In the shadow of Indian boarding schools, Biden signs legislation to improve tribal child welfare

In the 11th hour of his presidency, Joe Biden signed the Native American Child Protection Act into law, consolidating resources for tribes and reauthorizing grant funding for the nation’s “most vulnerable children.”

Native American children are more likely to be abused than any other racial group in the United States, according to reports from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Given the painful history of Native American children being removed from their families, this legislation will help Tribes provide services that reduce trauma and uncertainty for children,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., one of the co-sponsors of the bill. “This is an important step toward justice and protecting our most vulnerable of children.”

While most of the programs in the law have existed since the 1990s, this legislation reauthorizes and streamlines programs with the intention of better connecting resources to the people who need them, according to a news release from Luján’s office.

Passed in 1990, the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act allocated grant funding of up to half a million dollars per eligible tribe until 1995. That funding was never reauthorized by Congress, and as a result only $5 million was distributed in the 35 years since the act’s inception, according to the release. The Native American Child Protection Act, or NACPA, which Biden signed into law on Dec. 23, seeks to remedy that funding gap.

This unfulfilled promise leaves the Executive Director of the Navajo Nation Division for Children and Family Services Thomas Cody somewhat cynical about this new legislation.

“It cannot be an unfunded mandate,” Cody said.

The division serves the Navajo Nation and only has one licensed therapist on staff. It relies on the Indian Health Service and federal contractors for much of its treatment.

Currently, the division manages the cases of 600 Navajo children who were removed from their homes due to abuse. The case backlog is so bad, Cody said, that children often have to wait one to two months to begin the process for treatment.

NACPA outlines that funds are for child abuse prevention and “culturally appropriate treatment” that better suit the needs of tribal communities. Alongside grant funding, the act establishes the National Indian Child Resource and Family Services Center to pool federal educational and technical resources for tribes.

“Ensuring that Native children and families have access to resources, assistance, and funding to address abuse, violence and neglect is vital to our communities,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., who co-sponsored the companion bill in the House, said in a statement to the Journal.

Facing Naayéé’

“We call them ‘Naayéé’,” Cody said. “Which is ‘the monsters.’”

The Diné word often represents the troubles someone faces in life, whether that be mental health problems, alcoholism or abuse.

To fight the Naayéé’, the division provides traditional treatment to Navajo children in the form of cultural dance, song and prayer, often alongside other Western therapies. This is especially important, Cody said, for children who were placed with non-Native caretakers and might otherwise feel depressed and disconnected from their culture.

Under NACPA, the Navajo Nation, and other tribes, could secure grant funding for these alternative treatments.

NACPA is the latest in remedial legislation from the federal government following the Indian boarding school era in which Native American children were forcibly separated from their parents and assimilated into the dominant white culture, often enduring physical, emotional and sexual abuse. A report from the Bureau of Indian Affairs states that this era caused “intergenerational impacts” still felt by Native communities today.

The era lasted from roughly 1819 to 1969, according to Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates, although some schools predate or remained open after that time period. By the end of the era, the Indian Affairs Bureau estimates that, adjusting for inflation, the federal government appropriated $23.3 billion for boarding schools.

But the assimilatory practices didn’t end there.

U.S. policy shifted to removing Native children from their parents and intentionally placing them in the state foster care system with non-Native caretakers, according to the report. To this day, Native children are overrepresented in foster care systems, according to a report from the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

Nearly 1,000 died while in the care of boarding school staff, though the federal government is still working to repatriate and identify remains of children found in unmarked graves, leading experts to believe that the total death count is higher. For those who survived, according to the report, their adult lives are often plagued with chronic health conditions, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems.

“The trauma that our parents, our grandparents went through — our children still suffer from it.” Cody said.

The trauma experienced by survivors had a trickle-down effect, impacting generations down the line. One study shows that children whose fathers attended boarding schools were 36% more likely than their peers to have a chronic health problem in the past year.

The first formal rejection of forced assimilation of Native American children was in 1978 with the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law that stopped the intentional placement of Native children with non-Native caregivers. Then came the 1990 Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act, which the recent NACPA law builds upon.

“The United States has an obligation to correct and heal the wrongs wrought by the Federal Indian boarding school system because those wrongs continue to harm Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Villages, and the Native Hawaiian Community,” wrote Indian Affairs Department Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland in the report.

In his list of recommendations for legislators Newland not only implored the federal government to apologize, something realized by President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in October, but to give funding to Native communities that is “at a minimum, commensurate with the investments made in the Federal Indian boarding school system.”

Though the NACPA is a step in that direction, with the investments made into boarding school policy in the billions, there is, as written in the report, still a long “road to healing.”

Gillian Barkhurst is a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal. She can be reached at gbarkhurst@abqjournal.com or on Twitter @G_Barkhurst.