MEGAN PRATHER: Promised Land recap: How the McGirt ruling is affecting legal matters in Oklahoma - NONDOC

Promised Land recap: How the McGirt ruling is affecting legal matters in Oklahoma

Promised Land recap: How the McGirt ruling is affecting legal matters in Oklahoma

Since last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, journalists have been covering the details, legal questions and uncertainties in the wake of the landmark court decision. Complicated and delicate in nature, the affirmation of Indian Country reservations and ongoing developments constitute an important storyline for the state of Oklahoma and the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations.

This story is a part of the Oklahoma Media Center’s Promised Land collaborative effort, which shows how the landmark McGirt v. Oklahoma decision will affect both tribal and non-Indigenous residents in the state. 

Recently, the Oklahoma Media Center launched a collaborative reporting project called The Promised Land: A Supreme Court decision places Oklahoma at a crossroads.

Newsrooms across the state have committed to share their content regarding issues pertinent to court rulings and their effects on Indigenous and non-tribal residents of Oklahoma.

The following recap features the opening paragraphs of five stories that were published between April 17 and April 23 by Oklahoma reporters. To read more from each story, click on the provided hyperlinks.

The snippets below have been edited lightly for date clarity and to include additional links to relevant information.

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Judge rules State of Oklahoma has jurisdiction for former KCA reservation CONTINUE READING: Promised Land recap: How the McGirt ruling is affecting legal matters in Oklahoma

Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools

For about 100 years, the U.S. government supported a system of boarding schools where more than 100,000 American Indian and Alaska Native children were stripped of their culture, their languages, and their religions and forced to assimilate to white customs.

That policy, which continued until the 1960s, has continued affects on native communities today, says a bill filed this week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M. 

The United States has never fully accounted for the harms caused by the schools, the lawmakers said. Their bill, which has attracted a bipartisan list of cosponsors, would form a "Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy" to compile records and oral accounts of what happened in at 367 Indian boarding schools across 30 states. Those schools educated children as young as five years old and sometimes forced them into labor in white communities far from their homes, advocacy groups say, but many records of their practices have been lost or destroyed.

The legislation uses some blunt language to make the case for a deep examination of the schools' history.

"The Indian Boarding School Policy was adopted by the United States Government to strip American Indian and Alaska Native children of their indigenous identities, beliefs, and traditional languages to assimilate them into White American culture through federally funded Christian-run schools, which had the effect of cultural genocide," the bill says.

An early model for those off-site boarding schools was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Penn., where founder Gen. Richard Pratt operated under the motto "kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Education Week included the Carlisle school in a previous series on Indian education. A timeline shows an archival photo of long-haired students when they first arrived at CONTINUE READING: Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools - Politics K-12 - Education Week

The Federal Government Gives Native Students an Inadequate Education, and Gets Away With It — ProPublica

The Federal Government Gives Native Students an Inadequate Education, and Gets Away With It — ProPublica

The Federal Government Gives Native Students an Inadequate Education, and Gets Away With It
The Bureau of Indian Education has repeatedly neglected warnings that it is not providing a quality education for 46,000 Native students. Once called a “stain on our Nation’s history,” the school system has let down its students for generations.

SERIES:LESSONS LOST

How Federal Schools Are Failing Native American Students

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This story was co-published with The Arizona Republic, a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

A couple of months after Kimasha Shorty’s son started sixth grade at an Arizona public middle school, his teachers called her at home. He had trouble adding and subtracting and was struggling to read at grade level.

Shorty didn’t understand how it was possible that her oldest child could be so far behind after leaving Wide Ruins Community School, the sole elementary school in an area of about 1,000 residents at the southern edge of the Navajo Nation. He had been diagnosed with a mild learning disability that affects reading and math comprehension, but Shorty said he was doing so well by fourth grade that he skipped a grade at the urging of administrators and began attending a public middle school about 25 miles south in Sanders.

There, her son was far behind his classmates, many of whom did not grow up in his rural community and didn’t spend their early years at an elementary school overseen by the Bureau of Indian Education, a little-known federal agency that manages more than 180 schools and dormitories across the country.

Year after year, a similar pattern emerged for Shorty, the mother of nine children. Her daughter’s middle school math class started with geometry, but her fifth grade CONTINUE READING: The Federal Government Gives Native Students an Inadequate Education, and Gets Away With It — ProPublica