Native Americans Raise Funds to Feed Migrants

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 A group of Native American women from several tribes in Oklahoma have launched a nonprofit organization they're calling the "Auntie Project: Native Women of Service."

Their goal is to help indigenous kids in need, beginning with child migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The idea came to them in June, after hearing that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) would move 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children to Fort Still, a U.S. Army post near Lawton, Oklahoma.

"And it struck a nerve in all of us," said Amanda Cobb-Greetham, chair of the University of Oklahoma Native American Studies program and a member of the Chickasaw Nation.

Built in 1869 on the ancestral lands of the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache tribes, Fort Sill was the site where several Chiricahua Apache prisoners, including about 50 children, were "dumped unprotected" in the autumn of 1894, among them Chief Geronimo, who died there in 1909.

"In fact, there were Native peoples born in captivity in Fort Sill even after Oklahoma statehood," Cobb-Greetham said. "And there was an Indian boarding school there, for many, many years — that really tapped into our own and our families' history as boarding school survivors."