(upbeat music) (calm music) - Hello and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later than the show, we'll see episode one of "Black History of the Northern Plains."

But first, joining me now is our guest, Sarah Matthews.

Sarah, thanks for joining us today.

- [Sarah] Yes, thanks for having me.

- You're the executive director of the Red River Children's Advocacy Center in Fargo and Grand Forks.

Kind of a mouthful, but tell us about yourself first before we talk about that.

- Sure, so I'm originally from Fargo, North Dakota, born and raised, and I have a beautiful family.

I'm married and have two children, ages eight, excuse me, and three, and we are busy.

We're a hockey family and soccer and all of the things.

And I come from a background, in my position from the non-profit world, my family founded the North Dakota Autism Center in 2008 when we found out that my brother was diagnosed with autism.

And so I come from a background from some driven women who really wanna get things done and change lives.

So that's what you get from me.

- Well, tell us about the Red River Children's Advocacy Center.

What is it, when was it founded, and what does it do?

- Sure, so the advocacy center is a center where we see children who are victims of sexual abuse, abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

And what we do is use a multidisciplinary approach to help them be comfortable and provide an environment that is safe for them to tell their allegations and the abuse that they've endured.

We have been around since 2004.

We were founded as a 501c3 nonprofit at that time.

So that's about 18 years.

And I recently became the executive director in April of 2022.

So I am also fairly new to children advocacy centers.

So our services are very unique.

We often get victims who are not ready to really tell their story to anybody in those environments where it would typically occur in the street with law enforcement or social workers.

So we provide that safe environment for them to come into and we provide advocacy, interviewing with them, mental health services.

We partner with Sanford Care Clinic to do the medical examinations that are necessary at times, and then law enforcement, social services, prosecutors, and others.

- So how many offices do you have, employees, counselors?

- We have two offices.

One in Fargo and one in Grand Forks.

We only have a part-time employee in Grand Forks who does our forensic interviewing.

And then we partner with other nonprofit organizations in that area currently to help provide the other care that we need to.

And then in Fargo, we have about 15 employees and five interns now.

And we have forensic interviewers, advocates, and we have three clinicians that are able to see mental health patients currently.

- What geographical region, is it just the cities, the metros, or do you get some other counties involved?

- So right now, our statistics show that we have conducted interviews and services to people in 48 counties surrounding the area.

- Okay.

Take me through the process of when you get a referral of child neglect or abuse.

- Well, our referrals come straight from law enforcement or social services.

Those are the only referrals that we're allowed to take in at this time.

And what happens is they contact our program coordinator, whether it's on the web to schedule or gives us a call and gives us some information on the case and what they need, if they need a female interviewer or a male interviewer.

And then we schedule it as soon as possible.

Within about 24 hours to 48 hours, we can typically schedule their forensic interview for that time.

- Well, with that said, can you talk about what the forensic interview, what that is and how you conduct it?

- Yeah, so the forensic interview is a highly trained interview system, if you will.

And the interviewer has to go through many classes in education to become a forensic interviewer.

And what they do is once they've greeted the child, they bring a child to an interview room where there is video cameras, recording equipment, and then a link to a two-way, well, a one-way, I guess, television in another room where our forensic team, which I mentioned earlier was prosecution and social work and law enforcement and the others.

And where they are able to see and hear, in real time, the interview going on.

Because we need a team approach in order to know how to help the family and help the child and then seek prosecution or justice afterwards as well.

And what we do is we burn that disc for law enforcement after the interview is done.

During the interview, the interviewer starts off by testing out communication skills with a child.

So they have a casual conversation back and forth, not related to any of the content, just how their day is going or anything else like that, and start to see if they can recall events, if they can predict future, if they can remember colors or rooms and things like that from other fun things in their lives in order to know if they're capable of conducting the interview at the time.

If they're not, we stop the interview and they come back another day, another year, another time when they're able to do so effectively.

If they are able to disclose, our interviewer does go through sort of like an hourglass technique where they start at a broad topic and then they narrow that down and then they start another broad topic and narrow it down and then come back to key points in the interview so that it's sort of breaking little barriers and uncomfortable moments lightly so that the child is less traumatized.

- So what age groups are you normally working with?

- So we see children from ages three and up and we see patients who are older than 18 as well depending on the situation.

If they have cognitive impairment or they are vulnerable themselves, we will take those older people on as well.

- How many cases do you take on or see per year, I guess?

- So in 2022, we saw 805 individuals for forensic interviews and we provided over 2,200 mental health services to people.

- Have cases increased over the past few years, I guess with COVID years, since that's what we're talking about?

- Yeah, actually they did.

In 2019, we saw about 350 individuals for forensic interviews.

And that skyrocketed to closer to 750 during the pandemic.

So we saw almost double what we were normally seeing during the pandemic.

And now we're sort of going down a little bit to that normal range again after that spike.

- Do you have anything that really contributed to that?

Just because of COVID, everybody was.

- Yeah, so I guess our only assumption could be that they were home during the pandemic with their perpetrators.

Typically 90% of people know their perpetrator and being locked down during a pandemic with them with no way of being in the school system or anything like that caused a lot of influx once people found out.

- Okay, have you seen mental health issues increase in children since the pandemic?

- Yes, I would say so.

You know, with social media and also with devices and electronics and things like that, kids are isolated, the social skills aren't there.

Throw the pandemic in there, mental health issues, all of those things are just kind of recipe for disaster.

- Can you talk about why are children so vulnerable even today in our society?

- Because children are good.

They're genuinely good and they have great hearts and they believe anything anybody will tell them.

They want to see the good in people and they're a very easy target because of that.

- So how do you stay focused in your job when you really see, I guess, bad cases of abused children and how do you and your counselors deal with this?

- Yeah, great question.

So we have a process that we call secondary trauma stress.

And so what we do is provide training to those staff and support systems for those staff to deal with their secondary trauma.

And we do that on a daily, weekly basis and check in often.

And then we also have outside resources for them to access if they need.

- Yeah, and especially during, you know, you jumped up, you said from 300 and something to 805 in 2020.

That just has to be stressful for your employees.

- Yeah, and we get subpoenaed to court quite a bit as well as witnesses to the interview.

And so not only are they doing their daily job, talking to kids and documenting those stories and providing mental health services, but they're also running to court, to and from, hearing it over again, and trying to help seek justice on those cases.

And sometimes it's difficult when cases aren't, the perpetrators aren't locked up or put away.

They have a hard time with those types of cases.

And a lot of that doesn't have to do with necessarily our interview process.

It's other factors that are involved in that and it's very difficult for our staff to absorb.

- Are there things that the public can do?

How can people help your organization?

- Yeah, so we have plenty of opportunities for fundraising events that we put on throughout the year.

We have that listed on our website.

Our website is rrcac.org, where you can find a list of all of our services, our wishlists, and other things like that.

So volunteering, donating your time, holding fundraisers for us.

Making blankets is another thing.

Every child gets a blanket when they attend our center and a toy, food as well when they're there 'cause sometimes they're there for a really long time or had to travel a far distance to get to our center and so they're often hungry.

And so gift cards are often given to restaurants or to gas, gas cards for traveling back home so that they could have gotten back and forth without having to pay that cost.

- Now, does your facility house any of these children or do you have to refer them to another organization for that?

- Yeah, so our advocates outsource those types of services.

So any other services that we provide in the metro area or any of those 48 counties, our advocates know about them and what they'll do is they'll help the family get all of those resources and hook them up with the people and business cards and places that would offer shelter, permanent housing, food, all of those things.

- You mentioned a wishlist.

What are some of the things that your organization needs or would like from people?

- Yeah, food is always a good one.

So individually wrapped bars, goldfish, those types of things.

Anything that possibly a child would like.

Fruit snacks are very popular.

Drinks, water, and also items, so hygiene items, we like to give them hygiene items because sometimes they're running away from a situation and they need those types of items.

Gift cards, like I mentioned, to restaurants or gas gift cards, as well as toys and blankets.

- Mm hmm.

When you're facilitating the children, are there times that you end up having to facilitate maybe one of the parents that came in with the child?

- Absolutely.

So our advocate sits with the child at all, or with the parent or non-offending caregiver at all times during the interview process.

And they are given coaching, they are kind of given a breakdown of how it's not their fault, things like this happen.

A lot of parents feel a lot of guilt around that.

Like, "How did I not know this was happening?"

And you don't, unless you know the signs of prevention and you know what a perpetrator would do to try to gain access to your child.

So they get a lot of that type of counseling and then they get all of the resources at that time and then coaching on what to do further with their child to help their child heal.

- Okay.

Does your organization ever facilitate kind of the rebuilding of families after bad things happen or does that depend on the individual situation or what?

- Yeah, it depends on the individual situation.

So if the advocate can provide support and services to the family to help them in the situation that they're in, that doesn't usually need to go any further than our family advocate because they do provide ongoing support for months, six months afterwards, however long it takes to make sure that that family is feeling comfortable and maintaining their healthy relationship with their child and services that they have.

If our advocates cannot do something, they would partner with social services to try to get those types of supports.

And then it's in social services' hands to help rebuild that family up at that time.

And typically they're involved as they're part of our MDT team.

- Can you remind our viewers, your organization's not the one that you would call to report child abuse?

- [Sarah] Correct.

- You're referred to- - Yep, Child Protective Services is where you would call to do that.

You could either fill out a 960 form on the government website or you can contact them.

- Is it sometimes difficult to find out what exactly has happened?

You talk about the forensic interview and how do you and others really get to the bottom of that?

You explained the interview process, but that's gotta be difficult sometimes to really get to the bottom of what happened and how it, what happened.

- Yeah, so our interview process does not beg or prompt the child to have a response.

So what we would do if it was difficult to get to the part that we're hoping for or law enforcement wants us to get to in an interview, it can take a very long time, maybe two hours, sometimes they take three hours.

And in that time, the child's playing with Play-Doh and talking to this person as just a general casual conversation.

They don't understand, necessarily, exactly why they're there or exactly what we wanna hear because we don't tell them.

That would mess our whole investigation up.

And so getting to that point sometimes doesn't occur.

Sometimes the child will leave and not disclose information and then several years later, maybe they're ready to come and talk about it, or months later after counseling, or whatever the case may be, they may then disclose at that time or they may never disclose because disclosing is very difficult.

- With that said, what's the best part of your job?

- As the executive director, I don't see all of the day-to-day children that come in, but I also get to see all of the backend and all of the stories and all of the children who have come through our center and the success stories that we have through our mental health clinic as well.

And our advocate also is telling me those types of things.

So just knowing that my work to help the staff to feel better, to have the tools for their job, to ease their life in all of the other ways in the office, that's kind of my role.

And that's what I like about it is I can help them to do the very important work that they're doing and make it as most comfortable and easy as possible for them.

And then also allow them time and flexibility to recover when they need to.

- Okay.

If people want to help or want more information, where can they go?

Who can they contact?

- So they can call our main number at 701-234-4580 and leave a message or just talk up to Linda up front, she'll give you any answers that you need.

And then also, you can go to our website at rrcac.org and we also have Facebook and LinkedIn as well that they can follow us on.

- Well, Sarah, thank you for joining us today and thank you for what you're doing.

- [Sarah] Yes, thank you so much for having me.

- Stay tuned for more.

(upbeat music) In this first episode of "The Black Histories of the Northern Plains" series, we get an overview about the formation of the Northern Plains geographically, culturally, and ethnically.

- [Matt] The Northern Plains of the United States conjure a few images in our histories.

(plaintive music) Glaciers, blizzards, and bison.

Indigenous hunters on horseback, fur traders, forts, immigrants, and railroads.

(plaintive music) An agricultural revolution that reshaped the indigenous landscape in cattle, wheat fields, and water towers.

(plaintive music) - But to those of us who call this place home, we think of our own lives.

The families, communities, and tribes formed primarily by Dakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Ojibwe ancestors and the descendants of primarily German and Scandinavian immigrants.

One image that doesn't often spring to mind here is that of Black America, whose histories tend to take form in the South and in large industrial cities.

However, long before wheat and the Northern Pacific found a home in Minnesota, Montana, and the two Dakotas, Black history was weaving its way through the Northern Plains.

Join us as our narrator, Matt Olien, guides us through this series and we explore these stories and think about how the broad strokes of history can lose sight of critical and colorful details.

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public and this is "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(plaintive music) - [Matt] When Professor Elwin B. Robinson set to the task of writing a "History of North Dakota" in the 1950s and '60s, his story of the plains started with grass, the foundation of the immense northern ecologies that stretched from the Great Lakes forest to the Rocky Mountain foothills and from the Boreal Forest of Canada, south to the Nebraska Sandhills, where the Central and Southern Plains begin their journey to the Chihuahuan desert.

This vast grassland was created over vast geological periods of time.

The landscape was carved through the North American continent by the Western Interior Seaway 100 million years ago.

As oceans and tectonic plates swelled and dropped, the Rocky Mountains were pushed into the sky and erosion from the process filled this shallow salt water sea with sand, silt, and mud.

As the sea receded, the Mississippi River soon took its place.

The past 2 1/2 million years brought glaciers thousands of feet high, advancing and retreating, growing and melting.

These glaciers created rivers like the Missouri, Minnesota, and James and Lakes like the Sorus, McKenzie, and Agassiz.

At its largest, Lake Agassiz was twice the current size of Lake Superior, holding an estimated volume of 23,000 cubic kilometers of water.

Like Agassiz, Superior and the other Great Lakes were formed by glaciers too.

As these glaciers retreated to the Arctic Ocean, many of those lakes followed, leaving rivers and flatlands in their path.

The Red River Valley and Lake Winnipeg, for instance, follow Lake Agassiz's final retreat to the north.

The First Peoples survived as hunter-gatherers, moving through seasonal camps in the plains and woodlands to harvest food and resources like bison, wild rice, mussels, berries, wood, flint, and clay.

Later, they cultivated corn, squash, beans, and tobacco.

Their wealth and success were evident to newer arrivals over the last 500 years from France, Spain, England, and the United States, people who soon developed an interest in indigenous minerals, furs, and lands.

Black history in the Northern Plains begins in these exchanges.

As a field of study, Black history in the United States is about as old as these early arrivals to the Northern Plains.

Of course, African histories are among the oldest on our planet.

African-American writers too have recorded their thoughts and experiences in various forms for centuries, in literary works like Phillis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," autobiographies like Gustavus Vassa's "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano," and Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," and speeches like Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?"

However, the earliest histories of the United States, much like its foundational documents, were written by white men, many of whom were slaveholders with little interest in the humanity of Black folks.

The first historical accounts of Black America were produced by Black writers in the abolitionary spirit of New England in the 1830s and '40s.

After the Civil War and Emancipation, historians of Black America took a more scientific and secular turn in their accounts.

George Washington Williams, a Civil War veteran and journalist, was the most influential of this next generation.

His 1883 "History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880" used modern historical methods to reconstruct African American life, drawing from news stories, maps, public records, and interviews.

Writing during the end of reconstruction in the early years of the following period of violence and political oppression we now know as Jim Crow, Williams watched as religious rationalizations of slavery evolved into powerful pseudo-scientific endorsements of racial segregation.

In response, Williams championed education and Black self-determination, arguing, "For too long, we've allowed others to tell our story."

These historians, who lived primarily during the years of Jim Crow and segregation, were led by scholars like W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson, the first two African American historians to earn a PhD in the United States, the Howard University bibliographer, Dorothy Porter Wesley, and John Hope Franklin, the author of a groundbreaking 1947 study of Black life in the United States, "From Slavery to Freedom."

These scholars built the necessary infrastructure to pursue Black history as a serious academic field, which was vital as they were frequently excluded from archives and academic organizations.

(plaintive music) Since the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and '60s, as American institutions have increasingly opened their doors to African-American scholars and scholarship, Black history has flourished in journals, universities, and popular media.

These studies have given greater focus to the lives of Black women, artists, entrepreneurs, and subcultures, and, increasingly, Black experiences outside of the South and since reconstruction.

- Studies of Black America and the Northern Plains are even newer.

Contemporary works of the 1990s and 2000s survey Black life in Minnesota and North Dakota focus works on the roles of the enslaved, slaveholders, and racial segregation in our region from historians like William Green, Christopher Lehman, and Walt Bachman have been followed by institutions such as the 2018 opening of the Minnesota African-American Heritage Museum and Gallery.

Our work in "Black History of the Northern Plains" follows right in these footsteps.

We hope you'll join us for the journey.

I'm Troy Jackson II.

Thank you for watching.

(plaintive music) - Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.