Local, USA

DENISE LAJIMODIERE: I want America to be aware of what happened to us.

TINA MCDUFFIE: For decades, Native children were forcibly removed from their families and tribes.

Abuse, neglect, bullying, torture, and pain.

MCDUFFIE: Now survivors fight to protect the next generation.

MARIE STARR: Let us take care of our children.

It's our right to take of them.

MCDUFFIE: Presented by Retro Report, "Generations Stolen" on Local, U.S.A. DIANA JEFFERSON: Want to go skip rock, Rosa?

- Okay, I want to grab this one.

I will throw it.

REPORTER: The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a decades-old law on adoptions of Native American children.

The 1978 law gives preference to Native American families.

DIANA JEFFERSON: Go further.

REPORTER 2: The law was being challenged by a group of White Christian foster parents who alleged it was unconstitutional racial discrimination.

REPORTER 3: The federal law will remain intact.

AMY LONETREE: There has been a long history of child removal to remove Native American children and place them in White homes.

This legislation is so important.

It is about the future of our nations, the future of our communities.

DIANA PHAIR: This is the Lummi Reservation, and we're not an island, but we're a long peninsula.

And water is on, is big part of our, um, our heritage.

It's your canoe racing, your harvesting of your clams and your fish, and... (voiceover): We knew we wanted to build a project here, a place that would be helping to bring children home out of foster care, because at that time, we had over 200 kids in foster care.

We had people coming in, saying, "I lost my kids, and I need to get my kids back."

- Mommy!

PHAIR: And so, we knew we needed to help provide the stable housing for return of their children.

(Rosa Jefferson cheers) DIANA JEFFERSON: At first, it was, like, really hard to believe that we're here and to be a family again.

It makes me so happy.

(chuckles) Back in 2019, my mom was very sick, and I started using around then.

When she passed away, we really didn't have nowhere to go at the time, and the trailer that we were staying in was really small.

And the kids, you know, they're missing a lot of school.

CPS was called on us and the cops came and grabbed our kids.

We had to do a lot to get where we're at today to get our kids back.

WOMAN: I grew up in the foster care system.

- Right.

Then I turned 18 and ran off.

PLUMMER: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

WOMAN: So... PLUMMER (voiceover): When I work with them, I'm just coming alongside and hearing their stories, and then helping them connect the dots to past trauma.

PLUMMER: So, tonight, we're just going to talk about some of the history and heritage we have from our families.

DIANA JEFFERSON: My grandma would talk to me about, like, her going to boarding school.

PLUMMER: Mm-hmm.

- Um, she talked about the abuse that she went through, and... PLUMMER: Anyone else?

CLAIRE: I'm just trying to break that generational cycle of childhood trauma, and having this place of safety and, you know, knowing that my son... (crying): ...won't get taken away and won't get hurt by anybody.

PLUMMER: That's what it's all about.

Breaking that cycle of the trauma from the past.

DENNIS DECOTEAU: It was in '65,'66.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, they had a police force, and, uh, they were going around and they were rounding up some of these kids.

And so, they came to our house, and, uh, they picked me up and they put me in the police car.

I was, uh, 11.

They put us on a bus, and, uh, we were going to this boarding school, Wahpeton Indian Boarding School.

I wrote down, uh, a couple of words when I, when I try to explain, uh, try to describe my experience there, um... Abuse.

Uh, neglect, bullying, torture, and pain.

LAJIMODIERE: I've been doing research along with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition for about a decade.

The first off-reservation federal boarding school was 1879.

They developed pretty rapidly after that.

The social ills that we're experiencing now, so many of them come from the boarding school era.

- This is where my father and my grandfather were sent here.

(voiceover): I want America to be aware of what happened to us.

I called it America's best-kept secret.

LORETTA MONETTE: We walked in, and all these strange people were standing there-- people talking rough and mean and jerking us in line, and... We didn't know from one day or another what was going to happen to us.

We were all afraid of being there.

DENNIS DECOTEAU: I have flashbacks getting to the school.

Uh, I'm noticing that they're cutting everybody's hair off.

Uh, there were kids crying, I remember.

Young, you know, young Native Americans, you know, I think that they, um, they prided them, themselves on their, their long hair.

The children as we find them before we bring them to the government schools.

We bring them in, clean them up.

They are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.

(door unlatching) (exhales) So, these are the sinks, the troughs that the little boys would have come, washed up in the morning.

Oh, this is really in bad shape.

(voiceover): My father was beaten severely.

- Some more storage of the old desks.

(voiceover): And they were told, you know, "You filthy stinking Indians," and, "You'll never amount to anything."

- And back here is the dungeon.

So, this is where boys were put when they didn't speak English.

DENNIS DECOTEAU: At Wahpeton, there was 18 rooms on each wing, and they were all numbered.

And, um, there was an equipment room that didn't have a number on it, so we gave it that name, Room 19.

And there was a little, um, metal grill on the door about this big, and, uh, one day, I noticed that there were some kids all standing around this grill.

And you can hear this kid getting beaten in this room.

One day, I took some food out of the cafeteria, and, uh, I got into trouble for, uh, for doing that, and I ended up in Room 19.

Your choice was the fiberglass fishing pole or the razor strap.

MONETTE: They would haul us out early in the morning before breakfast to go and work.

We did hard labor like little, tiny, miniature slaves, and whose brains were just now starting to function for five, six, seven years.

I have male friends that told me the things that, that were done to them by priests.

We were taught so much hardship that they didn't teach us nothing except anger as we got older.

DENNIS DECOTEAU: It was difficult for me.

I was kind of a lost, uh, lost soul, you know, just stumbling around.

It's hard to talk about it, because it was something that I tried to block out of my mind.

LAJIMODIERE: My folks did not send me or my brother or sister to boarding school.

But I still suffer from the effects of them having attended boarding school.

My father was very verbally abusive.

We were hit a lot.

I always say, "Where did they learn to be parents?"

LONETREE: The social workers kind of took over from where the boarding schools left off.

Native families were basically under surveillance by social welfare agencies, and they used any excuse they could to remove Native children.

Lately here, we've had a lot of trouble with the social welfare of Benson County coming in and taking the children away from the mothers and fathers and grandmothers.

We want our children and our grandchildren, but we are not allowed to keep them.

REBECCA BLACK: We call it the Scoop Era because your children weren't safe playing in their front yards.

Your children weren't safe walking home from school.

When a new car comes into the yard, they run in the house and, "Mama, are they coming after us now?"

And they're always, every day and every night, when a car comes, they're afraid that they're coming now to get them.

And they hear the talk, too.

My very first recall is being lifted into the window of a red truck and placed between two strangers and, um...

The smell, the smell of the skin of the woman next to me, the smell of the dust, of the, the man, when these became my parents, my adoptive parents.

BERTRAM HIRSCH: Starting in 1968, I was tasked with trying to determine what was going on with tribes nationwide.

Virtually every tribe in the country was experiencing somewhere in the 25% to 35% out-of-home placement situation for all their kids.

(man speaking in background) HIRSCH: There was frequently not an allegation of child abuse, almost never of child abuse.

Child neglect, yes.

Neglect by the lights of, of what these caseworkers or social workers wanted to define as neglect, which was almost always conditions of poverty.

They weren't doing the same thing to White poor folks.

They weren't doing that.

BLACK: My mother was taken during that era from our people, from my grandparents and my great-grandparents.

My grandmother Myrtle found out where they were, and she went to go get her children.

But with a swing of the gavel, a White judge said that she was morally unfit to raise her children.

While my grandma and my great-grandparents are fighting to regain custody, my mother has already been transported out of state into White adoption.

The family that adopted my mother was really abusive, and, um, when she got pregnant with me, they sent her away to a Catholic girls' home.

She went into labor, and then the nuns brought, uh, paperwork for her.

And they said, "You just need to sign these."

And I was taken from the room, and she asked, "Where's my child?

Where's my little girl?

I want to hold my baby."

And they told her... (voice breaking): "You will never see your child.

You signed papers, adoption papers for her."

HIRSCH: The Bureau of Indian Affairs established this project called the Indian Adoption Project, which was funded and financed by the federal government, but it was carried out by the Child Welfare League of America and its affiliated adoption agencies.

BLACK: So these are the papers that changed my life forever.

HIRSCH: The market for Indian children emerged because the White families wanted to adopt a White baby, but White babies were in short supply.

And so, they started to look elsewhere, and the next best thing, it seems, was a Native American kid.

BLACK: We were being advertised to middle-class, uh, White America as of these, like, poor Indian waifs who have no one, who have nothing.

WHITE HAWK: And they made sure they used words that made us seem like we were orphans, the child that nobody wanted.

I wasn't needing a home-- I had a home, and I had a family.

I had a huge family that cared and loved for me.

But I remember my adoptive mom said, "Your mother didn't really want you.

"She just wanted to keep you so she would get a welfare check so she could drink."

That I needed to be grateful, more grateful, because any Indian kid on the reservation would be happy to be where I'm at.

HIRSCH: Everybody knew that there were children in out-of-home placements, but nobody connected the dots and realized that this was an epidemic.

We have called these hearings today to begin to define the specific problems that American Indian families face in raising their children.

HIRSCH: This was an unknown issue in the Congress, and we had to make it a known issue.

Well, they always come to me and said that I wasn't, I wasn't a very good mother and everything, and that my children would be better off if they were in a White home or if they were adopted out.

JAMES ABOUREZK: They, they said that, but did they ever...

Were they ever able to prove that in court, or did they give anybody a specific example of why you weren't a good mother?

It was never proven in court that she was unfit.

LONETREE: We saw an issue that had to be addressed, and you had grandmas and aunties gathering together.

And they were out there fighting for our children.

Several hundred Indians and their supporters walked from the Lincoln Memorial, past the Washington Monument, up to Capitol Hill today to support certain legislation, including one proposed law that will affect their right to decide what can happen to Indian children.

HIRSCH: We mounted a massive campaign to get this law through.

It was just jubilation, you know?

Just total jubilation.

STARR: The Indian Child Welfare Act, that was a blessing for our children.

Some of the kids were coming back from being out in foster care, and they were hurt-- their, their spirit was hurt.

They didn't know where they belonged.

Their identity was gone.

You want to make sure that your kids are safe.

Let us do our job-- let us take care of our children, and it is our right.

It's our right to take care of them.

REPORTER: One Texas family wants the justices to strike it down to make it easier for non-Native families to adopt Native American kids.

REPORTER 2: Petitioners argued ICWA not only went beyond Congress's authority to govern Indian affairs, but violates the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

BLACK: If the Indian Child Welfare Act had been in place when my mother was taken, she would have grown up in our community and with our people.

She would have grown up with her extended family around her.

She would have grown up knowing who she was as a, as a young girl.

For me, the story was very similar.

The abuse that I suffered in, uh, my adoption was horrific.

I lived for a long time like my mother, really disconnected.

And so, healing for me has taken a long time.

I looked for it my whole life in other things, you know, self-medicating and all of the things that people do looking outside of themselves.

And it wasn't until connecting to our culture and our ceremony that I started this healing of my own.

AMANDA CHAVIRA: As a kid, it was painful and sometimes was scary.

All of you were operating out of your trauma and we were then suffering for it.

- Yeah, right.

- And I didn't know that.

I equated culture with the pain and suffering of our people, um, and the ways that people act that out.

I didn't feel like transformation started to happen until later.

I remember weeping and thinking all of this is what was taken from me.

(voice wavering): Because before, I thought of it in relation to you.

- Right.

- This was taken from you.

This was what happened to you and your mom.

And I always separated myself from it.

Um, and so, that was the first moment where I was, like, "This was taken from me, myself, and then in turn, from my children."

- (singing) CHAVIRA: During the ceremonies, like, when I'm dancing and I'm singing and I'm able to be a part of that, it feels powerful.

Because it's healing, it's beautiful.

It's amazing to know that you're there witnessing me doing my thing, and each time that we do it, I feel stronger.

BLACK: Yeah.

- I feel my Indian is stronger.

- Yes!

(singing and drumming continue) BLACK: It took four generations to heal the trauma that was created from my mother being taken from our people.

CHAVIRA: And so, the hope is, is that with each generation, it's going to get a little bit easier on them, you know, a little bit less that they're going to have to heal from.

DENNIS DECOTEAU: I'm getting close to the end of my career.

Had quite a few jobs in education and made my way back, uh, to Dunseith here, uh, about four years ago.

And I was thinking about these, um, these students that I went to school with when I went down, down to my office there, and, um, their faces are forever young in my mind.

And a lot of them are gone now, of course, you know?

When I think about that, I think about, uh, you know, "What am, what am I doing here?

What is my responsibility?"

You know, if I could, uh, have an impact on one child's life, uh, especially a Native American one, uh, then, you know, I've, I've accomplished my goal.

Divulging these stories that I've kept in my vaults for 50 years is, uh, I think, is a way for me to heal, but those wounds are still there.

They're still there, you know, after 50 years.

So, time doesn't heal all.