Join South Dakota’s American Indian tribes and the Lakota People’s Law Project in calling on you to conduct a field hearing on Native foster care in South Dakota at the earliest possible opportunity.
I am appalled at the treatment of Lakota families and children by South Dakota’s Department of Social Services. The recent report submitted to Congress by the Coalition of Sioux Tribes for Children and Families confirms the worst of the findings in NPR’s 2011 series Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families. The Indian Child Welfare Act, signed in 1978, was supposed to end the centuries-old pattern of governments destroying tribal culture and family structure by seizing Indian children and placing them into non-Native environments to “assimilate” them. But I have no doubt that an agenda of assimilation is alive and well in South Dakota today.
The ICWA is not working. The state of South Dakota is violating federal law, and their abuses are longstanding and egregious. It’s time for members of Congress to hear first-hand from the state’s lost children and shattered families. It’s time to go to South Dakota.
Missing From Valley City, North Dakota Since July 4, 2012
Amber Marcia Glatt, age 22, was reported missing by her boyfriend on July 4, 2012. She is white, stands 5’4” tall, weighs 96 pounds, has brown eyes and medium-length brown hair.
Amber suffers from recurring amnesia and her episodes can last four to six weeks. She may be driving a silver Mitsubishi Lancer with Virginia license plates XFK 1538 and the rear, driver-side window broken out.
The mother of a missing 22-year-old here who has suffered episodes of amnesia believes a note found by police indicating she lost her memory was not written by her daughter.
Amy Glatt, the mother, said Friday that she was the last person to have contact with Amber Marcia Glatt before her boyfriend, Andy Mushet, 20, reported her missing on Wednesday to the Valley City Police Department.
Mushet told police that when he returned to the home he shares with Amber at about midnight, he found a note saying she had amnesia with her name signed at the bottom, her mother told The Forum on Friday.
“The whole note was strange. I know my daughter’s handwriting, and it is messy and full of misspelled words,” she said. “You could read everything in the note, it had the proper punctuation and spellings. I think if my daughter had written it, it would have taken her two to three hours.”
After texting her about camping equipment around 2 p.m., Amy Glatt said her daughter told her she was on her way to her job at a snow-cone shop, but authorities say she never made it.
Amber Glatt has suffered from focal retrograde amnesia for two years, her mother said. Her amnesia is a result of a traumatic brain injury she suffered July 8, 2010, an incident her daughter didn’t recall occurring. Amy Glatt said all they knew was something hit her in the right front part of her head hard enough to penetrate the skull and cause swelling.
Anyone with information regarding Amber’s whereabouts is asked to contact the Valley City Police Department at (701) 845-3110.
How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform & How You Can Push Back on it
In a mostly-silent process few Americans know about, reform opponents are currently pushing nearly a dozen highly technical bills through congress that will allow bankers to manipulate the prices of everything from corn to heating oil to municipal bonds: “The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway’s Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore…With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart’s birthday.”
You can push back on your Twitter account.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma , has included in his campaign to end abortion a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina , wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been “moral values.
