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Vice President Kamala Harris will officially accept her party’s nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night in Chicago.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) formally accepted his nomination for vice president Wednesday.
As National Native News anchor Antonia Gonzales reports, Native Americans at the DNC say it’s important for the next administration to keep the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations.
Native people at the DNC say there are a number of tribal issues that need to be addressed by the next administration.
Duane Duffy is vice president of the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico.
“We want to see an investment in head start facilities, head start education, and the federal government to honor and respect the treaties that were signed and that trust responsibility owed to the tribal governments and tribal citizens.”
Kansas delegate Carole Cadue-Blackwood (enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe) says she’d like the next administration to further the boarding school report by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), which investigated the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding schools.
“I would like to see someone support, enforce, endorse the Indian boarding school report, and Deb Haaland one of her recommendations is that schools should teach Native American curriculum. That’s history, culture, language.”
Ellen Williams, a member of the Native community in Chicago, says she’d like see the next president and vice president make sure to protect the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) as the law, intended to keep Native children with Native families, continues to be challenged.
“When people attack our families and our children, steal our children, remove our children it’s a way for genocide, if we can’t keep our children, all of our love, and all of our future is with our babies.”
In her role as vice president, during remarks at the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit in Washington, DC, Vice President Harris told tribal leaders she’ll continue to defend the ICWA.
At the summit, Harris also recognized tribal sovereignty and told leaders she’s committed to speaking truth about the horrors of federal Indian boarding schools and work on healing intergenerational trauma.
This week, Gov. Walz made an appearance at a Native caucus meeting.
In his remarks, he acknowledged tribal sovereignty saying in Minnesota it’s about actions on every decision that needs to be done.
The DNC wraps up on Thursday.
Watch our special coverage of Harris’ acceptance speech featuring “Native America Calling” host Shawn Spruce and Antonia Gonzales Thursday starting at 8 p.m. CT live from the DNC
Screenshot from 2020 documentary interview.
A new episode of the public radio program Reveal explores the controversial adoption of a Northern Cheyenne child by a wealthy white family in Utah.
Co-reporter Bernice Yeung says the saga started in 2017 when David Leavitt, the politically connected brother of former Gov. Mike Leavitt (R-UT), traveled to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana.
A Native woman with connections to his wife’s family was struggling and had a young child. Leavitt thought he could help through adoption.
“In that whole process, members of the child’s Native family have raised concerns and have objected to the adoption. So the story really looks at how well the Indian Child Welfare Act was followed.”
The act is intended to keep Native families together. But relatives say, after the mother was arrested and the child put in the care of the BIA, Leavitt became a temporary guardian.
Weeks later, the Leavitts adopted the child, against the wishes of the biological father and other Native relatives.
“Another important aspect of this is the history of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints Indian Student placement program. It’s now a defunct program, but for nearly 50 years, students were taken from the reservation and placed in LDS Family foster homes. The aim was to educate children, but also of course assimilation and baptism.”
The Reveal episode drops this Saturday.
Watch Mike Leavitt’s interview with a documentarian in 2020, which was reportedly given to Homeland Security investigators as part of a criminal human trafficking probe
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