Back at Interior: Reconciliation, Repatriation, Reparations?
The DOI takes a lead in naming and addressing past and present systemic harms
Last month we began a look back at the first year and a half of Deb Haaland’s time at the Department of the Interior. Our first post focused on the changes happening to the bureaucracy both in the Department and the Biden administration at large, including more diverse representation, consultation and co-management practices, and some of the programs aiding movement of infrastructure funds out into communities.
This time we’ll look at the work that will certainly shape a large part of Haaland’s legacy: her efforts at seriously moving along cultural restoration and repatriation; national efforts towards reconciliation; and intervention in ongoing harm to Native communities, with attention toward the violence experienced especially by Indigenous women.
The DOI has never stated formally that they are engaging in wholesale reparations work, but surely the constitutive components listed above sound a lot like a reparations program, as they look to name, repair, and stop past and ongoing harms to Indigenous communities. DOI might be showing us a way in which one can do reparative work without getting caught up in a debate about reparations—none of the programs below has yet been caught up in some culture war flash storm. It’s a strategy worth paying attention to.
Boarding School Reconciliation
If you’re unfamiliar with the history or ongoing impact of boarding schools in the United States, we’ll get into some basic information in just a moment, and I also recommend the three-part series Native News Online recently published that pays special attention to intergenerational trauma, “How Indian Boarding Schools Have Impacted Generations.”
The stories told in that series are similar to those Haaland is gathering in her “Road to Healing” listening tours. These long listening sessions in Tribal communities won’t simply be one-time events; what is shared is being gathered as oral history to inform DOI’s reports on boarding schools which will in turn shape the work of Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies.
However, Congress has not yet passed the legislation that would authorize and fund the commission, whose purpose is outlined in the bill as developing “recommendations on actions that the Federal Government can take to adequately hold itself accountable for, and redress and heal, the historical and intergenerational trauma inflicted by the Indian Boarding School Policies,” including:
(A) to protect unmarked graves and accompanying land protections;
(B) to support repatriation and identify the Tribal nations from which children were taken; and
(C) to stop the continued removal of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children from their families and reservations under modern-day assimilation practices.
Haaland was the initial sponsor of the bill proposing the commission, when she still served in the House; it’s now under the stewardship of Rep. Sharice Davids. While the bill has made progress, Gaylord News reported earlier this year on the hesitancy around granting subpoena power that seems to have the legislation stuck in committee. Proponents see the subpoena power as necessary to require schools and other bodies to turn over documents they might be otherwise reticent to share.
While that is stalled, though, Haaland and the DOI are still moving forward with the Federal Boarding School Initiative, which is researching and documenting all the schools and facilities where children were sent, attempting to identify the children sent to each facility, and locating both marked and unmarked graves. They released an initial report in May, with information on 431 sites, including locations in Alaska and Hawaii. Both marked and unmarked graves have been found at over 50 of those sites thus far.
The report also documents the broader history of the creation of boarding schools and forced removal of children. To briefly outline: Schools were in operation as early as 1801 and initially operated under the War Department; that fact alone might give one a sense of their true purpose. The last recorded opening was not so many decades ago, in 1969. In the late 1800s forced removal of children to the schools picked up pace; in 1893 Congress authorized the withholding of rations (even those guaranteed by treaties in exchange for land) to those families that did not send their children away to school. Simple violence or threat of force was also used to take children without consent, as the schools became a major part of the government’s assimilation policy:
Systematic identity-alteration methodologies employed by Federal Indian boarding schools included renaming Indian children from Indian names to different English names; cutting the hair of Indian children; requiring the use of military or other standard uniforms as clothes; and discouraging or forbidding the following in order to compel them to adopt western practices and Christianity: (1) using Indian languages, (2) conducting cultural practices, and (3) exercising their religions.
Forced labor was also common. The report highlights a daily schedule from a school that includes 4 hours of work, for instance. And, as is well known, corporal punishment was routine; solitary confinement was also used. Conditions were often poor, leading not only to illness but death.
Reconciliation Report Recommendations
The report ends with a number of recommendations. These include continuing the investigation, and also identifying attendees and documenting their experiences; supporting preservation and co-management of boarding school sites; taking care to identify and protect records related to the boarding school program across federal agencies; and urging Congress to update NAGPRA, advance Native language revitalization, promote Indian health research to address ongoing effects of the boarding schools, and funding a federal memorial for all those who experienced the boarding school system.
Action on some of these recommendations will depend on Congress. Where it doesn’t, though, the DOI is often pressing on with the means and authority it already has at its disposal—though some of those efforts are also delayed, for reasons that remain unclear.
Repatriation
Boarding schools aren’t the only places continuing to hold the ancestors of Indigenous communities across the continent. Museums, universities, and other institutions also have remains as well as cultural objects eligible for return under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and many have been notoriously slow or uncooperative in complying with NAGPRA.
For the first time in early 2022, a full-time federal investigator was hired to focus solely on NAGPRA. In addition, DOI launched a process in 2021 to gather input from Native communities on potential updates to NAGPRA. An initial request for comments was pushed out, though, and the DOI’s site hasn’t had any updates in over a year. A review of the federal register suggests that the only update to NAGPRA in 2022 has been an inflation adjustment for the fee levied on offenders of the law. Rumors that DOI is finalizing its proposal for changes to the law and preparing to make them public have occasionally surfaced this last year, but to date, they have not actually been released. Is that delay the result of continuing to gather feedback, both through the Federal Boarding School Initiative and other consultative processes? No update has been provided by DOI or by the National Park Service, which manages the federal NAGPRA program. However, the White House Council on Native American Affairs has held additional listening sessions on repatriation issues in 2022, including on questions of how to repatriate items that have been taken outside the U.S.
Reconnection with sacred objects is possible not only through repatriation, but also by restoration of access to the land on which they exist or from which they came. To that end, the DOI also signed an MOU with other federal agencies to improve access and protection for sacred sites under their care. Following the trend we noted last time, an interagency working group on the matter was established as well.
While all this may be moving more slowly than anticipated, given the prioritization at DOI of having updated repatriation policies truly reflect the needs and requests of its incredibly diverse constituency in Indian Country, such slowness should probably be taken for granted. So will Haaland manage to pull off an overhaul of NAGPRA before the finish of her second year in office? It remains to be seen, but would certainly be a major victory if she does.
Disrupting Violence Against Indigenous Persons
While repatriation and boarding school initiatives are largely addressing past harm, Indigenous communities continue to experience unchecked harm in the present; in both the U.S. and adjoining countries, they still experience violence at dramatically higher rates than other groups. Haaland, who helped pass the Not Invisible Act of 2019 to address these high levels of violence, is now in charge of implementing it and the findings of the commission it established.
She’s done so in part by putting people and funding toward the problem, through the formation of a new Missing and Murdered Unit at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. An extraordinary number of missing and murdered cases in Native communities go cold. Not knowing who committed them or why they happened not only interferes with healing, closure, or justice for the impacted families, it also hampers the ability to prevent such events in the future. The “MMU” then, aims not just to solve individual cases but to inform the work of the Not Invisible Act Commission as well as the “Trilateral Working Group on Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls,” a body with members from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada that Haaland also helps convene that addresses the problem as a broader regional issue.
Additionally, the Biden administration last year proclaimed May 5th to be “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day,” to continue to bring attention to the problem.
Language Revitalization
Restoring Native languages is key to repairing one of the specific harms done by the federal boarding school system. At the White House Tribal Nations Summit last fall, an MOU set out a framework for interagency cooperation on this, and the DOI announced new grant funding available last December. $7 million was awarded in June to dozens of groups. The grants focus on preservation and revitalization, with a focus on preserving languages at risk of extinction.
Not only is DOI funding language preservation, but it’s working with the broader administration to consider a ten-year plan that would identify additional funding for such efforts and promote Native language reclamation in federal policies (they’re taking public comment through the 14th of this month).
The Takeaway
Naming and healing past harm; interrupting ongoing harm; restoring that which has been taken, be it an ancestor, a physical object, or one’s very language. Can you see why I want to use the word “reparations” to describe what is playing out at DOI? Consider, again, that this is all taking place within the direct descendant of the original War Department, responsible for implementing much of the United States’ policies of physical and cultural genocide; the about-face is astonishing. What’s more, Haaland is drawing not just on the resources at DOI but other departments (DOJ, Health and Human Services, and others) to get the job done—using the “all of government” approach, as the Biden administration likes to call it. Pretty appropriate, given the “all of government” approach of colonization.
Haaland is certainly proving that “representation matters.” Yet as head of Interior—also managing bureaus such as the BLM, Reclamation, and others—is that enough for changing the culture of land management in the U.S.? And can she do so in a way that responds adequately to the climate crisis? We’ll take a look at that in our next installment in this series.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday
Before I wrap up here, a reminder that Indigenous Peoples’ Day is this Monday (October 10th). Here in Oregon it’s only the second year that the state is officially observing the day (rather than as Columbus Day). If you’re in the Portland area and looking for an event, Portland Indigenous Marketplace and others are sponsoring a “Meet and Greet” for Barbie’s Village, a unique Land Back effort providing housing for Native women and children in the area.
Thanks for reading Unsettling!
Until next time,
Meg