Giving Compass' Take:

• Brayden “Sonny” White, a citizen of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, shares his Nation's experience with family separation and trauma inflicted at Residential Schools.

• Why hasn't America learned from history? How can philanthropy prevent further human rights abuses? 

• Learn how donors can help the ongoing family separation crisis.

I have been following the ongoing events regarding the separation of migrant families, and how children were being put into detention camps and in cages. There has been much discussion in my community regarding these events because they are reminiscent of the times of the Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop in Canada.

Being from Akwesasne, where my Nation stretches into Canada, our Elders were a part of the Residential School system — in which Indigenous children were forcibly sent to boarding schools to assimilate them into Euro-Canadian culture — and the Sixties Scoop — a policy of removing Native children from their families to be put into foster care or up for adoption by white families toward the same end. I have heard numerous accounts of our Elders running down Highway 401 or the railroad tracks after escaping the Residential Schools, trying to get home.

America has a lengthy rap sheet of atrocities committed against Indigenous people, whether it is the genocide that committed through disease, malnutrition, land dispossession, or Residential Schools. My community knows the effects of separating children from their families — effects that can last long beyond a single generation.

Read the full article about family separation in America by Brayden “Sonny” White at The Aspen Institute.