Indian Child Removal: New Developments in South Dakota

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

Yesterday, I cross-posted my piece from a year ago on South Dakota's practice of stealing Indian children and placing them in white foster "care" situations" in the service of racism and financial profit.  Despite being more than a year old, the piece tragically is not outdated in the least.  That said, there are new developments, so I reposted it primarily to provide the backstory for anyone not yet familiar with it.

On Monday, February 3, four separate American Indian groups formally asked the Justice Department to investigate the public scandal that is the so-called "child welfare" (i.e., removal, foster care placement, and adoption) in Indian Country.  The four groups are the National Congress of American Indians [NCAI], the Native American Rights Fund [NARF], the National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA], and the Association on American Indian AffairS [AAIA]. 

The request, delivered via letter, was typically polite but also pointed:

[T]he groups wrote that a lack of federal oversight had led to Indian children being improperly placed with non-Indian families by child welfare workers and that tribal representatives were too often left out of custody proceedings. They also accused adoption agencies of sometimes ignoring the tribal membership of children in their care. 

“Although these civil rights violations are well-known and commonplace, they continue to go unchecked and unexamined[.]”

Yes.  Well-known and commonplace, unchecked and unexamined.  And unremedied.  One hundred and eighty-four years after that walking, talking embodiment of evil known as Andrew Jackson unleashed genocide on our peoples under the sanitized label "Indian Removal" . . . and Indian children are still subject to removal, and our peoples still subject to the accompanying genocide.

The demand for an investigation comes hard on the heels of a ruling late last month by Chief Judge Jeffrey L. Viken of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Dakota:  He approved class-action status for a lawsuit being spearheaded in South Dakota by members of the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires of the great Sioux Nation, comprising he various Lakota/Dakota/Nakota [LDN] tribal nations.  According to the ACLU, which is helping the tribes with representation:

First, this ruling marks the first time that an Indian tribe has sought and been granted the ability to bring ICWA claims on behalf its members. This is immensely important for Indian tribes because, as the judge notes in his opinion, this lawsuit "is inextricably bound up with the Tribes' ability to maintain their integrity and 'promote the stability and security of the Indian tribes and families.'" Second, the judge agreed that, "[k]eeping Indian parents in the dark as to the allegations against them while removing a child from the home for 60 to 90 days certainly raises a due process issue." So, the court agrees that if Pennington County's child removal procedures really look the way our lawsuit describes them, those procedures violate the Due Process Clause and ICWA.

This is significant, but it's not the only jurisdiction where problems exist. One of the signatories to the letter to the Justice Department, the Portland, Oregon-based NICWA, reports similar problems in that state:

Another problem, according to Craig Dorsay, an Oregon lawyer who works on many Native child welfare cases, is inconsistencies in identifying who is an Indian child and who is not – and whether the law applies to families who are deemed not Indian enough in the eyes of a court. 

In Oregon, Dorsay said, the overall relationship between tribes and counties is good when it comes to applying the law. But statistics continue to show the disproportionate removal of Native children from their families. 

Native American children in Oregon are more likely to be placed in foster care than white children, according to research from Portland State University. And they're more likely to exit care by adoption. That, despite the fact that the abuse rate among Natives is the same as for white families. 

Researchers found that suspected abuse or neglect involving Native American families was reported to child protective services at a higher rate than the group's representation in the general population.

And, of course, by now the whole world is familiar with the infamous Baby Veronica case (and others involving white adoptive families in South Carolina), a story I've covered here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

There will be much more on these issues in the days and weeks to come.  For now, it's progress.




Copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.