This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, and Ethnic Studies at the state and national levels. It addresses politics in Texas. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This exchange with reporters happened on June 29, 2017. It was part of a four-day “reoccupation” protest around Canada Day that takes place annually on the first day of July, Canada's independence day. As you view the video that I share, it is important to understand the context.
First, this exchange unfolded after Indigenous demonstrators erected a teepee on Parliament Hill—and, even more importantly, in the shadow of an ongoing national tragedy: the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls whose cases remain unresolved, their families’ pleas too often ignored by authorities. This crisis, rooted in the intergenerational trauma of the boarding school era and the broader legacy of colonial violence, has been extensively documented not only in Canada but across the United States, as well.
A reporter expresses why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is to blame for this, incensing the women who then accuse the media of disrespect and demanding that the reporter asking the question leave the room.
Without a doubt, their anger was more than a reaction to one reporter's disrespect. It was a lesson on white privilege and white fragility. That act of refusal is not hostility—it’s sovereignty. It's also inescapably about the agonizing loss of their loved ones. It insists that Indigenous peoples control their own stories, their own truths.
In the larger scheme of things, it means naming genocide and dispossession, and restoring not only land but decision-making power. Journalists and educators alike must ask: do our institutions create space for Indigenous truth, or do we stage reconciliation as a feel-good narrative like Thanksgiving itself that leaves power untouched?
From Parliament Hill to Texas classrooms, the struggle is shared: whose histories are told, whose truths are silenced, and whose comfort determines the limits of justice. In case you're interested and available, the Texas State Board of Education is addressing Social Studies standard this Wednesday as follows:
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Time: 9:30am – 11:00am
Location: William B. Travis building located at 1601 N. Congress, Austin, TX, 78751
**Due to construction in the lobby of the building, it will be necessary to enter from the back entrance located on Brazos St. Parking information will be provided to registered participants prior to the meeting.
As educators, advocates, and community members, we have an obligation to stand where truth is being told—even when it unsettles. Our task is to insist that our schools, our histories, and our public institutions reflect the full truth of who we are.
Indigenous demonstrators accuse media of being disrespectful in heated exchange with reporters (on June 29, 2017).
Indigenous demonstrators who led a protest and erected a teepee on Parliament Hill on Wednesday held a press conference this morning, in which they accused media of being disrespectful, rejected Justin Trudeau's reconciliation efforts with indigenous communities, and called for the UN to prosecute federal leaders
It was sung by a Cree woman named Si Pih Koh from Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada to Pope Francis last July 25, 2022. The video of her singing is embedded in the Indian Country Today story written by Miles Morrisseau. I link to it below, as well.
The Pope's visit is on the heels of the 2021 report of 215 remains of Native children discovered at Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. You can read my earlier post of this to this blog.
She expresses being on her own healing journey and she went to sing truth to power. She sang for the heart ache and generational trauma. Holding his jacket in her arms, she sang for her brother's mysterious death while in policy custody.
She sang for healing. She sang against injustice. She sang for freedom.
Si Pih Koh, Cree, who sang an emotional protest to Pope Francis with tears streaming down her face in Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada on July 25, 2022, was at peace by the time she followed the Pope to Lac Ste. Anne on Tuesday, July 26, 2022. (Photo by Miles Morrisseau/ICT)
WARNING: This story has disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. The National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline in Canada can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
LAC STE. ANNE, Alberta, Canada — She is glowing as she stands near the shores of Lac Ste. Anne, wearing the same white buckskin dress and beaded headband that captivated the world.
But this time Si Pih Ko didn’t break into song in Cree as she did Monday in Maskwacis, with tears streaming down her face — a symbol of protest at Pope Francis’ first public appearance on what he calls a “penitence pilgrimage” across Canada.
Instead, on Tuesday, she stood beaming as the sun sparkled on her beadwork and her smiles at the sacred waters of Lac Ste. Anne. It was as though the weight of the world had been lifted from her shoulders.
It's so hard to read this and not cry, to not feel the pain and emotion in this ghastly, heartbreaking account. My first question is "why isn't this front-page news everywhere?!" We can't even count on the so-called liberal media for according this appalling story its due attention. After all, this CNN report just appeared yesterday.
The structured silences are deafening—and already were a problem even before this anti-Critical Race Theory fascist campaign that is currently underway.
One commentator guesses, and I think correctly, that since there were twice as many boarding schools in the U.S., as opposed to Canada, the death count of children is also at least twice as high. I mention this in the context of the recent, horrific discovery of children's remains in Canada, (see 'Unthinkable' discovery in Canada as remains of 215 children found buried near residential school').
Can anyone imagine their own kids playing next to graveyards instead of playgrounds?!
U.S. governmental policy killed these children under the brutal framework of "assimilation," a term that is so widely used today that it may seem innocuous. Yet, that is exactly what the 1836 Project and anti-Critical Race Theory bills amount to today. Whitewashing, ethnic cleansing, that can lead to actual attacks on native peoples and genocide.
There's no other interpretation of policy that explicitly called for "killing the Indian, to save the man." This settler colonial logic is what defined federal Indian education policy from the the middle 1800s to the middle 1900s. You can read about this history in David Wallace Adam's book, Education for Extinction.
In my own work, "subtractive cultural assimilation" is my preferred term for this kind of harm to children of color whose historical experiences of oppression have been conditioned—not by voluntary migration to our shores—but by the involuntary experiences of slavery, conquest, and colonization.
It's one thing for Texas republicans not to want this taught in our schools. Aside from this brief report on CNN, it's another for our news outlets to minimize this astonishing account as not sufficiently newsworthy to cover, much less make it to the A page of the newspaper.
Rose Long Face was 18 years old when she was taken to the first government-run boarding school for Indigenous children in the United States. Within two years, she died and never returned home.
More than 140 years have passed since the Lakota girl and at least eight other children and young adults with ties to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. It was part of a campaign to assimilate Native children into White American culture.
For six years, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, also known as Sicangu Lakota, negotiated the return of the remains of 11 children and young adults who have been buried there for generations. Next week, the remains of nine of those children will arrive in South Dakota, just as officials in the US and Canada confront the countries' grim history of Indigenous boarding schools.
"It was a government model... basically, eradicate the Indian in you and replace it with a White man way of thinking," said Rodney Bordeaux, president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. "'Take the Indian on and save the child' was kind of the talk back then."
"What they forgot is the real resiliency of who we are, how we came about, how we survived and how we're continuing to survive," he added.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first off-reservation boarding school for Native American children, and was built on the abandoned Carlisle Barracks, according to the National Museum of the American Indian and the US Army War College. The college now occupies the site.
The exhumation, announced last month, is the US Army's fourth disinterment project at Carlisle Barracks, after the Army moved human remains to the post's cemetery from the school's in 1927.
The deceased are among more than 10,000 students, spanning about 50 tribes, who were brought from across the US to the school until it closed in 1918.
The nine children and young adults are part of the more than 180 students buried on the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in named and unnamed burials, according to the Office of Army Cemeteries.
Four boys posing for a photo on the grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
in 1879. Alvan Kills Seven Horses (One That Kills Seven Horses), second from left,
was buried there and his remains are among those that will be repatriated to the
Rosebud Sioux reservation next week.
The students were between the ages of 12 and 18 when they arrived at the school, said Russell Eagle Bear, a historic preservation officer for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
Their names, according to the Office of Army Cemeteries, are: Dennis Strikes First (Blue Tomahawk); Rose Long Face (Little Hawk); Lucy Take The Tail (Pretty Eagle); Warren Painter (Bear Paints Dirt); Ernest Knocks Off (White Thunder); Maud Little Girl (Swift Bear); Alvan, aka Roaster, Kills Seven Horses, One That Kills Seven Horses; Friend Hollow Horn Bear; and Dora Her Pipe (Brave Bull).
While some remains have been returned to their families and tribes in recent years, the remains of more than 100 people are still buried on the former school grounds, the OAC said.
It's unclear which tribes the rest of the children came from "due to poor record- keeping by the Indian Bureau during the operation of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School," the OAC said in a statement.
A group of teens fought for the repatriation
Malorie Arrow was a teenager when she and a few other members of the tribe's youth council made a stop on the grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School after a 2015 trip to a conference in Washington, DC.
"It wasn't until we got to the grave sites that... till we got to the parking lot of the grave sites that we all started crying...like we all started crying, we all felt the energy there," said 22-year-old Arrow.
That visit sparked a movement within the tribe, led by youth members on that trip who began asking their elders why they couldn't just bring the children home, said Akichita Cikala Hoksila Eagle Bear, 23, another member of the youth council.
"We got tired of waiting for someone to be our advocate so we had to become our own advocate. We saw a change that we needed so we became the change," said Asia Ista Gi Win Black Bull, 21, a youth council member.
"One little spark of the youth group, visiting Carlisle sparked a whole (Lakota) nation down here," she added.
Rachel Janis, Asia Ista Gi Win Black Bull, Malorie Arrow and Akichita Cikala
Hoksila Eagle Bear (left to right) are some of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's youth
council members who encouraged tribal leaders to negotiate the repatriation of
children buried at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Next week, a delegation of relatives, tribal leaders and members of the youth council will travel with the remains as they made their journey to the reservation.
Tribal members will then hold a ceremony near the Missouri River, which is the place where officials believe the children took a steamboat and began their trip to Pennsylvania, said Eagle Bear, the historic preservation officer said.
"That's the last time they saw their parents and relatives, not knowing where they were going or what was happening to them," he said.
After relatives and tribe members pay their respects and pray for the children during a wake, the remains of seven of them will be buried at the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Veterans Cemetery and two in their family's land, according to Eagle Bear.
US officials will investigate more boarding schools
The children's homecoming is an opportunity for their descendants to heal but also a realization of how many more children are left to be found, Indigenous rights advocates and tribal members say.
The Department of Interior will review its past oversight of the school program, assess how it has impacted generations of families and identify boarding school facilities and burial sites across the country, Haaland said.
While the unmarked graves discovered in recent weeks were in Canada, Christine Diindiisi McCleave, chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, says similar discoveries could also take place in the US.
"If you look at the numbers here from the United States, we had twice as many schools. You can basically just estimate that our numbers will be double what they found in Canada," McCleave said.
Because the coalition has been working for more than a decade in collecting records for the more than 300 boarding schools across the country, McCleave says federal authorities are taking on a challenging task.
For McCleave, the recent discoveries of unmarked graves have brought up pain and trauma for many Indigenous communities, reminding them of their families' grief and how they lost their language and culture over the years.
As the Sicangu Lakota prepare for the children's homecoming, they know there's much more to be done.
"This is the very start of the fire," Black Bull says. There are many children that remain unaccounted for and many former boarding schools that should be investigated, she said.
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Excellent piece by Mark Trahant of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes on how this administration's actions are an extension of a tawdry and violent history against native peoples.
Cages for kids in our context today are disturbingly analogous to
the image of baby handcuffs below designed specifically for American Indian children when they themselves were ripped apart from their parents only to be "schooled" (not educated) via "forced acculturation through brutal military-style incarceration cloaked as education in U.S. Indian boarding schools."
Our goal should not be to continue to bureaucratically administer this horrible injustice on the U.S.-Mexico border, but rather to give amnesty to all of these victimized families so that the U.S. government can provide them with the psychological counseling and trauma-induced mental disorders and delays and other social welfare services that they desperately need. Parents that have already been deported also need to get amnesty and reunited with their children.
Uniting every single child with their parent only to deport them will further perpetuate the cycle of abuse, poverty, and poor human development.
While I'm not at all sure about comprehensive immigration reform with this Congress and this president, it is still the case that we need fair and just immigration policy about which we can be proud, including a Marshall Plan for Central American countries to help re-build their economies so that families do not have to migrate to begin with.
This is our problem. We need to own it. Do read Trahant's powerful reflection and exposition below.
Many in Indian Country were quick to condemn the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy
Mark Trahant
Indian Country Today
Indian Country remembers. This is not the first administration to order the forced separation of families.
The Trump administration has initiated a zero-tolerance policy on the border. Zero tolerance means that people caught crossing the border are treated as criminals.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said the Trump administration separated 1,995 children from the adults they were traveling with at the U.S. border between April 19 and May 31.
“The act of ripping children away from their parents is nothing new for the United States. Separating children and their families to “kill the Indian to save the man“ by sending Native children to boarding schools, and doing it in the name of religion, is one generation removed from my family,” wrote Peggy Flanagan on Twitter. Flanagan, White Earth, is a candidate for lt. governor in Minnesota. “Trump’s ‘zero tolerance policy’ is nothing more than a clear violation of human rights. We must learn from history. We must stand with immigrants and refugees.”
From the piece: "For such small objects, the child’s handcuffs are surprisingly heavy when cradled in the palms of one’s hand. Although now rusted from years of disuse, they still convey the horror of their brutal purpose, which was to restrain Native children who were being brought to boarding schools. “I felt the weight of their metal on my heart,” said Jessica Lackey of the Cherokee tribe as she described holding the handcuffs for the first time.
Pember wrote that she had heard rumors about the existence of the handcuffs during visits to Haskell. Then Haskell agreed to allow a public viewing of the handcuffs. She wrote: “Andy Girty, one of the elders who first blessed the handcuffs when they were given to Haskell in 1989, helped unwrap them for me. Known as the Haskell Institute in its early years, the school opened its doors in 1884. It was originally founded as an instrument of the final solution to this country’s “Indian problem”; Haskell Institute’s mission then was embodied in the now infamous motto of Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” This mind-set led to decades of forced acculturation through brutal military-style incarceration cloaked as education in U.S. Indian boarding schools."
This tragic history is once again public policy. And, like previous public policy debates, the authorities rely on Christian scripture for their inhumane acts.
“The American people have been begging and pleading with our elected officials for an immigration system that is lawful and that serves our national interest—one that we can be proud of. There is nothing mean-spirited about that. They are right, decent and just to ask for this,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week. “We’ve got a choice here. We either have open borders or we have laws. It’s one or the other.”
Sessions, a Sunday School teacher, proclaimed: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”
Immigration is an issue that will surface again in Congress as soon as this week. President Trump will meet with House Republicans to discuss the issue Tuesday.
Republicans debate their own competing plans for immigration reform. The House will consider two bills: A conservative, hardline approach and a more moderate version. (Moderate among Republicans. The bill is unlikely to win votes from many Democrats.) A third bill, an actual moderate proposal, could only be brought to the floor with a discharge petition, the signatures of a majority of members. The House leadership’s immigration bill is designed to make sure that never happens.
But the division between Republicans (harsh across the board on immigration or mostly harsh on immigration) leaves Democrats out of the discourse, and therefore any bill is unlikely to become law.
The conservative bill is authored by House judiciary chair Bob Goodlatte. That bill includes funding for a wall, further slow legal immigration, and end family reunification as a policy. The conservative approach does not address the family separation issue or any legal citizenship route for the dreamers, immigrants who came to this country as children.
The House leadership bill, a draft was posted by Politico, calls for more border security, a solution for the dreamers via a special visa. It also says it ends separation of families at the border.
Both bills restrict legal immigration and provide penalties for cities that support sanctuary policies.
Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, a member of House leadership, told Axios that the only way this bill can happen is if President Trump “leans in on it hard, he can make a huge difference.” The president is expected to meet with House Republicans this week.
Perhaps an immigration bill could pass in the House. But Senate Republicans would need votes from Democrats in order to prevent a filibuster -- and that’s unlikely.
A new poll shows two-thirds of voters are against the policy and nearly 80 percent support citizenship for the Dreamers.
American voters oppose 66 - 27 percent the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.
"When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can't ignore? Two- thirds of American voters oppose the family separation policy at our borders," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. "Neither quotes from the Bible nor get-tough talk can soften the images of crying children nor reverse the pain so many Americans feel. And if you are a Dreamer, voters say, 'We have your back.'"
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Speaker Paul Ryan picked up more flack for the Trump policy of separation of children from their parents.
Singer John Legend attacked Ryan’s Father’s Day tweet. “Seriously, f--k you,” he tweeted. “Reunite the families at the border and we can talk about father's day.”
Legend is not alone in his condemnation of the policy. Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote an op-ed against the policy in The Washington Post. “On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents,” she wrote. “People on all sides agree that our immigration system isn’t working, but the injustice of zero tolerance is not the answer. I moved away from Washington almost a decade ago, but I know there are good people at all levels of government who can do better to fix this.” Since Bush's op-ed, four former First Ladies have called for an end of the policy.
And there is one more parallel with Indian Country and the border policy of family separation. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Colleen Kraft, told Buzzfeed News that the separations will cause “irreparable harm to lifelong development by disrupting a child’s architecture. Immigration has become so politicized. We would really like people to sit back instead and think of the health of these children.”
She cited a list of physical and mental health issues. She said the research shows that children who are forcibly taken from their parents have demonstrated links to asthma, obesity and cancer, in addition to tendencies toward substance abuse, developmental delays and mental health issues.
One such study is a 2013 report in the Journal of Family Issues. Researchers looked at historical trauma “incurred by genocide (see United Nations definition, 1948) and the subsequent forced acculturation polices has been accumulating over the past decade to include affective states like anger, depression, guilt, and anxiety, internalized oppression, and feelings of inadequacy in parenting roles.”
The Intergenerational Effects of Relocation Policies on Indigenous Families by Melissa L. Walls, PhD and Les B. Whitbeck, PhD said that “government relocation policy of the 1950s provides a somewhat recent example of an acculturation policy. It affected a cohort of whom many still survive and affords the opportunity to measure the psychosocial impact of moving individuals from reservations to urban employment settings.”
The study found “a critical and widely documented aspect of intergenerational continuity concerns the mediating effects of parenting processes on parent-to-child transmissions of behavior and emotional well-being.”
A key point: “Generational ties are particularly valued because elders are viewed as repositories of cultural knowledge, spirituality, and traditional language. Their life experience is enormously respected and they are turned to for direction and advice. When these linkages are disturbed the consequences ripple through subsequent generations.”
Monday on CNN, Dr. Kraft detailed how the administration's policy emotionally harms children. “I can’t describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers,” Kraft said. “Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. And this is not normal activity or brain development with these children.”
Mark Trahant is editor of Indian Country Today. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Follow him on Twitter - @TrahantReports Email: mtrahant@indiancountrytoday.com
