Trace A. DeMeyer's Blog, page 4
September 21, 2025
UI professor to return documents to survivors of Native American boarding schools
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz (University of Iowa) In the dimly lit rooms of the National Archives, Joe Maxwell recalled digging through what he described as “the bowels” of the U.S. government as he and other student research assistants sifted through boxes full of paperwork as a part of Project Return, a nationwide project set to launch officially in October.
The project’s goal is to return documents to the survivors of Native American boarding schools who were taken from their families and attended abusive classrooms.
These residential schools, which were located across the U.S., Canada, and more than 526 of which were federally funded, according to The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, were often the site of abduction, acculturation, abuse, and death, with the U.S. Department of the Interior reporting at least 973 children died while attending these schools.
Many people who survived were unaware documents from their time in the schools even existed. Report cards, photographs, and letters sent to and from the families of the children remained unreturned.
“Most Indian boarding school survivors that I’ve ever met were not aware that there were records in the National Archives,” Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz said, the director of the Native Policy Lab and a UI associate professor of practice in the School of Planning and Public Affairs.
Schuettpelz was recently awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to fund Project Return in July.
“Part of the reason that I do this is that they don’t know they exist, and the process for getting them is not straightforward,” she said.
As a part of the pilot for Project Return, the program partnered with the Chickasaw Nation, which provided Schuettpelz and the student research assistants with a list of student records they were interested in having repatriated and returned to their rightful owners.
KEEP READING: https://dailyiowan.com/2025/09/14/ui-professor-to-return-documents-to-survivors-of-native-american-boarding-schools/
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
September 20, 2025
September 19, 2025 | ICT Newscast
Homelands
HOMELANDS
26 September – 31 December 2025
HOMELANDS celebrates the eightieth year in the life of Mvskoke artist Rick Grimster. Born to an English mother and a Native American father, war baby Rick was raised by adoptive parents in the UK.
In this series of acrylic paintings, Grimster playfully merges abstract impressions of England and America through masterful use of colour, pattern and texture. Together these autobiographical landscapes chart his remarkable passage through time on two continents and his lifelong journey of transformation from adoptee to Indigenous elder.
HOMELANDS is a love letter to the people and places that gave life to this extraordinary artist.
This exhibition coincides with National Adoption Week.
Exhibition opening Friday 26th September 5pm-7pm
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meThe American Way Of Silencing And Oppression Is Nothing New If You Are Black Or Brown
Shut the F*ck Up by Sean Sherman
The American Way Of Silencing And Oppression Is Nothing New If You Are Black Or Brown
Read on Substack excerpt:The Shock of Being SilencedThe empire grows stronger and voices like Colbert, Kimmel, or basically anybody who says out loud that Charlie Kirk was a racist piece of white trash is being thrown aside through government pressure. Americans are acting like they just realized censorship can happen to white people also. While the media (and who owns the media nowadays?) is busy tiptoeing around the fall of democracy and ignoring the blatant authoritarian actions of the current White House agenda, Trump and clowns are busy defining their own brand of “cancel culture” wrapped in the typical nationalistic patriotic bullshit shielded by hypocritical Christian beliefs. We should all know by now it’s just more distraction to throw fuel on the fire of their division war and keep the conversation away from exposing the cheetoh stained Epstein files.
In reality, America as a government has been silencing people since 1776. The only thing new now is who’s feeling the muzzle. It’s not just Indigenous people, Black folks, immigrants, and the poor anymore. Now it’s nipping at privileged voices who always assumed their mic was untouchable.
KEEP READING: https://substack.com/home/post/p-174075249
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meSeptember 18, 2025
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
"Sand Talk How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World" By Tyson Yunkaporta
What happens when global systems are viewed from an Indigenous perspective? How does it affect the way we see history, money, power and learning? Could it change the world?
This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger's cat.
Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?
Sand Talk provides a template for living. It's about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It's about how we learn and how we remember. It's about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It's about finding different ways to look at things.
Most of all it's about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.
Sometimes it is hard to write in English when you’ve been talking to
your great-grandmother on the phone but she is also your niece, and in
her language there are no separate words for time and space. In her
kinship system every three generations there is a reset in which your
grandparents’ parents are classified as your children, an eternal cycle
of renewal. In her traditional language she asks you something that
translates directly into English as ‘what place’ but actually means
‘what time’, and you reluctantly shift yourself into that paradigm,
because you know it will be hard as hell to shift back out of it again
when you go back to work. Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in
seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles and time is so bound up
in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space. We
experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat
schedules and story-less surfaces. In our spheres of existence, time
does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we
stand on. - Tyson Yunkaporta, SandTalk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World is a 2019 book by Tyson Yunkaporta that sets out to look at the world, especially sustainability, through Aboriginal perspectives.[1] Yunkaporta calls for fewer token gestures such as land acknowledgements and more meaningful inclusion.[2] The book engages with other Indigenous people to draw from their lived knowledge, which creates paradoxes for the reader.[3]
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meSeptember 17, 2025
Should States Guarantee a Right to Know Your Biological Parents?
Until recently, children of closed adoptions in Georgia would have to hire an attorney and make the case in court that they needed to know the identity of their biological parents. But a new law ensures that adoptees who are at least 18 years old can get access to a copy of their original birth certificates.STORY: https://www.governing.com/policy/should-states-guarantee-a-right-to-know-your-biological-parents
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meSeptember 16, 2025
A Baby Adopted, and ICWA failed
A video leaks of a wealthy politician describing how he adopted a Native child, leading to outrage from the child’s biological family and members of her tribe. LISTEN: https://revealnews.org/podcast/native-adoption-utah-politician-northern-cheyenne/
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meSeptember 15, 2025
Sixties Scoop Survivors call for more support in reconnecting with families
“I always knew I was adopted, I always knew I was Indigenous, but I didn’t know what my connection to the community was,” she said.
In 2015, Strongwind put in a request for her birth certificate, which had her biological mother’s name listed.Katherine Strongwind at four years old. (Handout) Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
September 14, 2025
Sixties Scoop Survivor returns home
Hooker, who has lived his life in New Zealand, was never able to locate his birth mother, until now. Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
During 2020 Zoom Meeting, Boss Recognizes Employee as Child Who Disappeared...
Trace A. DeMeyer's Blog
- Trace A. DeMeyer's profile
- 2 followers
