four consecutive nights, 15th to 18th July 2024, the former Crown Ireland paint headquarters in the sprawling suburb of Coolock on Dublin’s northside was set ablaze as people protested against the renovation of the plant for accommodating 500 international protection applicants.[xv] It has become a familiar sight to see men (and women) posing as protectors of community rights by opposing the accommodation of international protection seekers. ‘Refugee scammers’ has become a catch-phrase.

A few years after I saw and heard and smelt the fearful cattle shuffling down the North Circular, I was brought toa remote part of County Cavan every Sunday by my friend’s family across the road. It was his father’s home place. His father was a butcher who ran a small shop in Cabra. He collected the meat from the abattoir on Blackhorse Avenue in his car, sometimes with two of us in the back beside the stiffening ribbed half-carcases. I can still get that faintly sweet smell of raw dead meat in my nostrils. Once I was locked in the freezer among the dangling beasts for a joke. Maybe I was forgotten about, I was there a long time. Like Ghassan Kanafani’s men in the sun, I didn’t shout for help, afraid that would be considered bold and I would be scolded. Conditioning, you see. It was so gorgeously warm when I was let out with goose-pimples all over. Cabra never looked so bright. When the Seven Towers shopping centre (each named after a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation) was built in Ballymun for the half-centenary in 1966, he leased a unit there. Soon after that, he had herds of young cattle placed in a field beyond Coolock, near the Crown Paints factory. I was brought to see what he called “the land”. The tiled roofs of the newly-built Kilbarrack estates loomed over the hedge in the distance. He’d made the journey from small farm to north County Dublin grazier. The endless demand for live cattle from Libya had to be met by reliable supply. He was a great man for reciting ballads such as James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Cathal Mór of the Wine-Red Hand’ and could quote Longfellow at length, died a great success at a good age and was buried in an impressive tomb beside the bishops, between O’Connell and Parnell inside the main gate of Glasnevin Cemetery.

A drover won’t pass by the Grand Canal tents with his cattle smelling of wet hills of the west, no Irish young person will queue to be deloused for a weekly wage in Peterborough, but maybe their shades can be felt by Hassan among the twenty-four people sleeping in one long room in the Red Cow. “We are the masters of this house” is the catch-phrase of Israeli Justice Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The dehumanising of Palestinians to lessness is a requisite of Israeli Zionist expansion. Every Israeli political leader since the foundation of the state and before has proclaimed some version of it, his or her particular flavour of supremacism. It all goes back to slavery. It all goes back to Aristotle, Plato and the derivative philosophies driving extractivist economics (including agriculture) since the conception of capitalist expansion in the 15th century and the impetus given by the “Age of Discovery” and the consequent Atlantic slave trade.

Everything in life is predicated on a fundamental binary: approval of enslavement or opposition to enslavement. This division became clear to all of humanity during the later stages of the American Civil War 1861-65. In the early 1960s boxes of Devlin’s sweet cigarettes contained US Civil War picture-cards to mark the centenary. The miniature cigarettes were made of candy, and you stuck them in your gob and pretended you were smoking tobacco (slave-grown for centuries) like every adult you saw. Aged seven I knew the names of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, I knew of the siege of Atlanta, the Battle of Gettysburg, the blue and grey uniforms, the Howitzer cannon-guns, but .. there were no slaves in any of the pictures, no black soldiers recruited from free blacks, no reference whatsoever to the historical fact that the recruitment of black troops in 1862 was the swing factor that won the war for the northern Union side[xvi], and restrained Britain and France from siding with the slave-holding Confederates, as they were set to do, led by UK Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, one of the most expansive landowners in Ireland.

If we don’t know history, we can’t learn from history, and if we can’t learn from history, we will repeat history’s mistakes. But it’s not mistaken activity by the perpetrators of injustice and profiteers from decisions made by carefully-chosen policy making elites of previous times. It was and is their deliberate informed choice. We must devise a way of arranging ourselves as a species so that no dominance is achieved by a ring-fenced entity calling itself “we”, as in “we the people” the opening phrase of the 1787 United States Constitution that, while acknowledging its much-heralded wide bestowal of franchise comparative to European states at the time, studiously and strategically ignored and suppressed the legalised permanent captivity and forced labour of an enormous section of the population – black slaves.

There is no way to take racism out of the issue of international protection and accommodation of asylum seekers, no matter how much the righteous local opponents of accommodation centres, and their political grandstanders, proclaim otherwise. History will insist we eventually, as a species, own up to historical facts and acknowledge the fostered inequality that results in the discriminatory distribution of wealth, generated by capitalist enterprise historically based on legally-structured enslavement, in today’s world.[xvii] That is not to deny or downplay the class discrimination within European states and economic entities worldwide, but also to recognise the abuse of white working-class poverty and capitalist exploitation by white supremacist ideologues throughout the past two centuries. Freed black slaves were not the adversary of impoverished white Irish housemaids and low-paid labourers, though thousands of lynching victims, forgotten and erased, remind those willing to search of the strange fruit once hanging from southern trees.[xviii]

The most fanatical, strategic architects of the ring-fenced ‘we’ human history has had the misfortune to behold, from British imperialism to American slavery and Jim Crow disenfranchisement, to European colonial exploitation of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the Carribbean, have framed our handed-down canon of historical narrative, whether we like it or not. Geography is not the only arbiter of communality; shared and comparative experience and real rooted common understanding build communities across borders, and in the future, all going well, because water and air knows no borders, offers a vision of progress unimagined by policy makers since the so-called enlightenment that has given us the current mess of dominance, selfishness and brutality. It must not last. We must resist despair. We owe it to the excluded to imagine, to listen, to learn, to engage. ‘It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions’[xix].

[i] Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 8/2/2022 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/08/02/fintan-otoole-the-old-irish-way-of-doing-things-must-become-extinct-or-else-we-will/

[ii] James Henry Hammond, “Speech of Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, On the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858,” Washington, D. C., 1858 [Often referred to as the “Cotton is King” Speech]

[iii] Clair Wills’ That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War (Faber, 2007) exposes much neglected information on the exodus of Irish labour to wartime Britain.

[iv] Kathleen Paul’s Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-War Era contains vital information about the efforts of Britain’s policy making elite to keep Britain white, and Ireland’s role in that effort. “.. eventual accommodation of the Irish was based on economic and political factors, but an additional factor also influenced the decision – an unspoken context of demographic acceptability. Thus the public defence of Ireland’s unusual position rested on the “specially close relationship” arising from “ties of kinship” and the “ties of blood, history and intermingling of peoples which bound Eire to the older countries of the Commonwealth.” (18 Nov 1948, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 5th ser., CAB128/13 CM74(48), v. 458, c. 1414)

Likewise, an internal (Foreign Office) justification outlined the “historical, racial and geographic links” that bound the two countries together. (FO371/76369 G.W .Furlonge, 21 Jan 1949)

[v] Up to the American Declaration of Independence 1776 the British policy making elite let the colonial legislatures devise and impose the Black Codes, a cast-iron web of legal measures that ran the bespoke racialised slaveholder regimes in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Maryland, as their individual state ruling elites dictated. From 1783 they continued to enact ever more gross regulations penalising slaves for a wide range of infractions, such as being in groups of more than four without permission of their owner, until the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution 1865 brought the Civil War to an end.

[vi] For description of Petty’s A Treatise on Ireland (1685) see Sins of the Father: The Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy, Conor McCabe, pages 64-65. Sir William Petty’s text A Treatise on Ireland available on https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hull-the-economic-writings-of-sir-william-petty-vol-1

[vii] Fiach Kelly, Irish Independent 21/10/2011 https://www.independent.ie/world-news/dictator-sent-arms-to-ira-and-was-supporter-of-haughey-26784290.html

[viii] As placed on the Seanad record by Senator Dan Neville 10/11/1993 https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1993-11-10/10/

[ix] Mary Manning, Striking Back: The Untold Story of an Anti-Apartheid Striker, with Sinead O’Brien, The Collins Press, 2017, p.14-15.

[x]RTE 4/12/2023 “32 international protection applicants were not offered State-provided accommodation when they presented to the International Protection Office.“ “the Department of Integration said it can no longer provide accommodation to all international protection applicants due to a severe shortage.” https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/1204/1420023-international-protection-applicants-ireland/

[xi] Irish Times 30/5/2024 Grand Canal: asylum seekers’ tents cleared in latest operation https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/05/30/latest-clearance-of-migrants-tents-along-grand-canal-gets-under-way/

[xii] RTE 4/5/2024 Don’t allow ‘shanty towns’ to develop, urges residents’ group https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2024/0504/1447397-residents-tents/

[xiii] RTE 17/7/2024 Tents sheltering asylum seekers attacked in Dublin https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0717/1460324-tents-dublin-attack/

[xiv] Al Jazeera 23/7/2024 Israel war on Gaza live: At least 81 killed in Israeli blitz on Khan Younis https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/7/23/israel-war-on-gaza-live-scores-killed-in-new-israeli-blitz-on-khan-younis

[xv] Irish Times 21/7/2024 Coolock unrest: Fourth fire at former Crown Paints factory https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2024/07/21/coolock-unrest-fourth-fire-at-former-crown-paints-factory/

[xvi] I had no idea of this until I read Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. DuBois (1935) about a year ago, Its sub-title is AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880. it’s available online and I would recommend it to anyone eager to get to grips with the US Civil War and its aftermath that shaped much of the modern world we inhabit.

[xvii] Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1939) is, I discovered to my shock a couple of years ago, required reading to get a handle on how British industrial prosperity was predicated on its leadership role in the Atlantic slave trade for more than a century.

[xviii] An extract from At the Hands of Persons Unknown by Philip Dray (2002) focuses on W. E. B. DuBois’ contemporary account of the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan Georgia in 1899, published online by the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/atthehandsofpersonsunknown.htm

[xix] ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’, Sven Lindqvist, The New Press, 1996


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Donal O’Kelly
Donal O’Kelly is an Irish writer and performer currently writing a creative non-fiction book about the origins of Ireland’s 25-year-old system of Direct Provision of accommodation for people seeking international refuge.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY IS @N@RCHY

Liberal Democracy’s Had A Good Run

But it’s dying now, and needs to be replaced

By Joe Reynolds

July 29, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Power of Collaboration by Kati Szilágyi

One thing that all past human societies and civilizations have in common is that they all eventually collapsed. While each of us may be aware of this in the abstract, we don’t necessarily follow the logic to the depressing conclusion: why should we expect this one—global capitalism which is responsible for countless atrocities and yet, is also our collective life support system—to be any different? Although we can’t know when the collapse will happen, many believe we are now dangerously close to that day. Millions of people are screaming the warnings and demanding change from global leaders, but those ‘leaders’ have no real power. The sad reality is, humanity simply doesn’t have a system for making decisions collectively. Instead, the only decision making system we have is an economic one, in which those with capital to invest, do so in their own best interests, no matter the consequences for the rest of us, or the biosphere.

Through their individual choices, capitalists collectively, are deciding humanity’s future. The economist Adam Smith described this process nearly 250 years ago as an ‘invisible hand’. Despite all the promises or intentions, of every type of politician, there is unfortunately no way to control capitalism. To avoid the gradual, or sudden collapse of the world we know, humanity will need to first create a democratic system if we’re going to make decisions collectively.

Liberal democracy, the nation state, and capitalism all grew up together over the last few hundred years, evolving into this complex global system in which we now find ourselves, forced into the inhumane situation of having to compete for survival with 8 billion of our sisters and brothers, as individuals, communities and heavily armed nation states. The roots of this system though, are in the discovery of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago and the surplus of food which could then be produced. Soon-after, the value of that surplus was recognized by some, and the concept of private property was born. Since then, economies and cultures based on the idea of property ownership have gradually come to dominate the world. Owning food, land, tools, animals and even people has seemed ‘normal’ to those who grow up in such a culture, yet there have always been, and hopefully still are, cooperative cultures in which the idea of ‘ownership’ is not even understood let alone accepted as truth. Humans are by nature, a cooperative species. In fact, we would never even have survived at all without the ability to create communities and support each other. Unfortunately though, we evolved to cooperate in relatively small groups, in which we know and trust each other. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests a maximum of about 150 people.

The reason that liberal democracy doesn’t work for collective decision making is because it groups together voters who don’t know each other, so naturally each votes in their own interest rather than the collective good. Under such a system, politicians are stuck. To get re-elected they must keep the economy delivering for the voters’ individual interests, which generally requires doing whatever it takes to promote investment. Keep in mind, liberal democracy was designed by slave owners to manage their collective property rights, not for the benefit of communities or humanity as a whole. At the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2022, Joe Biden said “American democracy is not a reality show. It’s not a reality show. It’s reality itself.” So passionate, but he’s wrong. American democracy is in fact very much a reality show. Reality itself, is capitalism, the global market in which individual property owners make choices to invest their capital, which leads inevitably although sometimes indirectly, to the manipulation, exploitation and destruction of communities all around the world. Liberal democracy on the other hand, is really just a game in which some people claim they can control capitalism and promise to make all of our lives better, just like a reality TV show. The contestants (politicians) participate in various activities (debates, rallies, media appearances, canvassing…) hoping to be chosen by the viewers (electorate). If chosen, they generally have four years to prove themselves to avoid being voted off the island of economic control. The producers of the show (corporations, hedge funds, the IMF, Davos attendees, think tanks…) are permitted to fill all forms of media with their expectations (low taxes, privatization, de-regulation, high stock prices…) as challenges for the politicians to meet. If on occasion, we are able to elect progressive politicians and they actually put people’s needs before the profits of capital, investors can just take their capital somewhere else to avoid regulations or taxes. This obviously hurts the local economy, which in turn hurts that politician’s chances of being re-elected. Usually though, capitalists merely have to threaten to pull their investments out to have politicians bend to their will. The extreme polarization between political parties along with the rise in real and threatened political violence, keeps us all locked in ideological warfare and fearful of each other, unable to cooperate in a global system that is spiralling out of control. Liberal democracy provides us with nothing more than an illusion of collective control, while ultimately, the market itself always forces political leaders at all levels to comply, one way or another.

In recent years, even this extremely limited version of democracy is under attack and on the decline while most of the world continues to live under autocracies, which make little or no effort to even appear democratic. While the decline of liberal democracy is very unlikely to be reversed, and it was never suited for humanity to govern ourselves globally in the first place, many people remain hopeful that the United Nations will provide a rational decision making system for humanity, but the UN doesn’t represent humanity. Instead, the general assembly represents only the most powerful people in each competing nation state, whether democratic or autocratic, and ultimately all decisions rest with the security council, whose five permanent members—each with veto power—are currently at war over Ukraine and possibly soon Taiwan. Each year environmental activists are heart broken as the COPs once again fail to deal with the robber barons who’s wealth decides humanity’s future. This is no conspiracy though—they don’t trust each other any more than we should trust them—it’s simply the inevitable result of a system which is based on the accumulation of private property. Investors have an incentive to make short term decisions for their own profit; politicians have an incentive—getting re-elected—to make decisions in the interests of capital. The tragically inadequate global response to the pandemic has shown us that we are not at all prepared as a species to deal with global emergencies cooperatively. It’s completely unrealistic to expect that nation states, which are all trapped in a competitive struggle to survive, will suddenly begin to cooperate. As the world slides further into chaos, humanity desperately needs to create a global democratic system to face these crises together if we are to avoid social collapse.

There is fortunately, a better form of democracy. Hannah Arendt referred to it as council democracy; Kees Boeke used the term sociocracy; Murray Bookchin called it democratic confederalism; The Haudenosaunee people have been calling it the Great Law of Peace for a thousand years. These are all different names for a democratic system in which communities govern themselves, and each elects a representative to a regional governing body. This type of system has existed on a small scale many times throughout human history and has often been spontaneously created during revolutions such as the Paris Commune in 1871, Hungary 1956, Iran 1979, and currently in Rojava. In each case though, they have remained isolated and been destroyed by the better organized forces of capitalism. With hope, Rojava might be able to prove the trend wrong. The best known example though, would be the soviet (council) democratic system which was created by workers and soldiers during the 1917 Russian revolution. That brief experiment in truly representative democracy was tragically destroyed when the Bolshevik party seized control of the soviet with the October Revolution, imposing its authoritarian rule. Not only did that coup end the Russian experiment in council democracy, which otherwise might have been able to grow globally and ultimately change the world, it has also left the progressive movement confused, divided and demoralized for more than a century. Hannah Arendt’s dream of a global democratic council system for humanity to govern ourselves came to be viewed as no more than a utopian fantasy, and sadly that interpretation was probably correct, before the Internet.

The internet, a global communication system, now allows us an opportunity to create a democratic system for the world, but it will require a very specific design to work. Many believed, back in the 90s and briefly after the millennium, that the internet had the potential to bring us democracy and a better world. Douglas Rushkoff’s 2003 book ‘Open Source Democracy’ predicted hopefully that “the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.” That optimism lasted only until facebook and other platforms began to demonstrate how capitalism would now be able to use the internet to extract ever more profit out of us, and further erode liberal democracy. But of course democracy was never going to happen automatically; we’ll have to design and build it together. Many have tried to create such a movement, but unfortunately, despite what Margaret Mead famously, but mistakenly said about “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” changing the world, in reality, movements have only ever been able to change parts of the world, and even then, only temporarily. No movement will ever be able to unite enough of humanity to change the whole world, simply because movements, being ideological, automatically generate opposition and resistance, sometimes leading to civil war. Millions of dedicated activists and organizers all around the world are selflessly building essential social movements and nobly fighting for change, but with humanity divided from each other in so many ways, there is no single ideology that will ever unite us so that we can cooperate globally. As much as we might wish for it, changing the world just won’t work that way.

There remains hope though, in the fact that we are capable of organizing ourselves in two distinct ways. One is ideologically, by uniting people around a set of common beliefs, the way that movements, political parties, and religions do. However, for practical reasons, people will also join non-ideological organizations that are useful to them, like unions, or internet platforms. The latter provides the possibility for a global system of council democracy to be built gradually, by using the internet. Only when we have a fair, global, democratic system will we be able to act collectively to confront the myriad of problems that have been created by capitalism, and replace it with a cooperative system to govern the world. As the anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote about the embryonic democratic system developing during Occupy Wall Street, “but was it our job to come up with a vision for a new political order, or to help create a way for everyone to do so?”

Ironically, facebook has also shown us a better way to organize the world for positive change. Imagine for a moment if facebook had originally been created as a democratic platform cooperative, rather than a profit seeking corporation which is now responsible for so many horrendous social problems and suffering. It could have instead grown by now to be a global democratic organization of over 3 billion people, perhaps even in a position to realistically demand from corporations and governments the changes we need for a better world. Of course, many individuals and communities have tried to organize a cooperative social media platform, but the problem that every internet platform runs into, is anonymity. Online ‘communities’ are not really communities at all, because there is just no way to know and therefore trust each other. It would take only a simple requirement though, of having to register a real community that we are part of—our workplace, school, religious or cultural community, neighbourhood… and many other possible real communities—to remove the element of anonymity from a cooperative internet platform. Each individual’s behaviour on such a platform would then be self-policing, as we all are within our communities, because they’ll have to explain themselves to their own community if they behave in an anti-social way on the platform. A platform that we could actually trust would appeal to many people who are frustrated by the anti-social climate of so many platforms, but in order to eventually encourage everyone on the planet to choose to join the platform, it would have to provide something of interest to every community. It could for example, provide any or all of the same types of services and entertainment that people currently get from platforms like facebook, google, amazon, spotify, tiktok, games or any other app that is useful to someone. The only requirement for membership on the platform would be recognition in good standing by a real community, which must itself be recognized in good standing by the neighbouring communities, ultimately creating a sort of ‘blockchain’ of communities. Each individual wishing to join the platform must register a community which will endorse them. They can either choose one that is already recognized, or organize a new community and then seek recognition for it. Obviously this could only be built in a gradual way, beginning with any programmers and other volunteers willing to offer their time to create and maintain an open source platform cooperative. The growth of this platform would initially have to take place in the same manner as any other movement for social change, but the platform must also be designed in such a way to be capable of scaling up infinitely—something that movements are unable to do—eventually growing to include everyone. Yeah, everyone. Otherwise we won’t be able to change the world.

One of the reasons that movements for progressive change have always reached an upper limit in their numbers, and are unable to change the world in any lasting way, is because they must make demands on our time, energy and finances, which is a lot to expect from people who have very busy lives, struggling just to survive and feed their kids in the increasingly competitive world of capitalism. Unfortunately, organizing ourselves ideologically, and expecting masses of people to commit themselves to a project, no matter how progressive, will just never be able to bring together the numbers of people necessary to actually change the world, but facebook, in contrast, has organized the most people in human history simply by offering something that is useful, or just fun, and makes no demands. If an open source, democratic, platform cooperative were to do something similar—provide an excellent web platform that people WANT to join—and include the REQUIREMENT to register a REAL community that they are part of, we can begin to gradually build a global system of council democracy together. This mechanism prevents anonymity on the platform (and therefore the antisocial behaviour that goes with anonymity) and, it simultaneously brings grassroots communities around the world into a democratic Network.

There is a well established strategic formula that is typically followed when organizing for change: 1—Develop an ideological theory. 2—Find the others. 3—When the number of people reaches the ‘tipping point’, implement the desired change. While this is of course a gross simplification, the point is that while this method works quite well in achieving relatively small goals, it won’t scale up to allow us to change the world. Regrettably, it will never be possible to convince all of humanity to agree to one single ideology which means that we cannot change the whole world with this method. However, reversing the order of the first two will allow us to first organize enough people to be capable of actually changing the world, then together, democratically, humanity can decide how we will act collectively to change the world. There are of course many reasons not to trust our future to the internet, but at the same time, it’s a powerful tool that we can use to organize ourselves in a new and fair way. It is our communities themselves, in which we are all organized already, that we can trust, and the internet can facilitate the organizing of those communities into a global democratic network. If we keep trying to solve our problems with the same strategies that have always failed, we really should stop expecting different results.

You can reach Joe Reynolds at joe@liberigi.net

The Pussy Riot Trial Was a Warning for US Universities

The 2012 trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot was a scandalous case of censorship dressed up as preventing offense. Claims that US campus protests over Gaza represent “faith-based harassment” are doing the same thing.

By Spencer Adler

July 29, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Yekaterina Samutsevich (Pussy Riot) at the Moscow Tagansky District Court | Photo: Denis Bochkarev, public domain wikimedia commons



Three women sit before their country’s highest deliberative body, on trial for incitement of hatred against a religious group. Their statements, which rigorously distinguish political speech from criminal harassment, earn widespread condemnation from liberal and conservative commentators alike. In the eyes of the federal government and the court of public opinion, these women have crossed an unspoken boundary on acceptable political discourse. Calls for their public punishment abound.

One would be forgiven for confusing this scenario with the 2012 trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot. In fact, I’m referring to the recent Congressional hearings on antisemitism at college campuses, which began on December 5, 2023, in Washington, DC. University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned after backlash to their testimony, while the leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University also faced immense pressure to step down. While the state-sanctioned cases against Pussy Riot and the Ivy League presidents differ vastly in context, content, and consequences, they rely upon the same tactic: invoking accusations of religious intolerance, faith-based harassment, and faith-based animus as a reason to censor political speech. The repercussions of the Pussy Riot trial in Russia should give all Americans pause as they consider the appropriate tools, and actors, to combat hate speech.
Fighting Words

While the prosecution of Pussy Riot struck many Western observers as a cynical show trial, the charges against them reflect a rather conventional interpretation of free-speech limitations in the Russian context. On February 21, 2012, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich disrupted services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to sing the following lyrics from their song “Punk Prayer:”


Black robe, golden epaulettes

All parishioners crawl to bow

The phantom of liberty is in heaven

Gay pride sent to Siberia in chains

The head of the KGB, their chief saint,

Leads protesters to prison under escort

In order not to offend His Holiness

Women must give birth and love

Shit, shit, the shit of God!

Shit, shit, the shit of God!

They were apprehended before reaching the second verse and chorus, which contained more explicit denunciations of President Vladimir Putin. For this protest performance, the three women faced criminal charges of “disruption to the social order . . . motivated by religious hatred or enmity.” Patriarch Kirill of Moscow asserted that “Nadia has a plan . . . to destroy church and state,” while a commentator for state television declared that “a sin must be called a sin, not a political act.” Aliokhina’s explanation that “God’s shit” referred to the relationship between church and state, rather than religion itself, resonated with an international audience. However, Putin’s argument that “we must protect the feelings of believers” reflected the dominant response in Russia.

In both Russia and the West, the apparently simple notion of free speech becomes complicated when it clashes with religious freedom. Soviet history helps clarify the rationale for prosecuting anti-Orthodox political statements as hate crimes. In an English-language interview for Russia Today, which touched on the events, Putin cited the communists’ persecution of Orthodox believers to justify the punishment of Pussy Riot. Although the idea that punk singers could destroy the Orthodox Church seems ludicrous, the memory of Bolshevik radicals suppressing religion remains fresh for many devout Russians. The prosecution reasoned that “one may not spit at another or poke a person in the eye. One may not insult those who have different beliefs.” This argument invokes the “fighting words” restriction on statements that, “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Do the location and choreography of Pussy Riot’s song “Punk Prayer” qualify the lyrics as “fighting words”? American courts have historically protected similar protests, but powerful organizations across the political spectrum seek to censor speech that disrupts religious worship. The Anti-Defamation League claims that a 2023 anti-Israel march in St. Louis, which led protesters by a synagogue, infringed “on the right of Jewish people to pray without harassment.” This logic echoes the Russian prosecution’s argument that Pussy Riot had deprived worshippers “of their dignity” and freedom to pray in peace.

Moreover, the Russian government employed its doctrine of “sovereign democracy” to sacralize the state and deny the political nature of “Punk Prayer.” Putin’s party, United Russia, developed the concept of sovereign democracy in 2006 to restrict viewpoints and actors that ostensibly threatened Russian sovereignty. The ruling elite has cynically interpreted this notion to imply that a stable dictatorship reflects the will of the narod, or common folk. However, the basic logic of sovereign democracy can be compatible with democratic principles. In his influential 2006 speech at a United Russia rally, Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov attacked a variety of perceived threats to Russian sovereignty: Western cultural imperialism, military patronage networks such as NATO, and economic globalization. He proclaimed that these forces imperil Russian values, norms, and traditions, which largely derive from Orthodox Christianity. Fundamentally, Surkov argued that certain issues are too important to be left to democracy — an idea with surprising sway in liberal democracies themselves. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Bill of Rights, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — these measures and countless others attempted to limit the influence of foreign agents, white supremacists, populous states, communists, and similar groups that could threaten “liberal values” by winning democratic elections.

The trial of Pussy Riot illustrates the danger of the sovereign democracy doctrine, especially when the state locates its sovereignty in organized religion. In an essay on the Pussy Riot affair, anthropologist Anya Bernstein documents the state’s efforts to strip “Punk Prayer” of its political message. She links Putin’s claim that Pussy Riot threatened the “moral health of our society” to the trial judge’s statement that “Punk Prayer” did not count as political speech because no politicians’ names were uttered in the church. Bernstein argues that the prosecution employed Orthodox notions of heresy or blasphemy in their case against the band — as she points out, Putin himself declared criticism of the Orthodox Church an offense against the Russian state. The state prosecutors recast Pussy Riot’s political performance into an apolitical desecration of sacred space. By imprisoning the performers, the government restricted its notion of “politics” to the official actions of elected politicians, excluding gender, religion, or any other social issues.

The government response to anti-Israel speech at American universities bears troubling resemblances to the prosecution of Pussy Riot. In particular, members of Congress have repeatedly equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism and mischaracterized the constitutional limits on free speech, both during and after the December 5 hearings. In her questioning, Representative Elise Stefanik linked chants of “intifada” (Arabic for “uprising”) to calls for “genocide,” which implicitly equated the two and potentially led to the university presidents’ confused responses. Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth all maintained that calls to “genocide” only rise to the level of harassment in certain contexts, which earned the ire of Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike. Among many others who criticized the “unacceptable” statements, Democratic senator John Fetterman remarked, “it isn’t ‘free speech,’ it’s simply hate speech.” However, legal doctrine on the First Amendment supports the university leaders’ emphasis on context. For speech to become incitement, the plaintiff must prove a direct connection between statements and (potential) violence; for speech to qualify as harassment, it must be directed at specific individuals with the intent to bully, threaten, or infringe on a protected activity such as worship. Otherwise male chauvinists could successfully sue Pussy Riot for the song “Kill the Sexist!” because its lyrics endorse violence.
Official Censure

Since December 5, the federal government has pressured private universities to censor political speech well beyond restrictions in the Constitution. The House of Representatives passed a resolution on December 13 that stated, “President Magill has resigned, and the other Presidents should follow suit.” Federal elected officials have repeatedly called on university leaders to arrest and punish student protesters, with Speaker Mike Johnson even demanding the deployment of the National Guard. Although less direct than the Russian model, Congress’s use of investigations, public hearings, and the leverage of funding to achieve its aim counts as state censorship nonetheless. Why does censorship at private, Ivy League universities pose a threat to free speech more broadly? First, academic freedom translates the abstract ideal of free speech into societal practice by providing a relatively open and democratic forum for different viewpoints. Second, pro-Palestinian protesters on campus already risk being doxxed and blacklisted from future academic or professional endeavors. Official censure from the university, which impacts students’ educational disciplinary records, immigration status, and access to on-campus housing, has a chilling effect on speech.

Even before the new year, developments within the University of Pennsylvania administration painted a grim picture of the censorship to come. The New York Times has chronicled the monthslong effort of Zionist billionaire Marc Rowan to oust president Magill and board chairman Scott L. Bok. Following their ouster, the Washington Post published a column by Claire Finkelstein, law professor and member of the school’s Open Expression Committee, entitled “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.” Finkelstein asserts that “calls for genocide against Jews — or even proxies for such sentiments, such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ — are, in the present context, calls for violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group.” Her claim that “such speech arguably incites violence” mischaracterizes the several decades of legal precedent on the “fighting words” doctrine. More alarmingly, her proposed ban of “proxies” for genocidal statements dangerously conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” calls for the end of a Jewish-majority ethnostate, but the phrase makes no mention of the type of state that should come in its place. By characterizing this chant as an endorsement of genocide, Finkelstein suggests that Palestinians are incapable of living in a multicultural democracy.

Finkelstein’s essay underscores the Israeli sovereign democracy doctrine that limits criticism of Zionism. In her final trial statement, Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samsutevich declared, “Orthodox culture does not belong solely to the Patriarch.” The state proved her right in one important sense: the imprisonment of Pussy Riot demonstrated that Orthodox culture belongs to the Patriarch and the Kremlin, but not to the people. The Israeli government, which has appropriated Jewish religious symbols into its national iconography, makes a similarly broad claim over Jewish culture. Israel equates rejection of a Jewish state with hostility toward Jews and their right to exist. Whereas Russia censors domestic criticism of the relationship between church and state, Israel manages to restrict speech abroad as well. The trial of Pussy Riot clearly illustrates the danger posed by any ethnoreligious regime that seeks to control the bounds of political discourse.

Spencer Adler is a cellist and recent graduate of Yale University, where he was secretary of Yale Young Democratic Socialists.

AMERIKA

‘No Children In The Village’: Tribes’ Losses To Indian Boarding Schools

"My aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village," another student from Alaska told a panel convened to hear from boarding students...

By Debra Utacia Krol 

July 31, 2024

Source: Arizona Republic

Photos of the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center, which is dedicated to sharing the history of the Phoenix Indian School.

More than 18,000 children were shipped off to faraway schools in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Nearly 900 known deaths occurred in the 417 federal-run institutions, along with uncounted cases of trauma, abuse, neglect, poor nutrition and despair. Entire generations paid the price for a failed federal policy.

These and other facts punctuated the second report on the troubled legacy of Indian boarding school policies and the federal government’s attempt to assimilate tribes by removing children as young as age 4 to military-style schools.

But it was the personal accounts that stood out Tuesday in the second and final volume of a groundbreaking report on the toll the federal Indian boarding schools exacted on tribal communities, families and children.

“I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and just wanting to go home,” one former student said.

“My aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village,” another student from Alaska told a panel convened to hear from boarding students and their families.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the report Tuesday, following up on the first from 2022. This one contained more accurate information about how federal assimilation policies, including boarding schools and the wholesale removal of children handed off for adoption by non-Native families, caused havoc and disruption in Indigenous communities throughout the U.S.

This map shows some of the federal Indian boarding school sites that were examined in an Interior Department report. Source: Department of the Interior

Federal Indian boarding schools examined

Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021 to investigate and document the “troubled legacy” of how the 417 federal schools and another 1,025 religious and privately operated schools worked to assimilate Indian children by removing them from their homes to sometimes remote military-style schools where they were systemically deprived of language, culture and family life.

“We’re here because our ancestors persisted,” Haaland said during a call with reporters Tuesday. “It’s our duty to share those stories with the world.”

The Interior Department’s team identified 417 Federal schools operating on 451 sites across 37 states or then-territories, including 22 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii, between 1819 and 1969. The report found that religious organizations operated nearly half of the 417 federal schools, while another 59 schools run by religious groups received federal dollars.

Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, said investigators also identified 1,025 other institutions that were not run by the federal government but by religious organizations.

The report also provided detailed profiles on the federal institutions, Newland said.

Investigators pored through 103 million pages of records to locate at least 18,624 Indian, Alaska Native and Hawaiian children who were taken into the federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and 1969, but they admitted the numbers are not complete.

For one thing, the report noted, children in the system outside of the study period would not be counted. Also, records from non-federal religious or private schools were not available. Other schools like day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories and schools operated without government support also were not counted.

The report also estimated that more than $23.3 billion in fiscal year 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars were appropriated from 1871 to 1969 to run the schools and similar institutions and associated policies.

Deaths at boarding schools are likely underreported

The report identified 973 children who died while attending one of the federal boarding schools. That number included 249 students from Arizona tribes. The three largest tribes in Arizona suffered the greatest losses. The Navajo Nation lost 135 children plus one from the Ramah Navajo Reservation in New Mexico; the four Apache tribes in Arizona suffered 49 deaths; and the O’odham tribes lost 41 students.

Those figures are also likely far less than the number of children who perished. Some burial sites contain human remains of multiple people or burials of people relocated from other sites. This prevents tribes from the ability to identify those individuals.

The report also identified schools with onsite and offsite burial sites. The Phoenix Indian School, which operated from 1891 to 1990, did not have an onsite cemetery to inter the estimated 23 children who perished there.

Students, their families and entire communities have endured disruption from the boarding school system for nearly 200 years, the report said. Tribes are dealing with domestic violence, substance abuse and adverse childhood experiences often resulting in reduced cognitive abilities through adulthood, along with other social ills.

Those effects include the government’s next failed tribal assimilation policy: the wholesale removal of Indian children to be adopted into non-Native families. That policy persisted until 1978 with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, although Native kids are still removed from homes at greater rates than other groups.

What’s next in ‘The Road to Healing’

The boarding school initiative included hearing the experiences of boarding school survivors and their families about the school experience and how it affected their lives and those of their descendants during “The Road to Healing,” a series of listening sessions across the U.S.

“We listened, we wept and we began to heal,” Haaland said.

The Interior Department held one of those sessions in the Gila River Indian Community in 2023.

The report includes eight recommendations for the federal government from Assistant Secretary Newland that aim to support a path to healing the nation, including:

1. Issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government regarding its role in adopting and implementing national federal Indian boarding school policies.
2. Investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.
3. Establishing a national memorial to acknowledge and commemorate the experiences of Indian tribes, individuals, and families affected by the federal Indian boarding school system.
4. Identifying and repatriating remains of children and funerary objects who never returned from federal Indian boarding schools.
5. Returning former federal Indian boarding school sites to tribes.
6. Telling the story of federal Indian boarding schools to the American people and the global community.
7. Investing in further research regarding the present-day health and economic impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.
8. Advancing international relationships in other countries with similar but their own unique histories of boarding schools or other assimilationist policies.

An oral history project launched in 2023 will continue to collect and make public boarding school students’ experiences. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which has been recording boarding school survivors’ accounts and advocating for support services, will receive $3.7 million in grant funding to help facilitate this project.

Newland and Haaland also said that language revitalization was one of the most-asked-for points during the 12-stop “Road to Healing” tour. Haaland said the departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Interior were developing a 10-year strategy to promote language revivals in tribal communities.

President Joe Biden has supported the generation of the report, Haaland said, and she expects him to read it. She believes Biden and First Lady Jill Biden support language revitalization efforts.

“President Biden has made many promises and kept many promises to Indian County,” Haaland said.

Newland said families and students have also been calling for community-based, trauma-informed healing care, family-strengthening programs and reductions in Native kids being pulled into foster care, and programs to address domestic violence to deal with the intergenerational effects of the schools and other federal policies.

“There’s a lot of work to be done to turn these broad recommendations into specific strategies,” Newland said.

Historians, scholars say it’s too little, too late

Dakota historian and Indian education history expert Jeanne Eder Rhodes believes the effort could be too little, too late. Rhodes, a retired history professor and co-author of one of the first definitive books on the history of Indian education, said the damage boarding schools inflicted on tribes is “so complicated that they really can’t fix it.”

For one thing, Rhodes said, the schools did such a good job of suppressing Indigenous languages that many tribes no longer have any living speakers, making revitalization difficult if not impossible. And, she said, larger tribes would most likely receive the lion’s share of any funding, leaving smaller tribes out.

Rhodes also said she believes the report is “reinventing the wheel,” pointing to earlier such reports like the Meriam Report, which among other findings showcased the poor conditions in the schools, inadequate diet, including foods like milk to which Indigenous kids were allergic, and the difficulties Native students returning from boarding school faced as they were not prepared to reassume their lives in tribal communities.

Because her stepfather worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she got a waiver to attend public schools. Still, she and other Native students suffered similar abuses to what boarding school students endured.

“There was a perception that Indian kids weren’t capable of learning,” Rhodes said.

She went on to earn a Ph.D in history from Washington State University.

David Martinez, an Indian studies professor at Arizona State University, said the federal government “should be held accountable for all people who suffered from the egregious boarding school policies whether or not they are in recognized tribes.”

Martinez is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community but is also a member of the Hia-Ced O’odham Tribe, the only unrecognized tribe in Arizona.

He said there were no recognized tribes until 1934 when the Indian Reorganization Act was enacted, and that many students from currently non-recognized tribes were pulled into the schools.

“The worst abuses in Indian boarding schools occurred before 1934,” Martinez said. “Justice for non-federally recognized tribes is not based on when the abuses happened but on the fact that they happened at all.”

Newland said abuses occurred in the schools well into the 1960s and 1970s but the department is aware that many Native people living with the harmful effects of the schools don’t live in their communities or are not members of recognized tribes. He also said the boarding schools may have had effects on federal recognition, particularly in Northern California.

“We’ve got to repair our relationship with all Indian people,” Newland said.

Federal Indian boarding school sites are shown on this map from an Interior Department report. (Source: Department of the Interior)