CPS and America's native communities. A history of...what else(?) tragedy and failure. Part I.

From the earliest days of European contact with America's native peoples, of course, the power relationships between the two groups have forced one group to adapt and adopt now ways of life, and the other to play the role (alternately) of conqueror, overlord, teacher, mentor, missionary and "big brother."

Of course, nothing like the horrors of our current so-called "child protective" "services" (CPS) milieu was imagined by either side until almost 500 years of inter-relations between the groups had occurred. None of the major European settler groups in what is North America-- whether Cavalier, Pilgrim, Dutchman, Acadian, Mennonite, Amish, Irish or Quebecois-- ever envisioned a system where the government interfered in matters that were, for millennia the unique and sole province of church and family.

(Image courtesy of en.wikipedia.org.)

Sadly, with the exception of the French Catholics along the St. Lawrence Seaway and what is now Nova Scotia, most of the Europeans eventually saw the native tribes as merely groups in need of "religion and civilization." While they had a Biblical mandate to at least attempt the former, there was no Scriptural warrant for the latter--though there was sometimes an urging from authorities back home. "The white man's burden" may have been a term more readily applied to English missionaries (and the British East India Company) later and much further East, but the tenets of it began much earlier and in North America.

The concept centered around the notion that it was the responsibility of "more advanced" people to bring "the blessings" of modernity to native peoples, even if those peoples had no interest in adopting new life styles. As war became more and more common between natives and settlers, the inevitable victors often began resorting to the role of "benevolent overlord"--seeking to to "acculturate" those conquered and, especially, to raise the orphaned children of dead braves in all the manners and precepts of European Christendom. Native languages were forbidden in school. Dress codes were enforced. Hairstyles altered. If they could not save the soul, it was thought, they could at least "kill the Indian, in order to save the man."

(The White Man's Burden...taking unwilling native peoples to the promised land of "Civilization" and modernity.)

When the active resistance against an increasingly impossible enemy ceased around 1890-1900, it became common practice for "Indians" to be herded onto reservations where their somewhat nomadic and hunter/gatherer subsistence styles were overcome by the desire of white administrators to make farmers of the natives. As, invariably, the tribes were given the lands no white people wanted, this often was a non-starter from the beginning, especially for people with no skill or history with farming or large-scale animal husbandry. Alcoholism and other forms of "quiet resistance" and escapism set in, causing, of course, great hardships for native children.

(Native children "on the res."...Courtesy of floridamemory.com.)

Even before there was anything even remotely akin to modern CPS, American government officials, missionaries, and others were commonly involved in caring for orphaned and abused native children. Sometimes these children were voluntarily turned over by parents in no condition, now, to care for them.. but often child seizures (with or without warrant--usually without) became an all-too-familiar element of "reservation life" for devastated native communities.

It wasn't until 1978 and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) that American government officials began to see the error of their ways, and that something had to be done in order to halt what had become almost a completely irreversible eradication of all Indian cultures. Indeed, dozens of entire tribes had already disappeared from the map, never to rise again before concerted efforts were made by the U.S. government to intervene. Canada had seen the problem of potential cultural genocide earlier and had done a better job (possibly best explained as a simple result of a much lower density of white settlement) of leaving native tribes alone, providing only minimal charitable resources as necessary, and allowing native cultures to remain intact...especially in the prairie provinces and the far West.

(Native reservation school...Image courtesy of newsmaven.io)

Still, Canadian and American elites increasingly began to see native children as a type of natural resource, and while approaches to acculturation varied, the problem of absentee and extremely incapacitated (by alcohol, drugs and depression) native parents drove continued intervention by authorities into native population centers.

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry about the ICWA:

"ICWA was enacted in 1978 because of the disproportionately high rate of forced removal of Indian children from their traditional homes and essentially from American Indian cultures as a whole. Before enactment, as many as 25 to 35 percent of all Indian children were being forcibly removed, mostly from intact American Indian families, and placed in non-Indian homes, with a deliberate absence of American Indian cultures. In some cases, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) paid the states to remove Indian children and to place them with non-Indian families and religious groups. Testimony in the House Committee for Interior and Insular Affairs showed that in some cases, the per capita rate of Indian children in foster care was nearly 16 times higher than the rate for non-Indians."

(Image courtesy of picpedia.org.)

It was around this time that the harbinger of future tragedy was seen with the advent of The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA,) which was passed in 1974, and which required states "to prevent, identify and treat child abuse and neglect." Modern CPS was thus born, largely as a result of the tragedy of centuries of sadly one-sided native-European interaction.

In Part II, tomorrow, we delve more deeply into the way native American children have been treated by CPS in comparison to children of other races, focusing mostly on the sad and failed history of American policies and procedures purportedly designed to help children and families, while manifestly doing almost the complete opposite.