Removing Children–Another Story
What a wild story: Right wing extremists in Franco’s Spain forcibly and often violently removed the children from left wing families so as to indoctrinate the kids to become good fascists. The victims who are now elderly have lived with shame and an emptiness ever since. Most never knew what had happened to their parents. According to the NPR news story (http://tinyurl.com/d649bm) the children were often removed just before their mother was executed.
Once again we can point to a story that reflects what happened to our own Native children from tribes across America: the forced removal of children from their families to indoctrinate our culture out of them and substitute a newer, foreign culture into them. Countless stories from across Native America reveal the trauma to our Native children of this touted federal policy of last century (1900′s). It is a trauma echoed by the Spaniards featured in the NPR story. Both groups speak of the abuse meted out by the hands of the institutions charged with their care: rape, beatings, exploitation.
Today we tend to gloss over or even forget the tragedy that befell the thousands of Native children who were forcibly removed from their families. This type of trauma lives with you your whole life and, sadly, is also passed to successive generations by attitudes, by outlook, by psychology, distorted values and confusion. Today our communities are, in part, rife with a dysfunction that can be traced back to those days when our children were forcibly removed from the family fires.
Julian Lang