Spirit Lake Nation responds to critics
August 9, 2012 at 2:11 pm in Grand Forks Herald
In a lengthy statement published this week in the Devils Lake Journal, the Spirit Lake Tribe decried recent criticism of tribal social service programs involving child protection. Continue Reading
Maybe if the tribal leaders would stop reprimanding workers trying to do a tough job with little support from them positive things could start to happen. It has long been known that if you press this issue on the res you will be treated in a hostile manner and either fired, forced to resign, reassigned or end up working in a very dangerous environment. Stop trying to keep secrets it is only hurting the residents of Spirit Lake.
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Who ever wrote this letter claims that there has been a media frenzy. Are you kidding me? Two kids were found tortured and killed and stuffed between some mattresses and there were a few newspaper articles, a couple blurbs on the local news . Then nothing for a year. If those were white kids found in an expensive home in Fargo or Grand Forks, then you would see a media frenzy. The fact is that someone on that reservation wants everyone to turn their heads and stop looking so they can go about whatever it was that they were doing before. No one out there is demanding answers because they know that there is a lot of stuff that will be discovered that they want kept secret. I smell a rat.
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The Editorial is more about making excuses and less about the facts and how they’re working to change the social environment in their community. There are people who live outside the reservation but work on the reservation who state that what’s reported in the news is only a small piece of what actually goes on inside the reservation. If the tribal council thinks the news that’s being reported is bad, what would they say if half of what’s not being reported hit the front page?
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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Haga-I was bad mouthing you a couple of days ago about doing some real reporting and getting away from “Never Never Land” UND logo stuff. Great to see you into an area with some substance! However, a bit more tooth might be needed in future articles on SL as you were pretty tender with this one.
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You may have missed the 10 or 12 stories Pat Springer of The Forum and I produced over the past several weeks from Spirit Lake, before your … helpful … suggestion to “do some real reporting.”
And as weary as we all are with the nickname story, I’m comfortable in my judgment that certain developments warrant being put on the record.
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They were great articles Chuck.
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There is more going on over there than one can fathom. It is sad to see how children are left to the wayside over there.
tribal leaders are turning their blind eyes aways from all the issues over there.
The whistleblower was spot on and I am glad it finally came out in the open. More needs to be done.
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I find it amazing that finally they allowed a message board on one of these articles. Started to wonder what they were concerned about. None the less between the whistle blowers and the media coverage there’s finally something being done about all this and that’s definately a plus…
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I wondered as well. We are a sensible crowd and should be trusted to discuss this situation. I was pleased to see this one open up.
I hope and pray this opens up old cases on the reservations. It would be nice to see someone go to prison for the murder of Eddie Peltier and others as well. I hope the people responsible are nervous…very nervous. It’s time they paid the price for their crimes.
Be scared boys…we are coming to take you away.
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This is sick, most if not all of you people on this site don’t know S_ _T. You sit in your glass house and throw stones at Spirit Lake as if it were the gate way to hell. When the vast majority of it’s member are good honest people just like every where else. They work, they raise their families. They bleed the same red blood.
You talk about Tilus as if he were a saint. He was there for 5 years and if you were to read his report as I have almost all of his complaints are in the first 4 years and 4 months. He complains about the incompetency of Tribal Social Services under the BIA and how they are removing children illegally. Then when a new Council and Chairman fire those incompetent people he charges them of over stepping. For more than 4 years he does nothing, then when disgruntle individuals are going to blow the lid off with all kinds of accusations (true and false), he writes a scathing report knowing the truth is coming out. WHY NOW? Was it not important for 4 years? Where are the reports, if there were any? What did he do for 4 + years?
Then there is the two children’s murdered. It happened a month before the current Tribal Government was seated, they were not elected to investigate crimes. They do not have a city police force that they can control. What they have is BIA police officers, Special Federal Investigators, FBI and Federal Attorney’s. So who dropped the ball? But who is getting blamed?
Have any of you heard of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978? It came into existence because of Social Services as well as religious origination especially the Mormon Church were removing Indian children by the thousands and courts were rubber stamping Social Services word, never looking for the truth. Families were being destroyed (ILLEGALLY) until the ICWA came into existence. It requires the Tribe to have the major priority in any removal from the Reservation. What is different in Tilus’s report, are they not it again as he said they are?
Does any one of you know what it is like to live in a dictatorship? That is what reservation are like and in most cases I don’t mean Tribal Governments. It is the Federal Government. Because reservations are under Federal Jurisdiction even misdemeanors off reservations become felonies on the reservations. Federal agents and attorney’s are padding the resumes at the expense of Indians on the reservations. Most attorneys won’t touch the cases because they are going against the Federal Government and it’s laws. Many times I have witnessed tribal members run to hide in their houses when the BIA cops drive by, even though their doing nothing wrong. Why? If you haven’t lived it you can’t know. But they survive and the vast majority are good people.
Are there problems and perverts on the reservations? Yes, but no more so than off the reservations, it just that you have less civil rights on reservations because your under Federal Jurisdiction and so it’s reported more.
Don’t let the Forum communications turn you all into racist, don’t help them to destroy a whole tribe and it’s people, for what ever their reason maybe people.
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