Organizers of the inaugural Small Town Summit hoped to create an event that would transcend boundaries, including township, city and state lines, as well as political boundaries.

“Connectedness,” “empowerment,” “community-focused” were some of the words participants used to describe their experiences after attending the three-day-long, Small Town Summit, created to address the issues of rural America.

The event, put on by the nonprofit organizations United Today, Stronger Tomorrow and Hoosier Action, created a space to amplify small town and rural communities through strategies and collaboration that includes highlighting the voices of Indigenous, Black, immigrant and LGBTQ+ needs.

“Of course you have your paid organizing staff, but you also have community leaders, and you have union leaders, and you have all these different folks and then even within your organizing staff, you have folks of a lot of different experience,” said Micayla Ter Wee, the national organizer for United Today, Stronger Together.

“Sometimes folks, when you hear rural or small town, forget the diversity that is in those communities and we wanted to make sure that that was acknowledged,” Ter Wee said. “And, you know, everyone from the Indigenous communities to our Black and immigrant communities, also had those spaces to talk about their work and their successes and challenges and for all of us to learn from one another.”

Leanette Galaz, Montana Organizer for United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, said the summit in Missoula came together after attending a separate conference with other organizers who work in predominantly urban areas that lean liberal and are more progressive.

Galaz recognizes that urban areas face issues themselves but felt like the “odd man out” because a lot of the organizing they do is usually in conservative areas.

“We started to realize that there were other organizations out there doing work similar to us, but there was no space for us to come together and share our work with each other,” she said.

Ter Wee said that they anticipated to have around 70 people register for the event, however expectations were exceeded when the summit received around 250 registrants. She mentioned that organizations and other attendee expenses like room and board, travel and food were covered by the summit, making it more available for those who wanted to be included.

Trisha Rivers, who is a part of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, presented during the summit, where she helped lead discussions on race and Indigenous history. Her session, titled Indigified, encouraged people to initiate in the often hard conversation about colonization and the Doctrine of Discovery in order for others to understand the Indigenous approach and perspective to community building and empowerment.

“Addressing the real trauma that has happened to us as peoples and having those uncomfortable conversations with non-Natives to say, this is not how we specifically build power,” Rivers said in an interview after her session. “This is how we do things and how we look at community building and relationship building and nation building and it may look a little bit different.”

The ‘Indigified’ session created a safe space that welcomed everyone to be a part of the uncomfortable conversation about race. Rivers said she hopes participants left the session with better tools to address their own organizational spaces and mindsets.

“What I would want for them to take away is that they know now that they have some kind of insight to begin their own decolonization process but to use the education and information and to really change the systems of oppression of overt racism and to really start calling out their own people to be honest to change.”

Located in Sioux City, Iowa, Rivers is also the Siouxland project director for the Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous led nonprofit organization. The nonprofit’s work reaches Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota and focuses on issues including cultural revitalization and political engagement.

She is also the first Indigenous representative to be on Sioux City’s first ever inclusive committee, where her role is to be the voice for her community when issues arise and to ensure that there are inviting spaces for Indigenous collaboration – initiatives that Rivers say begin with these uncomfortable conversations.

“What we see a lot of the times is that we, especially in rural areas and in small cities, that a lot of our boards and public elected officials are not really representative of our communities,” Rivers said. “It’s mostly Republican led, white males, and, you know, that’s not okay because our communities are not. We’re so diverse.”

Among the participants of the summit that was a part of the discussion was Michael Hovde with the For Our Future Foundation who sat in on the Indigified session. Hovde, who is based in Wisconsin, said during the discussion that the session delivered an impactful message which brought some insight to the Native perspective.

Hovde said he believes he will be able to take away ideas for his own work with Four Our Future Foundation when conducting their own Native outreach work within Wisconsin. He also didn’t mind being a part of the tough talk on Indigenous peoples as he was a contributor to the discussion.

“I think it’s important to lean into uncomfortable conversations sometimes because that’s how you make progress. That’s how you move forward,” Hovde said. “You know, if you don’t have an uncomfortable conversation where you, for example, confront your biases about a particular group, then how are you going to get past those biases or overcome or reshape them?”

Also from Sioux City was Brandon Arreaga, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Mexican. Before attending the summit, he had never been on a plane before.

During a session titled, “Native Wins: Native organizers sharing stories with other Native and non-Native communities,” he spoke of his experience as a formerly incarcerated individual and reconnecting with his Native and Mexican identity.

Arreaga said that he doesn’t have a Native name but joked that if he did, it would be “NDN Taco.” He said Native wins are not only in the courthouse, but “our wins are everywhere;” adding that the session was insightful and powerful.

“To be able to hear those stories of different types of wins that our Native people have accomplished and those stories need to be shared more so we can see why we’re fighting, what we’re fighting for and we’re preserving our culture and our ways,” he said.

Now working as a carpenter, Arreaga said he is rebuilding communities he once destroyed as a gang member. The summit brought him out of his comfort zone and returning home, he wants to take back what he learned to help get out the Native vote and help Native men rise above any current situations they may find themselves in.

“Healing is the strongest medicine we have,” he said.

One primary example of a rural Indigenous organization facing issues in their home state is the Riverton Peace Mission located in Riverton, Wyoming, where they address bordertown racism and violence.

“We’re here to get some more knowledge of how to better be advocates for what we’re doing. I think the leadership development here and the base building is gonna be really helpful in how we succeed,” said Leslie Spoonhunter, Northern Arapaho, co-chair for the Riverton Peace Mission.

Riverton is a town located on the Wind River Indian Reservation which is shared by two tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. According to the Riverton Peace Mission webpage, its main goal is to focus on “advanced healing, reconciliation and community harmony,” concepts that Spoonhutner saw in the Indigified session.

“It’s really a touchy subject, especially when there’s like non-Natives involved but I think we’re all here for the right reasons and forward thinking. So I felt good about it. You know, I haven’t really been into a session like that before, so I got a lot out of it,” Spoonhunter said after the session was out. “Very much needed because we all lived together on Earth, like we are all in our communities together. So yes, we need to have those very heartfelt and hard conversations.”

The summit featured a Native and Indigenous Caucus which Michelle Sparck, Cup’ik, was excited about.

“I’m really psyched to see a caucus,” she said. “I mean, usually we don’t have that kind of presence, maybe there’s a one-off or a two-off, a token; but no, we have a caucus and that’s really exciting.”

Sparck works as the director of strategic initiatives for Get Out The Native Vote in Alaska. Organizing is not new to her, over the years she has worked in Washington, D.C., working with politicians and big agencies.

She was heartened to see the Native representation at the summit and the ability to show others that Indigenous organizations can be a valuable ally.

“I just see so much potential in this kind of gathering.”

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Selawik, Alaska, is a Iñupiat Eskimo community where generations have survived off the land.

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Police and private security for a Canadian mining company arrested an Indigenous protester and demolished a protest blockade erected by descendants of a survivor of the 1865 massacre at the site, according to land and water defenders who were there.

The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.

Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and Indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.

Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.

“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights and it’s up to us to preserve these rights.”

According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.

The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.

“The Earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” Nobis said. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”

The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely Indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington, and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.

The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.

That’s exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.

“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we’re rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we’re all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.

Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.

Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.

In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.

“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.

Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.

Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?

“And we wondered why haven’t the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.

He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.

“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized… it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.

Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.

Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.

But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? Afterall, they were here far before humans.

States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and indigenous people were denied rights once too – what’s stopping the river.

“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I’m dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. 

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Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, met with tribal leaders representing a dozen Indigenous nations last weekend in a move that could expand protections for land around The Grand Canyon, permanently safeguarding the region from future uranium mining.

The proposed Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument would convert 1.1 million acres of public land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park into a National Monument, providing significant protections to tribal water sources, delicate ecosystems, and cultural sites, while curtailing the impacts of uranium mining — a proposal tribes in the area have been fighting for since 1985. Baaj Nwaavjo means “where tribes roam” in the Havasupai language, I’tah Kukveni translates to “our footprints” in Hopi.

The region has high concentrations of uranium and mining has been a feature of the landscape since the 1950s. When mining first began in the area, uranium was used primarily for nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships. 

In 2012, then-Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, placed a 20-year ban on uranium mining on more than a million acres of federal lands near the Grand Canyon in order to protect surface water from radioactive dust and mining waste. Without increased federal protections, tribal leaders say mining claims can be made at the end of the 20-year-ban, re-opening the Grand Canyon to uranium exploration.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, mining in the area disturbs underground vertical rock formations called “breccia pipes” — formations that often hold hydrothermal fluid or extremely hot water heated by the earth’s mantle and filled with various gasses, minerals and salts, including uranium. When disturbed, those breccia pipes can release their contents into aquifers and eventually, larger water systems.

In 2016, the Pinyon Plain Mine pierced an aquifer flooding mineshafts, and draining groundwater supplies. Between 2016 and 2021, the Grand Canyon Trust estimated that more than 48 million gallons of water had flooded Pinyon’s mineshafts, and the National Parks Conservation Association has consistently reported uranium levels in that water exceeding federal toxicity limits by more than 300 percent.

When ingested, uranium can cause bone and liver cancer, damage kidneys, and affect body processes like autoimmune and reproductive functions.

In 2016, tribal leaders brought the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni proposal to the Obama administration, but were rejected. Now, the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition, made up of 12 tribes with ties to the area, hope Secretary Haaland will encourage the Biden administration to protect the region.

“We can’t wait until the accident happens,” said Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai elder and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “We are trying to prevent the catastrophe before it happens.”

The Havasupai reservation is an eight mile hike below the rim of the Grand Canyon and one of the most isolated communities in the United States.

But Tillousi says that while stopping uranium mining will be a major goal of the proposal, ongoing contamination issues must be addressed. The Pinyon Plain Mine continues to contaminate the Havasupai’s sole water supply, the Havasu Creek. Pinyon has been operating since 1986, and while the 2012 uranium mining ban stopped the construction of new mines, Pinyon is exempt due to its pre-approval. As of 2020, 30 million gallons of groundwater tainted with high levels of uranium and arsenic have been pumped out of the mines flooded shaft and dumped in an uncovered pond.

“We’re a small tribe, our tribe is made up of 765 people,” said Tillousi. “We need to protect our village and homes.”

This article was first published in Grist.

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The Oklahoma Legislature on Thursday overrode Gov. Kevin Stitt’s veto of a bill that would allow students to wear Native American regalia during high school and college graduations.

The state House and Senate easily cleared the two-thirds threshold needed to uphold the measure, which takes effect July 1 and had strong support from many Oklahoma-based tribes and Native American citizens.

It would allow any student at a public school, including colleges, universities and technology centers, to wear tribal regalia such as traditional garments, jewelry or other adornments during official graduation ceremonies. Weapons such as a bow and arrow, tomahawk or war hammer are specifically prohibited.

Stitt, a Cherokee Nation citizen who has feuded with many Oklahoma-based tribes throughout his two terms in office, vetoed the bill earlier this month, saying at the time that the decision should be up to individual districts.

“In other words, if schools want to allow their students to wear tribal regalia at graduation, good on them,” Stitt wrote in his veto message. “But if schools prefer for their students to wear only traditional cap and gown, the Legislature shouldn’t stand in their way.”

Stitt also suggested the bill would allow other groups to “demand special favor to wear whatever they please at a formal ceremony.”

Lawmakers also overrode vetoes of several other measures, including one adding experts on Native health to a wellness council and another allowing for the existence of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, the state’s Public Broadcasting Service affiliate.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. thanked the Legislature on Thursday.

“I hope Governor Stitt hears the message that his blanket hostility to tribes is a dead end,” Hoskin said in a statement. “The majority of Oklahomans believe in respecting the rights of Native Americans and working together with the sovereign tribes who share this land.”

Kamryn Yanchick, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, was denied the opportunity to wear a decorated cap with a beaded pattern when she graduated from her high school in 2018.

Being able to “unapologetically express yourself and take pride in your culture at a celebration without having to ask a non-Native person for permission to do so is really significant,” said Yanchick, who is now a Native American policy advocate.

A Native former student sued Broken Arrow Public Schools and two employees earlier this month after she was forced to remove an eagle feather from her graduation cap prior to her high school commencement ceremony.

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This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice.

When two aunties visit parents in need, there is no scolding, shame or surveillance. Instead, they set themselves to the immediate tasks at hand on these southern California reservations — at times simply pitching in to fold a pile of laundry, or patting a baby to sleep with Kumeyaay lullabies.

Then there are the variety of lessons with mom and dad to nurture safe parenting that fold in traditional Indigenous teachings. Establishing family routines and healthy diets are taught alongside lessons in burning sage for cleansing, growing herbal medicines in a family’s backyard, and making basic introductions in a child’s Native language. 

“As a home-based program, if both of the aunties come in, it’s not necessarily a reprimand,” said auntie Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lycett. “It’s, ‘Let me take care of the child over here, so you can have your class.’”

Since its formal inception in 2019, My Two Aunties has assisted hundreds of Indigenous families in California’s San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties. From its base on the Rincon Indian Reservation, the small program with a staff of three is among the many ongoing efforts in Indian Country to keep children out of foster care and ensure Indigenous families remain safe and intact.

Beyond parenting support, the aunties seek to repair intergenerational trauma that can result in substance abuse, domestic violence and unsafe environments for children. They equip parents with cultural tools through “Indigenous Ways Of Knowing” that they may have missed out on due to their own childhoods in foster and adoptive homes. The goals are to reduce family separation, build parents’ trust in social services and help members of tribal communities heal.

My Two Aunties partners with nine local tribes, the local Indian Health Council and San Diego County, and is funded by California’s Office of Child Abuse Prevention and the Department of Social Services. 

The key component is the “aunties,” whose role “builds upon the strengths of family legacies, patterns, and kinship traditions that have endured since time immemorial,” the My Two Aunties’ program guide states. In contrast to the fear instilled by county social workers going into the homes of parents under threat of child removal, Lycett describes her work as an abundance of acceptance and understanding. Some home visits require just one auntie; others, two.

“When you have one auntie, everything is fine and dandy,” Lycett said with a grin. “But if two come into the door, you better duck for cover.” 

Lycett, 28 and fellow auntie Cori Biggs, 63, are descended from the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians. Lycett has an associate degree in sociology and is studying for a bachelor’s degree in the sociology field. She has been trained in the well-regarded Family Spirit program since 2019. Biggs has a master’s degree in social work.

They aim to build relationships between children, parents and their tribes to combat the cultural erasure that happens when a child is taken from their tribal home. So in addition to training in case management, mandated reporting protocols and developing safety plans, they’re also versed in local languages, legends and Native history, including the impacts of colonization.

Aunties’ responsibilities include supporting parents at risk for abusing substances, working with pregnant moms and guiding families for one year after a child’s birth. 

“WHENEVER WE’RE WORKING WITH THESE FAMILIES, THEY HAVE TO BE THE LEADER.”

— LIZZIE LYCETT, MY TWO AUNTIES

Lycett said “our first and foremost priority is the safety of our families,” and she and Biggs are mandated reporters of child abuse and neglect. If concerning issues arise that require a call to the child protection hotline, program staff may contact CPS, or encourage direct witnesses to do so. Aunties do not make foster care recommendations, however — that determination is made following an investigation by a tribal or county social worker. 

Clients were not interviewed for this article to maintain their privacy, but feedback the program has received shows family members’ appreciation for the guidance and support. “Raising a Native baby to be proud of being Native is a huge thing,” one parent said in a survey response. “That’s something that I really wanted and the main reason I wanted to be in this program.”

Former director Karan Thorne —  a member of the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians — retired last year after a three-decade journey to develop My Two Aunties. Thorne said that unlike the typical approach of social workers, the aunties focus on strengths within the household: “Instead of ‘What’s wrong with you?’ they ask: ‘What’s strong with you?’” 

She said generations to come are being positively impacted.

“I’m seeing such great change with these pregnant women, and a lot of the babies have tribal names now,” Thorne said. “To me, that says they’re proud of their culture and where their kids are coming from.”

At a recent National Indian Child Welfare Association conference highlighting noteworthy practices across the country, the nonprofit Indian Health Council described the program as “well received” among the members it serves as a tribal health organization. “In our community it takes trust to build a relationship,” a representative said. “It appears our Aunties are able to make that connection.”

Art Martinez of the Chumash tribe is a consulting psychologist who has worked on its curriculum and evaluations. He said the strength of My Two Aunties lies in the people it serves.

“In our ways, we never had child removal,” Martinez said. “We never had prisons, we never had jails. Why? Because we worked off a very basic understanding of living an honorable life in the way we were meant to be and the way we were meant to represent our own families.”

Martinez said he sees the program’s current caseload growing and shifting — from parents who are required by the court to participate, to parents who want to participate to reconnect with their cultural and spiritual pasts.

“IF BOTH OF THE AUNTIES COME IN, IT’S NOT NECESSARILY A REPRIMAND. IT’S, ‘LET ME TAKE CARE OF THE CHILD OVER HERE, SO YOU CAN HAVE YOUR CLASS.’”

— LIZZIE LYCETT, MY TWO AUNTIES

The My Two Aunties curriculum begins with lessons structured around the growth of an acorn into an oak tree. 

Lessons in the roots that strengthen families and communities involve practicing patience and staying grounded in tradition. The course evolves through teachings about a balanced diet and healthy relationships, and ends in a final class symbolized by a drawing of a towering oak. The tree is surrounded by a forest fed by the knowledge of elders, ancestral medicine and spiritual practice.

The aunties’ caseloads have grown steadily over the past four years, including parents who voluntarily seek their support and services, and those referred by physicians. Clients of the child welfare system arrive at different stages — some parents are under investigation for child maltreatment, some have children placed in foster homes, and others are in the final stages of reunification. Each family receives between one and 12 visits, depending on the level of need. 

In 2022, the program served 97 families and held 411 parenting classes. Those numbers have grown from 2021, when the program assisted 73 families and provided 133 parenting classes. 

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, families picked up workbooks and other material at outdoor drive-through sites, and dozens of mothers received pre- and post-natal check-ins through video conferencing. But new opportunities were created as well, and the program continues to connect with families through virtual visits.

“It’s an option that has proven to be very convenient for our families and sometimes increases the chances that they will participate in the program,” current director Nancy Spence said.

The work of relying on traditional teachings to reduce the number of tribal families separated by foster care began over 20 years ago in this community. At the time, the consortium of tribes served by the Indian Health Council’s Tribal Family Services had nearly 500 children in local child welfare systems. 

Indian Health Council data show there are currently 30 children in out-of-home care among the populations served by the agency serves, who include members of nine federally recognized tribes in San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties.

My Two Aunties is a key contributor to the low numbers in recent years, according to the organization. 

After publishing its 2022 evaluation report, the program is now working on its next robust set of findings. The measures that are being examined by Martinez and Jeremy Braithwaite of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute focus on the program’s ability to strengthen families: “How did families’ participation in various aspects of the program build/enhance/restore cultural resilience and how did they see this contributing to stronger, healthier families?” Braithwaite noted in an email. The evaluation centers on Indigenous Ways of Knowing methods, which the researcher described as “both culturally and scientifically rigorous.”

A final report on outcomes-to-date is forthcoming. But state data already show why the program is urgently needed in these southern California counties.

Native children make up roughly 600 of the more than 52,000 children in foster care in the state, or just 1.3%. But like Black children, they are, relative to their population size, the most likely to be reported as subjects of maltreatment and to enter foster care, according to state data.

“WHEN MY CLIENTS DON’T REUNIFY, I TELL THEM TO GET THAT ROOM READY ANYWAY. BECAUSE EVEN THOUGH HE’S IN FOSTER CARE, HE’S GOING TO AGE OUT AND COME HOME, SO YOU HAVE TO BE READY.”

— KARAN THORNE, FORMER DIRECTOR, MY TWO AUNTIES

The aunties’ care of these children’s families stands in stark contrast with the approach of county child welfare agencies — and it is more broadly defined. Some work is preventive — such as parents who have a family member with substance use disorder and need support “to ensure both the resiliency of the family and the family’s place in a Native community of wellness,” the program’s description states. 

Others, even after losing their custody rights to their children, remain in the program — parents who’ve had their rights terminated are still treated as care-worthy.

“When my clients don’t reunify, I tell them to get that room ready anyway,” said former director Thorne. “Because even though he’s in foster care, he’s going to age out and come home so you have to be ready.” 

The care is distinct in other ways as well. The aunties address and acknowledge the struggles Indigenous parents face that is a result of colonization, misrepresentation and social worker bias. Thorne said skepticism about Indigenous peoples’ ability to care for themselves and their families leads to the disproportionate numbers of child removals in Native communities. That includes conflating child neglect with poverty, in tribal communities, where as many as one-third live below the federal income level. 

“You have to get to that root cause of what’s really happening with these families,” Thorne said, noting that too often, children are removed because of “conditions that non-Native social workers didn’t feel were right.”

Under the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and state law in California, child welfare agencies must make extra efforts to avoid the separation of Native families. To address historic injustice, that means making “active” — not simply “reasonable” — efforts to provide services to parents and to avoid placing children away from kin. That work is another central goal of My Two Aunties.

“ICWA says social workers have to use active efforts to help reunify families,” Thorne said. “We’re doing the active efforts to prevent those removals.”

The distrust parents have toward child welfare agencies in low-income and communities of color is not an exceptional experience in California or among tribal members. Lycett has seen it first-hand. In her initial home visits, she routinely encounters tension that must be overcome before she can earn a family’s trust. Some of her clients have a deep-seated fear of social workers taking away their children, and they’ve been left to feel powerless.

“With historical trauma and generational trauma, these families view social services as the Big Bad Wolf,” Lycett said. “Whenever we’re working with these families, they have to be the leader.”

To counter the mistrust, the My Two Aunties model is anchored in storytelling: “native cosmologies or ways of knowing related to the seasons, nature, familial kinship relations, spirits or trickster figures.” These oral traditions “carry the weight of wisdom passed on through countless generations,” the program description states, imparting “important lessons about how one should act in the world.”

“RAISING A NATIVE BABY TO BE PROUD OF BEING NATIVE IS A HUGE THING. THAT’S SOMETHING THAT I REALLY WANTED AND THE MAIN REASON I WANTED TO BE IN THIS PROGRAM.”

— PARENT SURVEY RESPONSE

To that end, the program’s Cultural Family Life Skills Discussion Guide curriculum draws on the storytelling traditions of southern California tribes. Life lessons are taught through an array of human and animal characters. A lesson in humility, for example, involves Turkey Vulture — whose now-bald head was scorched after Coyote tricked it into putting its head in a fire pit.

A version of the widely told Legend of the Three Sisters is another theme. In it, three sisters are going through the forest when they pass a river, and hear infant cries. As they get closer to the river, they see babies in the water.

The first sister jumps in immediately to save them. Thorne said this represents the Indian Health Council’s work with families navigating dependency courts. The second sister jumps in next, helping kids swim ashore. This sister represents foster care prevention skills — the work coaching families to heath and wellness through culturally-relevant lessons and values. The third sister goes upstream to keep any future children from falling into the river, which represents their prevention services. 

When parents are finishing their My Two Aunties visits, they fill out a Personal Reflection Tool worksheet. 

The document features a giant tree in the shape of a woman’s form, with deep roots beneath her feet and powerful branches for limbs. Around the tree are words for parents to pick from that span the emotional spectrum: Alone. Shame. Uncertain. Supported. Grateful. Rejuvenated. Positive. Stressed. Parents circle four or five primary emotions they are experiencing.

Filling out this worksheet began as a tool for evaluators to gather insights on the program’s impact, tracking any changes over time. But it has since become a routine part of aunties’ visits. Of the dozen parents who participated in the latest evaluation, eight consented to their worksheet responses being used. None circled the words “alone,” “shame,” or “scared.”

One mother described moving from initial feelings of insecurity to empowerment. She reported feeling more motivated and happier as visits progressed. And she was learning to look toward the future with optimism.

Reflecting on the Mighty Oak lesson of the day, she acknowledged ongoing struggles, circling: “tired” and “stressed.”  But she circled three hopeful words and phrases as well: “okay,” “I got this” and “positive.” 

One of the auntie’s responses is noted in the evaluation.

“I was happy there were more positives than negatives,” she stated, “which shows the client is learning how to find hope and look forward to a better future for her and her family.”

This story is the first in an ongoing series by The Imprint examining tribal child welfare best practices and the steps Indigenous communities are taking to heal from and limit the use of foster care.

The post <strong>Protecting Children and Healing Families, One Native Auntie at a Time</strong> appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Devon Parfait steers his truck into the parking lot of what used to be a firehouse on Shrimpers Row in Dulac, Louisiana. He tries to get his bearings in a landscape both familiar and strange. He spies a bayou down a side street, so we walk in that direction, searching for traces of the home his family fled as Hurricane Rita barreled in. Back then, in 2005, Parfait was a second grader who collected Ranger Rick Zoobooks. Today he’s a 25-year-old coastal scientist with a mop of curls, a nose ring, and a puzzled look in his brown eyes.

“I’m scanning through the memory of all my old neurons,” he tells me. “Maybe this is it. Maybe it really has just changed so much I don’t even recognize it.”

Parfait’s January 2023 visit isn’t just for nostalgia. He’s the new chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and he’s getting reacquainted with his community. The 1,100-citizen tribe has traditionally fished and hunted along this fertile edge of the Gulf of Mexico. But human engineering and extreme storms have reshaped Louisiana’s coastline, swallowing up 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s. Many of the land patents granted to the tribe’s ancestors in a 19th-century treaty are now largely or wholly underwater. Land loss has chiseled away at tribal livelihoods and traditional diets, exacted a toll on citizens’ mental health, exacerbated chronic illnesses, and displaced families.

The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and its neighbors also serve as harbingers of a climate crisis that threatens more intense high-tide floods on every U.S. coast by the mid-2030s. Unless protective measures are taken, rising waters could displace up to 13 million Americans by century’s end—“a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans,” wrote the authors of a 2016 University of Georgia analysis.

As we stand alongside the bayou, overshadowed by tall dry grass, a car pulls up to a nearby house. An older couple gets out and Parfait approaches them. “I’m trying to figure out if this is the place I used to live,” he says, naming his grandparents.

“I’m a Parfait,” the woman volunteers.

“Oh! Hey! Give me a hug then,” the chief says.

The couple lead Parfait to the footprint of his old home, now a garden bed that, later in the year, will produce mustard greens, speckled butter beans, and tomatoes. A fig tree Parfait remembers remains, but the rope swing of his childhood has vanished. The couple, who have lived here almost 50 years, say the land has eroded so much that the backmost six feet of their property has crumbled into the bayou.

“Now, you step out your back door, you’re going to sink.”

Cleveland “Coco” Rodrigue

Parfait understands the changes he sees represent both an existential crisis and a leadership burden. He prepared for this moment by leaving Louisiana to study geosciences. Now he’s back, crafting a plan to hold his tribe together, and shaking the hands he needs to get it rolling. Still, he’s cognizant of the obstacles ahead.

Coastal land loss has upended life in South Louisiana—for Cajun, Black, and Creole residents, for Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, and in particular for the half-dozen Indigenous tribes that rely on the abundance of its wetlands. Some 11,000 Native Americans live in the four coastal parishes (counties) with the highest Indigenous concentrations—flat expanses of two-lane roads that parallel bayous lined with oaks, elevated houses, and shrimp boats, and occasionally converge on small, industry-thick cities.

Cleveland “Coco” Rodrigue, a 61-year-old shrimper and citizen of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, says he used to walk into the woods near his house in Dulac and hunt ducks and rabbits—“live off the land.” But those woods are gone, replaced by water. “Now, you step out your back door,” he says, “you’re going to sink.”

These losses stem from vast projects that altered the Mississippi River and its delta. The building of flood-control levees, according to many scientists, has prevented sediment from reaching and replenishing wetlands that naturally subside. The dredging of 10,000 miles of artificial canals by oil and gas companies altered the delta’s hydrology. Shipping channels allow saltwater to penetrate inland. Until recently, climate change was a minor factor, but now accelerating sea-level rise threatens even more inundation. Fewer wetlands mean less protection from hurricanes, which lately have intensified. The storms themselves erode the coast—a feedback loop of destruction.

Land loss impedes not just hunting and trapping but also raising livestock. Vegetable gardens face higher flood risk. Fishing and shrimping have become dicier, partly because the wetlands serve as nurseries for aquatic animals. Loss of natural food sources mean tribal citizens now have to rely more on grocery stores than in the past. But historic discrimination, like being kept out of public schools until the 1940s, has created barriers to wealth that have spanned generations. In the parish that includes Dulac, the poverty rate is 30 percent for Native Americans and 12 percent for non-Hispanic White people.

“When you don’t have the funds to purchase foods that are healthier, or better quality, you’re going to get what you can get [to] fill your stomach,” says Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Parfait’s predecessor as chief. Alongside this shift toward less healthy processed food, she has seen a rise in heart disease and diabetes.

Parfait-Dardar’s anecdotal observations square with national figures (local data are hard to come by). Native Americans, for whom diabetes was once rare, now have twice the rate of White Americans. Obesity and cardiovascular illness run rampant, too. A key culprit is the shift from traditional to Western diets, whether because of forced migration, environmental degradation, or government policies like the mandated thinning of livestock herds.

Beyond dietary disease, tribal leaders describe crushing stress from living in a place that’s increasingly uninhabitable. “Everyone here is suffering from PTSD, myself included,” says Parfait-Dardar, whose home Hurricane Ida leveled in 2021. Researchers studying the Gulf Coast have seen domestic abuse and substance-use disorders spike after hurricanes. The former chief has seen similar patterns in her tribe.

Health experts call the psychological and dietary tolls inseparable. “Stress triggers hormones that let you eat more, and eat more junk,” says Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who has researched and collaborated with Indigenous people in the Louisiana bayous. “Stress also triggers sleeping less. A short night’s rest actually increases obesity. So, the physiological consequences of stress feed into the social consequences of stress. And that, I think, is a cycle very difficult to break.”

Julie Maldonado, an anthropologist who has studied Louisiana’s tribes and is now working with them on issues like climate adaptation, says contemporary stresses are intertwined with a collective trauma that stretches back centuries. European colonization set the stage for the altered coastal landscape, the pollution, the hurricane damage, the growing untenability of commercial fishing, the scattering of neighbors.

“What people often talk about is a legacy of atrocities, or these cascading effects as these disasters are layered upon each other over time,” says Maldonado, associate director of the non-profit Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Now, as these climate-driven events get closer together, become more intense…you’re still recovering from one when the next one hits.”

That’s a lot of history to place on the shoulders of a Generation Z chief. But Parfait is in an unusual position: He knows firsthand how environmental changes can affect a community’s health, and he has done the academic work to help him address the underlying causes.

The summer of 2005, when Parfait’s family was forced from its home, was especially bad for land loss: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone claimed 217 square miles. After Rita destroyed the house and ruined his grandfather’s shrimp boat, the three-generation family uprooted three times. They traveled a 200-mile circuit before settling into the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. Parfait’s mother, Dana, wanted him to have a male mentor, so she sent him to live with her brother. But his uncle was also struggling, and eventually committed suicide.

Already diagnosed with ADHD (a condition linked to childhood trauma) and depression, Parfait retreated into himself. “He rarely came out of his room,” says his mother. He failed his freshman year of high school.

“Everyone here is suffering from PTSD, myself included.”

Shirell Parfait-Dardar, former chief, Grand Caillou/Dulac Band

But Parfait’s curious mind caught the attention of his mother’s cousin, then-chief Parfait-Dardar. As early as age 12, he watched her try to gain federal recognition for the tribe, a cumbersome, elusive, ongoing process that could bring financial benefits and self-governance rights. He asked questions and offered to help, and over time Parfait-Dardar identified him as her eventual successor. (Each chief names the next.) “When I recognized that it was him—and I still get chills today—it was like the ancestors spoke,” she says.

To face the tribe’s issues, Parfait needed a specific kind of education. It happened that the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band has a relationship with the Williams-Mystic Program, a collaboration of Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum that runs a coastal field seminar in Louisiana. Rónadh Cox, a geosciences professor at Williams and seminar instructor, invited him to a scientific meeting in 2017, noticed his drive and curiosity, and wondered if her school might entertain a transfer from his community college. “This could be a moment where we can do something,” she remembers thinking, “to make a difference, to give back to the tribe.”

Admissions officers at Williams, a competitive liberal arts college, looked at Parfait’s grades and declined his application. After another year of academic preparation, he reapplied to Williams and this time was accepted. At Williams, Parfait studied geosciences and collaborated with Cox on several mapping projects related to the tribe’s historic territory. One showed the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and nearby Jean Charles Choctaw Nation were losing land faster than the surrounding basins, and at more than double the rate of Louisiana’s entire coast.

Parfait always imagined his tenure as tribal chief would begin in the distant future. But as he was finishing up his undergraduate degree in 2022, Parfait-Dardar called to say she was ready to step down. “I knew what we were facing,” she says: further land loss, potential dispersion, continued public health challenges. “And Devon had the education that I don’t have.” Knowing the burden Parfait would be taking on, the outgoing chief also called his mother. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

After graduating, Parfait returned home and started working as a coastal science coordinator for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). In August 2022, he recited the oath of office at a kitchen-table ceremony scaled down for the pandemic. That same month, he turned 25.

One of Parfait’s first orders of business as chief was to assist an intertribal effort to get the federal government’s attention. The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band had teamed up with four other tribes—one from Alaska, the others from Louisiana—that have seen their traditional lands disappear. The five had petitioned for a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleging that the government had failed to protect them from the impacts of climate change and other human-caused disasters.

The consequences, the petition claimed, amounted to a forcible displacement. Grand Bayou Indian Village, home to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha, has lost nearly all its land; the handful of remaining houses sit on pilings and can only be reached by boat. Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has watched its ancestral island erode down to a sliver and the state’s relocation plans devolve into conflict over how much decision-making power the tribe would retain.

The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, had scheduled a hearing for October, two months after Parfait’s swearing-in. The commission lacks binding powers for the U.S. government, “but it’s still important,” says Maryum Jordan, an attorney with EarthRights International who worked with the tribes on the hearing. “This is a key moment to put displacement on the radar at the international level. And it’s also an opportunity to pressure the government to do more.”

The hearing was online, but there were private in-person meetings, too. The day before, Parfait took an early-morning flight to Washington, D.C., where the team huddled over sandwiches and cupcakes, crafting testimony and supplemental material. They met with a White House official. And they talked with an IACHR attorney to provide more context than they could squeeze into the 90-minute hearing. Parfait talked about how colonialism had altered the coastal environment, making it harder for the tribes to stay self-sufficient.

The next day, Parfait watched off-camera as his predecessor, Parfait-Dardar, logged in from a hotel ballroom in Thibodaux, Louisiana—in her emerita role as elder chief, she retains moral authority and years of knowledge. She sat at a conference table with Rosina Philippe, an elder from Grand Bayou. Tribal banners hung behind them.

“The lands once lush and fruitful have eroded away, so that all that remains today are strips of land that stick out like fragile fingers on a badly wounded hand,” Parfait-Dardar testified. The declining harvest, compounded by education discrimination, “has led us into lifeways that have also caused negative consequences for our mental and physical health.” And without federal recognition, she said, the tribe can’t secure the funding it needs to recover from hurricanes and adapt to climate change.

After Parfait-Dardar and three other tribal representatives made their case, the U.S. government responded. Department of Interior staffer Joaquin Gallegos, who is from the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the Pueblo of Santa Ana, acknowledged that climate change poses “existential threats” to Native economies and health. But, Gallegos said, the government “takes its political and legal responsibilities to Indigenous people seriously,” funding climate-resilience programs, supporting traditional food systems like fisheries, and consulting with tribes on issues like relocation.

Still, the panel seemed alarmed by the tribes’ testimony. “Why is it taking so long…to assist these communities?” asked commissioner Margarette May Macaulay, a Jamaican attorney. She announced the IACHR would submit an official request to visit Louisiana and Alaska. “Around the world,” she said, Indigenous tribes “have the least footprint and suffer the greatest crisis from climate change, which is committed by the industrialized state in pursuing industrialized profits.”

Then the laptop screen went dark. Parfait-Dardar turned to Philippe. “OK,” she said. “We survived.”

Philippe exhaled. She had watched the federal officials talk about collaboration. But that didn’t square with her own experience of a process that solicits tribal input without any real intention of disrupting the oil-and-gas economy. “The government—they maintain that whip hand,” she said. “So they can tout and say, ‘We are engaging the tribal communities.’ …But in the end product, we don’t see our suggestions. We see them just forging ahead with what they planned to do in the beginning.”

As winter approaches, Parfait confronts the enormity of his unpaid role as chief. His tribe’s mental and physical health, limited food access, and economic insecurity all demand attention, but so does his full-time day job at EDF. “I can’t do everything,” he says.

Sometimes, public-health problems require action in areas that look tangential but are actually foundational. “You could treat that diabetes, you could tell people to walk,” but health is collective, too, says the University of Pittsburgh’s Lichtveld. “The sense of community cohesion, or the gaps in it, in Indigenous communities is very strong.”

And so Parfait gravitates toward the issue that, to him, undergirds all the others. “How do you live a healthy, happy, productive life,” he says, “when you can physically see your lands eroding away in your backyard?” He fixes on a primary task: pushing for coastal restoration efforts that would slow the degradation enough for his tribe to plan an orderly retreat.

Louisiana has a 50-year, $50 billion coastal master plan, released in 2007 and updated every five to six years. Some of the funding comes from a Deepwater Horizon oil-spill settlement. But no amount of money can fix the entire coast. “It’s not like restoring a chair, where you’re going to strip the old varnish off and put some new stuff on, and it’s going to look exactly the same as it was,” says Denise Reed, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans and a member of the master plan development team. “If you have limited resources, where are you going to put them? Where can you achieve most of your objectives?”

A keystone of the state’s coastal program is the $2.3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion: a gated structure, built into the levee system downriver from New Orleans, that will allow river water and sediment to flow back into the delta. According to the 2023 draft update to the master plan, the diversion could build 21 square miles of new land over the next half-century. “That will serve to protect everything inland,” says Kelly Sanks, a Tulane University sedimentologist. “From a protection-of-New-Orleans standpoint, it’s good and lots of people want it,” including a coalition of large environmental groups.

But the diversion will make flooding more severe for the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha in nearby Grand Bayou, and tribes like Grand Caillou/Dulac live too far from the river to benefit.

“So it costs billions of dollars,” Parfait tells me. “It only benefits people 50 years from now. And it does nothing to help the tribal communities.”

The state’s plan acknowledges that some places won’t survive intact. For those residents, it recommends voluntary property acquisition and relocation assistance. This is not a reassuring prospect for Native Americans who watched Jean Charles Choctaw Nation’s dispute with the state over resettlement. “[It] indicates to these communities who are on the frontlines that people have given up on them,” Parfait says.

The chief understands that land loss might continue to force the tribe inland. But he wants the state to invest more in slowing down that loss—“buying time” to prevent citizens from dispersing helter-skelter as his family did after Hurricane Rita. “If you were to do coastal restoration projects to save the land now, and have that community stay there and develop a plan, you have a better chance to save culture, to keep the community cohesive, and to keep families together,” he says.

Topping Parfait’s priority list: seeing those oil-and-gas canals backfilled with the piles of dredged material that run parallel to them. This, some researchers say, could help restore the hydrology the canals wrecked decades ago. The tribes have consulted with R. Eugene Turner, a coastal ecologist at Louisiana State University who calls backfilling a cheap, fast, and effective way to rebuild wetlands. Those wetlands, he says, would in turn provide habitat for the seafood and game that make up the traditional Indigenous diet.

Stuart Brown, the state official who oversees the plan’s development, calls backfilling “one of many tools in the toolbox, not a panacea.” But after meeting with Turner and tribal leaders, he added one sentence to the 2023 draft endorsing the practice. “Now,” he says, “those seeking funding for it can go to the master plan and specifically say, ‘Look, it’s consistent with the plan.’”

When Parfait saw the draft update, he initially had mixed feelings: happy that backfilling got mentioned at all, and saddened by the brevity. “It is kind of an asterisk,” he says.

But he has moved past his disappointment and now views that sentence as a potential pipeline. “It feels like they’re saying, ‘Hey, connect,’” he says. “And that’s exactly what I’m doing.” His calendar is filling with meetings, and his head with strategies. He has met with local officials about a potential backfilling demonstration project that, if it comes about, would be managed by the parish government with tribal input. If that project succeeds, Parfait hopes it will nudge backfilling higher on the state’s priority list.

Parfait often thinks in stories; he calls this a product of his Indigenous heritage. “When I leave this world, what story do I want my life to represent?” he asks. “I don’t want to move forward into a world where we have to be constantly displaced, where we have to be constantly worried about our next meal, where we have to be constantly worried about land loss.” He thinks about his 8-year-old self, fleeing the bayou without his Zoobooks, and all the upheavals he has experienced since. Those memories remain close, guiding his plans for the future.