#native american boarding schools

[mannyblacque]

Reservation Dogs 3.03 "Deer Lady"

This episode was a real gut punch.

[red-and-black-forever]

Here is my plqylist for Podcast Episode about Native American Boarding Schools and Residential Schools.

[olowan-waphiya]

What is NIBSDA?

NIBSDA was conceptualized to serve as a national digital platform and digital repository for boarding school archival collections throughout the United States. As part of truth-telling, access to boarding school records for survivors and descendants is paramount to understanding this history and its consequences on Tribal Nations. Through cultivating historical insights, NIBSDA supports community-led healing initiatives throughout American Indian and Alaska Native Nations towards restored Indigenous cultural sovereignty.

⚠ In negotiating these pursuits, you may encounter content that can trigger secondary trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); we encourage individuals to prepare themselves prior to engaging with these collections and to seek counseling or healing if you experience any stress related to boarding school history.   Indigenous peoples are warned that NIBSDA may lead to other external resources that contain images, names, and references to deceased persons. For more information, please see Content Warning. ⚠

[thoughtportal]

Native American Children murdered at US boarding schools

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 29, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 30, 2024

In 2008, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law an act making the day after Thanksgiving National Native American Heritage Day.

About a month ago, on Friday, October 25, President Joe Biden became the first president to visit Indian Country in ten years when he traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Maricopa County, Arizona, near Phoenix. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland traveled with him. The trip was designed to highlight the investments the Biden-Harris administration has made in Tribal Nations.

At a press gaggle on Air Force One on the way to Arizona, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that under Biden, Tribal Nations have seen the largest direct federal investment in history: $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan and $13 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build roads and bridges, bring clean water and sanitation, and build high-speed Internet in Tribal communities.

Jean-Pierre added that First Lady Jill Biden has also championed Native communities, visiting them ten times to highlight investments in youth mental health, the revitalization of Native languages, and to improve access to cancer screening and cancer care in Native communities.

Secretary Haaland, herself a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, agreed that the Biden-Harris administration has brought “transformational change” to Native communities: “electricity on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona for homes that have never had electricity; protecting cultural resources, like salmon, which Pacific Northwest Tribes have depended on for thousands of years; new transportation infrastructure for the Mescalero Apache Nation in New Mexico that will provide a safer travel route and boost their economic development, their local economy; addressing toxic legacy pollution and abandoned oil and gas infrastructure that pollutes our air and water for the Osage Nation in Oklahoma; providing clean drinking water for Fort Peck in Montana.”

“Tribal leaders are experiencing a new era,” Haaland added. “They’re at the table. They’re being consulted.”

When Biden spoke at the Gila Crossing Community School, he said he was there “to right a wrong, to chart a new path toward a better future for us all.” As president of the United States, Biden formally apologized to the Native peoples—Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans—for the U.S. government policy that forced Native children into federal Indian boarding schools.

The apology comes after the release of an Interior Department study, The Federal Boarding School Initiative, that Secretary Haaland directed the department to undertake in 2021. According to Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen and former president of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), the initiative was “a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of Federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past.”

The initiative set out to identify federal Indian boarding schools and sites, to identify the children who attended those schools and to identify their Tribal identities, to find marked and unmarked burial sites of the remains of Indian children near school facilities, and to incorporate the viewpoints of those who attended federal Indian boarding schools and their descendants into the story of those schools.

The report looked at the Indian education system from 1819 to 1969 as a whole, bringing together federal funding for religious schools in the early 1800s with later explicitly federal schools and their public school successors during and after the 1930s. But historians generally focus on the period from 1879 to the 1930s as the boarding school era.

In 1879, the government opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school for American Indian children in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, explicitly designed to separate children from their families and their culture and to train them for menial jobs.

The boarding school era was the brainchild of Army officer Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War veteran who, in the years after the war, commanded the 10th United States Cavalry, a Black regiment stationed in the American West whose members Indigenous Americans nicknamed the “Buffalo Soldiers.” Pratt fought in the campaigns on the Plains from 1868 through 1875, when he was assigned to oversee 72 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo prisoners of war at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida (now known as the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument).

Many Indigenous prisoners at Fort Marion, taken from the dry Plains to the hot and humid coast of Florida where they were imprisoned in a cramped stone fort, quickly sickened and died. Pratt worked to upgrade conditions and to assimilate prisoners into U.S. systems by teaching them English, U.S. culture, Christianity, and how the American economy worked. He cut their hair, dressed them in military-type uniforms, and urged them to make art for sale to local tourists—it’s from here we get the world-famous collection of ledger art by the artists of Fort Marion—but focused on turning the former warriors and their families into menial workers.

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and the subsequent pursuit and surrender of leading Lakota bands throughout that year and the next, leading to the murder of Crazy Horse in 1877, popular opinion ran heavily toward simply corralling Indigenous Americans on reservations and waiting either for their assimilation or extermination. At the same time, with what seemed to be the end of the most serious of the Plains Wars, Army officers like Pratt had reason to worry that the downsizing of the U.S. Army would mean the end of their careers.

Indigenous survivors of Fort Marion returned home to see that the American government had no real plans for a thriving American Indian populace. There was little infrastructure to link them to the rest of the country to sell their art, and Indian agents rejected tribal members for jobs in favor of white cronies.

But Pratt considered his experiment at Fort Marion a great success, and he came to believe he could make his system work even more thoroughly by using a loophole in the treaties between Plains Tribes and the U.S. government to force Indigenous Americans to assimilate as children. He planned, he said, to “Kill the Indian and save the man.”

Treaties between Plains Indian Tribes and the government required the U.S. government to educate American Indian children—something their parents cared deeply about—but the treaties didn’t actually specify where the schools would be. So Pratt convinced the U.S. Army and officials at the Interior Department to give him the use of the Carlisle Barracks to open an industrial school, designed to teach American Indian children the skills necessary to be servants and menial workers.

In summer 1879, Pratt traveled to western reservations of the Lakotas and Dakotas, primarily, to gather up 82 children to begin his experiment in annihilating their culture from their minds. He forbade the practice of any aspect of Indigenous culture—language, religion, custom, clothing—and forced children to change their names, use English, practice Christianity, and wear clothing that mirrored that of Euro-American children.

Crowded together, many children died of disease; bereft of their family and culture, many died of heartache. Some found their newfound language and lessons tolerable, others ran away. For the next fifty years, the Carlisle model was the central model of government education for Indigenous children, with tens of thousands of children educated according to its methods.

In the 1920s the Institute for Government Research, later renamed the Brookings Institution, commissioned a study funded by the Rockefeller Institute—to make sure it would not reflect government bias—to investigate conditions among Indigenous Americans.

In 1928 that study, called the Meriam Report, condemned the conditions under which American Indians lived. It also emphasized the “deplorable health conditions” at the boarding schools, condemned the schools’ inappropriate focus on menial skills, and asserted that “[t]he most fundamental need in Indian education is a change in point of view.” In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act reversed the policy of trying to eradicate Tribal cultures through boarding children away from their families, and introduced the teaching of Indian history and culture in federal schools.

But the boarding schools remain a central part of the experience of American Indians since the establishment of the U.S. government in North America, and the Federal Boarding School Initiative recommended that “[t]he U.S. Government should issue a formal acknowledgment of its role in adopting a national policy of forced assimilation of Indian children, and carrying out this policy through the removal and confinement of Indian children from their families and Indian Tribes and the Native Hawaiian Community and placement in the Federal Indian boarding school system.”

It continued: "The United States should accompany this acknowledgment with a formal apology to the individuals, families, and Indian Tribes that were harmed by U.S. policy."

On October 25, 2024, President Joe Biden delivered that apology.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ironysgrace]

The school was only open for FIVE YEARS and housed 150 stolen children

I can’t even wrap my head around that

Like imagine 12 of your classmates dying in high school ???

[captain-eppe]

Unlocking Pipers Backstory part 1

-She's native and vegetarian

Or Piper iii

*I have Opinions on both Native American portrayal in Media, and Vegetarianism.

Piper is having a dream. It's a memory of her last day with her dad. They have managed to find an isolated beach Villa. She figures something is going to ruin it, paparazzi, fangirls wanting an autograph with permanent marker, something, but it's an enjoyable moment. He's teaching her how to surf. It's a nice moment. 

I wonder if in the future, Piper and Percy will have a surfing competition. 

Piper is not a natural surfer, but still flushes with pride whenever her dad gives her a compliment. Her dad is a bizarrely good surfer, who has no surfing background. 

She might have given it up, except it allows her to spend time with her dad. 

Piper reveals she loves PBJ, and wishes her dad made it for her, rather than the Extra personal chef, who wraps it in gold leaf. 

She's also a vegetarian, because the smell of slaughterhouse makes her throw up. 

Alright fine. We all have our reasons for our diet choices. I want to see Piper being careful and asking after ingredients in foods, making sure that the pie she accepts doesn't have a crust made with lard and the like. And maybe at least one instance of her praying to the porcelain gods, and her friends getting super angry on her behalf, because someone lied about the vegetarian friendliness of the food. 

I know Grover was also a vegetarian, but he was also a goat, and could eat tin cans and the like. I have different stomach expectations from him. 

I have three vegetarian family members, and  eat enough with them often enough to know that they consider their food choices carefully. And I get to hear the stories of people who don't consider some kind of meat, as meat, and how my cousin spent the night throwing up from that ignorance when their stomach rejected it. 

Disrespecting dietary needs hurts people, and fiction is a safe place to explore and educate people about the hows and why's. And people are far likelier to remember its bad effects if it happens to a fave fictional character. 

The dream/ memory continues, and the further in we go, we see that Piper and her Dad don't have great communication.  

Piper wants regular clothes. But more than that, she wants his attention. She's hacked off her hair deliberately, she steals, she gets kicked out of schools she doesn't like. 

This is the first time alone she has had with him in three months. The trip was a pleasant surprise.  She hasn't told him about stealing a BMW yet because, she didn't want to ruin the moment. 

She starts to bring it up. Her dad notices her serious face, and decides to play 'Any Three Questions'. A game where the participants must answer any three questions posed honestly. The rest of the time, her dad stays out of her business, which isn't hard, Piper notes, as he's never around. 

Piper takes the opportunity to ask about her mother. "Do you think she's still alive?"

He starts with a Cherokee story from her grandpa Tom. 

If you walked far enough towards the sunset, you would come to Ghost Country, where you could talk to the dead. A long time ago, you could bring the dead back, but mankind messed up. Its a long story. 

Piper cuts in to make a comparison to the land of the dead. About a year ago, her Dad had taken on a role of an ancient Greek King. He included her in his reading of the legends, and they had a fun time together. It helped her feel closer to her Dad for a time, but like everything it didn't last. 

Her Dad agrees on the similarities between the Greek and Cherokee. 

I have to wonder what's up with Piper and her Dad. Did Rick do his research, based on papers his kids wrote years ago? I have to wonder?

What's up with Tristen? He's kind of living his reality far away from his Native heritage. And I have to wonder if that's generational. 

Let me imagine a backstory, based on talks I've attended, and native bibliographies I've read. Tristan's mom was a residential school victim. She gets out, and has the reaction of pretending to be a different ethnicity (as I have heard some people did). She marries a white man, after an unplanned pregnancy. Tristen grows up rather divorced from his culture, but given how his mom does act about it, maybe it's better that way. She tries really hard to be anything else, and gets weird about sending him to school, so he keeps it quiet. Grows up, becomes famous, and does as an adult try to learn about his culture. He meets a relative of his mothers who grew up in Cherokee culture, and calls him father. He's having trouble connecting himself to his culture between being a famous person, and being raised to pretend to be anything else. Then, unexpectedly, he becomes a father. And He's not ready to be a father, but He's trying. He's not taking on Native roles, because he feels he's not the person for that, and He's trying to teach Piper their heritage, but between him not sure himself how he connects to his culture, and being a Famous Absentee parent, Piper grows up a little more personally connected to it, but also in a lot of ways, just as clueless as him to the nuance of it. Her grandfather dies of cancer, as often not even money can fix that. 

There is a tragedy in them both missing on the messed up notes in his decision to send Piper to boarding school. Tristen never thought to ask Thomas when he was alive. 

Ok now that I've done that, let's go check the wiki. 

…

No. He doesn't know enough about his culture or other people in his community for me to buy this backstory. He makes far more sense as an adult trying to find a connection, but not sure how to bring it into his life. 

Did you research that Rick? I admit, mine is probably more suited to a fanfiction than a novel, but maybe read a native american bibliography or two before writing a backstory for one. Get a cultural consultant. If friggin Ubisoft will get a culture consultant for Assassin's Creed iii, you should be able to write for one to get a culture consultation! Even if you didn't do it for the first one you SHOULD HAVE going forward in the series. For someone who likes to use other cultures myths as a structure and key part of their stories, you should know how to reach out to experts and collaborate! Generational trauma is not a buzzword, it's something that affects the culture to this day. 

People got out of res school, and they drank to forget the abuse , and even when the residential schools were over, they still took kids and fostered them to other families. That's not the story for everyone, but it is an important part of the story for a lot. 

"Before 1978, approximately 80 percent of Native American families living on reservations lost at least one child to the foster care system, according to data compiled by National Indian Child Welfare Association. Additionally, more than 25 percent of all Native children were removed from their families, with 85 percent receiving placements outside of their tribes or relatives.

“And that was even if there was no abuse — there were no issues occurring,” Lowden said. “Even if there were willing and fit family members available, these children were still adopted out to white families.”-

"These policies continue to negatively impact individuals, families and tribes. Non-tribal placement and adoption has created identity issues and disconnected feelings along with negative mental health outcomes.

They may be living in a community where they’re the only Indian person, and when people feel stress, anxiety, depression, a lot of times they cope in unhealthy ways, and that is in order to mask their trauma,” she said."

It was an attempted genocide, and so much has been lost for it. You were a teacher Rick, would you let your students pull that? Not that I actually expect him to read this, but I'm here to talk with imaginary Rick, not real one, as I would probably not be this upfront on most of the things with most of the people I know or meet irl. I'm better at writing fire than spitting it.

Anyway, the story wraps up, and Piper concludes that he thinks her mom is dead. She corrects him, and says that he doesn't know if shes dead but she might as well be. She also reminds on her dads inner sadness that's apparently attractive to women, and her dad tells her that he doesn't really believe in ghost countries and the like. That he would always be looking to blame. Success does not make her dad happy. Neither will the upcoming news from his assistant Jane.

Piper tries prayer, but it is ineffective. Piper tries to confess, but is too slow. Jane seems partly annoyed, partly triumphant, which tells Piper shes been in contact with the Police. I hope she is not trying to get in his pants.

So Piper looses the chance to tell him her side of the story, and the day is ruined. Jane gives Piper a look "like she was a disgusting pet that had whizzed on the carpet." Add that one to the eventual bingo.

So Tristen comes back with betrayal in his eyes. "You said you would try"Piper claims she hates the school and was going to mention the car. Tristen tells her he could have gotten her any car she wanted.Piper says that it would have been Jane getting her the car, and the point of it is she wants his attention. He says we've talked about this, but as far as Piper is concerned he talked about it, and it hasn't been a conversation.

She's going to boarding school for problem children, much as he tries to word it differently. He asks her what else is he to do after she let him down.

The connotations of going to boarding school for a child of native decent (yikes! Yikes!! YIKES!!!) Are not touched upon. She says anything, as long as its him doing something, not Jane. Tristen chooses Delegation. The day is over, and he looks off into the ocean. Jane has the details, Jane has the plane ticket. Piper does her best not to cry.

[nightqueens-world]

Army returns remains of 9 Indigenous children who died at boarding school over a century ago

The remains of nine more Native American children who died at a notorious government-run boarding school in Pennsylvania over a century ago have been disinterred from a small Army cemetery and returned to families

via ABC News App

They should've never been taken from their families to begin with .

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Adria R. Walker at The Guardian:

On Friday, Joe Biden formally apologized for the United States government’s role in running at least 523 Indian boarding schools. His remarks were given at the Gila Crossing community school outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and marked his first visit to Indian country as president.

“After 150 years, the United States government eventually stopped the program,” Biden said. “But the federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened – until today. I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did. I formally apologize. That’s long overdue.” “Federal Indian boarding school policy, the pain it has caused, will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history,” he said. “For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention.” Indian boarding schools were run with the express goal to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man”, a phrase coined by the army officer Richard Henry Pratt, who founded Carlisle Indian boarding school, the first federally run Indian boarding school. From 1819 to 1969, in what Biden called “one of the most horrific chapters in American history”, the US government directly managed or funded Indian boarding schools in nearly 40 states. The schools, at which formal education was limited, forcibly and systematically stripped Indigenous children of their culture by removing them from their families and communities, forbidding them from speaking their languages and, typically violently, punishing them if they resisted.

A US Department of the Interior report released earlier this year found that at least nearly 1,000 Indigenous children died in the schools. Sexual violence was commonplace. Dr Denise K Lajimodiere, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and one of the founders of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, wrote that the “boarding school era represented a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide and human rights abuses”. “Some of our elders who are boarding school survivors have been waiting all of their lives for this moment,” said Stephen Roe Lewis, the Gila River Indian community governor. “If only for a moment on Friday, this will rise to the top, and the most powerful person in the world, our president, is shining a light on this dark history that’s been hidden.” No president has ever apologized for the abuses that tens of thousands of Indigenous children faced in the schools.

On Friday, President Joe Biden gave a formal apology for the US Government’s role in creating boarding schools for Native Americans by calling it “a blot on American history.” The boarding schools served to forcibly assimilate Native Americans and abuse if they resisted assimilation.

[fwmdks2]

Thank you President Biden!

[olowan-waphiya]

note the downplaying of the headline vs the reality. this is just the confirmed number.

“And the report confirms that at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending schools in the system. The Department acknowledges that the actual number of children who died while attending Indian boarding schools is likely greater.”

—

“The investigation also confirms that there are at least 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at 65 of the schools. One initiative proposed in the report is to identify and repatriate the remains of children who never returned home from the schools.”

[follow-up-news]

At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by Interior Department officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools. The investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools where Native American children were forcibly assimilated into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but officials said the causes of death included sickness and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969. Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said. The findings follow a series of listening sessions held by Haaland throughout the U.S. over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted harmful and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families. “The federal government took deliberate and strategic action through boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures, and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in a Tuesday call with reporters.

[thewordygreenlion]

We need to talk about US Indian boarding schools

We need to come together and acknowledge what was done to Native Americans in the name of "civilization."

Mass graves have been found in Canada, with surely others still to be found, and nearly all in the US remain to be located, but they are surely somewhere. What was done to these human beings in the name of ‘civilization’ is shocking. Be prepared: this involves the worst potential of our species. If you experienced childhood abuse of any kind, please take care. [click through for the rest]

[sadbicth]

elon musk did a nazi salute twice at the inauguration, and republicans are defending him.

trump revoked executive order 11246, which prohibited discrimination.

trump put all dei employees on leave to be fired.

trump blamed the dc plane crash on dei.

trump banned all lgbtq+ flags from being hung in government buildings.

trump ordered the pentagon to cancel celebration of mlk jr. day, black history month, women's history month, holocaust remembrance day, asian american pacific islander heritage month, lgbtq+ pride month, juneteenth, women's equality day, national hispanic heritage month, national disability employment awarenessmonth, and national american indian heritage month.

trump proposed removing all palestinians from gaza, turning the area into a vacation resort called “riviera of the middle east”.

trump posted an ai generated video showing what he hopes to turn palestine into, with a large golden statue of himself in the middle of it.

trump rolled back biden’s executive order to lower prescription drug costs for people using medicare and medicaid.

trump rescinded the $35 cap on insulin, and prices are expected to rise to $1500 a month.

trump ordered the national institutes of health to cancel their review panels on cancer research.

trump ended the guidelines to prevent ai misuse. the guidelines prevent many things, but notably it prevents production of ai child pornography.

when sean hannity asked trump about the economy, he said “i don’t care”, after campaigning with the economy as his main talking point.

trump has withdrawn the us from the world health organization.

trump is ordering health agencies to stop reporting on bird flu and halt publications of scientific reports.

trump has pardoned over 1500 people who stormed the capitol on january 6th.

trump changed denali back to mount mckinley.

trump signed an executive order to rename the gulf of mexico to gulf of america.

trump shut down cbp one, an app which granted legal entry to 1 million+ immigrants.

trump has discussed introducing a “gold card”, which would allow the wealthiest people to buy us citizenship for $5 million usd.

trump is allowing ice raids at churches and elementary schools.

trump announced plans to declare a national emergency at the us-mexico border.

trump signed an executive order to expand the use of the death penalty.

trump disbanded the school safety board that works to prevent school shootings. it was comprised of survivors, educators, and gun violence prevention advocates and formed after the school shooting in parkland.

trump has threatened to invade panama to claim the panama canal.

trump withdrew from the paris climate act.

trump revoked all protections for transgender troops in the us military.

trump rescinded executive orders made by biden that benefited and protected women, lgbtq+ people, black americans, hispanic americans, asian americans, native hawaiians, and pacific islanders.

trump is attempting to make it legal to refuse to hire or fire pregnant women.

multiple state legislators are drafting bills to allow the punishment for abortion to be the death penalty.

trump pardoned 23 individuals convicted under the freedom of access to clinic entrances (FACE) act for their anti-abortion activism, including oftentimes violent protests at abortion clinics.

trump signed an executive order allowing deportation of foreign students who they believe express support for hamas or hezbollah.

trump announced that the us government will from here on out only recognize male and female as sexes. intersex is not legally recognized anymore.

trump has told all schools and universities that they have two weeks to end all diversity initiatives, or he will cut federal funding. (as of feb 19, 2025)

trump fired the staff of the federal aviation association after a deadly plane crash in dc.

trump has fired the heads of the tsa and coast guard, and gutted a key aviation safety advisory committee.

the state of louisiana just rolled back desegregation laws because of a petition from the department of justice.

the supreme court weakened the clean water act's limitations on raw sewage discharge into our water in a 5-4 ruling.

the official white house twitter account posted an “illegal alien deportation” asmr video where they did closeups of chains and the sound of ankle chains hitting the metal stairs of the airplanes deportees were being loaded onto.

on truth social, trump posted, “LONG LIVE THE KING!”.

at CPAC, a republican group called the “third term project” held a rally to support changing the constitution so trump can run for a third term. on their posters, they’re photoshopping his face onto julius caesar’s, seemingly forgetting what happened to julius caesar.

the trump administration paused health communications to prevent the fda from announcing food recalls.

republicans on tiktok are recreating elon’s salute to prove that it “wasn’t a nazi salute”, and they’re either doing it completely wrong because they know if they replicate it then it will actually be a salute, or they’re doing the proper salute and posting it online.

google and apple maps now display the gulf of mexico as “gulf of america”.

rfk jr. wants to ban SSRIs and put everyone on them into labor camps.

andy ogles drafted a constitutional amendment to allow trump to be president for a third term.

the us senate confirmed russell vought, one of the main authors of project 2025, will lead the white house budget office.

nancy mace repeatedly used the t-slur during a congressional meeting, three times were out of spite.

andy biggs introduced a bill to abolish osha and completely eliminate federal workplace safety protections.

georgia republican congressman mike collins called for the deportation of new jersey born mariann budde, the bishop who urged trump to “have mercy” on the lgbtq+ community and immigrants during a service at the national cathedral.

florida republican anna paulina luna has introduced a bill to add trump to mount rushmore.

new york republican claudia tenney introduced a bill to make trump’s birthday a federal holiday.

west virginia republican delegate lisa white has introduced house bill 2712, which would remove rape and incest as exceptions for abortion, even for minors. you can call her at (304) 340- 3274 or email her at lisa.white@wvhouse.gov and let her know your opinion on that.

there is a bill named the SAVE act which would require americans to provide their birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship documents every time they vote, and would require the last name on their driver’s license to match that of their birth certificate. this would prevent married women who have changed their last name from voting.

bill h.r.1161, which is available publicly on congress.gov, would authorize trump to enter into negotiations to acquire greenland and to rename it to "red, white, and blueland".

six states (arizona, idaho, iowa, kansas, mississippi, and north dakota) are planning on challenging obergefell v. hodges, which would end same-sex marriage nationwide. about a dozen more states have representatives are also considering filing similar resolutions.

a bill to ban the mRNA vaccine has passed out of the house committee.

amazon revoked protections for lgbtq+ and black employees.

the cdc has removed their hiv prevention page.

the united states state department has officially changed its “travelers with special conditions” page which previously said “lgbtqi+ travelers” to “lgb travelers”, completely getting rid of the tqi+.

every single republican told us we were overreacting. trump swore he had nothing to do with project 2025 yet continues implementing details outlined in it. not a single person has the right to tell us we’re being dramatic anymore.

hope “cheaper eggs and gas” was worth it.

EDIT: i removed the “trump refused to swear on the bible” point because it was being taken as me being an offended christian. i’m not christian, im agnostic. the reason i included it in the first place is because he’s the first president in history to ever refuse to swear on ANYTHING. meanwhile his “conservative christian” followers had no issue with this, and decided to continue to scramble for excuses instead of admitting he may not be as religious as he claims he is. i figured taking that point out entirely is probably better than filling this with an explanation in the middle of the other important issues.

[happilylostinwords]

Reviewed: "Medicine River" by Mary Annette Pember

I received a copy of Medicine River through NetGalley and Pantheon in exchange for an honest review. The story Mary Annette Pember has to tell isn’t an easy one to read. It can’t have been easy for her to write. As much as it is a story that she needed to write, it is a story that needs to be read, told, and understood so that, to paraphase the cliche in the study of history, what happened does…