Pura Fé: Protecting Sacred Seed
Artist and activist Pura Fé is working to heal the trauma of indigenous children who have been forcibly removed from their families.
Pura Fé: Healing the Soul-Pain of Our Indigenous Children through Music
By René Locklear White, Lt. Col. USAF (Retired)
Sanctuary on the Trail™ Native American Church of Virginia
Lumbee Indian
Our indigenous children are our sacred seed. Many are suffering and need our help. Pura Fé ’s progressive folk and blues tones invoke our ancestors and are part of a vocal masterpiece aimed at helping heal indigenous children and families forcibly removed from their people.
Taking indigenous children away from their families is still happening across the United States and Canada, resulting in thousands of children experiencing “soul pain” through grief, disempowerment and spiritual disconnection. What most people believed was over, with the boarding schools, is still affecting generations of children.
According to national reports, nearly 700 indigenous children in South Dakota alone are being removed from their homes every year, sometimes in questionable and suspicious circumstances.
Government programs remove children from reservations and place them in white foster homes. In these homes, our indigenous children are experiencing a long list of abuses including sexual violence, physical abandonment, and mental trauma.
The crisis in Saskatoon, Canada foster homes includes overcrowding. Some families try to care for as many as 15 Native children and youth at the same time. There are reports of children being beaten and “crawling around with lice.”
“The foster homes are so overcrowded, officials are locking youth in prison cells,” said Pura Fé who lives a few hours from Saskatoon on a reservation in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada.
“Taking children away from the families is the most traumatic thing you can do to a child, to a family, and to a people,” added Pura Fé who is an activist for these children. “They come in and just take the children!”
As a Native American singer-songwriter and musician, Pura Fé uses the healing power of music to help bring recognition to these atrocities and help with the healing process.
After splitting up families and separating siblings, officials move the native children to a nebulous family, erasing the child’s records. When foster-money runs out or the foster families no longer want the children, officials move the children from foster home to foster home. If children manage to run away and officials find them, they send the children back into the broken foster-care circle.
“When foster care money runs out, officials literally drop children off on the streets,” added Pura Fé. “And many children go missing.”
These realities are powerfully hard to listen to and accept to be true in this day and age. It seems little has changed. Only the words used to describe what officials are doing with our children changed.
Foster Care or Boarding Schools, Just Different Words
It is profoundly disturbing that many foster care programs have become residential schools like the original federally funded, off-reservation, Indian boarding schools of centuries past.
The original boarding school operated in Carlisle, Penn. from 1879 – 1918 using former military barracks and military-style uniforms to imprison and assimilate little Native children. In many cases, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) paid the states to remove Indian children and to place them with non-Indian families and religious groups.
Just this August 2017, 17 members of the Northern Arapaho tribe, including tribal elders and young people, traveled to Carlisle to collect and return bodies thought to be the remains of 15-year-old Little Chief, also known as Dickens Nor, and 14-year-old Horse, also called Horace Washington.
Officials attempted to “Americanize” the children, by cutting the children’s long hair, changed their names to European names and held them until they assimilated, ran away, or died. The officials’ idea was to “Kill the Indian: Save the Man,” through any means necessary.
The 19th and 20th century Carlisle boarding school became the model school for 26 BIA boarding schools, within 15 states and territories, in addition to hundreds of private boarding schools sponsored by religious denominations. It is estimated that more than 10,000 Native American children from 140 different tribes forcibly attended Carlisle alone.
“The boarding-school era that had begun in the late 1800s was winding down and the abusive residential schools set up to isolate and assimilate Native children were being closed down or turned over to the tribes, a process that was largely completed by the 1970s,” said Stephanie Woodard with Indian Country Today. “Meanwhile, another means of separating Native children from their communities was gathering steam.”
Why is this still happening?
It is a combination of reasons including cultural insensitivity and a culture of non-compliance with policy. What officials continue to fail to realize are the cultural differences. What is in the best interest of an Indian child is not necessarily what was in the best interest of a non-Indian child. Indigenous families are traditionally larger with extended families and tribal relationships.
U.S. federal law says that, with some exceptions, if the state removes a Native American child, the state must place that child with relatives, tribal members or other Native Americans. But that is not happening. In the United States, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 is U.S. Federal law that governs jurisdiction over the removal of Native American Indian children from their families.
“The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was passed to halt the widespread practice of separating Indian children from their biological families, intended to protect the best interests of Indian children and the stability of Indian tribes. Instead, the ICWA elevated the interests of tribes above those of individual children, and it weakened the protections of children that state laws provide,” according to Clint Bolick with Newsweek.
Investigations are unhurriedly uncovering disturbing examples where social services is failing to comply with their own policies and practices and government officials routinely break their own rules, while these power grabs come at the expense of our children.
Who Feels Lead to Protect and Advocate for These Indigenous Children?
We need “healing humanity” type organizations, people, music and arts to help. To help with the healing. To help find answers.
Pura Fé, an American Native singer-songwriter, musician, composer, seamstress, teacher, and activist – with a big heart, feels the call to help. Pura Fé ’s force is magnified by teaming up with organizations like Green Arrow Healing and WhiteLightening Consulting.
Green Arrow works in partnership with White Lightning Consulting to offer local, effective healing opportunities in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Green Arrow Healing specializes in holistic, culturally-sensitive health care. Pura Fé, Green Arrow Healing, and White Lightening Consulting aim their initiatives at healing and educating these children and families.
Pura Fé, is also the founding member of the Native American women’s a cappella quartet, Ulali Project. The Ulali Project quartet is currently made up of Ulali founders, Pura Fe’ and Jennifer Kreisberg, and new additions, Charly Lowry and Layla Locklear.The ladies’ “Sacred Seed” album features original compositions, written in English, Tuscarora, and Tutelo. Pura Fé writes music about residential-school and foster-care survivors.
“Sacred seed, DNA, the memory of all time,” sings Pura Fé in the Sacred Seed album. “Within every seed is a universe.”
Our indigenous children carry our sacred seed, carrying our DNA and the memory of all time. If we lose our children, we lose our future. If we allow historical trauma to continue, we continue to wound the soul of our people and our universe.
More help is needed.
The goal is to reroute the current monetary system and put the foster care money back into Native communities to build healing shelters and rehabilitation for young parents and homeless youth in every native community, urban or rural.
“Rehabilitation in the communities is where the healing begins and stopping the theft of the children,” she added.
If you or your organization is interested in helping, consider buying the Sacred Seed album https://purafe.com/release/sacred-seed / https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/sacred-seed/id955750520 or reach out to Green Arrow Healing online at www.GreenArrowHealing.ca or Native American Church of Virginia Sanctuary on the Trail www.SanctuaryontheTrail.org.
Sanctuary on the Trail’s vision is “Helping Leaders First” and “Bringing recognition to the contributions that the Indigenous of the Americas have made to the globe” to “Reduce Suffering in the World.”
Help expose this terrible reality by sharing this story to help ignite what is needed to transform this system affecting Indigenous children today and help our children still affected by years of trauma, orphans from their culture and people.
Pura Fé will be recording a new album in 2018. Most of the tunes will reflect helping heal indigenous people. One of her new lyrics says, “Every Village can Build Healing shelters with Foster Care Service Funds.”
“The album is a collage of poetry and featured artists that I am asking to join me,” said Pura Fé.
Related Information
To Donate to Green Arrow Healing click on this link: http://www.greenarrowhealing.ca/donate.html
Video Link: http://workingitouttogether.com/content/learning-from-the-past/
Video Link: Healing Land, the land helping these youth: http://workingitouttogether.com/content/healing-on-the-land/
Video Interview with Pura Fé about her music http://www.e-k.tv/videos/977-dixiefrog/978-pura-fe-interview
You will also enjoy Sensitive Children and Trauma
