Pretty Bird Woman House - first and last call

by: betsyny

Mon Dec 21, 2009 at 20:16:54 PM PST

For those of you who aren't familiar with the history of our involvement with the shelter, I will direct you to a post that Andy T wrote on the Pretty Bird Woman House blog, which pretty much summed up our efforts then.

the shelter, which includes a general (tax deductible) fund for the shelter, and a separate one for gift cards for the staff (not deductible).

This year, for reasons I will tell you about in the update below, I'm just doing a ChipIn for the staff. General donations (the tax deductible kind) can still be made by check, but not on-line.

Impressions of the Standing Rock Reservation - Photo Edition

by: betsyny

Fri Feb 13, 2009 at 09:58:49 AM PST

For those of you who haven't followed the Pretty Bird Woman House diaries, to make a long story perhaps too short, last fall I became the shelter's fundraiser. Last winter, due to the generosity of the Netroots, the shelter bought a 3 bedroom house in McLaughlin SD, and it now a fully-functioning, 3 bedroom women's shelter.

Georgia Little Shield, the shelter's director, invited me out to Standing Rock to observe some domestic violence prevention workshops they were doing in the communities with Cecilia Fire Thunder and Carmen O'Leary, two famous activists. Unfortunately, due to some snow and severe cold the workshop was postponed until after I left. So, I had to stay indoors for the first few days and then I got to know the eastern part of the reservation for the rest of the time.

Below the fold you'll find lots of photos of Standing Rock and some of my impressions. I will follow with another diary strictly about the shelter.

Lets Honor Joe Biden's Family Like this

by: betsyny

Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 12:11:25 PM PDT

Considering that Sarah Palin wants Alaskan women to buy their own rape kits and is against abortion even in case of rape or incest, and John McCain's pathetic record on women's issues buying Pretty Bird Woman House a new furnace also draws a stark contrast between our values, shared by the Obama/Biden ticket, and the McCain/Palin horror show.  

So what do you say? Are you in for say $5.

Building Momentum For Change: Ending the Maze of Injustice

by: Andy Ternay

Wed Jul 23, 2008 at 20:29:17 PM PDT

Right now Native American women on reservations are 3 times as likely to be raped as a white woman. Due to an insanely complex series of jurisdictional issues, limited law enforcement, minimal political will and racism, perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence against Native American women often commit their crimes with impunity, knowing they will likely never face prosecution. All of this was documented in sickening detail last year by Amnesty International's report Maze of Injustice

Today, Senator Byron Dorgan introduced the Tribal Law and Order Act in the Senate.

The legislation is designed to boost law enforcement efforts by providing tools to tribal justice officials to fight crime in their own communities, improving coordination between law enforcement agencies, and increasing accountability standards.

Will this legislation stop the violence?

How To Rape A Woman And Get Away With It

by: Andy Ternay

Mon Jul 21, 2008 at 11:50:28 AM PDT

Come over the fold and I'll tell you exactly how this happens - and you can take an action, a small first step towards ending this nightmare.

Pretty Bird Woman House Needs a Coat of Paint +

by: betsyny

Mon Jun 09, 2008 at 11:07:48 AM PDT

Anyway, the shelter has been operating for about a month, and wonderful things have been happening since they closed on the house in February.

One exciting development has been that many members of the McLaughlin community have gone from being suspicious to being supporters. That's one reason we're raising money right now: a youth group from a local church as volunteered to paint the house.

More below the fold.

Pretty Bird Woman House Update: It's a GO!

by: betsyny

Wed Jan 30, 2008 at 14:55:59 PM PST

First of all, I want to express my deepest gratitude to all the Kossacks and other members of the netroots community for your commitment to the survival of the Pretty Bird Woman House.  Helping this shelter has been one of the most gratifying things I've ever done, and some of that has to do with the outpouring of caring and compassion that I witnessed while I was doing this project.

This morning I received an email informing me that the McLaughlin City Council had unanimously approved the shelter's petition to operate in the house it wants to purchase. This was a wonderful accomplishment given some initial misgivings that some of the City Council Members had expressed.  

Pretty Bird Woman House Update: Why Isn't Anything Easy in Indian Country?

by: betsyny

Thu Jan 10, 2008 at 10:20:52 AM PST

I want to update everyone who has been involved in the Pretty Bird Woman House fundraiser on the situation with the house purchase.

After you read this you might also ask: Why isn't anything easy in Indian Country?

While we were running this fundraiser, the City Council of McLaughlin, which exists as a separate entity within the boundaries of the Standing Rock Reservation, passed an ordinance requiring that any nonprofit wishing to establish a boardinghouse or shelter in a residential area get the approval of the City Council first.

This means that  even though Pretty Bird Woman House could have closed on the house on January 4th, they had to wait for a Council meeting on January 7th.

Everyone was certain that after hearing about the shelter, the City Council would just say "of course you can" to their request.

Not so.  

Pretty Bird Woman House: Raises Over $80,000 for a New House

by: Andy Ternay

Sun Dec 30, 2007 at 08:02:28 AM PST

In October, Betsy Campisi, a volunteer on the last Pretty Bird Woman House fundraising drive called Georgia Little Shield, the shelter director to check in. After all, after the previous May fundraiser, things looked great - Pretty Bird Woman House had a building, funding from the Netroots until a grant kicked in in... things were going well. But when Betsy spoke to Georgia she heard grim news.

Our shelter was burned down. They stole everything. Then they burnt it down.

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and just hope that the net is there to catch you. This time there was no net. But you wonderful people... you wove that net even as everything was falling off the edge. You wove the net out of blog posts and $5 donations, out of human love and compassion.  

Pretty Bird Woman House: Giving Hope (Update)

by: winter rabbit

Sun Dec 09, 2007 at 08:38:24 AM PST

ccamp made a comment over at Native American Netroots that I want to share and focus on. I then want to share a personal story of how much I think this fundraiser being successful will save lives by giving hope, and conclude with what betsyny has already told us.

Pretty Bird Woman House Update: YOU are buying THIS house!

by: betsyny

Fri Dec 07, 2007 at 12:17:23 PM PST

We need donations urgently right now since there was only enough money for a really low bid, so that makes things still a bit tenuous. And then there will be closing costs and a security system. But even though we haven't sealed the deal yet, we're coming very close!

The amazing part of this project is that the individual efforts of a bunch of bloggers are making such a big difference to a group of women. This is what a community is really about.  And were else can you see donations doing something so huge so fast?  

Sioux Scalp Needs Coverage by Olbermann

by: winter rabbit

Sun Dec 02, 2007 at 05:43:48 AM PST

(Photos will be deleted after the scalp is in the proper tribal hands. For verification only)

Olbermann's contact information

Kill the Indian, save the man

by: jenniestarrish

Tue Nov 20, 2007 at 16:29:56 PM PST

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans

In one sense I agree with Pratt's sentiments. But only in the belief that education is critical for all peoples. But an  education that destroyed cultures, families, self-worth and identity is what Pratt proposed, what Congress agreed with and what is a large part of the problems found in the native community up to this day.

The first schools weren't so bad in that they were on the Reservations where the kids could live at home and be with their families. However, these schools soon gave way to Indian Boarding schools. These boarding schools were set up with the express purpose of separating Indian children from their families, the communities and their traditional beliefs, their whole world in fact.  The government believed the only way to make the Indian what they thought he should be was in fact to kill the Indian in him. Unfortunately, all the really succeeded in doing is destroying the man (or woman) in many cases.

Most of the Indian parents had no problem with schooling for their children. They fought for it, even knowing that their kids would be taught in English and would to an extent begin to adopt White ways. Being forced onto lands which could not support the traditional ways of life, these parents knew that it was impossible to live in all the traditional ways and that the only way out of the extreme poverty forced upon was through education. But they were also determined that their children would hold onto their traditions, beliefs and culture while learning to function in the "white" world.

The government vehemently disagreed with this. Their belief was that only way to take care of the Indian "problem" was to take generations of Indian children, remove them from their families and all they had ever known and loved and in this way destroy their culture.  For the many Native families whose kids were forced to attend boarding schools all the government really accomplished in many cases was to destroy Indian communities and families. I do not the exact number of Indian children who attended boarding schools. I can tell you that in the 1930's there were approximately 300,000 Native Americans in the U.S. Of these about 100,000 had attended boarding schools for some period of time.

The boarding schools were definitely not the type that white people sent their kids to get the best education possible. The Indian boarding schools were often run like the Russian gulag camps set up for political dissidents with a bit of education thrown in.  Only in the case of Indians, it was children who were being raised by "cultural dissidents" who were sent to be reeducated.  And the farther from home they could sent the better. In many cases the children would not see their families for years. And some never saw their families again. The conditions in the boarding schools were deplorable more often than not.  The nutrition was inadequate, they were often filthy and there was next to no healthcare. Disease was rampant,  and children with TB  and other contagious diseases often not only lacked medical care,  they were in many cases left to live in the same dormitories and attend classes with the kids who would then be exposed to these diseases. When parents tried to prevent their children from being sent away, food rations were cut, arrests made and the children were literally kidnapped and sent away.  Once at boarding schools, many children tried to run away.  Punishment for them was harsh, from beatings to starvation and isolation. In one case at Wrangell Institute boarding school which my father attended, a girl who had runaway was caught and forced to stand tied up in a hallway for hours. When she grew tired and leaned or tried to sit she was beaten with a stick. When she fell, she was beaten until she managed to get up again.
Many children died at these boarding schools, and the extent of these deaths is just now being investigated. For example:

During the first decades of the federal government's Indian boarding schools, stories of morbidity and mortality among students were prevalent. Don't Know How, a Lakota father, shared an all-too-common experience. Anticipating the return of his daughter from Hampton (Virginia) Institute, Don't Know How constructed a new house, purchased a store, and adopted to the extent he could the trappings of white America. His daughter, meanwhile, returned from Hampton suffering from consumption. Within days she succumbed to the scourge of Indian Country: tuberculosis. Soon thereafter, Don't Know How's other daughter departed for Hampton, where in a few years she followed her sister "to the little cemetery on the hill." In Hampton's first ten years of educating American Indian students, one of every eleven students died (31 of 304) at school and one of every five died as did Don't Know How's daughters soon after returning home.

"A more complete history of the abuses endured by Native American children exists in the accounts of survivors of Canadian "residential schools." Canada imported the U.S. boarding school model in the 1880s and maintained it well into the 1970s-four decades after the United States ended its stated policy of forced enrollment. Abuses in Canadian schools are much better documented because survivors of Canadian schools are more numerous, younger, and generally more willing to talk about their experiences.
A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.
The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure."

Recent invesitigations of U.S. boarding schools have reported the following:

Both BIA and church schools ran on bare-bones budgets, and large numbers of students died from starvation and disease because of inadequate food and medical care. School officials routinely forced children to do arduous work to raise money for staff salaries and "leased out" students during the summers to farm or work as domestics for white families. In addition to bringing in income, the hard labor prepared children to take their place in white society-the only one open to them-on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder...
Native scholars describe the destruction of their culture as a "soul wound," from which Native Americans have not healed. Embedded deep within that wound is a pattern of sexual and physical abuse that began in the early years of the boarding school system. Joseph Gone describes a history of "unmonitored and unchecked physical and sexual aggression perpetrated by school officials against a vulnerable and institutionalized population." Gone is one of many scholars contributing research to the Boarding School Healing Project.
Rampant sexual abuse at reservation schools continued until the end of the 1980s, in part because of pre-1990 loopholes in state and federal law mandating the reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse. In 1987 the FBI found evidence that John Boone, a teacher at the BIA-run Hopi day school in Arizona, had sexually abused as many as 142 boys from 1979 until his arrest in 1987. The principal failed to investigate a single abuse allegation. Boone, one of several BIA schoolteachers caught molesting children on reservations in the late 1980s, was convicted of child abuse, and he received a life sentence. Acting BIA chief William Ragsdale admitted that the agency had not been sufficiently responsive to allegations of sexual abuse, and he apologized to the Hopi tribe and others whose children BIA employees had abused.
The effects of the widespread sexual abuse in the schools continue to ricochet through Native communities today. "We know that experiences of such violence are clearly correlated with posttraumatic reactions including social and psychological disruptions and breakdowns," says Gone.

The abuse has dealt repeated blows to the traditional social structure of Indian communities….. Today, sexual abuse and violence have reached epidemic proportions in Native communities, along with alcoholism and suicide. By the end of the 1990s, the sexual assault rate among Native Americans was three-and-a-half times higher than for any other ethnic group in the U.S., according to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Alcoholism in Native communities is currently six times higher than the national average. Researchers are just beginning to establish quantitative links between these epidemic rates and the legacy of boarding schools.

http://www.amnestyus...

In my family's case, my dad was sent to a boarding school about 800 miles from home. This was in the early 1930's and that was an incredible distance to cover in those years.
His sister was sent from Alaska to a boarding school in Kansas. My grandmother was not able to stop this. It was only when her husband (who was white) returned after several years in Sweden that he was able to get the kids back. In my mother's case, she and her brothers and sisters were lucky because a church had started a local school for Indian kids in the town of  Saxman which they were able to attend.
As I said they were among the lucky ones. The kids and parents who were separated throughout their school years were harmed in two ways people don't always consider. First, children learn to parent by being parented. When they do not have role models to parent, they literally do not know how. So when they have kids, they are often lost as to how to raise them.

In interviews with some of the individuals who had ateended boarding school, comments like this were heard"

We heard from several respondents that their time away at boarding school, even when a good experience, contributed to their lack of parenting skills. One respondent said the following:

Although we had some chances to do things, but we did miss out a lot that we could've learned from our parents. And then one thing that I often talk to my friends about is the fact that we missed out on being raised by our parents, being taught by our parents. And we missed out in having the opportunity to observe our parents raise kids our age. Because we were kids, we were 12 years old, 11, 12, 13 year old kids being away. The guidance, we missed out the guidance that we could have received from them… So when I see parents not doing anything with their children,
not talking to their children, not disciplining their children, parents that are my age, I think about that. Because when I look at the parents, I see they've gone to St. Mary's or Bethel or Edgecumbe or Chemawa, Oregon, Chilocco, Oklahoma, all those boarding schools that were popular at that time, they're the parents that went.

The phenomenon of children being removed from their homes affected not only the students, but their home villages as well. One respondent described the phenomenon of a healthy village being turned upside down: When the children were taken away to boarding school the parents turned to
alcohol for solace. Three other interviewees, from two additional communities, shared similar tales about the adults from their villages becoming alcoholics after the children were sent away.

http://www.iser.uaa....

When the kids were taken from their parents, many times the parents just gave up. I'm sure most of us realize that when we have kids, we (hopefully) realize we have to grow up, become responsible, and work for our kids future. However, when kids on the reservation were taken away, that incentive was lost for many parents. With their kids torn from them, leaving them depressed and despondent, without hope, it was not unusual for the parents lives to also spiral downward. It has led to cycle of despair for many families on many reservations. Fortunately, many  The thing people should be surprised about concerning the level of abuse and neglect on, (and often times off) reservations is that it is not worse than it is.
The work of women like Georgia Littleshield is what is going to turn this type of thing around. I thank all of you who support her.

I Want Olbermann to Cover Pretty Bird Woman House

by: winter rabbit

Mon Nov 19, 2007 at 13:57:14 PM PST

Artwork by Tigana.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of the main television media ignoring American Indian issues in general, and I'm even more sick and tired of conservative personalities spewing their racist venom towards American Indians. I think Olbermann would cover the critical issue of Pretty Bird Woman House if he were asked to by enough of us, but let's look at some spewing of racist venom towards American Indians by conservative personalities first after a generalized observation of mine.

Pretty Bird Woman House: Let's Unbury some Hearts

by: winter rabbit

Tue Oct 30, 2007 at 14:14:28 PM PDT

Herstories on the issue of violence against women

A Cheyenne proverb states, "A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong its weapons." Our hearts are not on the ground. Our feet are. And we are moving forward.

A travesty to the true spirit of justice is taking place on the Standing Rock Reservation that covers North and South Dakota. Predominantly white male rapists are sexually assaulting American Indian women and getting away with inadequate consequences or no consequences whatsoever.