Western countries demand Russia follows international law – so why don’t they?

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 30, 2022 

With a passion that recalls the aftermath of the Second World War, politicians and commentators are demanding a global order that takes seriously the rules of the United Nations Charter — notably on respect for sovereignty and fundamental human rights.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the immediate spur, China’s conduct in the Indo-Pacific region has prompted similar calls.

It’s more than a fight between autocracies and democracies, Fareed Zakaria recently argued in the Washington Post. This moment requires a rules-based international order that has inclusive global appeal beyond western interests.

Zakaria is joined by Edward Luce in the Financial Times in arguing these appeals for a global rules-based order clearly require the West to take those rules seriously too, pointing to both the war on terror and the International Criminal Court as evidence it’s not truly serious.

The United States, for example, has refrained from joining the court, even as it advocates for war crimes trials for Russian soldiers and politicians.

Railing against China’s encroachment on the marine sovereignty of its neighbours in the South and East China Sea — in violation of the Convention on the Law of the Sea — also isn’t helped by the U.S. failure to ratify that treaty or participate in its tribunal (which ruled against China in a landmark 2016 case brought by the Philippines).

Chinese structures and buildings are seen at the man-made island on Mischief Reef in the South China Sea in March 2022. China has fully militarized at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

According to international affairs experts Robin Niblett and Leslie Vinjamuri, there is a similar penchant for arbitrariness when it comes trade rules and the World Trade Organization, health rules and the World Health Organization and attitudes about development financing in sub-Saharan Africa. They argue that the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the fortunes of populist and authoritarian politicians may further erode liberalism.

This only scratches the surface. The essential issue is not merely inconsistency in following rules that have uncontested legitimacy. Rather, it’s whether those rules have withstood the assaults on their legitimacy by their western architects.
Global order hypocrisies

Russia’s Ukraine invasion has resulted in a massive exodus of people, exceeding 6.4 million at this point. Their reception in neighbouring Poland and Hungary has contrasted starkly with the treatment of equally desperate refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, among others. The conduct of supposedly liberal nations — from Great Britain and France to Nordic states, Canada and the United States — in terms of how they’ve received Ukrainian refugees compared to those from other nations isn’t any better.

The principle of nonrefoulement — a guarantee that no one will be returned to a country where they face torture, degrading treatment or other irreparable harm — is hardwired in international law, as is the right to seek asylum. Neither enjoy much respect in the face of populist attitudes, which have gone increasingly mainstream among politicians and citizens alike.

What has been called the “ethical spasm” in welcoming Ukrainian refugees (support for resettling refugees has been as high as 76 per cent in Britain) stands out precisely because asylum has otherwise been discarded as a pillar of international humanitarian law, and is replaced by what philosopher Serena Parekh calls “structural injustice” that’s comparable to Jim Crow segregation laws.

This conspicuous lack of regard for the letter and substance of rules is tied to resistance against scrutiny of domestic compliance with international human rights law. When it comes to Indigenous Peoples, for example, settler states like Australia, Canada and the United States have dragged their feet on any binding agreement, especially one that honours collective human rights.

‘Free speech’ folly

Incitement to hatred of vulnerable minorities, in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is also now justified via a loose interpretation of “free speech” — a phenomenon we see in white supremacist and Islamophobic activism, especially on social media.

In Canada, the “trucker convoy” protest that openly espoused white supremacy received support from the official Opposition within and outside Parliament. It’s hard to imagine such accommodation of a non-white protest paralyzing cities and borders for weeks on end.

Read more: The 'freedom convoy' protesters are a textbook case of 'aggrieved entitlement'

In this vein, what are we to make of liberal western states side-stepping the record of India’s egregious conduct towards religious minorities in order to mobilize a front against Russia and China?

We boldly claim to uphold the rights of China’s Uyghurs and Myanmar’s Rohingya but we ignore the rule of equal citizenship by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his longstanding embrace of a violent Hindu supremacist ideology. This is a wilful sabotage of holding states accountable.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi embraces Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as they attend the opening ceremony of the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. 

(AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

Finally, there is an outcry about “occupation,” which Crimea has endured since 2014 and the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine appears fated for in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion.

Foreign occupation is at the heart of the narrative of Ukraine’s plight as David confronting the Russian Goliath. The occupation has placed Taiwan on high alert, nervous China might be inspired by Russia.

But what about Palestine, where over a half century’s occupation by Israel is actively funded, militarily supported and legally shielded by western liberal democracies? Gershon Shafir, an American sociologist and human rights scholar, has explored why this is the case in the face of clear international legal and political norms to the contrary — from the UN Charter and the 1949 Geneva Conventions to explicit judicial rulings and UN resolutions, in addition to essential ethical and humanitarian principles.

The International Court of Justice found in 2004 that Israel’s “separation wall,” built in the name of security against Palestinian attacks, was outright illegal in its intrusion on occupied territories. It amounted to extending colonial capture by conquest, a practice explicitly outlawed since the 1960 Declaration on Colonial Peoples and Territories, which not a single UN member opposed.

The UN Security Council’s unanimous Resolution 242 of 1967 on the Palestine question affirmed the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Israel nonetheless ignored the International Court’s finding.

Precedents set

A major precedent for dismissing judicial findings on a salient issue of global order was set by the U.S. in response to the 1986 International Court of Justice ruling on “military and paramilitary activities against Nicaragua.” The U.S. simply rejected the decision of a court that it had helped establish.

An Ipsos poll on public attitudes toward the Russia-Ukraine conflict reveals, unsurprisingly, a stark divide between the Global North and South. While 82 per cent of people agreed that the conflict poses great global risk, only 39 per cent (entirely in the north) disagreed with the proposition that Ukraine’s problems “are none of our business, and we should not interfere.”

A man rides a bicycle in front of a building ruined by shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine, on May 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

This is not just about the north-south divide at the UN in condemning the invasion; it’s about the alienation of civil society and ordinary folk from the global order. Which begs the question as to whether the very adoption of the rules of global order has been systematically snuffed out.

Author

Amyn Sajoo
Scholar-in-Residence & Lecturer, SFU School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University

Why a 110-million-year-old raptor skeleton should never have been sold at auction for over US$12M

THE CONVERSATION

Published: May 25, 2022

In mid-May, Christie’s auction house in New York sold a raptor skeleton (Deinonychus) for US$12.4 million. This represents a failure to protect and share our natural history with everyone.

We are paleontologists and represent the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a group of 2,000 scientists, students and museum professionals around the world. We are promoting awareness of the problems that high-profile auctions of vertebrate fossils cause, and why we think they shouldn’t happen.

Fossils are fascinating and beautiful objects. They provide a glimpse into a past substantially different from our present. We love seeing them come to life in movies. As paleontologists, we share the wonder, but when significant fossil specimens are held by individuals and not public institutions, society loses.

Dinosaur skeletons provide scientific knowledge and educate the public about the history and life of our planet. (Shutterstock)

Private ownership, public losses

Loss of high-profile dinosaur skeletons clearly hurts both science and the public. Some countries have a sense of “cultural patrimony” that includes not only cultural heritage, but natural heritage as well. This informs their laws, and prevents fossil sales and the unauthorized removal of fossils from their countries. When a fossil is sold, this heritage is removed from people in that country without consent.

When people are permitted access to private fossil collections, they are often from the purchaser’s country and not from the specimen’s country of origin, leaving local people cut off from seeing the fossil and learning about their own natural heritage. Not surprisingly, laws protecting cultural and natural heritage are often strongest in countries who have suffered the greatest loss of this heritage, like Mexico.

How much have the United States and other countries without legal protections in place lost through fossil auctions? We are only just beginning to understand. Of the known specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex, only 55 per cent are in collections in the public trust — and the remainder are in private hands.

The scientific community also loses. Specimens complete enough to be sold at legal auctions are often of significant scientific value, but may have been prepared in ways that inflate esthetic value at the expense of long-term stability.

Benevolent purchasers might want scientists to study their specimens, but there is no guarantee that primary data is recorded, rendering the fossil less meaningful for scientific research. Casts and CT scans allow some work to continue, but techniques that require examination of the original bone cannot be used, nor can new hypotheses be tested.

Even when provenance — the documentation of a fossil’s discovery and acquisition — is preserved, specimens held privately but made available to researchers have later been removed from access, and in some cases have disappeared after the death of their owners. This may have been the case with one of 12 known specimens of the enigmatic transitional bird Archaeopteryx.

Market purchases

Legal fossil auctions help drive the black market because high prices attract more people to excavate and sell more fossils of all kinds, and try to export them against local laws. When fossils are seen as accessories, investments or interior decor rather than scientific objects that represent the natural heritage of a region, this drives desire for these objects.

While not everyone can afford a Deinonychus skeleton, such sales drive desire for specimens at all economic levels.

One might ask whether museums could just start purchasing scientifically significant fossils to “save” them. After all, collectors and preparators (the scientists who preserve and prepare the specimen) deserve to be paid. However, often it is middlemen, and not the discoverers and landowners, who profit the most from these sales

.

A fossil of an Archaeopteryx disappeared in 1991 after its owner passed away. (Shutterstock)

Museums, whether public or private, have limited budgets and cannot afford to pay the ever-increasing costs of auctioned specimens. The sum paid for the auctioned raptor would fund the discovery, collection, study, preservation and public exhibit of many more fossils.

Living room dinosaurs

We are not arguing that commercial collectors have no role to play, or that no fossils should be sold. However, privately owned dinosaur fossils do not further science or education and such ownership costs the public their access to, and knowledge about, these fossils.

Any time a fossil is sold to a private collector, there are no guarantees that it will remain in its country of origin or that it will be displayed to the public or be available to scientists. There are also no guarantees that it will be maintained and cared for properly, or that data collected with it will be preserved.

These items are not just pretty cabinet curios, but contain vitally important information about the history and life of our planet. It is up to all of us, not just scientists, to understand the stories they tell us and protect them for future generations. In short, we believe that it is critical to stop auctioning off the natural heritage of the world to the highest bidder.

Authors

J

essica M. Theodor
Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary

Margaret E. Lewis
Professor, Natural Sciences, Stockton University
Disclosure statement
Jessica Theodor is the President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. She receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Margaret Lewis is the Vice President and Ethics Officer of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation and Leakey Foundation.

The future of fishing and fish — and the health of the ocean — hinges on economics and the idea of ‘infinity fish’

Fish stocks are in decline around the world, in part because of the way we value nature and fail to account for their long-term benefits. (Shutterstock)

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 24, 2022 2.16pm EDT

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series that also includes live interviews with some of Canada’s top social sciences and humanities academics. 

Indigenous Elders recently shared their dismay about the unprecedented decline in salmon populations in British Columbia’s three largest salmon-producing rivers. Research produced by my team found that the Coho salmon catch off the southern B.C. coast has declined to only about five per cent of the peak catch, which dates back to the early 1900s.

The decrease in fish stocks is a global problem. Cod stocks off Newfoundland, pilchard along the coast of Namibia, spring-spawning herring off Norway and sardines off California have all collapsed in the past five decades or so. Globally, more than 100 million tonnes of fish are plucked from the ocean each year, equivalent to over 100 million mature cows in weight!

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 34 per cent of the world’s fish stocks are overfished. But other organizations, including the Global Fish Index, estimate that roughly half of marine fish stocks are overexploited.

Get news that’s free, independent and based on evidence.Sign up for newsletter

These depletions are partly due to the way we value — or rather don’t value — nature. The inappropriate valuation of the goods and services nature provides us with is a fundamental reason why we have failed to take good care of the ocean and the environment at large. It is undermining humankind’s ability to achieve what I call “infinity fish”: passing on a healthy ocean to our children and grandchildren so they too can have the option to do the same.
The price isn’t right

When it comes to fish, some economists say all will be fine if we just get “the price right.” I say get the value and valuation right and we will be in a better position to live in harmony with nature. Assigning the correct value to fish will help societies assess the long-term cost of depleting the ocean of too many fish, too quickly, in too many parts of the ocean.

More than 80 per cent of global fisheries subsidies go to large-scale industrial fishing fleets. (Shutterstock)

Marine fisheries are vital for the livelihoods of tens of millions of people worldwide. They contribute directly and indirectly to the food and nutritional security of billions by delivering seafood and generating tens of millions of jobs and incomes, especially in the least developed coastal countries of the world, where the ocean supplies up to 20 per cent of the animal protein people consume.

Read more: Ocean warming is changing the relationship coastal communities have with the ocean

Wild fish stocks are a renewable resource that can continue to provide food and livelihoods to people forever — if they’re used wisely. Mathematically, anything that continues to provide a positive gain, no matter how small, will add up to infinity.

No one wants a dead ocean. To avoid that, we need to adopt an infinity fish way of thinking: a proper and complete valuation of the full range of the ocean’s benefits — seafood, carbon sequestration, recreation, culture, heat absorption — beyond what we sell in the market.
Discounting nature away

A key challenge to economics is how to value benefits from marine ecosystems in a comprehensive manner and in a way that captures their long-term diverse values. We have to meet this challenge if we are to have any chance of achieving infinity fish.

A key obstacle to achieving infinity fish is that, as humans, we tend to view anything close to us, both temporally and spatially, as large and weighty, while we give little or no importance to anything more distant. This tendency, which is partly captured by the economic concept of discounting, has been a big stumbling block to our ability to live in harmony with nature.

Essentially, discounting, which reduces benefits to be received in the future to its value today, makes us want to frontload our benefits and backload our costs. This tendency partly explains why we continue to overexploit biodiversity and deplete marine fish stocks in particular. It also partly explains why we keep polluting the environment with carbon dioxide and plastic.

Closing the high seas to fishing would have an immense positive effect on fish stocks. (Shutterstock)

Once individuals, communities and societies calculate the true values, we will be able to develop the guiding principles we need to live in harmony with nature. It would motivate us to:effectively manage fish stocks;

deal with the drivers of overfishing;

eliminate or redirect harmful fisheries subsidies;

rebuild and restore depleted fish stocks;

avoid oil spills and marine plastic pollution;

eliminate illegal and illicit trade in fish catch;

close the high seas (areas beyond national jurisdiction) to fishing;

treat climate change as the crisis that it is.

Ultimately, we need to avoid harmful policies that encourage negative actions by people on nature, such as handing more than 80 per cent of global fisheries subsidies to large-scale industrial fishing fleets, to the disadvantage of small-scale coastal fishers, including artisanal and subsistence fisheries.

Read more: Putting an end to billions in fishing subsidies could improve fish stocks and ocean health
Future generations

From the ocean, good things come, and to the ocean, bad things go.

People take what they want or need from the ocean, pulling those goods into our economic, cultural and social systems. In turn, we generate lots of waste, including greenhouse gases, which are absorbed by the ocean and increase sea surface temperatures, raise sea levels and boost ocean acidity, among other negative impacts.

Achieving ‘infinity fish’ would allow us to pass on a healthy ocean to our children and grandchildren. (Shutterstock)

Clearly, we must take the good things from the ocean more wisely and within the limits of nature, while reducing the pollution that reaches the ocean to the barest minimum. We must also ensure that what we take out of the ocean is used to meet the needs of as many people as possible, especially, the most vulnerable among us.

To achieve infinity fish, we need an interdisciplinary approach, founded on partnerships that allow scientists, Indigenous Peoples, governments, businesses, NGOs and civil society to co-create solutions.

The ocean is huge: it covers 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface. But it is not too big to protect — we have the brains and empathy needed to collectively ensure we achieve infinity fish for future generations. We just need to get the values and valuations right.

Author

r

Rashid Sumaila
Director & Professor, Fisheries Economics Research Unit, University of British Columbia
Disclosure statement
Rashid Sumaila receives funding from SSHRC, NSERC, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Oceana. In addition to the University of British Columbia, he is affiliated with National University of Malaysia as a Distinguished International Professor.

Public police are a greedy institution

A photo from a demonstration calling for police accountability and an end to police brutality in Vancouver, in May 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 24, 2022

The ongoing calls from communities to defund public police, that grew louder following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, have raised several crucial questions.

As researchers of police work, we looked at some of the critical issues surrounding these calls in our new book on police, greed and dark money. We examined the push by public police to accumulate more resources despite these calls and the rise of secretive or “dark money” in public policing.

Although criminologists have shown that social development leads to less street crime and healthier communities, police departments seem unperturbed when social programs for housing, mental health and health care get cut to fund growing police budgets. It is also unclear whether a well-funded police institution leads to less transgression or safer communities.

The greedy tendencies of police departments help illustrate the major problems with public police funding in Canada and the United States today.

American sociologist Lewis Coser first spoke of greedy institutions in 1974. A greedy institution demands loyalty and conformity to its culture, worldview and politics. For example, the military is a greedy institution since it demands full loyalty to branches of the armed forces.

We are not the first scholars to apply the greedy institution concept to public police and to suggest its officers must be loyal and not cross the “blue line.” Our book extends this concept to show how the police institution seeks loyalty and conformity not just internally, it does so externally as well.

While the public police demands loyalty to its institution and conformity to its worldview, its challengers, within and outside the institution, tend to be shunned or neutralized.

A new book, Police Funding, Dark Money and the Greedy Institution 

outlines how public police departments demand loyalty and funds. 

(Routledge)

The other meaning of greedy institution is literal.

Police greediness is evident in the quest for private sponsorship of police, especially through private police foundations. These foundations exemplify the attempt of police departments to extend their networks and social connections while accruing more financial resources.

Another example is paid duty policing, which we argue reveals the police managerial desire to control officers’ off-duty activities, while ensuring they receive significant extra money beyond their salaries.

In both instances, dark money is something that often involves secret or anonymous donations or income. The murky exchanges of dark money are mostly hidden to the public.

Police foundations: a funnel for private capital

Police foundations have emerged as entities that allow private corporations and individuals to donate to police. In our book, we show how foundations are being established at record pace. In the U.S., there are hundreds of police foundations. In Canada, police foundations in Vancouver, Delta and Calgary, as well as a few others, have been funnelling corporate money to police for decades.

Not many people know how prominent the police foundation has become, nor about the sources and levels of dark money it funnels into public police or the related conflicts of interest that arise. For example, Axon (makers of tasers and body-worn cameras) and other weapons companies are major funders of police across North America.

The Vancouver Police Department’s SWAT Mobile Command Centre costs $500,000 and is funded by the donors of Vancouver Police Foundation. 

(Vancouver Police Department YouTube channel), CC BY

It usually works like this: Private entities give dark money to the foundation. Most foundation money ends up getting distributed to the police rather than local charities. The police often spend those dollars on tactical units, surveillance devices and police dog teams, things often associated with militarization of the police.

The foundation is the police institution’s shell corporation through which other corporations and individuals can privately donate. These donations continue despite already ample public police budgets and even after wide public calls to defund public police.

The foundation is also a communication vehicle for police, through which allies such as powerful corporations or folks from local companies and affluent individuals are accrued. The foundation can advertise the police worldview, garnering more loyalty and conformity. In this way, police foundations assemble allies and social and political capital even amid loud calls to defund police.

Paid detail policing as literal greed

Paid duty or paid detail is another type of greediness. You may have noticed uniformed and armed police officers standing or strolling about at sporting events: chances are those officers are working paid duty. The sports team or corporation’s venue is paying the officer individually.

If you’ve ever seen police standing around at a construction site, movie shoot or retail outlet or outside a nightclub, chances are those uniformed officers are receiving handsome compensation from a private funder.

Paid duty also reflects a greedy institution.

Officers are making big money from these paid duty postings. They receive up to $100 an hour extra from working paid duty and — where not legally required through obscure bylaws — loyal funders are expected to provide “easy gigs” such as standing around at construction sites or sporting events. Yet police administrators often restrict paid duty gigs where cannabis, alcohol, gambling or nudity is involved and that are assumed to taint officers’ loyalty.

In Winnipeg, police were criticized for paid duty guarding of groceries after they engaged in racial profiling of Indigenous customers.

Paid duty is a problem for professional, accountable policing and its connection with police corruption including in Jersey City, Seattle and New Orleans. In Toronto, officers sometimes miss court dates and exceed limits on paid duty hours worked during lucrative jobs provided by external funders, as reported by the Toronto Star.

Paid duty is also a problem because some funders are public, including government departments that operate road maintenance and construction, utilities and hospitals. The public already pays for police operations, with huge proportions of government budgets, but then are asked by the police institution to pay again for paid duty.

Both private sponsorship through foundations and paid duty channel dark money into police departments. This all suggests that public police need greater scrutiny so that their greedy influence and reach can be reigned in and this institution can be re-envisioned through a lens of the public good.

Authors

Kevin Walby
Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg

Randy K. Lippert
Professor of Criminology, University of Windsor

Canada needs to be as welcoming to Afghan refugees as it is to Ukrainians

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Fury personally greets Angelika, the first Ukrainian refugee off the plane at St. John’s, NL, on May 9, 2022. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Greg Locke

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 25, 2022 

“When we talk about systemic racism, we’re not talking about what the government intended; we’re looking at outcomes — and the outcomes speak for themselves,” says Sharry Aiken, a law professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

Since Afghanistan was forcibly returned to Taliban rule nine months ago, Canada has approved only 13,000 Afghan refugee applications for immigration.

In contrast, eight times that number of Ukrainians have been approved under the Canada-Ukraine Emergency Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program in the few weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

The processes for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees are different and operate at different speeds because the political climates of their respective countries are different, says Rémi Larivière, a media relations adviser at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

But Anna Triandafyllidou, a professor and Canada Excellence Research Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, says that’s not the entire story. She says that seeing such disparate treatment of Ukrainians compared with other refugees reflects unfairness in our immigration process — treatment that others say may result from systemic racism and pressure from diasporas.

An Afghan refugee stands outside the Mississauga, Ont., hotel where he and his family stayed when arriving from Afghanistan in October 2021. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Eduardo Lima

Inequity has many root causes

When asked why Canada offers one process for Ukrainians and another for Afghans, “we really don’t have an answer,” says Usha George, director of the Toronto Metropolitan Centre for Immigration and Settlement.

Aiken says the fact that Afghans are racialized but Ukrainians are not may play a role in this disparity. However, George says there’s more nuance to this: “It’s easy to say that it’s just racism but that’s an oversimplification.”

George says that over time, the Canadian public has lost sensitivity to the human suffering going on in Afghanistan. By contrast, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, without regard to treaties or human rights, “strikes people at the very core of their being” — giving Canada no choice but to act.

Then there’s political pressure from the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, which George says is also a factor. In Canada, there are 1.3 million people of Ukrainian descent, but only 84,000 of Afghan origin, according to the 2016 census.

Vastly different immigration experiences

For Olga Charnetska, a 49-year-old event company owner in Kyiv, the CUAET process has been relatively quick.

Within weeks of applying for emergency travel authorization for her husband and two younger children, they were approved on May 6. Charnetska and her family flew to Toronto on May 18, where they were met by her two older daughters who already live here.

Larivière explains that CUAET “is not a refugee program.” Instead, it uses an existing temporary-resident visa process to quickly bring as many Ukrainians as possible to Canada. Their stay is meant to be temporary while the situation in Ukraine unfolds, and then they return home.

However, Larivière’s written statement does not explain why the same process couldn’t be used for Afghans instead of the current refugee process, which leaves many to suffer in limbo.

Recently caught in that limbo is Najib Zafar, who was an interpreter for the Canadian Forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

For seven months, Zafar and his family hid from the Taliban in Afghanistan as they waited for Canadian documents to facilitate their escape to Pakistan.

Former Afghanistan interpreters protest on Parliament Hill in March 2022. The group who helped the Canadian military accused the federal government of lying to them about bringing their family members to Canada. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

When the family finally was able to leave, “it took nine hours of inch-by-inch walking and pushing to reach the border,” says Zafar.

“It was too hot and too loud. My wife was sick. The Taliban knew that we had worked for foreigners and that we were fleeing, so they treated us with a great degree of cruelty,” he says. “They would beat anyone — whether a kid, an adult or elderly.”

Zafar and his family were kept waiting an additional two months in Islamabad before the Canadian government finally flew them to Calgary on April 5, 2022. But he considers himself among the fortunate.

“There are people who have been waiting for five months in Pakistan now. No one cares. No health care is provided there,” he says.

Read more: Afghanistan’s libraries go into blackout: ‘It is painful to see the distance between people and books grow’

Other differences

Triandafyllidou says that Afghans are going through “nine degrees of security scrutiny” compared with Ukrainians, slowing down their application process.

Also notable is the lack of a limit to the number of applicants who can be approved under the CUAET program, compared with the government’s goal of admitting 40,000 Afghan refugees. Triandafyllidou says this is the first time Canada has not capped an immigration program for refugees.

“The thinking is that this will be a group that will be easily absorbed into Canadian society,” she says.

However, not all differences in the two programs work to Ukrainians’ advantage. Triandafyllidou explains that Afghan refugees resettle as family units and can later add on other family members from abroad to their original applications, facilitating reunification in Canada.

In contrast, most Ukrainians coming to Canada are women, children and older people who left behind male relatives aged 18 to 60, who cannot leave Ukraine due to mandatory conscription. These immigrants may have to return to Ukraine if they want a family reunion.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau playfully reaches for 20-month-old Haris Sadaat’s sucker as he meets with families who have resettled from Afghanistan in Hamilton, Ont., on May 6, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Bridging the gap

When it comes to bridging the gap between how we treat different groups of refugees, Triandafyllidou suggests: “Maybe what we should do is be more generous towards Afghans. Two wrongs are not going to make one right.”

George says the government should aim to be proactive to refugee crises rather than just reacting to political pressure and the visibility of an issue. “There is no use of previous lessons and experiences to create a better system,” she says.

Read more: The unprecedented Ukraine-to-Canada 'air bridge' could mean a brighter future for all refugees

In the end, Zafar says, Afghans just want to be treated fairly. “We’re also humans and deserve equal treatment,” he says.

“I know there’s a war in Ukraine. [But] in Afghanistan, people are forcibly disappeared without being reported. No one can raise their voice.”

Authors

Anthony Fong
Global Journalism Fellow, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Zamir Saar
Dalla Lana Fellow in Global Journalism, University of Toronto

For a few tokens, this vending machine aims to help undo centuries of colonial narratives

"Colonialism is someone else telling the story, but what they're going to see is someone who is First Nation telling the story."

Colin Butler - CBC


Avending machine might seem like an unexpected item to undo centuries of colonialism, but this isn't any old vending machine. It still spits out goodies — but not the goodies you're used to.

The Indigenous books from the vending machine are "culturally relevant" for children, said Sheree Plain, the Akwe:Go program co-ordinator at the N'Amerind Friendship Centre in London, Ont.

Plain works with Indigenous children between ages seven and 12. She helps them keep their cultural traditions alive while living in the city and away from their community.

The books are free. For a couple of brass tokens, which the friendship centre gives out, the youngsters can unlock a personal window into their own culture — one unfettered by non-Indigenous voices — something Plain said she never had growing up.
8-year-old inspired by dispensed books

"When you don't have that as a child, you almost feel like you don't belong," she said. "It makes us seen. It makes our kids seen. I think I'm going to cry thinking about it."


© Colin Butler/CBC News

Sheree Plain, the Akwe:Go program co-ordinator at the N'Amerind London Friendship Centre, says the books give kids a window into their own culture that she never had growing up.

It's an emotional moment for the grownups and kids alike.

Eight-year-old Kaida Lynn Aquash was the machine's first customer, and from the moment she deposited her "bookworm" tokens, she felt a jolt of anticipation.

"I jumped because I haven't used a vending machine in a while."

With time, she'll become better acquainted with the machine, the thump of the books as they're dispensed and the stories they tell — her stories.

"You can imagine lots of things. You can make your own books. You can have dreams," the youngster said.

"I can learn our language from these books and I feel like it inspires me, and I love it."
Putting tokens in machine a symbolic gesture

It's music to the ears of Brian Warren, the founder and director of Start2Finish, a charity that helps foster the well-being of children through fitness and education.


© Colin Butler/CBC News

Brian Warren is executive director and founder of Start2Finish, a Canadian charity that helps foster children's well-being through fitness and education. He's holding one of the brass tokens used to buy books from the vending machine.

"Kids love tokens and getting things," he said. "Something popping out — what we're saying is, 'Literacy is going to be the same thing.' They're going to look and read them in culturally relevant terms.

"Colonialism is someone else telling the story, but what they're going to see is someone who is First Nation telling the story."

Warren said he hopes the vending machine helps connect the kids with their own culture in ways their parents never had, and that by inserting tokens into the machine, they understand a symbolic gesture of investing in their own culture to gain knowledge.

"Once you see yourself, you can believe it too. This is where we say, 'Yes, you have a strong connection to learning and achievement.'

"Once we help them learn to read, we have started them on the path to a brighter future."

‘Every child matters’: One year after the unmarked graves of 215 Indigenous children were found in Kamloops


People march in Ottawa during a rally to demand an independent investigation into Canada’s crimes against Indigenous Peoples, including those at Indian Residential Schools on July 31, 2021.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

THE CONVERSATION
Published: May 26, 2022 

Editor’s note: This article contains details that some readers may find distressing

“Every child matters” has become a rallying cry, adorning banners, orange shirts, decals and memorials to the Indigenous children who died at or went missing from Indian Residential Schools and similar institutions.

Indigenous communities have used these words to recognize the thousands of Indigenous children who were taken, never to return.

Despite this truth being something communities knew for decades, it took the use of scientific methods to locate potential unmarked graves of children buried near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School to garner the attention of non-Indigenous people, both in Canada and globally.

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On May 27, 2021, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc announced that they had located 215 potential unmarked graves of children — that number reverberated around the world.

Read more: Unmarked graves of 215 Indigenous children were found in Kamloops a year ago: What's happened since? — Podcast

In the first rush of media coverage and public outrage, governments were quick to commit millions of dollars worth of funding for communities to undertake searches around the sites of former Indian Residential Schools.

Memorials of stuffed animals and children’s shoes began to appear. The Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for months. Orange Shirt Day was transformed into an official National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. And First Nations communities across the country made public statements about their searches.

The numbers from Kamloops were originally reported as 215 and later revised to 200, then the numbers began to climb as more unmarked graves were found at the former Marieval Indian Residential School, Kuper Island Residential School and many more. But inaccurate numbers also surfaced on social media — first 6,000, 10,000, then 12,000 and it didn’t take long for people to try and downplay the numbers and cast doubt on the results.

As someone who has worked with Indigenous communities for several years to help locate potential unmarked graves, it is very important to me that people to understand the difficult journey survivors and communities must take in order to find justice and healing.

Who is responsible for their deaths?

Finding the graves of children who died at Indian Residential Schools is a challenging task. Information exists in archives about the deaths of children, which has contributed to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s Memorial Register. As of May 24, 2022, the register has 4,130 confirmed names of children who died while at Indian Residential Schools.

People listen as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a ceremony to mark the one-year anniversary of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc announcement on May 23, 2022. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Some of these records indicate where the children were buried, including cemeteries located near the schools. Survivors have shared knowledge of disappearances or deaths of children at these institutions, with some recounting how they dug graves.

Thousands of children died, and by all accounts the records from many schools are woefully incomplete, meaning the number of children who died is likely much higher than what is currently known.

The questions that haunt families and communities are: Where are their children buried, and who is responsible for their deaths?
Ground penetrating radar

One year after the announcement, Indigenous communities across the country are working to find the specific locations where children may be buried.

Many families were never notified if their children died while at school. And even when they were, the bodies of their children were rarely sent home to be buried. Survivors have often spoken of times where deaths occurred and children weren’t buried in cemeteries and merely buried on the school grounds.

Ground-penetrating radar and other technologies are now being mobilized to try to narrow down where graves may be found to mark, commemorate and investigate what happened to children.

At best, ground-penetrating radar can find anomalies in the ground that look grave shaped, based on interpretations of results from scans. In some cases, such as in unmarked sections of historic cemeteries, these are likely to be graves. In other cases it is less clear. In all cases, further investigation is warranted. And the nature of that investigation will have to be decided by the communities whose children were forced to attend that school.

A child touches an orange flag, representing children who died while attending Indian Residential Schools in Canada, placed in the grass at Major’s Hill Park in Ottawa on July 1, 2021. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

The technical results of ground-penetrating radar surveys have become vital, but they are not the first step, nor the last, in the search for justice. Communities are working to find their lost children and hold those who were responsible for the horrors of Indian Residential School accountable, but they need certain supports to be able to do so.

There needs to be ongoing funding and access to expertise in a co-ordinated manner to ensure families and communities get the answers they deserve.

There are likely thousands of graves at former Indian Residential Schools across the country, but we don’t yet have enough information to know where most of them are located — some are likely lost forever.

As the number of anomalies reported increases over the months and years to come, we can’t forget that every child matters. Each grave represents a beloved member of a family who was torn away from their community. Each grave represents a story of a child stolen. Every family that lost their children to this genocide deserves answers. Reconciliation isn’t possible without truth and we must not turn away from the truth.

Every child matters.

If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419.

Author

Kisha Supernant
Director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology, University of Alberta

Kamloops Woke Up the World to the Subject of Indian Boarding Schools


Kamploops Indian Boarding School (Photo: Change.Org)

BY LEVI RICKERT MAY 27, 2022

Opinion. A year ago, as we headed into Memorial Day weekend, news broke from British Columbia of the discovery of 215 remains of innocent school children at the Kamloops Industrial Residential School.

For those of us in Indian Country, the disclosure was a reminder of what most of us already knew for decades about Indian boarding schools, as they were known in the United States.

We knew for decades about the stories of the physical, emotional and sexual abuse suffered by many of the children who attended these schools. We knew that these children were beaten if they tried to speak their tribal languages. We knew that Native students died at these boarding schools. We knew that hundreds of graves, some unmarked, existed at these Indian boarding schools.

We knew that the children who attended Indian boarding schools were part of a federal policy that sought to assimilate Native American children under the mantra “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Even though we knew of these gross atrocities committed against our ancestors and boarding school survivors, most non-Natives had very little or no knowledge of this federal policy up until late last May.

Kamloops woke up the world to the atrocities committed against Native children. 

Within three weeks of the Kamloops’ announcement, U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland established the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate and shed light on this dark era of cultural genocide. 

Kamloops caught the attention of the national and international media. On an ongoing basis, there is so much news to be covered that large media outlets tend to take a “shiny object” approach to news. They cover stories for a short duration of time, then move on to the next new thing. The story of the children’s deaths at Kamloops became a shiny object for much of the mainstream media.

Our editorial team at Native News Online decided that as a leading national Native American publication, we would continue to cover Indian boarding schools when the subject was no longer the shiny object to the non-Native media.

We knew we had to cover various aspects of Indian boarding schools from the Native perspective. We decided we would write the articles that needed to be told about boarding schools. The scenario played out over the past year, culminating with the release of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report on May 11, 2022.

Since the Kamloops’ story broke, Native News Online has published nearly 100 articles about Indian boarding schools. In addition, we hosted several live streams to examine the topic in depth.  

In a year of coverage, two stories stick out in my mind. The first article is Surviving Kuper Island Residential School: ‘I Hear Little Children Screaming in My Head’, written by Andrew Kennard, an Drake University intern. The article is about Eddie Charlie who provided vivid recollections of his time attending the Kuper Island Residential school that was located near Chemainus, British Columbia.

Charlie told of the physical beatings and even starvation. He recounted how children disappeared. Years later, he would learn over 200 children were buried at the Kuper Island Residential School. Charlie’s experiences at Kuper Island led him to attempt suicide. His recollections led our editorial staff to issue a warning to our readers due to its content.

The second article, entitled The Remains of 10 Children at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School are Returning Home, written by our senior reporter Jenna Kunze, tells the story of the repatriation of 10 children who died at the well-known boarding school located in Pennsylvania. 

The story describes the long rigorous process involved having the bodies of the students exhumed and returned to their tribal communities. 

As we commemorate the first year since Kamloops’ announcement, Kunze, who has been reporting from the Rosebud Indian Reservation this past week,  recounts how covering the Indian boarding schools has impacted her.

“Listening to the stories of survivors, reading federal documents, and visiting Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the former St. Francis Mission in South Dakota has changed the core of my entire understanding of reporting on Indian Country: that Indian Boarding School impacted its survivors on a genetic level, and they passed that trauma down to their children. But along with trauma, survivors also passed down resilience,” Kunze told me. 

Kamloops certainly woke up the world to the subject of Indian boarding schools. The announcement provided a new spotlight on what many of us already knew, but often didn’t talk about. Now, the conversation has started and is growing louder and more insistent. More and more Native people are talking about the intergenerational impact of boarding schools on their families and their communities.  And, for the first time, many non-Natives are learning about this dark period in our nation’s history. 

After a year of closely covering Indian boarding schools, we are not stopping. Native News Online remains committed to providing coverage of this important issue in a way that informs, inspires and uplifts.  We hope you'll join us

About The Author

Levi Rickert  (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.

INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS: After Kamloops, a Year of Reckoning and Initial Steps Toward Reconciliation

BY JENNA KUNZE 

 

MAY 26, 2022

WARNING: This story has details about boarding schools, assimilation and trauma. If you are feeling triggered or unsafe, here is a list of resources for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

It's been a year since the news first broke about an unmarked gravesite holding the bodies of more than 200 Indigenous children who had attended a former residential school in Canada. The discovery at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia made international headlines, shining a spotlight on a dark era of forced assimilation of Indigenous children by the federal governments of Canada and the United States, with help from several Christian denominations and churches.   

As communities around the world processed the news about Kamloops, many non-Indigenous leaders — including the Canadian Prime Minister and Pope Francis — expressed their shock. For most Indigenous people throughout North America, the overriding feelings were sadness and anger, but not shock.  

“Absolutely not shock,” one Native leader told us. “We’ve known about this."

The assimilation and, some would say, genoicide of Native children at boarding schools may not have been a secret to Indigenous families, but it also wasn’t something that was openly discussed in many Native homes. That changed in a matter of days after the Kamloops story rocketed around the globe.

Beginning last May, Native News Online has committed its newsroom to covering Indian boarding schools and their intergenerational impacts on Native families and communities. Over the past year, we’ve produced nearly 100 stories about Indian boarding schools, traveled to former boarding school locations, and interviewed survivors and their descendants, as well as tribal leaders, boarding school researchers and government officials studying this dark period of assimilating Native children. 

Since the news of Kamloops first broke, we’ve seen and reported on the remains of Indigenous children buried at former boarding schools being returned to their ancestral homes. We’ve written about the discovery of additional gravesites at other boarding schools. We witnessed Pope Francis attempting to apologize to Indigenous people for the Catholic Church’s role in the boarding school era. We tracked legislative efforts to create a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding Schools. And we’ve watched the U.S. government take a remarkable step forward as it produced an investigative report on Indian boarding school history and admitted, for the first time, its twin-policy goal of assimilating Native youth while dispossessing their families of their land.

Native News has compiled a timeline of events below to recognize the progress and momentum Native peoples have spearheaded to truth telling, and to highlight the healing work that remains in the wake of a centuries old policy built on the words of Henry Pratt, who infamously said the goal of Indian Boarding Schools was to “kill the Indian, save the man.

A memorial honoring the 215 children whose remains were found on the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. (Photo credit: GoToVan)

May 2021

On May 27, 2021,  the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia’s southern interior announced it had found unmarked gravesites holding the remains of at least 215 children — some as young as three-years old — on the former property of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The tribe hired a specialist in ground-penetrating radar to find the gravesite during a site survey on its property. 

While non-Natives across the world expressed shock and horror, Indigenous peoples said the findings confirmed what they’d long known.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify,” Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir said at the time. “To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths.”

In both Canada and the United States, Native people demanded accountability even as they mourned, holding memorials and marches to bring visibility to the legacy of boarding schools on both sides of the border.

Deb Haaland at NCAI in June 2021 (Screenshot)

June 2021

Less than a month later, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), the first-ever Native American to lead a cabinet department within the United States government, announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.The initiative’s work was, in part, to investigate the work of Haaland’s predecessors at the Interior Department, which had been tasked with assimilating and eradicating Native peoples, beginning in the mid 1800s.

“For more than a century, the Interior Department was responsible for operating the Indian boarding schools across the United States and its territories,” Haaland said in an address during the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) 2021 Mid Year Conference. “We are therefore uniquely positioned to assist in the effort to recover the dark history of these institutions that have haunted our families for too long.”

The new initiative, prompted by Kamloops, directed Interior Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland and his team to comb through government records with a goal of identifying how many boarding school facilities the federal government ran or paid for, how many potential burial sites exist near the schools, and the identity of the children who were taken to the schools.

On June 5, after a meeting with two Canadian Cardinals the day before, Pope Francis spoke to a congregation in his typical Sunday morning address at Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City. The Pope expressed “sorrow” “about the shocking discovery,” according to a translation of his prepared statement, though he offered no official apology for the role the Catholic Church played in the displacement of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children.

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said that, in order to apologize for something, you must first know what you’re being held accountable for. 

“While we seek an apology for this instance, until we do a complete fact finding of every instance, every life that was murdered, an apology is going to be incomplete,” Sharp told Native News Online.

The same month, the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of as many as 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. 

Carlisle Cemetery (Photo: Jenna Kunze)

July 2021

In July, the United States Army—which inherited and controls the grounds of the country’s first off-reservation Indian boarding school, called Carlisle Indian Industrial School—completed the exhumation of several Native children buried at Carlisle. These Native children died there and were never returned home to their families.

The Army, compelled by one tribal member's insistence in 2017, exhumed and returned the remains of nine Rosebud Lakota Oyate youth to their next of kin, more than 140 years after they left home.

During Carlisle’s four-decade history, roughly 7,800 Native children from nearly every tribal nation across the country were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to the Pennsylvania boarding school as part of the U.S. government’s assimilationist agenda, according to records from the Cumberland Valley Historical Society.

Today, 173 children still remain buried in the school’s former cemetery—the majority of which have records with their names and tribal affiliations. Following the return to Rosebud Lakota Oyate last year, the Army announced it would attempt to return each of the remaining children to their homelands, including those with headstones marked ‘unknown.’

Meanwhile, in Canada another 182 unmarked graves were discovered by the Lower Kootenay Band of the Ktunaxa Nation, which used ground-penetrating radar near the former St. Eugene’s Mission School in Cranbrook, British Columbia.

August 2021

Seattle’s city council passed a resolution in support of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative and the Truth and Healing Commission.

A makeshift memorial for the dozens of Indigenous children who died more than a century ago while attending a boarding school that was once located nearby is growing under a tree at a public park in Albuquerque, N.M. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)

September 2021

The city of Albuquerque announced it will become the first U.S. city to use ground-penetrating radar to search for remains of Native American children buried in unmarked gravesites over a century ago.

Later that month on the National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools, September 20, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the Co-Chairs of the Congressional Native American Caucus — U.S. Reps Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) of the Ho Chunk Nation and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) of Chickasaw Nation — reintroduced The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act.

The bill, originally introduced in 2020 by then-Congresswoman Haaland, seeks healing for stolen Native children and their communities.

Specifically, the legislation would establish a formal commission to investigate, document, and acknowledge past injustices of the federal government's Indian Boarding School Policies with a wider scope than is included in the DOI’s federal initiative. The commission would also develop recommendations for Congress to aid in healing of the historical and intergenerational trauma, and provide a forum for survivors to share their boarding school stories.

December 2021

In the first public move of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, the DOI entered into an Memorandum of Understanding with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS).

Christine Diindiisi McCleave (Citizen of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation), the CEO of NABS at the time, agreed to exclusively license Interior to use their historical research “without restriction.” NABS is the only organization with a count on how many Indian Boarding Schools were and continue to be in operation.

Additionally in December, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak (D) apologized for the state’s role in the government’s forced assimilation of Native youth into Indian Boarding Schools. 

January 2022

An increasing number of Catholic organizations join in the discussion about Indian boarding schools. Native News Online spoke with tribal leaders on what role they have to play in the pursuit of truth and healing, and who their participation is serving.

In a related story, Canada tentatively agreed to a $31 billion (U.S.) settlement to right its discriminatory child-welfare system that disproportionately separated Indigenous youth from their families over the past three decades, then chronically underfunded the welfare programs meant to serve them. 

April 2022

For the first time in history, the leader of the Catholic Church acknowledged the role of the church in perpetrating harm on the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children sent to residential schools in Canada.

In the nine months since Kamloops discovery, the remains of more than 1,400 Indigenous children were located at the sites of former residential schools where kids often died of disease, neglect, and abuse. The Catholic Church was responsible for running nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools operated across Canada.

“It's chilling to think of determined effort to instill a sense of inferiority to rob people of their cultural identity, to sever their roots, and to consider all the personal and social efforts that this continues to entail: Unresolved traumas that have become intergenerational trauma,” Pope Francis said,  addressing a delegation of nearly 100 Indigenous leaders who Canadian traveled to Italy to ask for an apology this week. “All this made me feel two things very strongly: indignation and shame,” the Pope said. 

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland at a press conference on the Indian Boarding School Report (Courtesy NABS)

May 2022

After a two-week forum at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, the UN’s United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues adopted its final report on Friday, May 6.

Included in the report was the Forum’s decision to create a working group dedicated to truth, reconciliation, and transitional justice, including in post-conflict areas, for lasting peace that respects the rights of Indigenous Peoples and promotes their full and effective inclusion, including Indigenous women. 

The U.S. Department of the Interior on May 11 released its initial findings after a nine-month investigation into the fraught legacy of Indian Boarding Schools that the U.S. government ran or supported for a century and a half.

The 106-page report—penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland—details for the first time that the federal government operated or supported 408 boarding schools across 37 states, including Alaska and Hawai’i, between 1819 and 1969.

About half of the boarding schools were staffed or paid for by a religious institution. The investigation identified at least 500 children in marked and unmarked burial sites at 53 of those schools, though the DOI expects to find the number of children buried at boarding schools across the nation to be in the “thousands or tens of thousands,” as the investigation continues. 

“This report, as I see it, is only a first step to acknowledge the experiences of Federal Indian boarding school children,” Newland wrote. He recommended a second report that specifically focuses on investigative findings of locations of marked or unmarked burial sites associated with the Federal Indian boarding school system; names, ages, and tribal affiliations of children interred at such locations; and an estimation of federal dollars spent supporting the Federal Indian boarding school system as well as Native land held in trust by the United States used to support the Federal Indian boarding school system.

Simultaneously, Haaland announced her year-long Road To Healing tour that will take her across the country to connect with and listen to boarding school survivors’ stories.

“Recognizing the impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system cannot just be a historical reckoning,” Haaland said. “We must also chart a path forward to deal with these legacy issues.”

While many across Indian Country rejoice over the past year’s progress in shedding light on the history of Indian boarding schools, they say we’re still at the very beginning of a long road.

“It is good news to hear that federal Indian boarding schools are being investigated at such a high level,” American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council Co-Chair Lisa Bellanger told Native News Online. “There is an intense amount of work that needs to happen to bring our children home.” 

Access our collection of Native News Online coverage of Indian Boarding Schools since May 2021.

About The Author

Jenna Kunze
Staff Writer
Jenna Kunze is a reporter for Native News Online and Tribal Business News. Her bylines have appeared in The Arctic Sounder, High Country News, Indian Country Today, Smithsonian Magazine and Anchorage Daily News. In 2020, she was one of 16 U.S. journalists selected by the Pulitzer Center to report on the effects of climate change in the Alaskan Arctic region. Prior to that, she served as lead reporter at the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska. Kunze is based in New York.