Tag: native americans

Tohono O’odham man shot and killed by border patrol

A well respected member of the Tohono O’odham community has been gunned down by Border Patrol agents.

The man’s family is outraged and wants answers.

According to Customs and Border Protection U.S. Border Patrol agents from the Ajo Station were involved in a shooting that resulted in the death of a man.

A family member says the man was respected and loved.

One family who asked not to be identified, fought back tears as she told News 4 Tucson,

“I keep hearing the gunshots and I can’t get over it…Its very sad just to know who they were shooting at you know.”

She told News 4 Tucson she wanted people to know what happened to their loved one, Raymond Mattia.

According to another family member who also asked not to be identified, Mattia was shot and killed by Border patrol agents Thursday night. She said Mattia had called Border Patrol.

“He called to request for assistance because there were multiple illegal immigrants who had trespassed into his yard and he wanted assistance getting them out of his property.”

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Why so many Canadians pretend to be indigenous

‘Pretendians’ must be among the fastest growing cultural groups in Canada. A Pretendian is someone with little or no indigenous background who pretends to be indigenous. The latest to be uncovered is Vianne Timmons, president of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Last week, Timmons was forced to apologise for misrepresenting her background and is now taking a leave of absence.

Timmons claimed in CVs and elsewhere that she was descended from Mi’kmaq First Nations peoples. A recent CBC News report questioned whether or not Timmons actually had any First Nations ancestry at all. Looking at her family tree, the report found that she is probably only one-1024th to one-2048th indigenous.

Timmons’ story is noteworthy because she is a high-profile academic. She is director on the board of Universities Canada. She was named as one of Canada’s Top 100 most-powerful women in 2008 and was the 2013 winner of the Saskatchewan Humanitarian Award from the Red Cross. In 2017, she was even named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her lifetime contributions to inclusive education, family literacy, indigenous post-secondary education and women’s leadership.

Timmons even accepted an Indspire trophy – ‘the highest honour the indigenous community bestows upon its own people’ – while holding an eagle feather. At that ceremony, she claimed that her father once told her: ‘We’re Mi’kmaq, but I was raised to be ashamed of it so I hid it, all my life.’ In 2021, Timmons spoke about ‘discovering’ her indigenous roots: ‘It’s like trying to find your story that somebody hid from you, not just hid from you, but changed for you.’

Timmons is far from the only high-profile academic to have claimed minority status on dubious grounds. In 2016, author Joseph Boyden, an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction about First Nations Canadians, faced doubts about his claims to indigenous ancestry. A 2020 CBC investigation raised similar concerns about filmmaker Michelle Latimer, whose film, Inconvenient Indian, won the People’s Choice Award for Documentaries and the award for Best Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2021, the CBC revealed that Carrie Bourassa, Canada’s leading indigenous health scientist, appeared to be of entirely European ancestry. She had to resign her position at the University of Saskatchewan. Last year, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond – a former judge, scholar and another recipient of the Order of Canada – was also found to have made inconsistent claims about her heritage.

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Secret COINTELPRO Plot to Infiltrate and Destroy the American Indian Movement: “We Wanted Them to Kill Each Other”—FBI Agent Admits After Five Decades of Silence

February 27 through May 8 marks the 50th anniversary of the occupation by the American Indian Movement (AIM) of Wounded Knee on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the site of the last great massacre of the Indian Wars in December 1890.

In a 2019 documentary that aired on PBS, From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: A Reporter’s Journey, filmmaker Kevin McKiernan interviewed Tom Parker, an FBI agent working for the FBI’s counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO), who admitted that the FBI had helped to fracture and disrupt AIM during its 1973 Wounded Knee occupation.

“[W]e wanted them to kill each other, as we were in a war against AIM,” Parker said.

According to Parker, a main goal of COINTELPRO was to infiltrate informers into AIM and to publicly identify AIM activists with the FBI so that others in AIM would turn against them.

In this way, Parker said, dissension would grow among AIM, and AIM members would become paranoid about FBI infiltration and turn against one another, and there would be violence.

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Minnesota Democrat Says She’s ‘Sick of White Christians’ Adopting Native American Babies

A Minnesota state lawmaker allegedly said in an online post that white Christians adopting Native American babies were contributing to “genocide.”

“I’m sick of white Christians adopting our babies and rejoicing,” Minnesota State Rep. Heather Keeler said in a post to Facebook, according to an Alpha News report. “It’s a really sad day when that happens. It means the genocide continues.”

The Democrat lawmaker continued by saying people who care about Native American babies should advocate against “the genocide.” Keeler urged concerned people to solve issues impacting Indigenous parents. She further demanded an end to “stealing our babies and changing their names under the impression you are helping.”

“White saviors are the worst,” Keeler exclaimed. “I said what I said.”

The Minnesota Democrat sponsored legislation to include parts of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected this term to rule on a challenge to the ICWA’s constitutionality.

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America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.

ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.

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ESPN’s Jalen Rose: Stop Saying Mt. Rushmore, It’s ‘Offensive’

ESPN analyst and former NBA player Jalen Rose has launched a new campaign to cancel Mr. Rushmore because he says the name of “offensive” to all Americans.

Rose posted a video to social media insisting that the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians dumped their Native American names and imagery because it was “offensive.”

He then said he has a new piece of U.S. history he believes should be canceled: Mt. Rushmore.

“I want to continue to challenge myself and to challenge you to do something,” Rose said in his Twitter video. “Can we retire using Mt. Rushmore?”

“That should be offensive to all of us, especially Native Americans,” Rose exclaimed.

“The indigenous people, who were the first people here before Christopher Columbus. Their land was stolen from them when it was discovered that it contained gold,” Rose continued.

“And 25 years later — to add insult to injury — four American presidents were put on what we call Mt Rushmore. On the top of the dead bodies that is buried right underneath,” he added.

“So, I call for you — and for myself, I’m in on this too — let’s stop using the term Mt. Rushmore,” he concluded, “when we talkin’ about our favorite rappers, talkin’ about our favorite movies, we talkin’ about our favorite players.”

“I know you gonna see this video and I know you gonna take action,” he said.

It was unclear if Rose was speaking metaphorically about the faces of the four presidents carved “on top of the dead bodies” of Native Americans. Or if he mistakenly thinks Mt. Rushmore is some sort of burial ground. But no one is buried on the mountain or immediately below the carvings.

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University Of California Waives Tuition For Native Americans, Starting Fall 2022

Announced in April, the UC Native American Opportunity Plan allows California residents who are “members of federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes” to get free education on UC campuses. The program applies to undergraduate and graduate students.

“The University of California is committed to recognizing and acknowledging historical wrongs endured by Native Americans,” UC President Michael Drake said in a letter (pdf).

“I am proud of the efforts the University of California has made to support the Native American community, including the creation of the [program].”

The UC system has ten campuses—Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. About 295,000 students were enrolled in the system in fall 2021.

The program is expected to cost $2.4 million and will be funded mainly by both the state’s and UC’s financial aid programs, according to Drake’s office.

The program was developed to expand “student diversity and make the University of California more affordable and accessible,” Drake said in the letter. The approximate annual tuition for a state resident is $13,104, according to the UC Admissions office.

California has 109 federally recognized tribes and has more Native Americans and those of Alaska Native heritage than any other state in the country, according to the Judicial Council of California.

Native Americans make up 1.7 percent of the state’s population while accounting for 0.5 percent of the UC system’s student body in Fall 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the university’s enrollment statistics.

Some universities and lawmakers across the country are following UC’s steps.

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US Government Admits It Used Schools as Tool to Erase Culture, Seize Native American Land

Erasing culture, pulling children away from their parents, and disregarding the emotional needs of children. These tactics could be pulled from today’s headlines, but they are the tried-and-true education policies the United States has admitted to using for 150 years as a tool to force the assimilation of Native Americans, and specifically to acquire Indian territorial land.

This month, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) released a 106-page report detailing how the U.S. federal government “applied systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies in the Federal Indian boarding school system to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children through education.”

The BIA says the government used the education of children to “replace the Indian’s culture with our own.” This, the report says, was considered “the cheapest and safest way of subduing the Indians, of providing a safe habitat for the country’s white inhabitants, of helping the whites acquire desirable land, and of changing the Indian’s economy so that he would be content with less land.”

The report was requested last year by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico. She is the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary.

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‘Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics

One year ago today, the leaders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Indigenous children detected at a residential school in British Columbia.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, said in a statement on May 27, 2021.

The band called the discovery, “Le Estcwicwéy̓” — or “the missing.”

What’s still missing, however, according to a number of Canadian academics, is proof of the remains in the ground.

Since last year’s announcement, there have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence. Nothing has been taken out of the ground so far, according to a Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman.

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‘Tens of Thousands’ of Native Children Discovered in 50 Mass Grave Sites at Gov’t-Run Schools

It is no secret that the United States of America has a deeply dark and disturbing history in regard to how Native Americans were treated in this country. After wiping out large portions of the indigenous populations with European diseases, the federal government took to forcibly assimilating the remaining population in government institutions.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, hundreds of federal schools were set up across the country in which Native children were taken from their families and tribes to be re-educated into the American way of life. Within these facilities, tens of thousands of children were both physically and sexually abused as “teachers” forced them to talk, dress and act “American.”

In these boarding schools, children were prohibited from speaking their Native American language and forced to assimilate into society. The abuse they suffered at the hands of staff was often times fatal and many of these schools began digging mass grave sites as a result.

A new study conducted by the interior department has given us glimpse into the deeply disturbing nature of these schools. The study found more than 50 burial sites, in which they suspect tens of thousands of native children have been buried — and, they expect that number to grow.

The study is far from complete, but some of the findings are being released as they focus on trying to identify the children and their tribal affiliations.

“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies – including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as four years old – are heartbreaking and undeniable,” Deb Haaland, the interior secretary, said in a statement.

The study uncovered the fact that hundreds of schools, ran and funded by the federal government, operated in 37 states, with many of them in Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico.

The US government ran several hundred of these schools while it provided funding to Catholic, Protestant and other churches who ran their own schools to “civilize” Native Americans.

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