Following is information about a coalition that filed a submission with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID).
The mission of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is to lead in the pursuit of understanding and addressing the ongoing trauma created by the U.S. Indian boarding school policy. NABS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, incorporated in June 2012 under the laws of the Navajo Nation.
Visit online to learn more. https://boardingschoolhealing.org
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, May 14, 2019–Today a coalition of tribes, organizations, and independent researchers will go before the United Nations to testify about American Indian and Alaskan Native Children who went Missing under the United States’ Indian Boarding School Policy.
The coalition filed a submission with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID) on April 12, 2019 detailing a number of children who were taken into federal custody and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown to this day.
The filing outlines how the U.S. has never acknowledged, accepted responsibility for, nor shown accountability for the many children that did not return home from federal Indian boarding schools. Nor has the U.S. provided any evidence that they systematically notified families or tribes when the children passed away or went missing from schools despite attempts by the coalition to obtain this information through the FOIA process. The coalition who filed the UNWGEID submission includes the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, and independent researchers Preston McBride, Marsha Small, and Eleanor Hadden.
Between 1879 and the 1960s, tens of thousands of American Indian and Alaskan Native children were forced to attend boarding school against their parents’ and tribes’ wishes. The United States enforced attendance at federal and church-run boarding schools by withholding rations from families or by incarceration of family members. Once taken into federal custody, many children died at the schools or went missing.
The coalition urges the UNWGEID to call on the United States to provide a full accounting of American Indian and Alaskan Native children who were taken into government custody under the United States’ Indian Boarding School Policy.
https://boardingschoolhealing.org/un-filing-announcement/
Human Rights
“Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture” –Article 8, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP)
Definition of Genocide according to Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention, 1948:
- A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
- A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
RESPECTFUL GREETINGS TO ALL TRIBAL NATIONS AND ALLIES.
The Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is worked with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to file a submission with the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID) to call on the United States to provide a full accounting of American Indian and Alaska Native children who were taken into government custody under the U.S. Boarding School Policy and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
On June 15, 2017, at its Mid-Year Conference in Connecticut, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) adopted Resolution MOH-17-014, sponsored by the Chickasaw Nation, encouraging Tribal Nations, families, and descendants to provide information on children who never returned home from Indian Boarding Schools. Read the Press Release about the NCAI Resolution and call for testimony.
On April 12, 2019, this coalition of tribes, organizations, and independent researchers filed a submission with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID) and on May 14, 2019, this coaltion went before the United Nations to testify about American Indian and Alaskan Native children who went missing under the United States’s Indian Boarding School Policy.
https://boardingschoolhealing.org/advocacy/un-filing-on-missing-children/
Minneapolis, Minn. – The National Native American Boarding School Heaing Coalition (NABS) announces the commencement of a ten-year strategic plan (2020-2030) designed to strengthen the organization as it continues to grow into the future. In its first few years of execution, the plan will be supported through a $10M grant recently awarded to NABS by the Kendeda Fund.
NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOL HEALING COALITION ANNOUNCES TEN-YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN AND RECEIVES $10M GRANT JANUARY 2, 2020 BY NABS
Quakers, social justice and revolution 