Abstract
A full understanding of the roots of child separation must begin with Native children. This Article demonstrates how modern child welfare, delinquency, and education systems are rooted in the social control of indigenous children. It examines the experiences of Native girls in federal and state systems from the late 1800s to the mid1900s to show that, despite their ostensibly benevolent and separate purposes, these institutions were indistinguishable and interchangeable. They were simply differently styled mechanisms of forced assimilation, removal, discipline, and confinement. As the repeating nature of government intervention into the lives of Native children makes clear, renaming a system does not change its effect. The historical roots of these systems must be acknowledged, and the current systems must be abolished and replaced. To answer the question of what a nonpunitive, non-assimilative system would look like, this Article looks to tribal courts and indigenous justice systems. It points to specific examples of how Native communities have reshaped ideas about caring for and disciplining children, including traditional adoption, kinship care, wellness courts, family group conferencing, and a “best interests” standard that emphasizes the link between individual and collective well-being.
Highlights
American law, historically, has been a tool of social control directed at fixing, confining, and punishing communities of color
They were of a lost generation which had given up all hope, necktie-wearers waiting for the Great White Father to do for them.”[99]. Beyond their effect on individual children, boarding schools disrupted family structures and intergenerational learning
The history of Native girls under state control reveals that the conception of education, child welfare, and juvenile justice as three separate institutions with three separate purposes is a false one
Summary
In the late 1800s, Fort Marion in Florida and Fort Sill in Oklahoma housed Native[1] prisoners of war, including Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache prisoners.[2]. Carlisle was the first federal Indian boarding school Pratt refined his assimilationist curriculum and disciplinary techniques on the Apache children and later generations of Native children. He employed methods developed during his time working as a prison guard at Fort Marion.[8] Carlisle’s first generation of Apache children had been prisoners and students, but the same approaches were used in the prison and the school and, the same person imposed them. The Chemawa Indian School is one of the many federally run boarding schools opened in Carlisle’s image. 10 Larsen, supra note 9, at 9 (reporting on 1880 construction).
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