WCAIMA White River Amphitheatre Aubrn, Wa. MAY 3

www.myspace.com/myspaceim GENOCIDE During the 19th century and into the 20th century, American Indian children were forcibly abducted from their homes to attend Christian boarding schools as a matter of state policy. The policy of boarding schools again demonstrate the links between sexual violence and state violence. Sexual, physical and emotional violence was rampant. This system was later imported to Canada in the form of the residential school system. Recently, the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities has issued a report which documents the involvement of mainline churches and the federal government in the murder of over 50,000 Native children through the Canadian residential school system. The list of offenses committed by church officials include murder by beating, poisoning, hanging, starvation, strangulation, and medical experimentation. In addition, the report found that church clergy, police, and business and government officials were involved in maintaining pedophile rings using children from residential schools. The grounds of several schools are also charged with containing unmarked graveyards of children who were murdered, particularly children killed after being born as a result of rapes of Native girls by priests and other church officials. While some churches in Canada have taken some minimal steps towards addressing its involvement in this genocidal policy, churches in the U.S. have not. Because the worst of the abuses happened to an older generation, there is simply not the same level of documentation or vocal outcry against boarding school abuses. As a result of boarding school policies, there is now an epidemic of child sexual abuse in Native communities. However, because of the shame attached to abuse, there has been no space to address this problem. Consequently, child abuse passes from one generation to the next. This project becomes the entry way to address child sexual abuse. By framing abuse, not primarily as an example of individual and community dysfunctionality, but as the continuing effect of human rights abuses perpetrated by state policy, we may take the shame away from talking about abuse and provide the space for communities to address the problem and heal. By framing the U.S. as accountable for boarding school abuses, it provides an opportunity for native peoples to demand that the U.S. begin providing adequate funding for healing services Native survivors of boarding school abuses. It could also be used to pressure the U.S. to support language and cultural revitalization programs to reverse the effects of boarding schools. It is critically important now to make demands, because the U.S. government is not only not making progressing towards instituting needed policies, it is actually going backwards. The U.S. is cutting tribally-controlled education and social services programs, and state governments are increasingly supporting “English-only” laws which threaten the survival of indigenous languages.If you want to stop getting IM invites, go to your Privacy Settings and select block from everyone.