Research Reports
Reflections on Traditional American Indian Ways, 1998
Threats to Tribal Sovereignty, 1998
Traditional American Indian Leadership: A Comparison with U.S. Governance, 1997
Historical Trauma and Involvement in the Criminal Justice System
The history of colonization is replete with racism, injustices, and systematic mistreatment of American Indian people. Genocide-type policies clearly illustrate a long history of failed and harmful efforts to decimate Indian people through removal, termination, and relocation. Early on, before the country was fully settled, federal policy forced the removal and relocation of several Indian tribes to selected Indian territories. Later in the 20 th century another policy initiative called “Termination,” sponsored by the U.S. Congress attempted to end the sovereign status i.e., the nation-to-nation relationship, as well as the federal trust responsibility to Indian tribes. The “Relocation Program,” promoted by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and beginning in the 1950s, moved Indians from their tribal homeland to urban areas. These failed policies intended to assimilate American Indians into mainstream America, essentially eliminating the need to deal with the “Indian problem.” These failed policies, along with violation of the nearly 500 treaties that were negotiated between the United States and Indian tribes provide the foundation for historical trauma experienced by Indian people today. Some participants describe how the process of genocide-type colonization contributes to dysfunction in communities.
“It’s useful to look at things in the context of colonization. We need to be working on decolonizing ourselves, and we want to decolonize history. We can’t decolonize history but we can use it to build a foundation and use it to keep families strong… we can decolonize this one aspect of the law and make it about respect for Indian communities. We can challenge laws that are oppressive.”
“why do Indians go to jai? And that’s basically from, that stems from almost three hundred years ago, from the culture. Think, what happened to our forefathers was a really bad thing, and through the generations have been traumas and traumas and traumas that have been carried over and carried over. And then multiplied by the shockwaves that came after that, which hit us bad in the boarding school days. I was from a boarding school myself – that is just now hitting us, let alone learning how to float through it, and get past it and deal with it – you know, how are we going to deal with this? What happened to our forefathers and what carried over all the way from them – about 275 years ago to now, and what’s happened to us, that’s the multiple factor and how are we gonna deal with that?”
“We started out at 99 million and we ended up with two million. See, we’re the biggest blemish of America, the United States, that’s why they try to cover it. If we’d just kind of evaporated and disappeared, they’d be the happiest people in the world. Because we’re the living blemish, you know?”
“Historical trauma. I think that’s at the root … people aren’t being parented and they’re having children and they’re not quite sure how to parent … there’s a real loss of identity… a real kind of floating around trying to fit in … I think that’s where alcohol abuse comes in … drugs, abuse, gangs, trying to have an identity … any way to fit in … some take the right path, the good road.”
The
Well-Being of American Indian Children in Minnesota: Economic Conditions,
1994
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Tuesday November 1, 2005