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Throughout elementary school, a maintenance language program remains part of their regular education, keeping them fluent. Students are entirely immersed in Chinuk Wawa. The schooling starts 30 days before a child turns 3, and continues five days a week through preschool and kindergarten. Johnson, who is fluent in Wawa, worked on a 500-page dictionary, and in 2002, helped Grand Ronde launch a Chinuk Wawa immersion school. At that time, only about a dozen people still spoke Chinuk Wawa, which was verging on extinction. In 1997, he moved to Oregon when he got a job helping the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde build a language program. He returned to South Bend after college, where he majored in silversmithing and studied anthropology and American Indian studies, but he didn’t stay long. “It’s cyclical, and it’s all (a) product of not being federally recognized,” she said. The government’s refusal to recognize the tribe did not prevent it from taking Chinook children to settler-colonial boarding schools and subjecting them to federal Indian policy.
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The families still struggle today because of past government policy, Cushman says. That doesn’t always happen to kids who are adopted or fostered out many never reconnect with their tribe or family. Cushman’s own relatives in Oregon had children removed, though fortunately they were placed with a non-Native family who does keep in touch with the tribe and brings the children to cultural events. A decade ago, a research group in Washington found that Native children in the state were five times more likely to be removed from their families than white children. As of 2015, Native children in Washington were put in foster care at a rate nearly four times higher than they are represented in the state’s general population, removed for problems that the tribe struggles to address: houselessness, incarceration and poverty.
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Although her children deeply identify as Chinook - they attend gatherings, their names are Chinookan, and Kanim was born during a Chinook potlatch - the government considers them solely Oneida.įederal laws designed to protect Indigenous rights, including the Indian Child Welfare Act, don’t apply to unrecognized tribes. The kids are already aware of their tribe’s status, and Kanim, her 7-year-old son, has participated in letter-writing campaigns seeking recognition. “And as a parent, I realized what opportunities my kids would have based on their status.” Cushman’s husband is an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation in the Midwest, so her young children have access to more educational opportunities than she did. “Being on the tribal council, you are responsible for representing your people, and you then begin to have a greater understanding of how you’re treated differently than recognized Indians,” she said. Today, she still lives in Eugene, part of the Chinook diaspora, and serves on the tribal council. She gave the commencement speech wearing green robes and a woven cedar bark graduation cap, and she introduced herself in Chinuk Wawa, a creolized Chinookan language that once spanned from southern Oregon to Southeast Alaska. In 2010, Cushman did graduate, from the University of Oregon.