When someone hears the phrase “truth and reconciliation commission,” South Africa usually comes to mind. But the Emmy-winning 2018 film “Dawnland,” which will be shown for the public next Thursday, March 30, at 6:30 p.m. in the Bromfield School’s Cronin Auditorium, brings the idea much closer to home.
“Dawnland” tells the story of the first truth and reconciliation commission to be established in the United States. Set up by Maine in 2012, its mission was to gather information on the state welfare agency’s practice of removing Native American children from their parents and placing them in foster care or adoption with white families—a practice that continues to this day. The federal government began to encourage adoption and foster care for Native American children in 1958, as a replacement for the earlier policy of sending the children to boarding schools.
In the film, Wabanaki people recount their own traumatic experiences of separation from their families, with the resulting loss of their indigenous language and culture. The commission concluded the agency’s practice was a form of cultural genocide as it was defined by the United Nations in 1948.
Adam Mazo, the co-director and producer of “Dawnland,” plans to attend next week’s screening. The 54-minute version of the film allows time for a question-and-answer period. Speaking to WBUR in 2018, Mazo said, “Reconciliation is a long, ongoing process, and it means different things to different people.”
Bromfield social studies teacher Kristin McManus, who arranged for the screening of “Dawnland,” praised the film’s use of individual voices telling their own stories, because it encourages students to see history as more than just the written records. “Papers are the historian’s bread and butter,” she said, but history can also be found in music, art, and oral accounts.
The reconciliation process is one that Bromfield students have the opportunity to evaluate in McManus’s class, “Facing History and Ourselves.” In an interview with the Press, McManus described the course as focusing on “more of the ‘why’ behind history.” McManus assigns her students to research a truth and reconciliation commission (or TRC) of their own choice. Students have chosen cases from Argentina, South Korea, and South Africa, among others. “Not all TRC’s are successful,” McManus noted.
Controversial topics, civil discussions
Facing History and Ourselves is also the name of a Boston-based nonprofit educational organization. It develops teacher workshops and curriculum units, and McManus found its multidisciplinary approach inspiring. Its offerings include units on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the United States, and the fragility of democracy, some of which McManus uses in her class.
“It’s my job to talk about controversial issues … and have students discuss them in a civil manner,” McManus said. She explained the process of “structured academic controversy,” in which students are expected to understand both (or several) sides of an issue and move beyond an “either/or” debate. Her classes go over norms for discussion, such as careful listening and not interrupting.
A scene from “Dawnland.” (Photo courtesy of Upstander Project)
In part, “Dawnland” raises the question: How can people respond when they learn a terrible wrong was committed in their part of the world, whether it was a national issue or a local one?
One way has been to seek out the individuals responsible for the wrong and hold them accountable. Often that has been done by revealing their actions in a trial and punishing them with death or lengthy prison terms. That was the response in Europe in 1945, McManus pointed out, with the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II and the Holocaust.
South Africa chose a different path in 1995, after the end of apartheid. Its truth and reconciliation commission was an effort at national healing, with reparations for those who had been harmed during the years of apartheid and amnesty for many who were responsible for the harm.
What both paths have usually sought to create, in their different ways, is an accurate account of what happened, to preserve a record for history. And such an account, like the ones in “Dawnland,” McManus said, includes “a part of history that isn’t usually taught.”
Supreme Court case challenges Indian Child Welfare Act
In 1978, the U.S. Congress held hearings and recognized that, over the years, hundreds of thousands of Native American children had been taken from their homes and placed in schools or foster families that had no connection to their tribes.
In response, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). According to ICWA, welfare agencies should first try to place a child with extended family members, next with a family in the same tribe, and then with a family in another tribe, before considering placement with a non-Native American foster family.
Last fall, the state of Texas and two non-Native families who wished to adopt Native American children challenged ICWA in court, calling it an unconstitutional racial preference that does not consider the best interests of the individual child.
Lawyers on behalf of the tribes countered that tribal placement was indeed a factor in the child’s best interest because it takes account of the child’s language and traditions. Siding with the tribes, the federal government argued ICWA is not a racial preference because the Constitution has always treated Native American tribes as sovereign nations that have treaties with the United States, not as racial groups.
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision on the constitutionality of ICWA by June. While the court’s decisions can be unpredictable, many court-watchers say four justices seem ready to vote against the tribes and declare ICWA unconstitutional, while four are likely to uphold the law. Which side will win the decisive fifth vote is unclear.
—M.G
