October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month
The last of this series:
When Dwayne Stenstrom was 8 years old a state worker told him that he and his brother were going to a special camp for the summer. Instead, he spent 12 years in foster care.
Dwayne Stenstrom is a professor of American history. His office is lined with towers of obscure books and poetry on the walls. There’s even a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a binder.
In South Dakota, Children’s Home Society cares for hundreds of Native American children.
He teaches this document like many other professors, beginning with, “We hold these truths to be self evident.” But he stops on another phrase — “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages.”
“What [is] significant to me,” Stenstrom says, “is the impact that it has on a lot of our Native American kids when it still regards Indians as merciless Indian savages.”
Stenstrom teaches at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He grew up in a white foster care home, married his wife 31 years ago and raised six children. He’s as passionate about history as he is his community.
Most social services departments would look at him and say he’s a success story.
“The problem,” Stenstrom says, “is that that’s a fallacy.”
He says he didn’t make a life for himself “until I came back to the reservation.”
Losing Native Traditions
The Indian Child Welfare Act says that except in the rarest of cases, Native American children who have to be removed from their homes must be placed with relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans. Yet 32 states are failing in some way to abide by the law, according to 2005 government audit. These children are also more likely to end up in foster care than other races, even in similar circumstances, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association.
John Poole/Courtesy of Dwayne Stenstrom, Dwayne Stenstrom, in the striped shirt, is shown in a family photo as a young boy. He is pictured with one of his brothers who went to Vietnam and another brother who was also placed in foster care.
The result is generations of children growing up without a connection to their culture, traditions and tribes — as Stenstrom did.
He grew up on the Nebraska plains, on the Winnebago Reservation. He and his brother spent the summers outside on the prairie with their grandfather.
But when he was 8 years old, in the spring of 1968, a van pulled up outside his house. The driver, a woman, told him he and his brother were going away for the summer. Stenstrom recalls his grandfather looking worried.
“He told me never to forget where I come from and to embrace it,” Stenstrom remembers.
That was the last time he saw him.
Stenstrom spent the summer in several foster homes. One day the van took him to Ainsworth, Neb., to a house where an older couple lived. Their own children were grown and no longer living at home. There, he and his brother waited for fall so they could go home.
“I’m thinking when the summer’s over, the little van [is] going to come and get me,” Stenstrom says. “It still hasn’t come and got me. I’m still sitting there emotionally waiting for the little van to come. And I don’t expect it’s coming.”
Years later, he was told by a state worker that his mother drank too much. But he doesn’t recall any bad memories. He knows she loved him. When he closed his eyes, he could see it in her face.
He says he doesn’t understand why he wasn’t sent to live with one of his relatives. He had hundreds of them. Instead he was sent to a white foster home.
“I grew up in a teepee, for Pete’s sake,” he says. “This isn’t a cliche. Go to bed in a circular teepee tonight and wake up tomorrow morning with four walls. And when you open your eyes, you don’t recognize anybody in the room. And sit there for 12 years. Because that’s what I did.”
Sometimes he dreamed about Native American ceremonies. But when he woke up, the details were gone. For a while, he hoped his two older brothers would come get him. But they had both been drafted and sent to Vietnam.
“I’m sitting here feeling sorry for me because I lost my mom,” he says. “Imagine what she went through.”
John Poole/NPR, Dwayne Stenstrom and his wife, Rose, live on South Dakota’s Rosebud reservation, where they raised six children. Also pictured is their granddaughter.
Stenstrom liked his foster parents. He says they treated him well, but he does not refer to them as his own mother or father.
“I learned to appreciate that family,” he says. “I stayed with them until both of them passed away. When the mother passed, I went back to her funeral and one of her kids asked, ‘Why’s he here?’ “
After that, something snapped. And like more than half of children who leave foster care, he got in trouble with the law and drank too much.
“The only thing I had going for me was my memory,” he says. “I looked in four directions and there was nobody.”
That’s when he returned to the reservation, he says, to see what he had missed and find his identity. He says it saved him.
Finding Tiospaye
On the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, former foster care children walk into Juanita Sherick’s office every week. They want to be saved too. Sherick knows the feeling. She was taken from her parents when she was 9.
Sherick says like those who visit her, she lost her language and her sense of tiospaye — tribal family.
“A lot of times it’s real painful for me to think about it because my brother and I went through a lot,” she says. “I have never forgotten it. I think that’s why I work so hard in this job.”
Sherick is now the tribe’s social worker. The most difficult mornings are when young children are waiting at her door. They’re runaways from foster care.
Asked what she does with them, she says: “I don’t give them back to the state of South Dakota, that’s for damn sure.”
That feeling is common on South Dakota’s reservations. Officials from three separate tribes said they are actively hiding children from state caseworkers.
Sherick says she finds a relative to take them in — something she says the state should have done in the first place.
“They are so happy to see Grandma,” she says. “They just cry. It makes you cry. Those are the times it’s all worth it.”
After Stenstrom found his way home, he says he connected with the spirit of his grandfather and made peace with the years he spent in foster care. Eventually he even found his mother. She told him she had searched for him for years. He spent six months with her before she died of cancer.
“That was my mom,” he says. “That meant the world to me.”
‘They’ll Always Come Home’
Not too long ago a boy, about 6 years old, found his way to the pay phone at the minimart on the Cheyenne River reservation.
“He ran away from a foster home in Lemmon,” says Diane Garreau, the tribe’s social worker. “He was looking through the phone book because he had remembered names of his family.
“They try to come home,” she says. “They’ll always come home.They should have never left here.”
Garreau and dozens of other tribal officials say the only difference between running away and running home is whether or not you’re running in the direction you belong.
*********
Readers: These stories make my heart heavy. I can’t imagine what it must be like for these children to be taken away from their families…their tribes and brought to place to grow up in a life so foreign, so vastly different from what they once knew. These are just small children, thrown into a life with no culture to lean on, no traditions to remind them, no family to love them. No wonder so many of these children grow up feeling lost, break the laws and turn to alcohol. I can not believe that this is happening and continues to happen.
I am reposting the key findings because I find this to be horrific.
Key Findings Of This Investigation
* Each year, South Dakota removes an average of 700 Native American children from their homes. Indian children are less than 15 percent of state’s the child population, but make up more than half the children in foster care.
* Despite the Indian Child Welfare Act, which says Native American children must be placed with their family members, relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans, native children are more than twice as likely to be sent to foster care as children of other races, even in similar circumstances.
* Nearly 90 percent of Native American children sent to foster care in South Dakota are placed in non-native homes or group care.
* Less than 12 percent of Native American children in South Dakota foster care had been physically or sexually abused in their homes, below the national average. The state says parents have “neglected” their children, a subjective term. But tribe leaders tell NPR what social workers call neglect is often poverty; and sometimes native tradition.
* A close review of South Dakota’s budget shows that they receive almost $100 million a year to subsidize its foster care program.
If this is heartbreaking to you..if this pulls at your heart, I HOPE that it inspires you to do something. These are children that have every right to live a wonderful life with their biological families…to grow up knowing and experiencing life the way they were supposed to. I can’t tell you how disturbed I am reading this series, knowing that our country is supporting this horrific abuse to the native peoples of our country.
If you live in South Dakota, or really anywhere, and are reading this, I HOPE that you have learned something today that has horrified you and that you will make it known that you are not going to ignore this issue anymore…that you are going to help stop this before it is too late for these children. I have said before, that in light of all of our busy lives, find something that you are passionate about and spend an hour a week doing something to support that passion…something that helps others lives become better. I HOPE this is the thing that moves you.
Preeti: You’re welcome. I wish that I was posting better news. I wish the best for you and yours.
Social Butterfly: Love this idea.
Doug: This is appalling. It just shows us how little compassion people have for others when they are down. This behavior is really sickening, and those who participated should be fired.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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