Stephanie Woodard
Unity Rally for the Children: A two-fold issue
Press Release
Born of necessity for South Dakota’s children’s safety, the four colors of people will unite to insure that the children of South Dakota are protected from sexual predators and from being kidnapped by a social service agency resulting in the destruction of the family.
There is no doubt there are many caring social workers in our state who work tirelessly to protect children from various forms of abuse and neglect. It is the system under federal, state, and local mandates that is the issue here before us, today.
National Public Radio has reported that our great state receives $100 million per year to fund the foster care/adoption system. Many news reports are suggesting that the children of our state are a “cash crop.”
As reported by Native Sun News, an investigation of the Department of Social Services is under way for Indian Child Welfare Act violations.
Non-Indian families are not immune to the destruction of family by the DSS system. Two of our rally supporters have worked closely with a Caucasian family, recently. It was found that a CASA worker supplied the court with false information against the family. That CASA worker was fired yet the false information provided is still being used in court by the DSS system.
The family has been separated for two years with the children scattered around the state. What is more, the family’s minister is not allowed to visit the children, much less the parents.
Evelyn Red Lodge asked the DSS in Rapid City for a handbook or any information on parental rights when a family faces an investigation by Child Protection Services. She was informed that a letter of request for information be sent to the Pierre office. The obvious question screams, “Why all the secrecy!”
The second issue the four colors of people will address at the rally is protection of children from sexual predators. Since the further limiting 2010 HB1104 Statute of Limitations for Childhood Sexual Abuse was passed, Robert Brancato, a Certified Fraud Examiner; told Native Sun News more child predators are moving to our great state. That said, many media outlets are describing South Dakota as a haven for these predators.
Here is why. HB 1104 limits the time a child has to report the abuse and seek civil damages to three years or to the arbitrary stipulation of three years after the discovery that the victim was harmed by the abuse.
Ironically, the law was brought to South Dakota legislature by the attorney for St. Joseph’s Indian School who was charged with many sexual abuse allegations committed against Native American children.
Further, HB1104 limits the time to seek damages to those who have not yet reached the age of 40. In doing so, the law unconstitutionally targets Native Americans as an ethnic group as the law was presented and passed after over 40 such victims files civil litigation. Upon it’s passing, these civil suits were dismissed in the court.
As we are all aware, the clergy sex abuse scandal has reached epic proportions and is a global issue. The scandal reaches every color of peoples world-wide.
Why do these issues matter so much? Because, research tells us that children subjected to one or both of these issues will have life-long suffering.
Both issues will cross all racial boundaries and the effects of shattering a child’s dreams will be passed on generationally.
Please join with us in bringing awareness to the social change that must take place by using our constitutionally protected right to free speech in a public forum.
The rally is tentatively scheduled for the first or second week of December. We only ask for your support by being present at the rally.
Date of event: 16 December 2011 in Rapid City, SD. Location to be released after permit issues are resolved.
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Robert Brancato, CFE
Robert Dean & Associates
3213 West Main Street #169
Rapid City, SD. 57702-2314
Office 605.718.2783
Stephanie Woodard Writer, Human Rights
Pine Ridge Rising: Community-Based Development Project Gets Underway
Posted: 01/31/11 09:03 PM ET
Human Rights , Oglala Lakota Nation , Pine Ridge Indian Reservation , South Dakota , Economic Development , Impact News
Oglala Lakota community leader, Nick Tilsen, envisions a vibrant future for his people. He sees elements of that transformation already in place on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. However, they need stitching together, like a quilt whose diverse and colorful pieces are scattered — unseen and uncelebrated — all over the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s homeland in southwestern South Dakota. “There’s been economic activity around the reservation, but no way to pull it together,” said Tilsen (at left).
Until now. A new Housing and Urban Development grant will help the four-year-old organization Tilsen runs, Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, do just that. HUD spokesperson Brian Sullivan called the project “exciting” and “a well-rounded regional plan.” The funding — nearly a million dollars — comes out of HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, formed to reduce bureaucratic barriers and involve local people in the development process, said Sullivan. The office encourages grassroots innovation, and Thunder Valley is delivering that right out of the gate, according to Tilsen.
For starters, Tilsen and his colleagues have flipped the power dynamic. “This is not the federal government’s plan. It’s our plan: the collective vision of the Oglala people. They work for us,” said the 28-year-old Tilsen, who credits his parents, who met at the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee, for his activism.
Economic development has been attempted at Pine Ridge. Why would this endeavor succeed where others have failed? According to the project’s attorney, Brett Lee Shelton, previous models were targeted not at growth, but at assimilation. Since Oglalas have about as much affection for forced acculturation as they do for the Seventh Cavalry, the schemes inevitably collapsed. “Thunder Valley’s funders were creative in taking the community into account,” said Shelton, a tribal member and partner in the law firm Smith Shelton Ragona. “This project arises from the people.”
Attending the grant’s recent kick-off meeting in their new supportive role were federal, state, and tribal agencies, some of which have long tried to control Oglalas’ fate, with often devastating results for tribal members. Other attendees included Lakota Funds, Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce, and the award-winning architecture firm Berkebile Nelson Immenschuh McDowell, or BNIM, which has worked on the reservation for several years and will design housing and plan enterprise zones, among other tasks.
Elders provided guidance, and everyone began thinking outside the box, according to BNIM project manager and architect Scott Moore. “Government officials had a breakout session and talked about collaborating across agencies,” said Moore. “They got excited about working together.”
Thunder Valley promotes synergy not just between agencies, but also between tradition and innovation. “Community members approach this project as an expression of what it means to be Lakota in the 21st century,” Moore observed. One traditional activity that’s being revived is, simply, planning. “Looking forward is not new for us,” Tilsen said. “What’s new is that nowadays we live day to day, crisis to crisis. Our people never have a moment to consider the future.”
The level of crisis is staggering, with daily privations that are unimaginable off the reservation. People on Pine Ridge struggle just to survive, said Shelton: “They try to make a living as craftspeople, hunting and wildlife guides, and more, but there’s no funding or infrastructure to support them.” There are no banks to make personal or business loans and minimal public transportation to move goods and services and ensure employees get to work safely; automobiles may injure or kill pedestrians and horseback riders traveling roads without shoulders or sidewalks. Because dollars arriving on Pine Ridge land in a matter of hours in off-reservation businesses, such as grocery and clothing stores, the tribe has, in essence, barely any economy. These problems are exacerbated by 80-90 percent unemployment, minimal access to safe water and fresh food, a severe housing shortage, and extreme rates of chronic illness and suicide.
Our economy reflects our history,” said Tilsen. “It’s as though a tornado came through. A tornado of colonization, of oppression. But by asking what happened, we produce healing and progress.”
Harbingers of success abound, including the enormous energy and good will of the Oglala people. “Lakota culture is inclusive,” said Shelton. “The more this project reaches out, the more it honors that. There’s room for everyone, including non-Indians living on the reservation. The more, the better.”
The inclusiveness extends to the economic model, according to Tilsen: “Our people want to trade or participate in the cash economy, as needed. Some want a 30-year mortgage; others want to use local natural materials, as in straw-bale construction, to build homes with their own hands. We support all their choices.”
Job one for Thunder Valley CDC is collecting data — about current reservation homes and building projects; existing roads and utilities; tribal members’ travel and spending patterns; the reservation’s natural assets; and much more. Moore called information gathering the basis of smart growth and of a process that’ll outlast current participants.
Said Tilsen: “It’ll last as long as the people embrace it.”
Photos courtesy of Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation.
South Dakota Sex Abuse Scandal: A Peek Inside the Church’s Drawers
Posted: 04/19/11 05:28 PM ETThe letters are casual, even chatty, from officials of St. Francis Mission, on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, in South Dakota, to Catholic Church superiors. The mission ran one of many boarding schools to which Native American parents were required to send their children from the late 1800s until the 1970s, when most of the institutions were closed down or transferred to tribal control.
“All goes along quietly out here,” one priest wrote in 1968, with “good religious and lay faculty” at the mission. There are troublesome staffers, though, including “Chappy,” who is “fooling around with little girls — he had them down the basement of our building in the dark, where we found a pair of panties torn.” Later that year, Brother Francis Chapman was still abusing children, though by 1970, he was “a new man,” the reports say. In 1973, Chappy again “has difficulty with little girls.”
Some documents are more discreet than explicit. In 1967, two nuns at St. Paul’s Indian Mission, on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, also in South Dakota, had excessive “interest in” and “dealings with” older male students, says a report to Church higher-ups. (St. Paul’s, pictured below, was renamed Marty Indian School when the tribe took it over in 1975; 2008 graduation tipis are shown in the foreground.) Another nun has “too close a circle of friends, especially two boys.”
What ex-students describe as rampant sexual abuse in South Dakota’s half-dozen boarding schools occurred against a backdrop of extreme violence. “I’ll never forget my sister’s screams as the nuns beat her with a shovel after a pair of scissors went missing,” said Mary Jane Wanna Drum, 64, who attended a Catholic institution in Sisseton, South Dakota, for the children of her tribe, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.
Izzy Zephier, 62, a Yankton Sioux tribal member, recalled a Sunday-evening ritual at St. Paul’s Indian Mission. “Those who’d tried to run away were stripped, lined up, and given 40 lashes each with a thick rubber strap,” he said.
Zephier described a prison-like daily routine. “We were marched along barbed-wire-lined sidewalks from locked dorms to locked classrooms and back again; in grade school, we went outdoors within a barbed-wire-topped pen.” The church building at St. Paul’s had its own crown of thorns in those days; it, too, was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, lest worshippers made a run for it.
Rather than offering the children protection, the Church typically demanded secrecy, with clergy telling youngsters they’d be punished or go to hell if they told anyone what had happened to them, said several former students, male and female. The Church appears to have kept close track of these activities, though. “Every bishop has two sets of files — the public ones and the secret ones chronicling the abuse,” said Joelle Casteix, western regional director of Chicago-headquartered support group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). “The Church knows what happened when, and it all comes out in court.”
South Dakota’s Hail Mary Play
Starting in 2003, Native Americans in South Dakota, including Zephier and Drum, began filing lawsuits against the Catholic Dioceses of Sioux Falls and Rapid City, as well as the religious orders that ran the schools. The Native plaintiffs came forward in small groups, then ever-larger ones, claiming rape, sodomy, and molestation by priests, nuns, and others. By mid-2010, the number of plaintiffs topped 100, including six who said they were victims of Brother Francis Chapman, who is now deceased. More than 65 other pedophile clerics and Church employees were named, including the late Father Francis Suttmiller, accused by Zephier and more than a dozen other men and women who were St. Paul’s students.
The lawsuits resulted in the disclosure of Church documents (now public court documents, including those quoted above) that detail the abuse and describe transfers of predators, not all of whom are dead. After complaints about one brother surfaced in South Dakota, he was off to Washington, D.C., where he was convicted of sodomizing young boys there, his recent court testimony shows. Another priest who’s still with us, Father Bruce MacArthur, was transferred out of South Dakota, only to embark on a multi-state, multi-parish spree of sexual assaults of children and the disabled, for which he was convicted and imprisoned in the 1970s and again in 2008.
In March, a South Dakota court dismissed 18 of the Native American lawsuits. The judge’s opinion cited a 2010 South Dakota law limiting civil actions for childhood sexual abuse after the victim turns 40. The Native plaintiffs are older than that, and one of their lawyers, Gregory A. Yates, of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Los Angeles, charged that their cases had been targeted by the legislature. He asked the judge to reconsider his unusual retroactive ruling (applying a new statute to pre-existing cases).
On April 1, the judge refused to do so. The Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls, a defendant in the dismissed suits, did not respond to phone calls requesting a comment. Teresa Kettelkamp, who heads the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops child protection division, said the Church offers healing to sexual-abuse victims, but that civil and criminal matters are in an entirely different sphere.
Said Zephier, whose suit was thrown out: “The statute and the judge’s decision are insulting. They say the justice system does not protect Native people and does not care that terrible things happened to Native children.” Commenting on the section of Pope Benedict’s letter to the Church in Ireland, in which the pope favorably compared sex-abuse injuries to Christ’s wounds, Zephier asked, “Did Christ’s wounds include sodomy?”
SNAP director David G. Clohessy observed that South Dakota’s new law swims against the tide of childhood-sexual-abuse prosecutions: “Most states are making it easier to expose predators. South Dakota is the only one making it harder.”
Attorney Steven Smith, of Chamberlain, South Dakota, defended the 2010 law, which he wrote and submitted it as a “constituent bill.” He said plaintiffs are unfairly “trying to grab the brass ring, seeing someone else grab the brass ring, thinking that’s your ticket out of squalor.”
Smith’s client Congregation of Priests of the Sacred Heart is the defendant in a dozen boarding-school cases, including one involving the convicted sodomite. When speaking to the legislature in support of his bill, Smith described childhood-related cases as hard for the Church to defend against because “few people can remember what happened or didn’t happen.”
When asked about repentance on the part of the Church, Smith responded, “We aren’t going to throw money [sic] just because of this purported healing process the Church has to go through.”
Rolling Back the Stone
Native parents faced severe penalties, including jail time, if they did not send their children to the boarding schools. However, Zephier said, as a young teen he came upon an unexpected escape route: “School had just let out for the day, and I realized I’d forgotten a couple of books. I ran back into the building, where I found that a priest had a girl on the floor. She was fighting and screaming, ‘let me go.’ When the priest saw me, he got up and backhanded me hard. I hit him back and yelled to the girl, ‘run, get out of here!’ I hit the priest five times and knocked him down. The girl took off. The next day, I was expelled.”
He and other ex-students reported reaffirming their traditional spirituality upon leaving school. Drum participates in traditional ceremonies but has not entirely rejected Christianity. “I still walk with the Lord,” she said, “but I cannot even shake hands with a priest.”
Photograph by Stephanie Woodard. Upcoming posts in this series will relate survivors’ stories.
South Dakota Church-Abuse Chronicles,
Part 1: ‘I Want Everyone To Know What Happened To Us’
Posted: 04/27/11 10:42 AM ETCatholic Church , Human Rights , Native Americans , Roman Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal , South Dakota , Native American Boarding Schools , Nuns , Pedophile Priest , Priest Sex Abuse , Religion News , Sioux , Sioux Reservations , Religion News
From the late 1800s until well into the 20th century, the federal government compelled Native parents nationwide to send their children to boarding schools designed to assimilate them. Many of the institutions were run by the Catholic Church, which the government paid to “kill the Indian, save the man,” in the parlance of the day. To date, more than 100 ex-students of the half-dozen boarding schools in South Dakota have sued the Catholic Dioceses of Sioux Falls and Rapid City, as well as the religious orders that ran the institutions, charging that priests, nuns, and lay employees raped, sodomized, molested, and brutalized them. For more on the lawsuits, see this post.
Here is one woman’s story; her case is still pending:
A 64-year-old member of the Dakota tribe Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, she was taken from her family as an infant and placed in Tekakwitha Orphanage, a Catholic-run institution established in Sisseton, South Dakota, for the children of her people. Few youngsters there were orphans but had been, like her, removed from their families.
“All I remember about life in the first building I was in at Tekakwitha – the Papoose House for babies — was being hungry and a punishment that consisted of being placed in a dark crawl space of some sort. Other than that, I was generally alone in my crib or bed.
“When I was 6, they moved me to the main building to start school. The nuns there would take us to their private quarters and do things to our bodies that even at that young age I knew were not right. The next year, a boy who was 17 or 18 raped me. He said if I told, he’d bring other boys and they’d all rape me. I was so frightened, I never said anything to anyone.
“When I was 8 or 9, Father Pohlen, the priest in charge, placed me with a family in Michigan. I understood it was a tryout for being adopted by them. There were boys in the family, and they and the men would partake of sex with me. I have a memory of being told to go get Vaseline, then returning to the room to find them waiting for me. This lasted for a summer.
“I didn’t know where to turn or who to tell. Father Pohlen had placed me there, so I couldn’t say anything to him, and the nuns were so cold. They didn’t care about our feelings or our mental state and showed us no affection. They wanted our souls and to teach us to fear God. Sometimes they’d whip us — holding us with the left hand while using the right to beat us with a rubber hose.
“None of the adults in my life ever noticed anything about me — whether I’d sustained injuries and bruises because of the rapes or mistreatment or if I was afraid. I did have siblings at the school, but because I’d been taken so young and because the school had changed both my given and my family name, we never knew each other then.
“When I was about 10, Father Pohlen placed me with a dentist from Puerto Rico, who wanted to teach me Spanish so I could speak it once he and his wife adopted me and took me to live there. He raped me and said he wanted to continue his ‘affair’ with me — though I mustn’t tell his wife. After several weeks, I was returned to the orphanage. Again, I never said anything to Father Pohlen or the nuns other than that I didn’t want to learn Spanish or live with that man. I’d learned by then that to protect myself I shouldn’t say much.
“We did have good times. At Christmas, we each received a shoebox full of nuts and candy and oranges and another box with trinkets and a doll. Most of us girls immediately traded the dolls for food. We did that because the mother superior used to force us to simulate sex with a large doll before abusing us herself, so we were frightened of dolls. Can you imagine putting the fear of dolls into a child’s mind?
“Tekakwitha went just through junior high, and I was later sent to a boarding school in Nebraska. It had the same physical violence, though no sexual abuse. I was always trying to escape. We all did. We weren’t trying to get home because we didn’t know where that was. We were completely disoriented. We just took off and took our chances in the world, hitchhiking down the road. Then they’d find us and bring us back.
“As an adult, I’ve been a traveler. I’ve lived in 14 states, mostly waitressing because it’s a job you can get quickly. I’d always move on, though. I think I was searching for family. I eventually had three children, who were taken from me or I gave up. I don’t know where my boys are, though I keep in touch with my girl. Now, I’m back living on my reservation, which sometimes feels like a foreign country, though I’m related to half the people here.
“What I want is to talk about Tekakwitha. They took away our sense of belonging to anyone, our opportunities to develop relationships. They kept us constantly off balance by sending us here and there without warning.
“But they could never take away the truth — that what they were doing was wrong. I want everyone to know what happened to us there.”
