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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'It's not my walk. It's the souls that survived this'
Kevin AbourezkICT GENOA, Neb. – It took three years, but Nathan Phillips finally is fulfilling his dream. In the dream, he floated above the earth and looked down upon the many places he's visited in his life, places he had traveled in order to help people in their struggles. After a life spent devoted to social justice, Phillips marveled at his own accomplishments. Then something slapped in the back of the head, much like an auntie or grandma might do to a child whose head has gotten too big, he said. And then he heard a voice. 'We need you to come home and create these things here. We're waiting for you.' And so on Monday, May 12, the Omaha elder stood before elders of his tribe and others and talked of his dream and why he had brought them to this painful place – the site of the former U.S. Indian Industrial School at Genoa. 'It's taken me two years from those dreams to now to make it here,' he said. 'It's not my walk. It's the souls that survived this. That's what this is about, those survivors, and those that didn't make it home.' The Genoa Indian School Walk began Monday at the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation Museum. The walk was held as a way to honor those students who attended the school, which opened in 1884 and closed in 1934 and was home to as many as 600 students at its peak. Genoa was but one of more than 400 boarding schools that were designed to assimilate Indigenous people into White culture by separating students from their families and cutting them off from their culture. The walk is expected to end this week. Today, little remains of the once sprawling 640-acre campus besides the museum. Phillips' mother, Dorothy Hastings, attended the school in northeast Nebraska and later returned home to Macy. Many others weren't as fortunate, and some died while attending the school. In 2023, the Nebraska state archaeologist and the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs began searching for a gravesite where they believe as many as 80 students were buried. The former cemetery's location was lost after the school's closure. At least 86 students are believed to have died at the school, according to newspaper clippings, records and a student's letter. Students usually died of diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid, but at least one death was blamed on an accidental shooting. In 2022, the U.S. Interior Department released a report on federal-run boarding schools and then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, traveled to sites where boarding schools were located to gather oral testimonies from survivors and descendants of survivors. On Oct. 25, 2024, then-President Joe Biden delivered an apology to Native people for the failed boarding school era. One of the most devastating impacts of the boarding schools was its impact on Indigenous languages. In the schools, children were whipped and slapped for speaking their Native languages. Many of those who came out of the schools became convinced that their tribal languages and cultures were impediments to their people's survival in American society. Many decided to not teach their languages to their children and grandchildren, and within just a few years, many Indigenous languages began to fade away as few young people learned those languages and fluent speakers died. One of those who chose to not teach her son the language was Dorothy Hastings, and so Nathan Phillips never learned to speak Omaha. He has since spent much of his life trying to learn his Native culture and language and teach his daughter what he's learned. 'To see that dramatic loss of language just in that one generation from my grandmother to my father, and how that's impacting me in the way that I learn the language now is something that's really difficult,' his daughter, Alethea Phillips, said. She spoke about her dad being taken from his family at the age of 5 and placed in a series of foster homes before running away as a teenager. He eventually joined the U.S. Marines. On Jan. 20, 2019, he gained fame after a confrontation with Nicholas Sandmann, a White Catholic student, during competing political rallies before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In photos and videos that went viral, the teenager, who was taking part in an anti-abortion rally, stood face-to-face before the Omaha elder as Phillips sang and used a Native drum. Many accused Sandmann of sparking the confrontation and ridiculing Phillips, though later videos and news coverage showed the two met on the steps as Phillips attempted to walk up the steps and Sandmann stood still facing him and smiling. The teenager later received death threats, but later sued many of the news companies who reported on the incident, eventually settling many of the lawsuits. Nathan Phillips did not speak about the incident during the boarding school memorial walk, instead focusing on the children who attended the Genoa school and their troubled lives afterward. Alethea Phillips thanked her father for helping his tribe and others who have needed his help with social justice efforts. 'I just want to take this as an opportunity to express how proud I am of my father for doing the work he's done to reconnect with our tribe, with our family and with our community so that I know my culture in a way that he didn't growing up,' she said. As they departed from the Genoa boarding school museum, Nathan Phillips led the procession of nearly a dozen walkers and three horse riders. The sun was hot and the march snaked slowly through the small village of Genoa before turning onto a gravel road and heading east. Walkers were mostly silent. The riders laughed. Cars drove slowly past as morning became afternoon, and the riders – all from the Omaha Tribe – ended their leg of the journey and loaded their horses into a trailer. Walkers who had joined from the Omaha Tribe and many who came from Lincoln, Nebraska, also loaded into their cars and drove away. From there, Nathan and Alethea Phillips continued walking alone. Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Betrayal of a sacred federal promise'
Kevin AbourezkICT A Democratic U.S. senator and a Native American education advocate said Thursday that President Donald Trump's executive order calling for dismantling the U.S. Education Department could have disastrous impacts on Native signed the order Thursday, advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that's been a longtime target of conservatives. He has derided the Education Department as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. Republicans said they will introduce a bill to achieve department, however, is not set to close completely. The White House said the department will retain certain critical functions. Trump said his administration will close the department beyond its 'core necessities," preserving its responsibilities for Title I funding for low-income schools, Pell grants and money for children with disabilities. The White House said earlier it would also continue to manage federal student president blamed the department for America's lagging academic performance and said states will do a better job.'It's doing us no good," he said at a White House ceremony. However, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawai'i, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said Thursday that Trump's order effectively violates the government's federal trust and treaty responsibilities to tribes to provide education. 'The Department of Education plays a critical role in Native education, on everything from special education and Impact Aid to Native language revitalization,' he said in a news release. 'Without a functional Department of Education, Native students – more than 90 percent of whom attend public schools – will be at the mercy of state governments that have no legal responsibility to meet their needs.' The Education Department sends billions of dollars a year to schools and oversees $1.6 trillion in federal student much of the agency's work revolves around managing money — both its extensive student loan portfolio and a range of aid programs for colleges and school districts, such as school meals and support for homeless students. The agency also is key in overseeing civil rights called the order a 'betrayal of a sacred federal promise.''We have a duty to fight this reckless plan and protect Native students,' he said. More than 92 percent of Native students attend public and charter K-12 schools, not Bureau of Indian Education schools, Schatz the Education Department would slash funding for Native students in public, charter and BIE schools, which rely on resources like Individuals with Disabilities Education Act special education services, Impact Aid, English Language Learner supports, and Every Student Succeeds Act Title VI Indian education programs.'It would also mean less dedicated funding for teachers, sports, building repairs, school meal programs, transportation, and after-school tutoring/activities – leaving Native students with fewer educational opportunities,' Schatz the Trump administration has been gutting the agency. Its workforce is being slashed in half, and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil for public schools said eliminating the department would leave children behind in an American education system that is fundamentally unequal.'This is a dark day for the millions of American children who depend on federal funding for a quality education, including those in poor and rural communities with parents who voted for Trump,' NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the order will be fought in the courts and in Congress, and they urged Republicans to join them in opposition. The department was 'founded in part to guarantee the enforcement of students' civil rights,' said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. 'Champions of public school segregation objected, and campaigned for a return to 'states' rights.'' Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and chief executive officer of the American Indian College Fund, said Native American students should not be considered as members of a racial group, such as Black or Hispanic students, but rather as members of politically distinct sovereign nations with rights secured by treaties. 'We gave up land and resources in order for the United States to be founded and grow as a country,' she said. 'We're having to deal with that lack of knowledge on the part of many people." Native American students should be exempt from blanket attacks on programs and funding that serve minority and other vulnerable students, she said. 'We want to be allies with all of our other allies who are being attacked,' she said during a virtual panel discussion Thursday on efforts to protect minority students against federal policies. 'At the same time we have a different status that we have to advocate for.'She said further gutting or eliminating the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights would hurt Native American students, who rely on the office to ensure they are treated fairly. Native American students are suspended and expelled from schools at disproportionately high rates, studies have shown, including a recent study from Bull also expressed concern about the Trump administration cutting funding to the department's Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation's academic progress.'The loss of data is going to have a great impact on our ability to evaluate how our institutions are dealing with students and how investment should be made,' she she said she worries the nation's 35 tribal colleges and universities also could see further funding cuts as a result of Trump's executive order. She said federal education funds account for roughly 74 percent of funds for those institutions, and some of those schools get 90 percent of their funding from federal sources.'Many of the institutions are at risk of having their programs decimated by the loss of funding,' she recent decision to lay off hundreds of thousands of federal probationary employees especially impacted the country's only two federally operated tribal higher education institutions, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque and Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, both of which lost nearly one-fourth of their employees as a result of the federal published a report last year that showed tribal colleges and universities are perpetually underfunded by Congress despite federal legislation, as well as treaties, that have promised them adequate education funding. Those institutions receive a quarter-billion dollars less per year than they should, when accounting for inflation, and receive almost nothing to build and maintain their campuses, the nonprofit investigative news organization found. Those funding gaps have led to broken water pipes, leaking roofs and failing ventilation exacerbating the problem is the fact that state funds and private donations make up a miniscule portion of tribal college and university funding, meaning the loss of federal funding likely would be disastrous for those institutions, ProPublica found.'You freeze our funding and ask us to wait six months to see how it shakes out, and we close,' Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies for tribal colleges in Washington, D.C., told ProPublica. 'That's incredibly concerning.'Schatz said eliminating the Education Department, which administers federal loans and Pell grants, could impact Native students' ability to access college financial aid. And he echoed Crazy Bull's concerns about the impact of Trump's order on tribal colleges and universities.'Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), which depend on federal dollars for nearly three-quarters of their funding, could face catastrophic cuts if states decide not to maintain critical funding – pushing many to the brink of collapse and jeopardizing educational opportunities for future generations,' he Associated Press contributed to this report. Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
