News related to Indian child welfare.
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum signed a bill into law codifying the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into North Dakota, and our Native Americans have a lot to say about it.
Read the full article at the KX News website.
Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s FireLodge Children & Family Services works to protect children and vulnerable adults who are at risk of being abused or neglected, providing services such as court advocacy, investigations, prevention services, parenting education, counseling, foster home approval and adoption.
Read the full article at Potawatomi.org
A federal law preventing parents from taking custody battles across state lines did not apply to tribal nations, a federal appeals court ruled this week.
Read the full article at NBC News.
U.S. Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) reintroduced the Native American Child Protection Act (NACPA), bipartisan legislation that authorizes three programs that ensure Tribes have the tools needed to treat, prevent, investigate and prosecute Native American child abuse and neglect.
Read the full article at the Los Alamos Daily Post.
The state’s Indian Child Welfare Act Task Force met for the first time in Riverton to discuss next steps after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1978 federal law earlier this summer.
Read the full article at Wyoming Public Radio.
While ICWA remains a federal law, a dozen states have already moved to bring some or all of the law’s tenets into state child welfare codes. During the current legislative season, several other states have local ICWA laws under consideration. The Imprint has set up this basic state ICWA tracker to update readers on developments.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
Jones said it is unclear which act, ICWA or ASFA, applies to South Dakota Native families at which time, and that the conflict of these two laws has caused confusion among Native families. He said state legislation could help iron that out.
Read the full article at the Mitchell Republic website.
The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday acknowledged Nebraska courts’ obligation to follow federal regulations in cases involving the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Read the full article at Lincoln Journal Star.
A recent ProPublica investigation showed how ICWA was being unevenly applied in some states, breaking up Native American families that should have received additional protections under the law. There’s still room for improvement, advocates say.
Read the full article at ProPublica.
“In adopting the Indian Child Welfare Act, Congress exercised that lawful authority to secure the right of Indian parents to raise their families as they please; the right of Indian children to grow in their culture; and the right of Indian communities to resist fading into the twilight of history. All of that is in keeping with the Constitution’s original design.”
Read the full article at Indian Country Today.
“This case is about children who are among the most vulnerable: those in the child welfare system,” wrote Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the majority opinion. “The bottom line is that we reject all of petitioners’ challenges to the statute, some on the merits and others for lack of standing.”
Read the full article at Mother Jones.
By a 7-to-2 vote, the court upheld the law’s preferences for Native tribes when Indian children are adopted, ruling that the law does not discriminate on the basis of race and does not impermissibly impose a federal mandate on traditionally state-regulated areas of power.
Read the full article at NPR.
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a 1978 law aimed at keeping Native American adoptees with their tribes and traditions, handing a victory to tribes that had argued that a blow to the law would upend the basic principles that have allowed them to govern themselves.
Read the full article at the New York Times.
To help participants understand why ICWA is so important, the training focuses first on what Littlewolf calls “heart work — understanding the historical trauma, the correct history of Indigenous families.”
Read the full article at Minnesota Public Radio News.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has signed legislation giving Native American families preference in fostering and adopting Native children involved with child protective services, a proactive move to protect such rights as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case that could undercut them nationally.
Read full article at Religion News Service.
Beyond the tangle of legal matters, the Supreme Court case delves into the evocative terrain of historical trauma, race, identity, cultural biases — and the very meaning of family.
Read the full article at Searchlight New Mexico.
The Supreme Court is about to decide on a case arguing that the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, discriminates against white people. The lawsuit seeks to reframe tribal membership as a racial rather than a political category, and argues that it disadvantages white foster parents trying to adopt Native children. This week, Rebecca Nagle, host of the This Land podcast, explains how this decision could reverse centuries of U.S. law and precedent protecting the rights of Indigenous nations.
Listen to the podcast at Code Switch.
The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 sought to keep Native children in tribal communities. The Supreme Court may change that this spring.
Read the full article at the New York Times.
Right now, people who become a child’s legal guardian aren’t eligible for state assistance if their case is in a Michigan tribal court. Two bills in the state legislature would change that. They would extend the financial benefits of the Guardianship Assistance Program to all legal guardians, regardless of what court handles their case.
Read the full article at Michigan Radio.
Bipartisan legislation now before Congress would enhance funds available to tribal courts and child welfare systems, support tribal ways of adopting children and ease administrative burdens necessary to access the resources.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
At a U.S. House Natural Resources Committee virtual roundtable on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) on Tuesday, lawmakers heard from experts about the dark legacy of the U.S. government removing Native children from their homes as well as personal anecdotes about the impact of growing up as a Native child in a non-Native community.
Read the full article at Native News Online.
Some states are working to enshrine their own versions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act ahead of the anticipated U.S. Supreme Court decision that could overturn the policy. But Utah isn’t one of them.
Read the full article at KUER.
While ICWA is a federal law, a dozen states have already moved to bring some or all of the law’s tenets into state child welfare codes. During the current legislative season, several other states have local ICWA laws under consideration. The Imprint has set up this basic state ICWA tracker to update readers on developments.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
Congresswoman Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, and other House Democrats say they’re worried the U.S. Supreme Court is about to weaken the Indian Child Welfare Act, to the detriment of Native children and their tribes.
Read the full article at Alaska Public Media.
North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum has signed a bill into law to protect tribal cultures by codifying the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law, Burgum’s office announced Monday.
Read the full article at Valley News Live.
A report released Monday by a northern California civil grand jury finds that the local child welfare system routinely misses court deadlines, creating “an unnecessary amount of stress” for children and families — particularly members of tribal communities who are overrepresented in the foster care system.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
In a novel ruling, the Oklahoma Supreme Court found the exclusivity does not cover children who belong to one tribal nation but live on the reservation of another. The state can assert decision-making power over the lives of those children without the consent of the reservation tribe, the court determined.
Read the full article at Tulsa World.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court used the reasoning of the 2022 ruling in Castro-Huerta v. Oklahoma, which rolled back parts of McGirt, to come to their decision. The Oklahoma Supreme Court say that states have jurisdiction over child custody proceedings, and ICWA only limits the state’s jurisdiction when a member child is on their tribe’s reservation.
Read the full article at KOSU.
The Federal Indian Child Welfare Act is at risk. In the closing days of the session, a duel — or a duet? — of would-be replacements plays out.
Read the full article at Montana Free Press.
North Dakota House Bill 1536 passed the state legislature yesterday, April 25. The bill codifies ICWA into state law, meaning if the Supreme Court were to make changes to the federal law, it would not apply to North Dakota law unless the North Dakota Legislature chose to amend the law adopted in HB 1536 in a future legislative session.
Read the full article at Native News Online.
“If the court rules the law unconstitutional, it will not only prevent family reunifications like my own — it will tell tribes that we do not have a right to our own children, and that our political sovereignty, which Congress has recognized for centuries is no more. For all of us, this should be a terrifying notion,” she wrote.
Read the full article at The Washington Times.
Being a grandparent comes with trials and triumphs, sleepless nights and days that fly by, boundless joy and a sense of purpose. I’ve loved all of it, and it was only made possible by a law that is essential to keeping Native American families like mine together. It’s called the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and it’s at risk of being overturned by the highest court in the country this year.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
Uncertainty about the future of ICWA brought urgency to legislative efforts this year to strengthen the Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act or MIFPA. Lawmakers in both houses passed the legislation and Governor Walz is expected to sign it. “MIFPA legislation creates basically the gold standard of protection for our native kids,” said State Senator Mary Kunesh.
Read the full article at the Minnesota Public Radio website.
Let me be clear, this law is not about preventing non-Native families from adopting children when the situation and best interests of the child call for it. It’s about keeping families together whenever possible; it’s about fighting for the futures of Native American children; and it’s about giving tribes a long-awaited seat at the table. It not only upholds Oneida’s vision of protecting families and preserving our core values and traditional beliefs – it has promoted the best interest of Oneida children for more than 40 years.
Read the full article at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
While a Supreme Court decision overturning ICWA on sweeping equal- protection grounds would likely invalidate those state laws as well, other outcomes — such as a ruling that the federal law exceeded Congress’s authority — could leave state protections in place.
Read the full article at USA Today.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon last week signed legislation codifying the Indian Child Welfare Act into state law. A similar bill is moving through the Montana Legislature.
Read the full article at the Montana Standard website.
“With some of the sponsors of the bill and the support we have in tribal and state supporters, we’ll bring this issue back up again,” Estes said. “The fact of the matter is that tribal and state leaders need to find a better path forward to work together to put aside our differences and do what’s best for all South Dakota children.”
Listen to the full article at the South Dakota Public Broadcasting website.
Utah’s eight sovereign tribes push for support on HB40, a bill that would codify the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, or ICWA, into Utah law.
Read the full article at the Salt Lake Tribune website.
Davis said the potential reversal of ICWA at the federal level adds urgency to her mission to pass a similar state law in North Dakota. The Democratic legislator said all five tribes that share geography with North Dakota were consulted during the drafting of House Bill 1536.
Read the full article at InForum.
The Supreme Court of Montana has ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act applies to third party custody arrangements in which a Native American parent allows the courts to place their child in the care of a family member. The ruling overturns previous case law in the state that had said ICWA did not apply in these types of custody agreements made privately among family members without child welfare involvement.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
“There are some anomalies and gaps in the federal [law] that could be strengthened on the state side. And to have a task force to look at those and identify those and to determine if we do indeed want to adopt those on the state side is still a worthy discussion,” Larsen said.
Read the full article at Wyoming Public Radio.
The department’s investigation found that Alaska’s system of care is heavily reliant on institutions and that key community-based services and supports needed to serve children with behavioral health disabilities in family homes, such as home-based family treatment, crisis services and therapeutic treatment home services, are often unavailable. As a result, many children with behavioral health disabilities, including a substantial number of Alaska Native children, are forced to endure unnecessary and unduly long admissions to psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric residential treatment facilities both within Alaska and in states across the country.
Read the full report at the Justice Department’s website.
“As the only federally recognized tribe in the State of Mississippi, our 11,000 plus members are descendants of those members who chose to remain here in Mississippi to preserve our cultural heritage on our ancestral homelands,” the tribe said in a statement. “Today, just as in the past, the preservation and security of our tribe, and our tribal children and families are of utmost importance.”
Read the full article at Mississippi Today.
Janine Jackson interviewed Crushing Colonialism’s Jen Deerinwater about efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act for the December 9, 2022, episode of CounterSpin.
Read the transcript or listen to the interview at FAIR.org.
The Supreme Court will decide a case that affects Native children and their adoptive families. Although both sides claim to have children’s best interest at heart, removing kids from Native communities has a troubled history in America.
Read the full article at Harper’s Bazaar.
On the heels of oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), an organization comprised of a coalition of California tribes on Nov. 21 announced its creation of a think tank to advance and defend protections for Native children.
The California ICWA Institute—a new project under The California Tribal Families Coalition— will bring together tribal leaders and policymakers to craft legal and political strategies in defense of Native American youth and tribal sovereignty under attack.
Read the full article at Native News Online.
Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s FireLodge Children & Family Services welcomed DeAnna Voeks as its new foster care and adoption specialist in June 2022. She knew from her first day that working for the Tribe and FireLodge would be different than any of her previous jobs — in a good way.
Read the full article at Potawatomi.org.
If the law is stricken, Utah legislators talked Tuesday about plans to enact a nearly identical version statewide that would codify the same preference for continuing to place Native kids with Native foster parents. The Native American Legislative Liaison Committee voted unanimously in support of running that bill for the upcoming session that starts in January.
Read the full article at The Salt Lake Tribune.
Indigenous affairs reporter Miles Brady talked with Koston Lathoris, a Las Vegas lawyer and citizen of the Southern Paiute tribe, about the case.
Listen to the full story at Nevada Public Radio.
Each side presented their oral arguments Wednesday to the U.S. Supreme Court for the most serious challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act in recent memory. The decision in Haaland v. Brackeen will be a major force in the future of ICWA and the scope of tribal sovereignty. Today on Native America Calling, Shawn Spruce analyzes the legal debate from a Native perspective with Matthew Fletcher (Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians), law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and author of the Turtle Talk blog; independent journalist Suzette Brewer (citizen of the Cherokee Nation); and Dr. Sarah Kastelic (Alutiiq), director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association.
Listen to the conversation at Native America Calling.
The Supreme Court appeared likely Wednesday to leave in place most of a federal law that gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children.
Read the full article at Indian Country Today.
And because Native children represent about 55% of all children in state custody, Chen says overturning ICWA would have huge implications for Alaska. At the same time, Native people only make up a little over 20% of the population, so there’s a disparity, she says, and a feeling that the state hasn’t done enough to implement ICWA to begin with.
Listen to the full story at Alaska Public Media.
The law, known as ICWA, includes many other provisions that impact Native families across Indian Country. What ICWA will look like following the Supreme Court’s decision depends on how the justices rule. Amicus curiae briefs filed in the case cover arguments made for and against the law.
Read the full article at Native News Online.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed conflicted Wednesday, as the justices heard arguments challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act, known by the acronym “ICWA.”
Listen to the full story at NPR.
The Court is hearing a case that challenges the legality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which prioritizes the placement of Native American children in foster care or adoption with relatives, other tribal members, or in other Native homes.
Read the full article at Time.
Brackeen v. Haaland attacks a 44-year-old law enacted to halt cultural genocide.
Read the full article at Vox.
The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed to redress years of mass separations of Native families. This month, the court hears a case that could overturn it
Read the full article at The Guardian.
Every Native child deserves the deep sense of safety that comes with being cared for in a home that shares their culture.
Read the full article at romper.
In the sprawling federal lawsuit Haaland v. Brackeen, a handful of white foster parents, among other plaintiffs, are asking the Supreme Court to overturn a law called the Indian Child Welfare Act. ICWA was created in 1978 to prevent family separation in Native communities. When the law passed, about a third of Native children had been removed from their families. But in the lawsuit, far more than the future of Native children is at stake.
Read the full article at The Atlantic.
The Indian Child Welfare Act set out to fix generations of harm to Native kids. The Supreme Court could soon toss it aside.
Read the full article at the Mother Jones website.
There’s a central question at the core of every child welfare case: What is the best interest of the child? When it comes to Native adoptions, the fate of the law that set the standard for four decades now rests with the Supreme Court.
Read the full article at the Christian Science Monitor website.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Brackeen v. Haaland, a case engineered to hobble the federal government’s power to protect Native communities from exploitation. The plaintiffs are asking the justices to invalidate the 44-year-old Indian Child Welfare Act, which prioritizes the placement of Native children in custody proceedings with Native families. But they’re also contesting a constitutional foundation of Indian law itself. Allying with Republican legal groups and lawmakers, the plaintiffs want to kneecap congressional authority to regulate tribes for the benefit of their own members.
Read the full article at Slate.
The issue is whether a federal law that seeks to place Native American foster children in Native American homes is constitutional. The case could turn on whether the justices see tribes as racial groups or sovereign nations.
Read the full article at the New York Time website.
The case has enormous implications for Indian Country, its children and the ongoing existence of tribal sovereignty, said Sarah Deer, professor at the University of Kansas and chief justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
The Imprint walks readers through highlights of the Brackeen v. Haaland case
Read the full article at The Imprint.
“Who could ever believe that [ICWA] would be taken away?” she said. “That’s one of the last things keeping our community together in the way that it has, so imagining a world where that doesn’t exist is just too, too painful.”
Read the full article at the KTOO website.
California’s Morongo Band of Mission Indians is one of five tribes that have intervened in the Brackeen v. Haaland case, scheduled for oral arguments Nov. 9. The tribesspoke out this week alongside leaders of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, the Quinault Indian Nation of Washington, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the Navajo Nation.
Read the full article at The Imprint website.
Kendra Lowden, a Citizen Potawatomi Nation member, discussed the case as well as the Indian Child Welfare Act and the impact its repeal could have on tribes and children across the country.
Listen to the full podcase at Potawatomi.org.
“We will not go back to a time when our children were stolen from our communities without cause.”
Read the full article at The Imprint.
The Biden administration proposes spending $20 billion over a decade to help some of the most vulnerable families in the country, including relatives suddenly thrust into child rearing.
Read the full article at The New York Times website.
Matthew Fletcher, Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law, University of Michigan, and Rebecca Nagle, Creator and Host, “This Land” Podcast, discuss the case before the Supreme Court.
Listen at the Ideastream Public Media website.
The case, known as Brackeen v. Haaland, has galvanized Indian County. Tribes are concerned the Supreme Court will nullify their right to oversee foster care placements in cases involving Native children, and they fear it could lead to further erosion of their federal rights.
Read the full article at the MinnPost website.
Brackeen v. Haaland is a case centering around the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), which focuses on assimilation, tribal culture and the adoption of Native children. Across the country, tribes are watching this case unfold to see how it will impact tribal sovereignty and the relationship between tribes and the federal government.
Read the full article at SiouxlandProud.com.
This week, Representative Judy Chu (CA-27) and Representative Don Bacon (NE-02) introduced the bipartisan Strengthening Tribal Families Act, legislation designed to assist state and local child welfare agencies with implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA, which sets federal standards for abuse or neglect custody proceedings involving native children, lessens the trauma of removal by promoting placement with family and community.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Follow H.R.8954 – Strengthening Tribal Families Act of 2022 at Congress.gov.
The proposed options could include drafting a trigger protection legislation. What that means is if the federal government does strike down ICWA, Wyoming could say ‘no, we will still follow the tenets of ICWA’. Or use the federal law as a template to draft a state law.
Read or listen to the full article at the Wyoming Public Radio website.
Read the full article at the Navajo-Hopi Observer website.
Pascua Yaqui children taken into state custody in Arizona will continue to learn and grow up according to the tribe’s customs and traditions, and the tribe will still be able to intervene in custody proceedings such as adoptions and the termination of parental rights. The state and tribe signed a memo of understanding last week cementing that state-tribal partnership.
Read the full article in the Tucson Sentinel.
The Minneapolis-based National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, the First Nations Repatriation Institute, and the University of Minnesota are collaborating on a first-of-its-kind survey asking those difficult questions. Researchers have compiled close to 1,000 accounts, submitted on paper and online, for the Child Removal in Native Communities survey, which concludes September 11.
Read the full article at The Imprint.
The American Indian College Fund has announced four grants totaling $6.25 million in support of its Indigenous Early Childhood Education (IECE) program.
Read the full article at Philanthropy News Digest.
In an outpouring of support, 497 Tribal Nations, 62 Native organizations, 23 states and DC, 87 congresspeople, and 27 child welfare and adoption organizations, and many others signed on to 21 briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of upholding ICWA. This large, bipartisan coalition of tribal leaders, policymakers, and organizations understand that the far-reaching consequences of challenging ICWA’s constitutionality in Haaland v. Brackeen will be felt for generations.
Read the full article at the Native American Rights Fund website.
Today, five tribes filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Brackeen v. Haaland defending the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).
Read the full article at Indian Country Today.
On Friday, August 5, HB 184, a bill codifying the Alaska Tribal Child Welfare Compact, automatically became State law without the Governor’s signature. The Alaska Tribal Child Welfare Compact began in 2017, under Governor Bill Walker and HSS Commissioner Valerie Nurr’araaluk Davidson, who signed the landmark State-Tribal Compact with 18 Tribal Co-Signers, representing 161 federally-recognized Tribes. The Compact was created to address and improve deep structural inequities in Alaska’s child welfare system, and has continued under the current Administration.
Read the full article at Alaska Native News.
Read the full article in The Desert Sun.
For the last 44 years, a federal law called the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has sought to prevent these situations by prioritizing that Native children adoptees be placed, when possible, with Native relatives or other members within the child’s tribe.
But after months of consequential rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, four cases teed up for hearings by the court this fall are prompting worries that ICWA, too, could be toppled or drastically altered.
Read the full article in Michigan Advance.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article in Native News Online.
More than half of Native American children in California who are taken into foster care end up in non-Indigenous households.
Assembly Bill 1862, which has so far met unanimous support in both houses of the state Legislature, would provide annual funding for tribes to recruit foster parents among their members, and to refurbish and repair homes so they meet standards necessary to safely accommodate children.
Read this article in The Imprint.
Legal Topics: Child Custody; Tribal Courts
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Casey Family Programs, the nation’s largest operating foundation dedicated to safely reducing the need for foster care and building Communities of Hope for children and families, announced today the recipients of the 2022 Casey Excellence for Children Awards.
These awards recognize outstanding individuals for their inspiring work, exceptional leadership and unwavering dedication to improving the well-being of children and families who are engaged with the child welfare system in America.
Read the article in Yahoo Finance.
The United Indian Nations of Oklahoma (UINO), the Shawnee Tribe and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) announced today that they will host a summit with tribes in the area discussing the history and impacts of Indian Boarding schools on June 22 at the River Spirit Casino Resort in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The one-day event Breaking the Silence: Seeking Truth, Justice, and Healing from Indian Boarding Schools in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, will include an array of topics including an introduction of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition Coalition and unpacking the Department of Interior report, discussions on further research and investigations, healing initiatives and the next steps call to action.
Read the article in Indian Country Today.
Legal Topics: Custody; Jurisdiction
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article in Native News Online.
The California Tribal Families Coalition (CTFC) applauds the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for withdrawing a controversial rule from the Trump Administration that would have exposed millions of tribal children and families to unnecessary risk and removed countless regulations meant to uphold key healthcare standards.
Read the full article in Indian Country Today.
Read the full article in The Imprint.
Register and learn more about this training at the Turtle Talk blog.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article in Alaska Public Media.
Read the full article in the Tahlequah Daily Press.
Read Susan Devan Harness’s essay in the Harvard Law Bill of Health.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read Kathryn Fort’s essay in Harvard Law’s Bill of Health.
The child welfare system is racist. As with all systems in the United States, the system charged with protecting children is not exempt from the racist policies, practices, and mindsets that created and justified colonialization and slavery. Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color continue to fall prey to the harsh realities of child welfare involvement, finding themselves disproportionately represented in this system. Historically, the child welfare system has attempted to rectify this issue by implementing policies and practices that consistently fall flat. Perhaps one of the most comprehensive attempts at rectifying these wrongs involved the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) enacted in 1978. ICWA was created to protect Indigenous communities devastated by extraordinarily high rates of removing Indigenous children from their families and Tribes and adopting them out to non-Indigenous families. In 2013, eighteen of the United States’ most prominent child welfare organizations collectively asserted in an amicus brief that through the creation of ICWA, “Congress adopted the gold standard for child welfare policies and practices that should be afforded to all children.” Specifically, they asserted that ICWA serves as “a model for child welfare and placement decisionmaking [sic] that should be extended to all children.”
Read the full article in the Rutgers Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full law review article in the Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read Kathryn Fort’s post on Turtle Talk.
Read the notice in the Federal Register.
Minnesotans are needed to help shape child welfare policy, practice and training recommendations by serving on Citizen Review Panels for the state’s child protection system.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services is currently seeking more than 80 volunteers for citizen panels in Chisago, Hennepin, Ramsey and Winona counties. By bringing a crucial community voice to county and statewide child welfare policies and procedures, panel members play an integral role in ensuring that the child protection system protects children from abuse and neglect. They also help identify and eliminate racial disparities in the system.
Read the article in Indian Country Today.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Rebecca Nagle, host of This Land, joins Leah and Kate to discuss the issues at stake in Brackeen v. Haaland, a case challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act that the Supreme Court will hear next term.
Listen to this episode on the Crooked Media website.
Read the article in the Bangor Daily News.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Jurisdiction
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library.
Legal topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the decision at the Turtle Talk blog.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Listen to the segment on the Turtle Talk blog.
Read about this on the Turtle Talk blog.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Even though this is not an ICWA case, three people have sent me this opinion by Justice Montoya Lewis regarding the primacy of relative placement in child protection proceedings. This opinion points to all sorts of issues that beleaguers relative placement, especially certain aspects of background checks and prior involvement with the system. Here, the Court explicitly holds that prior involvement in the system alone cannot be consider as a reason to keep a child out of a relative placement, and seems to imply that both criminal history and immigration status cannot be considered either.
Read the decision, and discussion, at Turtle Talk.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the decision at the Turtle Talk blog.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
New Mexico can provide support for Native families and their children this legislative session — perhaps in the nick of time, depending on the Supreme Court.
Read the full article in the Santa Fe New Mexican.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
The OST Council met Tuesday in Batesland at the Bill C. Bear Memorial gym at Batesland school for their January regular session; after many questions from the gathered tribal council representatives, the council voted 11-6-1 to approve the annual attorney contract for Dana Hanna who represents the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Indian Child Welfare Act cases and in lawsuits against the State of South Dakota.
Read the full article in the Lakota Times.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Termination of Parental Rights
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the guest essay in the Navajo Times.
Read the dataset created by Kathryn Fort at the Turtle Talk blog.
Read the full decision, and additional commentary, at the Turtle Talk blog.
George F. Will’s Jan. 6 op-ed, “The racial politics of the Indian Child Welfare Act,” ignored the benefits of the Indian Child Welfare Act and the basic facts of tribal citizenship. The ICWA is considered the gold standard of child welfare laws and establishes a process that promotes efforts to keep children connected to their families, communities and heritage. There’s a reason those who know the ICWA best — from child welfare experts to tribes — have filed briefs defending the law.
Read the Op-Ed in the Washington Post.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
S.3337 — A bill to protect Native children and promote public safety in Indian country.
Read about this bill at the 117th Congress website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Termination of Parental Rights
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Read the full decision at the Turtle Talk blog.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Register for this conference at the Turtle Talk website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Further reading materials are available at Turtle Talk.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full federal register entry at the National Indian Law Library website.
Access the ICWA tribal agent directory at the federal register website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article in the Norman Transcript.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
On September 3, four tribes and the United States Solicitor General filed cert petitions with the U.S. Supreme Court in Brackeen v. Haaland, defending the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and its constitutionality. Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., Morongo Band of Mission Indians Chairman Charles Martin, Oneida Nation Chairman Tehassi Hill, and Quinault Indian Nation President Guy Capoeman issued the following statement:
“State and federal courts have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act for decades, but attacks on this critical law continue. Our tribes continue to fight for the Indian Child Welfare Act because it ensures the best outcomes for Indian children by keeping them connected to their families and tribal communities. We can never go back to the dark times when Indian children were removed from their homes and stripped of their heritage.
“The Indian Child Welfare Act provides a process for protecting the best interests of Indian children in the adoption and foster care systems. It is overwhelmingly supported across the political spectrum, and has been defended by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Child advocates such as the Casey Family Programs call the Indian Child Welfare Act’s protective features the “gold standard” of child welfare. We look forward to the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of this vital law.”
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article at the Native News Online website.
Listen to ‘This Land’ at Crooked Media.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
After the forced separation of Indian families, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to create heightened procedural protections to maintain and preserve Indian families. Following Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 570 U.S. 637 (2013), courts have indicated concern that the heightened standards of ICWA may be overbroad and harm Indian children. This Note provides an empirical counter to that concern, illustrating that, under similar circumstances, Alaska Native parental survivors of domestic violence lose custody of their children at considerably higher rates than non-Alaska Natives. The continued disparate treatment suggests that ICWA continues to serve an important purpose in protecting Indian families and ought to be strengthened.
Read the full law review article in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism.
Several years ago, the Lummi Tribal Council told Diana Phair, the executive director of the tribe’s Housing Authority: “We have 200-some children in foster care. We need to bring our children home.”
With the tribal members’ input, she and her colleagues devised Sche’lang’en Village, a novel housing arrangement for parents seeking to reunite with their children in foster care, homeless families, those overcoming addictions and women fleeing domestic violence. The sliding scale, low-cost, drug- and alcohol-free housing project, would be infused with social services, allow for indefinite stays and have a stated and intentional purpose: to preserve and protect Native American families by providing an opportunity for families to make transformational life changes.
Read the full article at the Crosscut website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision and Turtle Talk commentary at the Turtle Talk website.
Read the full article on the Native News Online website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Bay Mills Indian Community
3rd annual Noojimo’iwewin: A VAWA and ICWA Training
Aug. 4-6, in-person and online
BRIMLEY, Mich. — Picking up where last year’s training left off, Bay Mills Indian Community sets out to host its third annual Noojimo’iwewin: A VAWA and ICWA Training, Aug. 4-6. The event is hosted both in-person at the Bay Mills Horizon Center and online via Zoom. Once again, this timely training focuses on issues of child welfare, domestic violence, and community healing. Registration is free and still open!
Those who will attend in-person must book their room by at the Bay Mills Resort & Casino by Tuesday, July 27 using the training room block information. If you have any questions, please contact Neoshia Roemer at neoshia@whitenergroup.biz. This training is made possible by the Office of Tribal Justice’s TJS funding and organized by The Whitener Group.
This course is approved for 9.25 (including 1.25 Elimination of Bias) Minnesota Continuing Legal Education credits and this course is approved by the NASW-Michigan Social Work Continuing Education Collaborative for 9 credits.
Read the full press release or sign up for this training through the Turtle Talk website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full article at the New York Times website.
SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Nine Rosebud Lakota children began their last morning away from their homelands Friday at the base of a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. Shortly after 1 a.m. Friday morning, a caravan carrying the nine Lakota children who died more than 140 years ago arrived here with a police escort in front of them for a brief welcome ceremony and meal.
Read the full article at the Indianz website.
S.2326 — A bill to amend the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act to reauthorize programs under that Act, and for other purposes.
Read about this bill at the 117th Congress website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
SAN DIEGO — Gov. Gavin Newsom has appointed Carlsbad resident and professor Joely Proudfit to the Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, making her the first Indigenous woman to serve the organization.
Proudfit (Luiseño/Payómkawichum) is a professor at California State University, San Marcos who has served as American Indian studies chair and director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center since 2008.
During Proudfit’s four-year term, she not only plans to support the concerns of all women, she also hopes to highlight issues that impact Indigenous women and girls disproportionately.
Read the full article at the Sacramento Bee website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
H.R.4348 – To remove administrative barriers to participation of Indian tribes in Federal child welfare programs, and increase Federal funding for tribal child welfare programs, and for other purposes.
Read about this bill at the 117th Congress website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full statement on the Indian Country Today website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the full press release at the Department of the Interior website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
S.2167/H.R.4052 – A bill to establish a national, research-based, and comprehensive home study assessment process for the evaluation of prospective foster parents and adoptive parents and provide funding to States and Indian tribes to adopt such process.
Read more about this bill in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Shortly after a First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, confirmed it found the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried under a former residential school, news of more sites just like it started to surface across the country—and in the United States.
Read the full article on the Vice News website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
As I read stories about an unmarked grave in Canada where the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found last month, I was sick to my stomach. But the deaths of Indigenous children at the hands of government were not limited to that side of the border. Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States also has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people. It is a history that we must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.
Read the full article at the Washington Post website.
Oregon lawmakers have voted to codify provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law in an effort to honor tribal customs and sent the bill to the desk of Democratic Gov. Kate Brown.
Read the full article at The Imprint website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
The NCAI, which passed two different resolutions in the past decade on the issue, is calling for transparency and accountability for historical and generational trauma caused by boarding schools that was a program of the federal government that operated on the mantra to “Kill the Indian, Save the man.”
Read the full article on the Native News Online website.
S.1868 – A bill to amend the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act to require that equitable distribution of assistance include equitable distribution to Indian Tribes and Tribal organizations, to increase amounts reserved for allotment to Indian Tribes and Tribal organizations under certain circumstances, and to reserve amounts for migrant programs under certain circumstances, and to provide for a Government Accountability Office report on child abuse and neglect in American Indian Tribal communities.
Read more about this bill at the 117th Congress website.
The Indian Child Welfare Act became law in 1978 with a goal of keeping Native children with their families and tribes. As Blackfeet citizen and Salish descendant Brooke Pepion Swaney found out, the law was overlooked when Kendra was adopted by the Mylnechuk family. Brooke’s first feature-length documentary, “Daughter of a Lost Bird,” premieres at the prestigious Human Rights Watch Festival in New York, and everywhere online.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Save the date for a virtual Domestic/Family Violence Advocacy Training, June 16-17, 2021.
For more information, or to register, email: training@native-knowledge.com.
Original post from Turtle Talk.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Read the article at the Indianz website.
Read the full article in the Washington and Lee Law Review Online.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act; Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Custodial Agreements; Tribal Law
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
These foster youth say the state of Alaska pocketed thousands of dollars that belonged to them. Nationwide, government agencies take money owed to foster children with disabilities or a deceased parent, The Marshall Project and NPR found. And most kids never know it’s gone.
Read the full article at the Marshall Project website.
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA or the Act) is a federal statute that protects Indian children by keeping them connected to their families and culture. The Act’s provisions include support for family reunification, kinship care preferences, cultural competency considerations and community involvement. These provisions parallel national child welfare policies. Nevertheless, the Act is relentlessly attacked as a law that singles out Indian children for unique and harmful treatment. This is untrue but, ironically, it will be true if challenges to the ICWA are successful. To prevent this from occurring, the defense of the Act needs to change. For too long, this defense has focused on justifying the Act’s alleged different treatment of Indian children. Now, it is time to refute this charge and demonstrate this difference is illusory.
Read the full law review article in the American Indian Law Review.
H.R.2740 – To protect Native children and promote public safety in Indian country.
Read more about this bill at the 117th Congress website.
Read the full article at the Wyoming Public Media website.
I am an Ojibwe autistic parent of autistic children, and a disability advocate. My children and I are statistically insignificant, and we routinely endure systemic erasure. Most Native autistic people do not get an accurate diagnosis or the support they need at any age. Native communities desperately need access to accurate information about autism and culturally responsive care.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Read the full article in the Department of Justice Journal of Federal Law and Practice.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Today, the Yurok Tribe, Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria, the Wiyot Tribe and the Trinidad Rancheria announced their support of the California Attorney General’s effort to pursue a court order requiring the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services Child Welfare Services Division and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office to fully and transparently implement the terms of a 2018 court ruling regarding the agencies’ mismanagement of child abuse and neglect cases.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
A recent, unanimous opinion of the Washington State Supreme Court authored by Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, the first Native American justice to serve on the court, gives critical life to the rights granted under the act by giving expansive meaning to the “reason to know” standard that invokes its protections.
Read the full article at the Seattle Times website.
Unlawful rollback of data collection requirements is “riddled with errors,” ignores critical need to understand challenges facing American Indian and Alaska Native children, LGBTQ+ foster youth.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Repairing and strengthening Indian Country’s ancestral social safety net
Indian Country Today Opinion by:
-Tara ‘Katuk’ Sweeney, Iñupiat member of the Native Village of Barrow and the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope and Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior
-Jeannie Hovland, Flandreau Santee Sioux Member and Commissioner of the Administration for Native Americans, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
The law protects Native children from being taken from their homes without tribal involvement. The case before the state Supreme Court could tighten those rules.
Read the full article at the Crosscut website.
Under the direction of Children, Youth and Families Secretary Brian Blalock, state leaders announced in October the creation of New Mexico’s first Indian Child Welfare Act court. Only the nation’s sixth, the court opened Jan. 1 in the 2nd Judicial District to enforce and adjudicate the 1978 congressional law that requires the placement of Native American foster or adopted youth with Indian families.
Read the full article at the Santa Fe New Mexican website.
CYFD, in an effort to align with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) — a congressional law that aims to keep Native American children with Native families — created an all-woman, all-Native American ICWA unit within the child protective services division. Additionally, the state’s first — and only the nation’s sixth — ICWA court officially opened on Jan. 1. According to Special Master Catherine Begaye, the presiding officer of the ICWA court who spoke at the conference, the Second Judicial District (Bernalillo County) court will adjudicate foster care, pre-adoptive and adoption placement cases for indigenous children.
Read the full article at the Carlsbad Current Argus website.
The case centers on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which was designed to protect American Indian communities against state-led efforts to break up Native families. The challengers in the case—several Republican-led states and non-Native families seeking to adopt Native children—are attempting to invalidate ICWA’s restrictions on breaking up Native families and on non-Native families adopting Native children. In doing so, they risk undoing a set of doctrines that has facilitated tribes’ ability to govern themselves and prosecute individuals who victimize Native people.
Read the full article at The Atlantic website.
Northern Arapaho leaders and state officials are looking for ways to improve a child protective services program that the tribe says needs more money from the state to be more effective.
Gov. Mark Gordon and Northern Arapaho Tribe leaders met last week to discuss the tribe’s child protective and social services, which is funded with help from the state but managed by the tribe.
Read the full article at the Laramie Boomerang website.
The amicus brief urges the Fifth Circuit to uphold the court’s previous decision affirming the constitutionality of IWCA. The decision the Fifth Circuit issued in August reversed an unprecedented ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas which wrongly struck down ICWA as unconstitutional.
Read the full press release and view the amicus brief at the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs website.
Get ready for round two. Oral arguments in a closely-watched Indian Child Welfare Act case will take place on January 22, 2020.
After offering a tentative date last month, 5th Circuit Court of Appeals made it official on Wednesday. The case known as Brackeen v. Bernhardt will go before an en banc panel of judges in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the first round of arguments took place earlier this year.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
The legal status of the Indian Child Welfare Act is again going before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2018, a Texas federal court found the Act known as ICWA to be unconstitutional.
But this summer a panel of three Fifth Circuit judges reversed that finding. Now the full panel of appellate judges will hear the case, with oral arguments tentatively scheduled for the week of Jan. 20.
Listen to the full story at the South Dakota Public Broadcasting website.
Simply Smiles, Inc. is seeking Native American foster parents for the Simply Smiles Children’s Village on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation (South Dakota). …
Native foster parents at the Simply Smiles Children’s Village will ensure that Native children who have been removed from their homes on Cheyenne River can remain with their “kin and community,” fulfilling the letter and spirit of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Attacks on the law, enacted in 1978, have inexplicably risen in the past seven years and attracted the support of a seemingly disparate array of high power ultra conservative players and organizations.
Today’s challenges to the child welfare protocols aren’t only about adoption because if the Indian Child Welfare Act is found to be unconstitutional that would undermine tribal governments. So much is at stake: The authority of tribal courts, economic nationhood, including casinos, and the control of tribal land, potentially an opening for fossil fuels and other extractive industry development.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Pima County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Quigley said having an ICWA court would allow a legal team to specialize in these cases, much like with a mental health or drug court.
“Instead of having 14 judges deal with ICWA cases, we’d have one judge who would deal with it the same way, so everybody could have an expectation of how things would proceed,” Quigley said. “And I believe the tribes are also in support of having ICWA courts, as well.”
Read the full article or listen to the story at the Arizona Public Media website.
The Yellowstone County District Court is working to improve the outcome for Native children with the Indian Child Welfare Act Court launched 18 months ago with Judge Rod Souza presiding. It is one of only six ICWA courts in the nation.
Read the full article at the Montana Standard website.
Native American tribes got a big win in August when a federal court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act, a pivotal 1978 law that requires states to prioritize placing Native children in foster or adoptive homes with Native families over non-Native families.
But the decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is now being reconsidered by the full court, which announced earlier this month that it is granting a rehearing in a case known as Brackeen v. Bernhardt.
Read the full article at The Huffington Post website.
In the 40 years since Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act, the law has been criticized in legal challenges that have climbed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the ICWA, as the act is known, has always prevailed.
Now its constitutionality is being questioned again. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit agreed to rehear a lawsuit filed by a non-Native American couple in Texas claiming the ICWA discriminates on the basis of race and infringes on states’ rights.
Read the full article at The Washington Post website.
After initially deciding the closely-watched case in favor of Indian Country, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals announced that it will hear the dispute all over again. A larger set of judges will now scrutinize the landmark law but tribal nations remain confident that their sovereign rights and their most precious resource — their children — will win out in the end.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an order directing a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to be reheard en banc — before the entire Fifth Circuit. As previously reported, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit had held ICWA Constitutional in August, finding it was not a race-based statute that would violate the Equal Protection Clause.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Read the statement from the Protect ICWA Campaign at the Native American Rights Fund website.
More than 40 years after the federal law took effect, the child welfare system continues to absorb a disproportionate number of Native American children nationally and in Utah, noted Alisa Lee, Indian child welfare program administrator for the Utah Division of Child and Family Services.
Data provided by Lee’s office shows that roughly 5% of the total 4,659 children in the Utah foster care system are Native American, though census figures indicate just 1% of the state’s population belongs to the demographic group.
Read the full article at the Deseret News website.
The Supreme Court didn’t give a reason it declined to hear the case that began in 2013, when the Oglala and Rosebud Sioux Tribes and three parents in Pennington County brought a class action lawsuit against state Department of Social Services and Pennington County officials.
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the tribes and parents, alleged that Native American parents weren’t receiving fair preliminary hearings when their children were removed from the home, including that parents couldn’t have an attorney present and couldn’t see documents given to the court by DSS.
Read the full article at the Argus Leader website.
Emails to the adoptive family from the director of Bright Star Adoptions, an adoption firm for which Petersen served as general counsel, suggest that concerns came up about the firm’s compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act following Petersen’s arrest.
Read the full article at the Phoenix New Times website.
Read related news:
Carlisle, and boarding schools like it, are remembered as a dark chapter in the history of the ill-conceived assimilation policies designed to strip Native people of their cultures and languages by indoctrinating them with U.S. patriotism. But child removal is a longstanding practice, ultimately created to take away Native land. Although Carlisle is located in the East, it played a key role in pressuring the West’s most intransigent tribes to cede and sell land by taking their children hostage.
Read the full article at the High Country News website.
Nearly 200 pages of child welfare regulations are proposed for repeal by the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, and will be replaced by less than a dozen pages of regulations on adoption, the Indian Child Welfare Act and alternative response.
Read the full article at the Beatrice Daily Sun website.
The leaders of four American Indian tribes in North Dakota have signed a new agreement with the state over federal funding for child welfare services, including allowing tribes to license foster care parents on and off reservations.
Read the full article at the Bismark Tribune website.
In the 21st century, we are still fighting to protect indigenous children whether it is north or south of the Mexican border. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act was a critical step to keep our families, communities and identities intact. Now, some legal protections need to be enacted for the indigenous children being stolen at the Mexico border.
Read the full opinion piece at the Grand Forks Herald website.
As president of both the Quinault Nation and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, Fawn Sharp is a busy person. As of late, much of her time has been dedicated to the fight for Native children and, more broadly, tribal sovereignty.
Sharp knows firsthand how difficult it is for Native parents hoping to provide a culturally inclusive household for Indigenous children to jump through the hoops of the current system. Two years ago, Sharp shared her story in a video series produced by her former employer, the National Congress of American Indians, in which she detailed the painful process of applying to adopt Native children only to see them placed outside a reservation with non-Native families.
Read the full article at The New Republic website.
United States: Fifth Circuit Upholds Indian Child Welfare Act As Constitutional. Akin Gump (Aug. 14, 2019)
Federal District Court of Appeals Upholds Indian Child Welfare Act. Nonprofit Quarterly (Aug. 13, 2019)
EDITORIAL: ICWA ruling a victory for tribes. Tahlequah Daily Press. (Aug. 13, 2019)
Fifth Circuit Court reaffirms Indian Child Welfare is constitutional. The Ada News (Aug. 12, 2019)
Paxton likely to challenge ruling upholding Indian adoption law. Austin Statesman (Aug. 12, 2019)
Fifth Circuit Squarely Rejects Challenge to ICWA. The National Law Review (Aug. 12, 2019)
Indian Child Welfare Act Upheld By Fifth Circuit. KGOU (Aug. 12, 2019)
5th Circuit upholds Indian Child Welfare Act as constitutional, reversing lower court. The TexasTribune (Aug. 10, 2019)
Court panel upholds Indian Child Welfare Act. Newscenter ABC 11 (Aug. 9, 2019)
Federal Law Protecting Indian Children and Families Will Stand. The Chronicle of Social Change (Aug. 9, 2019)
Court ruled that ICWA is constitutional. Indian Country Today (Aug. 9, 2019)
Now 18, Carlisle was placed into the foster care system as an infant and adopted when she was a child, but one box checked on her foster care and adoptive records identify her as African-American. There’s no mention of her Native roots, meaning the state doesn’t legally recognize her status.
She’s spent the last two years ping-ponging between county and state officials to add her Native American heritage to her records, to no avail.
Read the full article at the Wadena Pioneer Journal website.
During her testimony, Representative Smith described her disillusion with some social workers who only look at potential foster and adoptive parents from a European standard; in doing so, Smith stated that they dismiss and diminish cultural norms that are in place to provide positive reinforcements for Native children. Having heard stories of other parents of color involved in the child welfare system, I have noticed that they have had similar interactions. What was most enlightening was the fact that tribal governments and their cultural kinship ties are protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).
Read the full article at the Milwaukee Courier website.
Now the [Indian Child Welfare Act] is facing its most serious challenge yet. In a case that has implications far beyond the adoptions of American Indian children, three non-Native families and three Republican state attorneys general have sued the federal government saying that the ICWA relies on racial classifications that violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In October, a federal judge in Texas agreed, striking down the Indian Child Welfare Act for the first time in its 41-year history. The government, joined by five tribes and supported by many more, appealed the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but advocates of the law are worried that if the court upholds the earlier decision, it could call into question all other federal Indian laws.
The battle is at once profoundly personal for each family involved and simultaneously so broad that many believe it could reshape U.S.-Indian relations for generations to come. It is about reckoning with the nation’s brutal past and protecting the possibility of its future.
Read the full article at the Time website.
The Indian Child Welfare Act was established to ensure that children benefit from Native families remaining together. Our families should not ever fear the removal of their children from their tribes and their culture. It is in the best interest of Indian children to keep their connections to their culture, communities and extended families. It’s troubling that anyone would suggest otherwise.
Read the letter at the New York Times website.
A LAW KEY to preventing state welfare agencies from separating Indigenous children from their families is at risk of being overturned thanks to the yearslong effort of a network of libertarian and right-wing organizations.
In the 1970s, between a quarter and a third of Indigenous children across the United States had been removed from their homes. Social services often cited neglect or deprivation — euphemisms for poverty — as grounds for placing children in the custody of non-Native families and institutions, offering birth parents little opportunity for redress. Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 in order to reform a system designed to destroy Indigenous people.
Read the full article at The Intercept website.
Zachary, or A.L.M. as he is called in legal papers, has a Navajo birth mother, a Cherokee birth father and adoptive parents, Jennifer and Chad Brackeen, neither of whom is Native American. The Brackeens are challenging a federal law governing Native American children in state foster care: It requires that priority to adopt them be given to Native families, to reinforce the children’s tribal identity.
Read the full article at the New York Times website.
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied review of an Arizona case challenging a law that gives preference to American Indians in adoptions of Native children.
The order last week leaves in place a lower court ruling that dismissed a complaint from a Phoenix-based, right-leaning think tank.
Read the full article at the Navajo-Hopi Observer.
Read related article from the Navajo-Hopi Observer: “Indian Child Welfare Act Still Under Debate as Supreme Court Rebuffs Bid to Void the Act.”
Please join the Bay Mills Indian Community for this multi-disciplinary, tuition-free training geared toward child welfare and domestic violence advocates to implement effective service and advocacy strategies in cases involving child welfare, domestic violence, or both. Minnesota CLEs are available for this training.
This training will be in Brimley, Michigan on August 1-2, 2019. For more information, please visit the training website.
PDF version available from Turtle Talk website. Direct questions to kate@naicja.org.
The crazy thing is that the Indian Child Welfare Act is forty years old, and it’s still one of the least well-understood pieces of federal legislation, even by judges, in the country.
Read the full article at The Progressive website.
| Find information about (Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases including the annual 2018 case update on the Turtle Talk blog. |
The Arizona Court of Appeals ordered a new hearing Thursday over the guardianship of a 6-year-old child who is subject to the Indian Child Welfare Act.The Navajo Nation appealed the case, The Navajo Nation v. Department of Child Safety et al., in October 2018 after the juvenile court failed to hear the testimony of a qualified expert witness as required by the ICWA in the child’s guardianship case.
Read the full article at the Arizona Public Media website.
But a week ago, citing a “crisis” in child welfare, Brown called for creation of the advisory board and other steps to give her more direct control of the agency with an aim of getting it to improve and to do so quickly. She issued an executive order to put her wishes into effect.
The new oversight board will meet at least every other week to decide what the child welfare agency should do. Brown also will install an on-site crisis management team to ensure Pakseresht and Child Welfare Director Marilyn Jones implement the board’s recommendations. The governor will also embed one of her senior advisers at the child welfare agency to oversee the work, her order says.
Read more about the panel, which includes National Indian Child Welfare Association Executive Director Sarah Kastelic, at The Oregonian website.
The South Dakota Supreme Court has ruled that a local judge erred when he transferred a child abuse and neglect case from state court to tribal court without considering testimony from the child’s doctor.
Read the full article at the Rapid City Journal website.
On April 23, 2019, ACF’s Office of Child Care (OCC) announced the availability of funds and requested applications for:
* American Indian and Native Hawaiian Nonprofit Organization Child Care Grant
* Native Hawaiian Nonprofit Organization Child Care GrantEach of these competitive funding opportunity announcements (FOA) provides grant funding for a private, nonprofit organization to provide child care services through funding from Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) formula grants. Eligible applicants may apply for funding under both FOAs, but they would only receive one award.
If an American Indian organization is already receiving funding under a CCDF formula grant directly with OCC, the grantee will not be eligible to receive such funding for the same service area under this funding opportunity. Projects will be funded for up to $1 million per year overthree years. Optional letters of intent are due by May 8, 2019, and applications are due by June 24, 2019.
See the Administration for Native Americans website for more information.
California lawmakers are considering a proposal to make it easier for Native American tribes to make their arguments in child custody cases.
Technically, the proposed legislation, AB 686, would let lawyers or other representatives of Native American tribes appear by phone or electronically in cases involving the possible removal of Native American children from their families and tribes.
Read the full article at the Daily Bulletin website.
So far, 325 tribes and states, including Montana, Idaho, Utah and Colorado, have joined forces to preserve a law that gives Native families preference in adoption of Native children.
Read the full article at the Wyoming Public Media website.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, First Nations Repatriation Institute, and the University of Minnesota are pleased to announce the launch of our study: Child Removal in Native Communities. This is an anonymous survey about American Indian and Alaskan Native experiences and impacts of child removal to #BreakTheSilence and #BeginTheHealing.…
If you are a boarding school survivor, have boarding school history in your family, or have you ever been adopted or placed in foster care, we need your help! You can take the survey now at: z.umn.edu/child-removal-study
Read the full announcement at the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition website.
Another way that ICWA differs from conventional child welfare laws is that it mandates “active efforts” to keep children with their families or tribe. In most regular child protection cases, social-service workers are obligated to provide “reasonable efforts” to help parents and children reunify, such as offering lists of treatment facilities, therapists, affordable-housing agencies or other resources that could help parents get their lives back on track. “Active efforts,” by contrast, require social-service agencies to do more, such as supplying bus tokens, phone cards and rides to get to those services, says White Hawk. In addition to providing attorneys for qualifying ICWA family cases, the law center also employs “Indian advocates” and “parent mentors,” individuals who meet with families, help them to get appointments and find housing, and go with them to court to explain how the process works. It’s more-intensive support, but advocates say that it is what their clients need. “Our families are coming to us in crisis most of the time,” Smith told me. “So having those connections and helping them walk through what that process can be like, and giving them hope along the way, makes all the difference.” Those sorts of active efforts, she adds, should be used for all families, regardless of background.
Read the full article at the Washington Post website.
Despite these challenges, Native American adoptees continue to lead a resilient fight both inside and outside the child welfare system to address disparities, often by providing support systems and advocates beyond what county or state governments offer families. And Native-led organizations hold the government accountable, ensuring that agencies and courts properly uphold ICWA and honor tribal sovereignty.
Read the full, in-depth article at the Indian Country Today website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: Department of Public Health and Human Services petitioned to terminate mother’s parental rights to children. The District Court, Silver Bow County, Brad Newman, J., terminated rights. Mother appealed, arguing that District Court had possessed reason to know that children could have been eligible for tribal enrollment so as to trigger Indian Child Welfare Act’s (ICWA) tribal notice and enrollment eligibility determination requirements, yet District Court had failed to observe requirements.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Dirk Sandefur, J., held that:
1) the District Court had possessed reason to know that children could have been eligible for tribal enrollment, triggering ICWA requirements, but
2) the District Court’s failures to comply with ICWA had been harmless.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act – Notice
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the formation of the Presidential Task Force on Protecting Native American Children in the Indian Health Service System.
A senior administration official hosted a White House conference call, and released statements to the media which outlined that President Trump has “charged the task force with investigating the institutional and systemic breakdown that failed to prevent a predatory pediatrician from sexually assaulting children while acting in his capacity as a doctor in the Indian Health Service.”
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Read related media coverage:
White House announces Presidential Task Force. KBJR6 website.
After doctor abused children on reservation, task force will investigate Indian Health Service. Associated Press.
1978 law giving preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving American Indian children is an unconstitutional race-based intrusion on state powers that has caused families to be “literally torn apart,” an attorney told a federal appeals court March 13.
But supporters of the decades-old law say it’s needed to protect and preserve Native American culture and families. In court, lawyers for Indian tribes argued that the law’s definition of an Indian child is based not on race, but on tribal political affiliations.
Read the full article at the Navajo-Hopi Observer website.
The American Bar Association’s recently published book, “The Indian Child Welfare Act Handbook: A Legal Guide to the Custody and Adoption of Native American Children, Third Edition,” focuses on the new federal regulations of the ICWA and important cases decided during the last 10 years. Authors Kelly Gaines-Stoner, Mark C. Tilden and Jack F. Trope have expertly updated this edition with important clarifications on what the law means and how it should be applied.
Read the full press release at the American Bar Association website.
Colorado is out of compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act, which requires courts make an effort to place Native American children in state custody with tribal or Native homes. House Bill 1232, co-sponsored by Rep. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose, offers minor fixes to Colorado laws for administering ICWA.“This proposed law writes into Colorado law what federal law already requires,” said Judge Brett Woods, who presides over the Denver Juvenile Court.
Read the full article at the Durango Herald website.
A case before a federal appeals court could upend an historic adoption law meant to combat centuries of brutal discrimination against American Indians and keep their children with families and tribal communities.
For the first time, a few states have sued to overturn the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress enacted in 1978 as an antidote to entrenched policies of uprooting Native children and assimilating them into mainstream white culture.
Now, in a country roiled by debates over race and racial identity, there’s a chance the 41-year-old law could be overturned by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the country’s most conservative court. (The law applies to federally recognized tribes.)
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
With the fate of the Indian Child Welfare Act in the hands of a federal appeals courts, tribes and some states have come together to defend the law, which Congress enacted in 1978 to address the high rates of Indian children being taken from their families and their communities.
Read the full opinion piece at the Indianz.com website.
I felt compelled to write today after reading a recent commentary by the Louisiana solicitor general criticizing the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). It is absurd and illogical to compare the placement of an Indian child with a tribal family to sending a child off to live in a foreign country.
Read the full letter at The Advocate website.
Non-Indians think they know better than Indians what is best for Native American children, said lawyers for the Navajo Nation in arguments before a federal appeals court.
It’s a bold argument, but goes to the heart of the case in Brackeen v. Bernhardt. Under the Indian Child Welfare Act, Indian tribes have priority over non-Indians in Native American adoptions.
Last year in Texas, a trial judge struck down the Act. Now the tribes are defending ICWA in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Read the full article at the FindLaw.com website.
Read related coverage at:
A case before a federal appeals court this week could upend an historic adoption law meant to combat centuries of brutal discrimination against American Indians and keep their children with families and tribal communities.
For the first time, a few states have sued to overturn the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress enacted in 1978 as an antidote to entrenched policies of uprooting Native children and assimilating them into mainstream white culture.
Now, in a country roiled by debates over race and racial identity, there’s a chance the 41-year-old law could be overturned by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the country’s most conservative court. (The law applies to federally recognized tribes.)
Overturning the law, its proponents say, could significantly increase the number of American Indian children adopted into non-Native families.
Read the full research article at the Pew Trusts website.
February 5, 2019
Yesterday, Utah Attorney General Sean D. Reyes met with the leadership of the Navajo Nation, reported on the proceedings of the ICWA lawsuit, and signed an Inter-Governmental Agreement (between DCFS & Navajo Nation) with Governor Gary R. Herbert.
The Agreement is the result of a two-year process working with the Navajo Nation on the principles of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). It states the intent to support the fundamentals of ICWA, to adhere to the tribal processes concerning families and children, and to ensure that when a Navajo child is unable to return home, they will be placed with a Navajo family.
Read the full press release and related news coverage at the Utah Office of the Attorney General website.
The Indian Child Welfare Act is under attack and tribes are pushing back after conservative and Christian groups joined a closely-watched battle over the landmark federal law.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, John Hoeven, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Tom Udall and Jerry Moran reintroduced the bipartisan Tribal Adoption Parity Act legislation that would bring parity to tribal government for the adoption tax credit.
Read the full article at the Minot Daily News website.
A Dec. 17 report on All Things Considered about the Indian Child Welfare Act prompted harsh criticism from the Native American Journalists Association, which called it “inaccurate and imprecise.” A meeting between NAJA leaders and NPR editors resulted in a clarification being posted on the online version of the piece, but NAJA members continued to have concerns about the reporting.
Read the full article from the NPR ombudsperson at the NPR website.
The Native American Journalists Association supports the assessment of National Public Radio’s Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen regarding the story “Native American Adoption Law Challenged As Racially Biased.”
Read the full response at the Native American Journalists Association website.
Joint Press Release from National Native Organizations on the Overwhelming Support for the Indian Child Welfare Act
Available at https://www.narf.org/icwa-brackeen/.
(Portland, Ore., January 18, 2019)—On Wednesday, January 16, 2019, 325 tribal nations, 57 Native organizations, 21 states, 31 child welfare organizations, Indian and constitutional law scholars, and seven members of Congress joined the United States and four intervenor tribes in filing briefs to urge the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the long-standing federal law protecting the well-being of Native children by upholding family integrity and stability.
“The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is child welfare best practice. Thirty-one leading child welfare organizations stated that ICWA serves the best interest of Native children and families with their declaration that ICWA is the ‘gold standard’ of child welfare policy,” said Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association. “As experts in research, education, advocacy, and providing services related to child welfare, adoption, and court-system reform, these organizations know that ICWA ensures all children and families receive the protections they deserve and that all children fare better when placed with family.”
“The National Congress of American Indians is moved by the overwhelming support to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act, which protects the best interests of American Indian and Alaska Native children. Tribal nations know, firsthand, the positive impact, the certainty, and stability that ICWA provides to our children in state-based child welfare systems,” said Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “Bottom line, ICWA works and the FifthCircuit Court of Appeals should overturn the erroneous district court decision and support American Indian and Alaska Native children and families because it’s the right thing to do.”
“The State of Texas and other Plaintiffs, supported by the Goldwater Institute, bring this litigation against the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) stating that it seeks to protect the equal rights of American Indian children,” said Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, “but ICWA is equal rights and human rights legislation. Statistics show that state systems continue to remove Indian children from their families at greater rates than white children, even though incidents of neglect or abuse are similar. Current studies that have researched systemic bias in the child welfare system have found that Indian families were two times more likely to be investigated and four times more likely to have their children removed and placed in foster care than their white counterparts. ICWA was meant to provide protections against this systemic bias and reduce the overrepresentation of Indian children into these systems.”
“The Native American Rights Fund, along with our co-counsel at Dentons, is honored to represent the 325 tribal nations and 57 Native organizations that are signatories to the Tribal Amicus Brief,” said Erin Dougherty Lynch, senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund. “The district court’s interpretation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has never been adopted by any other court, makes no practical sense, is directly contrary to ICWA’s policy and purpose, and finds no support in centuries of established federal Indian law. Indian Country is united in its support for ICWA, and we are confident the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will overturn the district court’s decision.”
See related news coverage:
Tribes Come Together to Challenge the Indian Child Welfare Decision at the Indian Country Today website.
Tribes Offer Overwhelming Support for the Indian Child Welfare Act at the Navajo-Hopi Observer.
Attorney General Ferguson Urges Appeals Court to Preserve Indian Child Welfare Act news release at the Washington State Office of the Attorney General website.
Alaska Official Call on Court to Uphold Indian Child Welfare Act at the KTOO Public Media website.
Lawmakers File Bipartisan, Bicameral Amicus Brief in Support of the Indian Child Welfare Act at the Office of Tom Cole (R-Okla) website.
AG Brnovich Joins Bipartisan Coalition in Defense of Law that Protects Native American Children at the Arizona Attorney General website.
Alaska Fights Ruling on Native Adoption Law at the Bristol Bay Times website.
An author recounts how 1960s policies ripped apart families and communities, including her own.
An essay from author Susan Harness about her memoir, Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption. Read the full article at the High Country News website.
December 18th, 2018 at12:00pm PT | 1:00pm MT | 2:00pm CT | 3:00pm ET (1.5 hours)
More information and register at https://t.e2ma.net/message/yfr9cc/e0pis1
The Indian Child Welfare Act requires that Native American children be placed in Native American foster or adoptive homes, where possible, to maintain their heritage and identity.
The law is being challenged with increasing regularity in courts and by special-interest groups who contend it prioritizes race over a child’s best interest.
In October, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas declared key parts of the act unconstitutional, the first time any court has struck down the law.
That decision has been appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by the federal government and by multiple tribes, including the Navajo and Cherokee nations. But Tamera Shanker, an attorney who represents the ICWA unit of the Navajo Nation Office of Child and Family Services, believes the question will ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
A 5-0 decision by the South Dakota Supreme Court says a man who admitted to killing his wife and is serving a life sentence in prison did not have his rights under a federal Indian adoption law violated when a Brookings judge awarded custody of his child to the slain mother’s brother and sister-in-law.
Read the full article at the Rapid City Journal website.
[Dec. 13, 2018]WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senators Tom Udall, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and Martin Heinrich praised the Senate passage of a bicameral resolution commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and recognizing its importance to promoting the stability and security of Tribal communities and families.
Read the full press release at the US Senate Committee on Indian Affairs website.
Synopsis from Westlaw: Department of Public Health and Human Services filed petition for termination of mother’s parental rights as to her two minor children. Following termination hearing, the District Court, Cascade County, Nos. ADN 16-175 and ADN-16-176, Gregory G. Pinski, P.J., terminated mother’s parental rights. Mother appealed.
Holdings from Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Beth Baker, J., held that:
1) trial court violated Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) when it terminated mother’s parental rights before having conclusive determination of children’s status in Indian tribe;
2) trial court’s oral findings and comments within written order did not implicitly establish that court agreed active efforts to prevent the breakup of Indian family were made, as required under ICWA; but
3) mother’s due process rights were not violated when Department raised issue of abandonment during closing argument.
Reversed and remanded with instructions.
Read the full decision at the National Indian law library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: Foster and adoptive parents and states of Texas,Louisiana, and Indiana brought action against United States, United States Department of the Interior and its Secretary, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)and its Director, BIA Principal Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs,Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Secretary seeking declaration that Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was unconstitutional. Cherokee Nation, Oneida Nation, Quinalt Indian Nation, and Morengo Band of Mission Indians intervened as defendants. Plaintiffs moved for summary judgment.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The District Court, Reed O’Connor, J., held that:
1) ICWA’s mandatory placement preferences violated equal protection;
2) provision of ICWA granting Indian tribes authority to reorder congressionally enacted adoption placement preferences violated non-delegation doctrine;
3) ICWA provision requiring states to apply federal standards to state-created claims commandeered the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment;
4) Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) exceeded its statutory authority in promulgating regulations, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA);
5) BIA regulations were not entitled to Chevron deference;and
6) prospective and adoptive parents whose adoptions were open to collateral attack under ICWA had no fundamental right to care, custody, and control of children in their care.
Motions granted in part and denied in part.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
A federal appeals court granted a stay requested by the four tribes on Monday to preserve the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act.
“The law is going to stay the same for now,” said Dan Lewerenz, one of the attorneys working on the Brackeen v. Zinke case.
That means Native American families will stay together under the law.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Read related:
“Court puts hold on controversial Indian Child Welfare Act ruling” at the Indianz.com website. (12/4/2018)
The United States will join four tribes defending the Indian Child Welfare Act against a district court ruling in Texas.
The Department of Justice, with the Department of Interior and Health and Human Services, and their officials, filed a notice of appeal on Nov. 30 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, according to a joint statement from the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the National Congress of American Indians, the Native American Rights Fund, and the Association on American Indian Affairs.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Related coverage:
“A Long Legal Battle is Expected as Tribes Appeal Texas Court Ruling on ICWA” at the Indian Country Today website. (11/27/1018)
“Tribes Appeal, Seek Stay on Indian Child Welfare Act Ruling; Feds Yet to Act” at the Chronicle of Social Change website. (11/21/2018)
“Why conservatives are attacking a law meant to protect Native American families” at the Washington Post website. (11/21/2018)
A state circuit judge didn’t violate the federal Indian Child Welfare Act when she terminated a father’s right to his four-year-old son, the South Dakota Supreme Court has ruled.
Read the full article at the KELO-LAND Media website.
“Dawnland” is premiering on the PBS series Independent Lens, as part of November Native American Heritage Month programming.
The investigation by the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission represented a groundbreaking moment in the history of tribal-state relations and its goal was to uncover and acknowledge the truth about what happened to Wabanaki children and families involved with the Maine welfare system.
From 2013 to 2015, Native and non-Native commissioners travelled across Maine, gathering testimony about the impacts of the state’s child welfare practices on families in Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribal communities, which together comprise the Wabanaki people.
Read the full article at the Navajo-Hopi Observer website.
Read related article, “Dawnland Documentary Shows How the U.S. Government Took Indigenous Children From Their Homes — and Placed Them With White Families,” at the Teen Vogue website.
Despite a federal appeals court vacating a previous local ruling ordering Pennington County to change the way it runs its initial hearings for Native American child removal cases, the county isn’t planning on reverting back to its old practices.
Read the article at the Rapid City Journal website.
Title: Tensions underlying the Indian Child Welfare Act: Tribal jurisdiction over traditional state court family law matters.
Author: MacLachlan, Elizabeth
Source: 2018 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 455 (2018)
SHERRY TREPPA POSTED ON WEDNESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2018
A Texas judge’s recent decision to strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, sets a dangerous precedent that unravels federal policy carefully designed to correct centuries of tragic injustices committed against Indian people.It not only threatens the wellbeing of Native children and their families, but also tribal sovereignty. Further, the ruling could undo many of the collaborative relationships our tribes have forged with local governments and states that already acknowledge the benefits of preserving Native families.
Read the full op-ed at the Lake County News website.
October 23, 2018
In passing the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978, the clear intent of Congress was to protect the best interest of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families. Oversight and enforcement authority regarding the provisions of ICWA was left to judges presiding over child custody cases.
Read the full statement on the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges website.
In a decision published by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was declared unconstitutional, jeopardizing the landmark legislation protecting tribal children.
This egregious decision ignores the direct federal government-to-government relationship and decades upon decades of precedent that have upheld tribal sovereignty and the rights of Indian children and families. Through 40 years of implementation, ICWA’s goal is to promote family stability and integrity. It continues to be the gold standard in child welfare policy.
Read the full statement on the Native American Rights Fund website.
A federal appeals court has delivered a major blow to tribes and parents who have been seeking stronger enforcement of the Indian Child Welfare Act in South Dakota.The Oglala Sioux Tribe, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and three Indian parents went to court more than five years ago, alarmed by the large numbers of Indian children being taken from their families. They secured a historic ruling which confirmed that the state was violating ICWA by failing to provide adequate notice in child welfare proceedings.”Indian children, parents and tribes deserve better,” Judge Jeffrey L. Viken stated in his landmark March 2015 ruling.But that victory is no more. In a unanimous decision, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals last week set aside the ruling, saying Viken went too far when he ordered the state to improve compliance with ICWA, the 1978 law that remains under attack throughout the nation.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Read related article from The Chronicle of Social Change.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that South Dakota officials violated the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Read the story at the http://listen.sdpb.org/post/aclu-will-ask-eighth-circuit-reconsider-opinion-icwa-due-process.
In 2016, the Obama administration finalized AFCARS rules that would for the first time require states to track information related to, among other subjects, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the disruption of adoptions and guardianships, education stability and sexual orientation.
Read the full article at the Chronicle of Social Change website.
See the following stories: Judge upholds Indian Child Welfare Act (Arizona Daily Sun) 8/7/18,Court rejects challenge to Native American law on adoptions (Arizona Republic) 8/7/18, and Appeals court won’t rule on challenge on Indian Child Welfare Act (Indianz) 8/7/18.
Read the court decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
When social workers take a Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine or Sioux child from their parents in Yellowstone County, 75 percent go to live somewhere with a Native connection — mostly to relatives …
Read the full article at the Billings Gazette website.
A Grand Traverse Band Tribal Court judge soon will decide whether three children who have lived with their Traverse City foster parents since 2009 will stay with them or will be removed from the home.
Read the full article at the Traverse City Record-Eagle website.
A Federal Register Notice by the Indian Affairs Bureau made on 6/04/18.
The regulations implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act provide that Indian tribes may designate an agent other than the tribal chairman for service of notice of proceedings under the Act. This notice includes the current list of designated tribal agents for service of notice. (PDF copy of notice.)
A Glendive woman is suing the Bureau of Indian Affairs for $1 million over a 2015 child custody dispute that pitted state and tribal courts against each other.
Patsy Fercho, 64, fled to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 2015 with her two grandchildren in an attempt to avoid a Minnesota court’s order granting custody to the kids’ father.
Read the full article at the Montana Standard website.
The Colorado Court of Appeals issued its opinion in People in Interest of I.B.-R. on Thursday, May 17, 2018.
Read the case summary at the Colorado Bar Association website.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, leading a bipartisan coalition of Attorneys General, filed an amicus brief late last week in Brakeen et. al. v. Zinke to defend the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).
Read the full press release at the Attorney General’s website.
The Michigan Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the father of two American Indian children is entitled to withdraw his consent to terminate his parental rights because the adoption of his children has not yet been finalized…
Read the full article at the Detroit Free Press website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act – Application of
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska (Tlingit & Haida) entered into a Support Services Funding Agreement with the State of Alaska’s Department of Health & Social Services (DHSS), Office of Children’s Services (OCS) to conduct diligent relative and Indian Child Welfare Act preference searches.
Read the full article at the Alaska Native News website.
The Miccosukee Tribe is defending its handling of a child welfare case that has drawn national attention.The tribe said a newborn was taken from her mother, a Miccosukee citizen, in order to protect the baby girl and her older siblings from domestic violence. The mother had previously been victimized by her non-Indian former partner, whose presence at the hospital during the birth earlier this month led the maternal grandmother to seek custody of the baby.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Read related coverage from the Tuscaloosa News article, “Legal experts say tribe overstepped authority in seizing baby“
MIAMI — The Miccosukee nation insists that it acted lawfully when its tribal court issued a child-custody order, and then sent two tribal detectives to seize newborn Ingrid Johnson from her Indian mother at a hospital.
But Indian law experts and two former Miccosukee police chiefs said they believe the tribe overstepped its authority. And while the tribe is immune from state civil lawsuits, the parents could file claims against the hospital and Miami-Dade County police for their roles in the fiasco.
Read the full article at the Valdosta Daily Times website.
A 5-year-old Native American boy at the center of controversy for more than a year will remain with his Coshocton County foster family, for now.
Last week, the Ohio Court of Appeals reversed an earlier juvenile court ruling that would have sent the preschooler 2,000 miles from his home to a reservation in Arizona. The ruling stated the juvenile court should not have granted custody without first conducting a full evidentiary hearing taking into account the best interest of the child.
Read the full article at the Coshocton Tribune website.
Read related news coverage at “Conservative group claims victory in Indian Child Welfare Act case” from Indianz.com
Native American tribes across Michigan will soon have access to certain state child protection records for children in tribes.
Read the full article at the Morning Sun website.
Read related article “Amended Child Protection Law Benefits Tribes” at The National Law Review website.
Since the passage of ICWA in 1978, the law has been labeled the “gold standard” for child welfare laws — and not just for Indian children. Policies created under ICWA have been adopted by some states to ensure that children are only removed from their homes as a last resort. To honor the children and preserve the memory of what life was like before ICWA, Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota citizen from South Dakota, hosts an annual powwow called Gathering of Our Children, where she welcomes people who were adopted or fostered out to non-Native families. She’s been able to uncover and share the stories of hundreds of children from all over the country who have been reunited with their Native families.
The Goldwater Institute, however, says that it is “fighting for equal protection of Indian children.” It cites a handful of cases where “active efforts” to reunify Indian children with abusive parents — rather than immediately placing with foster families or putting them up for adoption — traumatized the children. It points to cases like one in Oregon, in which the state terminated a couple’s parental rights to their son after they failed to follow through on court-ordered counseling and therapy. The institute has not provided any other details, including whether the boy, who is referred to simply as “L,” was abused or neglected.
Read the full article at the High Country News website.
Without comment, the justices on Tuesday denied a petition in Renteria v. Superior Court of California, Tulare County. The move, which came in an order list, ends a lawsuit which claimed ICWA was based on “race” and should be declared unconstitutional.
Read the full article at the Indianz website.
A lawyer representing two American Indian tribes urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to keep in place the changes a judge ordered for a South Dakota county’s system of removing children from homes in endangerment cases.
Read the full article at the ABC News website.
Read related coverage at the Indianz website.
The Office of Children’s Services and tribal governments are taking the first steps to implement an agreement that transfers control of welfare services for Alaska Native children from the state to a group of 18 tribal governments and organizations.
Read the full article at the Peninsula Clarion website.
The Department contended that mother’s signing of a written advisement of her rights, which included a question about the ICWA, served as the court’s initial inquiry. The inquiry should be made on the record. Regardless, the Court of Appeals found that the Department failed to send notice to the appropriate tribes when mother identified a reason to believe the children were Indian children.
The case was remanded with instructions for the limited purpose of directing the Department to send appropriate notice to the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma and the Pueblo of Taos.
Read the full case summary at the Colorado Bar Association website.
The Indian Child Welfare Act lawsuit filed in Rapid City’s federal court almost five years ago is going to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel is hearing oral arguments in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday, Feb. 12.
In March 2013, the Rosebud and Oglala Sioux Tribes, as well as tribal parents, brought suit against state officials in Pennington County. They claim the process for handling abuse and neglect cases routinely violates ICWA and due process rights.
Listen to the full story on the South Dakota Public Broadcasting Radio website.
State Rep. Daire Rendon has voted with the House Families, Children, and Seniors Committee to give tribal social services access to certain records that would allow them to communicate with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services for the best interest of children in their tribe.
Read the full press release at the Michigan House Republicans website.
Title: Are you my father? Adopting a federal standard for acknowledging or establishing paternity in state court ICWA proceedings.
Author: Heiner, Kevin
Source: 117 Colum. L. Rev. 2151 (2017)
Contact the National Indian Law Library if you need help obtaining a copy of the article.
Alaska Governor Bill Walker used an appearance Thursday at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage to sign a historic compact between the State of Alaska, tribes, and tribal organizations. The compact will allow tribes and tribal organizations to provide child welfare services and programs that previously were delivered by the Alaska Office of Children’s Services.
Read the full article at the SitNews website.
Read related news coverage:
Alaska and its tribes sign child services compact (Alaska Public Radio)
Alaska tribes and state sign historic document on tribal child welfare (Alaska Dispatch News)
Walker signs child welfare compact with Alaska tribes (Daily News-Miner)
The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) has announced the release of the Indian Child Welfare Act Judicial Benchbook to improve court practice for judges in handling Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases.
Paxton filed a lawsuit Wednesday in federal district court arguing that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which dates back to 1978, is unconstitutional and should be struck down. The lawsuit is on behalf of a non-Native American foster family from Texas that wants to adopt a Native American boy.
Read the full article at the Texas Tribune website.
Read related news coverage at the KVUE website.
Madison, Wis. (Oct. 16, 2017) – More than 350 court, child welfare, school, tribal representatives, and legal professionals from across Wisconsin will join forces Oct. 18-20 in Elkhart Lake to find better ways to serve youth and their families involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Read the full article at WisPolitics.com.
Two non-Indian parents filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop the state of Minnesota from transferring Indian child custody cases to tribes.
Read the full article at Indianz.com.
Research and data from states tell us that American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) children are disproportionately represented (or overrepresented) in the child welfare system nationwide, especially in foster care. This means that higher percentages of AI/AN children are found in the child welfare system than in the general population. The overrepresentation of AI/AN children often starts with reports of abuse and neglect at rates proportionate to their population numbers, but grows higher at each major decision point from investigation to placement, culminating in the overrepresentation of AI/AN children in placements outside the home. One study found that, due in large part to systematic bias, where abuse has been reported AI/AN children are 2 times more likely to be investigated, 2 times more likely to have allegations of abuse substantiated, and 4 times more likely to be placed in foster care than White children.
Bonnie Littlesun is raising eight children, all but one of whom are her grandkids, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“They’re crazy,” she said, laughing. It was midmorning and she had a brief break while her grandbaby slept and the others were at school. The kids range in age from 13 months to 18 years old.
Read the full article at the Spokesman-Review website.
The North Dakota Department of Human Services’ Child Support Division recently received the 2017 Partnership Awardfrom the National Tribal Child Support Association for its collaboration with tribal child support programs in accessing federal offset payments that support tribal children and families. “Partnerships with other jurisdictions are vital in child support. Borders shouldn’t be barriers when it comes to supporting children and families,” said Jim Fleming, the state’s child support director
Margaret Jacobs, professor of history and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, won the Bancroft Prize for her book White Mother to a Dark Race, an investigation of the U.S. and Australian policies of breaking up indigenous families and removing children to be raised in boarding schools run by whites. She has also published a second volume based on her research. A Generation Removed looks at indigenous child removal policies from just after World War II up until passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978.
ICTMN interviewed Jacobs about her work. “When I got to Australia [to begin research] it was shortly after the ‘Bringing them home’ report [1997] had come out about the stolen generation [of Australian Aborigine children]. When I went to the archives, I asked, ‘What were white women doing about indigenous children? Were they involved in this policy of the stolen generation?’”
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
The number of lawsuits alleging Mormon church leaders failed to protect children from sexual abuse has grown to include two more Navajos and a member of the Crow Tribe.
Thousands of American Indian children, most of whom were Navajo, participated in a now-defunct church-run foster program from the late 1940s until around 2000. The program was meant to give children educational opportunities that didn’t exist on the reservations.
The lawsuits contend certain foster families harmed children.
Read the full article at The Salt Lake Tribune website.
“So they turned to this policy of trying to close down the boarding schools and they turned toward a policy of trying to turn over the education and care of Indian children to the states,” says Jacobs.
While there were some American Indians working for the BIA in the ‘50s and some sympathy to the problems of Indian families, says Jacobs, “there were rarely any American Indian people working in the state bureaucracies. And there were rarely any people trained to have any sensitivity to American Indian societies or concerns. So this move to change the jurisdiction over Indian children to the states was a move that contributed to greater numbers of Indian children being removed from their families, fostered by white families and eventually moved into the adoption system.”
Jacobs says a close examination of the records shows that 25 percent to 35 percent of Indian children were removed from their families.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
The seventh annual Indian Child Welfare Act Conference is scheduled Thursday at the Silver Star Convention Center at Choctaw.
Tribal leaders and as many as 200 attorneys, judges, social workers and other professionals who deal with Native American children in a youth court setting are expected to attend the conference.
Read the full article at the Meridian Star website.
See related coverage at “Choctaw Tribe Works to Prevent Foster Care” on the WTOK-Newscenter 11 website.
Under the Indian Child Welfare Act, parental rights can only be severed if it is found beyond a reasonable doubt that the children are at severe risk of harm. Testimony to this fact must come from expert witnesses, and under tribal law, it must be proven that an effort was made to keep children with their biological parents.
According to Rideout, application of the Indian Child Welfare Act in custody cases such as this would be detrimental to the children involved. Rideout this week filed an appeal of CRIT’s [Colorado River Indian Tribes] decision with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read the full article at the Havasu News website.
TAHLEQUAH — The Cherokee Nation announced a new foster care paid leave policy that is the first of its kind in Indian Country, and also one of the first in the state of Oklahoma, according to a news release.
The new policy announced at the 2017 Cherokee Nation Employee Appreciation Day grants Cherokee Nation full-time employees five additional days of paid leave when a Cherokee child is placed in their Cherokee Nation Indian Child Welfare-certified home.
Read the full article at the Muskogee Phoenix website.
AKWESASNE — The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council and New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance have signed a historic agreement to cooperate in providing child support services.
The tribe’s Child Support Enforcement Unit became the first comprehensive tribal child support unit in New York in April 2014 and is also the only federally recognized tribal child support program in the state.
Read the full article at the Press Republican website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act – Notice
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Related News Story: Colorado Court of Appeals: dependency and neglect court should have followed ICWA’s notice requirements (Legal Connection) 3/31/17
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act – Application
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Cloaking its efforts in the language of civil rights, Goldwater has launched a coordinated attack against ICWA alongside evangelical and anti-Indian-sovereignty groups, adoption advocates, and conservative organizations like the Cato Institute. Since 2015, Goldwater has litigated four state or federal cases against ICWA, and filed several briefs in support of other cases. Goldwater’s stated goal is to have the US Supreme Court strike down ICWA as unconstitutional. The implications go far beyond child welfare: Many tribal members fear that if Goldwater is successful, it could undermine the legal scaffolding of Native American self-determination.
Read the full article at the The Nation website.
Butte County State’s Attorney Cassie Wendt presented to the Butte County Commission during its March 21 meeting, delineating to the commission the county’s rise in Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) cases and the added expense the county has shouldered in recent months.
Read the full article at the Black Hills Pioneer website.
On appeal, A.T. contended that the order should be reversed because the Department did not comply with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) notice requirements. First, when there is “reason to know” the child is an Indian child, the juvenile court must ensure that the Department sends notice to any identified Indian Tribe. Second, the court must “[t]reat the child as an Indian child, unless and until it is determined on the record that the child does not meet the definition of an ‘Indian child.’” Here, the Department did not meet its obligation to provide notice of the proceedings to any of the Apache Tribes. The juvenile court did not address whether the Department used due diligence to identify and work with an Apache Tribe to verify whether L.L. was a member or was eligible for membership and did not treat L.L. as an Indian child pending the Tribes’ verification.
Read the full case summary at the Colorado Bar Association website.
This past Monday morning (March 13) in a courtroom in Alameda County I witnessed three non-Native attorneys and a non-Native judge make the decision to end reunification and move towards terminating Allen Kepa’s parental rights. It was a broken day for Native American children and Native American Parents. The Honorable Judge Ursula Jones spoke about this child not considering her father as family. Heartbreaking.
Read the full opinion from Mona M. Evans at the Indian Country Media website.
March 17 – Yesterday, the federal District Court for the District of Arizona dismissed A.D. v. Washburn, a case brought by the Goldwater Institute challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act’s (ICWA) application to Native children in the Arizona foster care system. This case was an attempt by a special interest group to dismantle the law that has protected thousands of Native children and families nationwide.
Read more at the Native American Rights Fund’s blog.
Read related news coverage at the Indianz.com website and Indian Country Media Network website.
On January 22, 1818, the House Committee on Indian Affairs reported that Indian children “will grow up in habits of morality and industry…and become useful members of society” if they are given ‘the primer…the hoe…”and the Bible. By 1879 off-reservation schools were created to separate Indian children from their families, culture, language, sacred history, and territory to “kill the Indian…and save the man.” These schools not only “educated” Indian children, they put them to work in a mandated trade craft which, coincidently, generated profits for the school system.
Read the entirety of Eric Hannel’s opinion article at the Indian Country Media Network website.
One might be surprised to know that the removal of Indian children from their families is still going strong, seemingly unabated. For example, in Pennington County, South Dakota, the state has removed more than 1,000 children from their Native American families since 2010. A 2013 class action lawsuit and a 2015 validation by Chief Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey L. Viken revealed that Pennington County officials were not only removing the Indian children “on grounds not based on evidence,” but holding hearings in state court within 48 hours of removal and denying parents access to legal counsel, the right to testify, or notice of why their Indian children were taken. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the hearings lasted [from] 60 seconds up to five minutes, “and the state won 100 percent of the time.”
Read the entirety of Dr. Hannel’s opinion article at the Indian Country Media Network website.
The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) has selected the Central Council Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska Child Dependency Court as one of six new courts to join their Implementation Sites Project, which helps to improve outcomes for abused and neglected children and their families.
Read the full article at the Nevada Business magazine website.
In March 2015, Chief Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey L. Viken confirmed what our complaint had alleged: State employees were removing children from their homes and then holding hearings in state court within 48 hours, in which parents were not assigned counsel to represent them, were not given a copy of the petition accusing them of wrongdoing, and no state employee was called to testify. Moreover, the parents were not permitted to testify, call witnesses, or cross-examine any state employee. The hearings typically lasted fewer than five minutes — some were done in 60 seconds — and the state won 100 percent of the time.
That’s right, 100 percent.
Read the full article at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website.
The Capacity Building Center of Tribes has just published a new 8 page ICWA Guide for Tribal Governments and Leaders.
Read the announcement here. Download the guide.
The Indian Child Welfare and Wellness Conference will be held Feb. 22-24 at the Baymont Inn and Suites in Mandan.
The Native American Training Institute will host the 16th annual conference, which will cover child welfare issues, juvenile justice, cultural and tribal relations, as well as child behavioral health.
Read the full announcement at the Bismark Tribune website or visit the Native American Training Institute website to register.
Two years ago, Tarnowski attended a training in Duluth given by the National Child Welfare Resource Center on Legal and Judicial Issues. Stories of historical trauma that have helped lead to that disparity, and also what led to the creation of the Indian Child Welfare Act, were shared, Tarnowski said, creating “a little fire in my belly.”
“I wanted to try something new,” she said.
With the help of the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies, she formed a group of area public and tribal child welfare workers, from reservations ranging from Grand Portage to White Earth, to meet regularly over lunch. That group helped inform the new court. It also has helped build stronger relationships and understanding between everyone involved, said Brenda “Bree” Bussey, project director of the UMD Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies.
Read the full article at the Duluth News Tribune website.
With the number of American Indian children in Minnesota foster care reaching “unacceptable” levels, the state pledged Thursday to spend $400,000 over the next three years to reduce those numbers.
The announcement comes after a Star Tribune report found that Minnesota has more Indian children in foster care than any other state, including those with significantly larger Indian populations. Less than 2 percent of children in Minnesota are Indian, but they make up nearly a quarter of the state’s foster care population — a disparity that is more than double the next-highest state.
Read the full article at the Star Tribune website.
South Dakota and Pennington County officials filed an appeal Friday challenging U.S. District Court rulings that ordered changes in their handling of temporary custody hearings involving Native American children.
Read the full article at the Rapid City Journal website.
Read a related article at the Native Sun News website.
In a case that has national implications for how state courts are supposed to conduct 48-hour custody hearings involving Native American children a federal judge has given one county in South Dakota very specific guidelines for how to conduct themselves.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a foster family’s challenge to the adoption of their former foster daughter under the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Read the full article at the ABA [American Bar Association] Journal website.
South Dakota and Pennington County officials must make changes in their handling of temporary custody hearings involving Native American children as the result of judgments issued Thursday by the U.S. District Court.
Read the full article at the Rapid City Journal website.
UMD’s Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies, which is part of the Department of Social Work, will serve as the grant’s lead organization and will work with six other organizations including courts, child welfare agencies, and tribes, to determine the most successful methods to help children and families.
Read the full announcement at the Business North website.
“The important thing to remember is that you’re not saving these children,” Walksalong said. “You’re helping them.”
Walksalong began in October working as CASA’s Indian Child Welfare Act program coordinator. Part of her job is helping programs like the Center for Children and Families and Child and Family Services, understand the cultural background of Native American children.
Read the full article at the Billings Gazette website.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis from Westlaw: County children and family services agency filed petition against mother and father to terminate their parental rights to minor children, who potentially had Indian heritage. Following hearing, the Superior Court, Mendocino County, Nos. SCUK-JVSQ-14-1702501 and SCUK-JVSQ-14-1702601, David Riemenschneider, J., found both children adoptable, that exception to adoption for sibling bond did not apply, and that Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) did not apply, and terminated parental rights. Mother and father appealed.
Holding from Westlaw: The Court of Appeal, Dondero, J., held that trial court failed to comply with notice requirements of ICWA and state law.
Reversed and remanded with directions.
Utah tribal leaders gathered in the community of Wendover, Utah to discuss issues that would affect tribes at the state and national level, such as the Indian Child Welfare Act and voting issues that includes inefficient polling sites and a lack of language interpreters to aid non-English speaking Navajo people in San Juan County, Utah.
Read the full press release at the Navajo Nation Council website.
State and federal law protect the rights of Native American children even when one of their parents is not Indian. That’s the word today from the Washington state Supreme Court.
Read the full article at the NW News Network website.
The children have recovered from their injuries, but they now are innocent victims of a custody battle that pits their relatives in Visalia, Calif., against relatives in the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians in Placerville, Calif.
The case in U.S. District Court in Sacramento is being closely watched because a federal judge has ruled that Visalia residents Efrim and Talisha Renteria, who are Sharnae Cuellar’s uncle and aunt, should have temporary custody of the three children.
The Shingle Springs tribe is crying foul.
Read the full article at the Myrtle Beach Online website.
The University of North Dakota Department of Social Work has received a $2.4-million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to support implementation and evaluation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in North Dakota over the next five years.
UND is partnering in this grant with the Children and Family Services Training Center, the North Dakota Supreme Court, the North Dakota Bureau of Indian Affairs, the North Dakota Division of Children and Family Services, the Native American Training Institute, the Spirit Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Nation. The CFSTC is housed in the UND Department of Social Work; the Center provides training for all child welfare workers across the state and will develop new training on best practices in ICWA implementation.
Read the full article at the University of North Dakota website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: County child welfare agency filed dependency petition as to two daughters. The Superior Court, Los Angeles County, No. DK02646, Zeke D. Zeidler, J., terminated parental rights and transferred care, custody, and control of the daughters to the county child welfare agency for adoptive planning and placement. Mother appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeal, Perluss, P.J., held that county child welfare agency failed to adequately investigate mother’s Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) claim of Indian ancestry.
Conditionally affirmed and remanded with directions.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Local Native American tribes are creating their own child foster care system in response to problems statewide in implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act, put in place to ensure native children are placed in Tribal homes.
The Yurok Tribe and Tolowa Dee-ni Nation are developing a Title IV-E program that would allow them federal funding to cover foster payments and services and give them greater autonomy.
Read the full article at the Del Norte Triplicate website.
The tribes, represented by Alaska Legal Services Corp., had alleged defendants North Star Behavioral Health Center and Christy Lawton, director of the Alaska Office Children’s Services, had improperly warehoused foster children at the [psychicatric hospital] facility for indefinite periods of time.
Read the full article at the Alaska Dispatch News website.
The case has angered many within the American Indian adult adoptee community, who believe the law should be upheld and strengthened. Their protest on Friday is one of many protests across the country as the litigation moves forward.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
The issuances by the Department of the Interior of non-binding guidelines in 2015 and of legislative rules in 2016 are opportunities for states to promptly examine their current practices and standards and voluntarily adopt the guidelines and regulations as enforceable state requirements. New York State is an example of a state that has evidenced support for implementation of the [Indian Child Welfare] Act, but in a number of respects its current requirements fall short of the federal recommendations and rules. This Note urges states, with jurisdictions such as New York taking a leadership role, to act now to adopt the guidelines and regulations. Doing so will conform existing state practices to best practices and federal standards and, importantly, signal a strong commitment to the Act and to the best interests of Indian children, tribes, and families.
Read the full article from the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems website.
Title: Case comment: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 133 S.Ct. 2552 (2013)
Author: Akpan, Anietie Maureen-Ann
Source: 6 Colum. J. Race & L. 1 (2016)
This Comment discusses the 2013 United States Supreme Court case of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl,
which involved an unwed Cherokee father’s (Petitioner) journey to regaining custody of his child, after
erroneously granting consent of the child’s adoption to a non-Indian couple. This Comment further discusses
the issues that arise within transracial adoptions, including “cultural authenticity” of adoptive parents and the
significance of providing cultural outlets for a transracial adopted child. This Comment will also address the
lack of constitutional protection for unwed fathers in family cases, specifically the “sub-class” of unwed fathers
to which the Petitioner belongs. Generally, this Comment examines the intersectionality of race relations,
racial identity and how society has become socialized to view fathers against mothers.
Read the full article.
The courts in California have determined that the 1978 law applies to a Choctaw Nation girl who has been placed with relatives in Utah. But a non-Indian couple — aided by an attorney who has tried to weaken ICWA — has insisted on fighting.
The battle will continue after the California Supreme Court on Thursday refused to review the girl’s placement. The non-Indian couple quickly vowed an appeal.
Read more at the Indianz.com website.
The Indian Child Welfare act is a unique piece of legislation that governs the settlement of family law cases for children of Native American descent. Critics allege, however, that its definition of who counts as a Native American, as well as several other aspects of the law, can often work against children’s best interests. The ICWA can end up placing children in danger, sometimes in pursuit of no particular tribal goal at all. Critics counter that the ICWA is a needed corrective after many decades of deliberate erasure of tribal heritage, and that whatever faults the law may have, something like it is still necessary to preserve the integrity of Native American cutures.
Joining us to discuss this controversial law are Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute; Professor Matthew L. M. Fletcher of Michigan State University; Professor Kristen Carpenter of the University of Colorado; and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson.
Read more at the Cato Unbound website including:
The state of South Dakota has been violating the due process rights of Indian parents and a provision of the Indian Child Welfare Act for decades ruled a federal judge last year and continues to violate them.
Read more at the Indianz.com website.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s death impacts Indian country in dramatic ways. Last term, the most critical tribal court jurisdiction appeal to hit the Supreme Court of the United States in decades was affirmed by a 4-4 tie in favor of tribal jurisdiction. The court declined certiorari in a pair of tribal labor relations cases where there was a gaping circuit split, possibly because the justices foresaw yet another 4-4 tie. The next justice may be the deciding vote in cases that bring the same questions, but bigger cases involving the Indian Child Welfare Act(ICWA) are in the pipeline.
Read the full article at the Turtle Talk website.
Although the proceeding only involved one child, it’s being closely watched because the non-Indian foster couple is being represented by the Goldwater Institute. The conservative-leaning organization, which is based in Arizona, has launched a public relations and legal campaign aimed at undermining and even invalidating the landmark Indian Child Welfare Act.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Minnesota has more American Indian children in foster care than any other state, including those with significantly larger Indian populations, according to a Star Tribune analysis of federal and state data. Less than 2 percent of children in Minnesota are Indian, but they make up nearly a quarter of the state’s foster care population — a disparity that is more than double the next highest state.
Read the full article at the Minnesota Tribune website.
When it was first passed into federal law nearly 40 years ago, the Indian Child Welfare Act was a beacon of hope for many in the Native American community who considered the legislation a civil rights victory. But a lack of compliance from child welfare agencies has led a tribal task force in California to find that neither the federal nor state versions of the act are being properly carried out.
Read the full article at the Desert Sun website.
Interior Secretary Says Changes To Indian Child Welfare Act ‘Close Loopholes.’ Oregon Public Broadcasting. June 10, 2016.
BIA announces final ICWA rule revisions. Native Times. June 9, 2010.
Breaking: BIA Publishes Final ICWA Rule. Indian Country Today. June 8, 2010.
Judges must ask about youths’ tribal status under new rule. Salon.com (AP). June 8, 2016.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law a measure meant to bolster protections for Native American children placed into the tribal foster care system.
The law, which comes years after serious flaws were uncovered in the child welfare system of a Native American tribe in North Dakota, requires background checks before foster care placements are made by tribal….
See the full article published on 6/3/16 in the StarTribune.
Title: What is Measured is What is Done: Methods to Measure Compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Author: Williams, Jason R. et al.
Cite: 4 American Indian Law Journal 502 (2016)
Enacted more than three and a half decades ago, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA or “Act”) of 1978 is one of the most important pieces of federal legislation concerning Indian children, families, and tribes. Intended to reverse years of federal and state policies and private practices aimed at the acculturation and assimilation of American Indian and Alaska Native (“Indian”) children, ICWA holds the promise of “protect[ing] and preserv[ing] . . . the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes . . . [by] protecting Indian children who are members of or are eligible for membership in an Indian tribe” from removal and placement in non-Indian homes or institutions.
Red the full article.
Grant Posted April 29, 2016
Funding Opportunity Title: Standing Announcement for Tribal Title IV-E Plan Development Grants
Full Grant Information at Grants.Gov.
The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is to solicit proposals for one-time grants to tribes, tribal organizations, or tribal consortia that are seeking to develop and, within 24 months of grant receipt, submit to the Department of Health and Human Services a plan to implement a title IV-E foster care, adoption assistance, and, at tribal option, guardianship assistance program. Grant funds under this FOA may be used for the cost of developing a title IV-E plan under section 471 of the Social Security Act (the Act) to carry out a program under section 479B of the Act. The grant may be used for costs relating to the development of case planning and case review systems, foster care licensing and standards for tribal foster homes and child care facilities, quality assurance systems, court structure and procedures, data collection systems, cost allocation methodology development, financial controls and financial management processes, or any other costs attributable to meeting any other requirement necessary for approval of a title IV-E plan.
Woodbury County has too few foster homes to care for a steady population of Native American children, a state panel heard Friday.
Read the full article at the Sioux City Journal website.
Read a related article at the SFGate website.
A judge in South Dakota has agreed to pay $50,000 in sanctions in an Indian Child Welfare Act case. Judge Jeff Davis did not admit to “concealing” information sought by the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, two of the plaintiffs in the case. But he agreed to pay attorney’s fees for failing to turn over key documents that explain how the state courts handled proceedings involving Indian children.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Read a related article at the Native Times website.
In the United States, Native American children were torn from their tribes and families and forced to assimilate into white culture for decades. The upcoming documentary “Dawnland” explores the harm these policies created and how some of these practices still persist today.
Watch the trailer at the Business Insider website.
Tester’s bill, the Tribal Youth and Community Protection Act, will reestablish the ability for tribes to arrest and prosecute any offender for drug related crimes, domestic violence against children, and crimes committed against tribal law enforcement officers.
“Tribal communities must have every tool they need to protect themselves from folks who traffic illegal drugs and harm children in Indian Country,” Tester said. “This bill gives tribes certainty and provides tribal law enforcement with the tools they need to police and prosecute every criminal in their community.”
Read the full press release at Senator Tester’s website.
This is a critical time for Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), our nation’s keystone federal law protecting Indian children. As you’ve already heard this morning and will hear more about during the conference, there is a lot of exciting activity in this area, at the federal, state and tribal level. Federal engagement is at unprecedented levels. But in recent years, we’ve also seen increasing attacks on the statute and on tribal sovereignty more generally. The need for all of us to engage on these issues has never been greater.
Read the full remarks at the Department of Justice website.
In a major decision on child support, the Alaska Supreme Court stopped a Parnell administration effort against tribal rights that lingered during Gov. Bill Walker’s reign.
The court ruled unanimously Friday in a case going back to the beginning of the decade that tribes have authority over child support. The court directed the state to enforce tribal support orders like it does those issued by other states, even if one of the parents isn’t a tribal member.
Read the full article at the Alaska Dispatch News website. Read related articles at the Juneau Empire website, the Native News website and the Indianz.com website.
The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) is disheartened by some of the mainstream reporting on the recent adoption case involving a Choctaw Nation child and a non-Native adoptive couple in Los Angeles County.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
A California couple’s fight to reunite with a 6-year-old foster child who was taken from their home last week because she is 1/64th Choctaw Native American has cast a spotlight on the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The law has been long hailed as a protective tool for Native American communities by some and criticized as misinterpreted and misguided by others.
Read the full article at the NBC News website.
The Native American Law Student Association (NALSA) at the University of South Dakota School of Law will hold its Indian law symposium March 30-31 entitled “The Indian Child Welfare Act: Old and New Challenges.” The free event in the law school courtroom is open to the public.
Find more information at the University of South Dakota website.
On Monday, March 21, pandemonium broke out in Santa Clarita, California, at the home of foster couple Summer and Russell Page as social workers from the Department of Children and Family Services arrived to pick up a 6-year-old girl who was being held by the couple in defiance of a court ordering her returned to relatives after a five-year custody battle.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
See more coverage:
“Indian Child Welfare Act to separate foster daughter from family” at the ABC7 Chicago website (3/21/2016)
“NCAI Supports Responsible, Informed Response to California ICWA Case” at the Indian Country Today Media Network website (3/23/2016)
“Santa Clarita foster parents appeal to state Supreme Court in tribal custody battle” at the LA Times website (3/23/2016)
“Custody case of Native American girl appealed to high court” at the Eastern University Waltonian website (3/24/2016)
On Friday, February 19, Viken denied South Dakota’s motion to reconsider a prior decision, holding that the state violated the ICWA and denied Native parents their constitutional rights.
Read the full article at the People’s World website.
When children are taken out of their homes due to neglect or abuse, they’re under the responsibility and jurisdiction of the State Office of Children’s Services.
Now, through an agreement signed Wednesday night at the Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall between the State of Alaska and Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, the Central Council will be able to take over child welfare cases of tribal children.
Read the full article at the Juneau Empire website and at the Alaska Business monthly website.
A Federal Register Notice by the Indian Affairs Bureau made on 3/02/16.
The regulations implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act provide that Indian tribes may designate an agent other than the tribal chairman for service of notice of proceedings under the Act. This notice includes the current list of designated tribal agents for service of notice. (PDF copy of notice.)
Citing a “fundamental lack of competence,” a federal judge on Friday, February 19 denied South Dakota’s motion to reconsider an earlier decision, which found the state violated the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and denied Indian parents their Constitutional rights. In March 2015, Judge Jeffrey Viken issued a partial summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in Oglala Sioux Tribe v. Luann Van Hunnik regarding emergency removal hearings, also known as “48-hour hearings,” in Pennington County, South Dakota.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
Read related news coverage at the Indianz.com website.
From the National Indian Child Welfare Association:
On February 12, 2016, the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced two tribal consultation calls regarding a new round of Title IV-E Foster Care program development grants. Title IV-E funds placement activities related to foster care, relative guardianship, adoption, and independent living services.
There have been fewer than expected tribes participating in the program to date. The consultations will provide interested tribes with information on the Title IV-E program and a chance to share their concerns or questions regarding Title IV-E and the development grants.
The bureau will hold tribal consultation calls to discuss this opportunity on two dates:
The call-in number for both consultation calls is: 1-888-220-3087, Passcode: 8699239
America’s multibillion-dollar adoption industry and its allies seek to undermine ICWA’s enforcement by filing lawsuits they hope to take to the Supreme Court. If successful, the lawsuits would deny tribes of their right — and their duty — to look after the welfare of their children.
Read the full letter from Chief Baker at the Native Times website.
A federal judge on Friday questioned the legality of statutes that give tribal courts the right to decide adoption and foster care placement of Native American children who have never lived on the reservation.
Read more at the Verde Independent website.
Rucinski & Reetz Communication unveiled last week its video titled “Missing Threads: The Story of the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act.” The hour-long documentary represents nearly three years of work and “explores the connection between family, tribal culture and children, and the consequences of severing those ties,” said Susan Reetz, a partner in the communication firm.
Read more at the Wausau Daily Herald website.
On Thursday a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed a suit challenging both the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act and the new federal guidelines that were implemented last February by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, citing a lack of subject matter jurisdiction and standing in the case.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs officers escorted two children off an American Indian reservation in Montana where their grandmother brought them amid a custody dispute, bringing the federal government into a clash between state and tribal courts.
Read the full story at the ABC News website.
Tekamuk Training and Events, a wholly-owned enterprise of the Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians, has joined forces with Columbia Law School, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), and the National American Indian Judges Association to present the Indian Child Welfare Summit, a major national conference on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), December 7-9 in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Read more at the Native American Times website.
SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. (AP) — An organization designed to improve links between tribal, state and federal courts is focusing on American Indian child welfare and domestic violence crimes during a two-day gathering.
Read more about last week’s meeting at the San Francisco Gate website and the Michigan Lawyers Weekly website.
Wyandotte Nation hosted all nine Oklahoma Indian nations for a workshop to recruit native families to become foster families for native children.
Read more at the KOAM-TV website.
Two children who were disenrolled by the Pala Band of Mission Indians cannot be protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act, a California appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
The tribe formally objected in July 2009 when K.P. and Kristopher were put up for adoption. Their mother, Michelle T., is enrolled.
But sometime during the proceedings, the tribe disenrolled the children. As a result, they are no longer considered “Indian,” the court determined.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: After Office of Children’s Services (OCS) took three minor children into emergency custody, a standing master determined that no probable cause existed and recommended that children be returned to mother’s custody. Following remand from the Supreme Court, 2014 WL 1888190, the Superior Court, Fourth Judicial District, Aniak, Douglas Blankenship, J., rejected recommendation and determined that probable cause existed. Mother appealed and Superior Court dismissed underlying case before State could file brief.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Maassen, J., held that:
(1) public interest exception to mootness doctrine applied, and
(2) standing master’s order that children should be returned to parents was not effective until judicially reviewed.
Read the full decision on the National Indian Law Library website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act – Termination of Parental Rights, Drug Abuse
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: Father appealed from decision of the Juvenile Court, Cass County, East Central Judicial District, Susan J. Solheim, Judicial Referee, terminating his parental rights.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Kapsner, J., held that:
(1) juvenile court’s finding that the conditions and causes of child’s deprivation were likely to continue was not clearly erroneous, and
(2) father, who was member of Indian tribe, did not show that child was an Indian child, such that ICWA’s heightened standards applied.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
The failure to protect children has a damaging impact on the quality of life on Indian reservations. Native youth are 2.5 times more likely to be victims of abuse or neglect than youth of other ethnicities. Children exposed to violence are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and suffer from depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic disorders. These issues may compound or lead to failures or difficulties in school and delinquent or criminal behavior.
Read the full report at the U.S. Congress website.
The [American Bar Association] ABA is urging Congress to follow the recommendations of recent reports by the U.S. Justice Department and the Indian Law and Order Commission that call for giving American Indian and Alaska Native tribes more authority to exercise criminal jurisdiction and apply their own remedies in cases that occur on tribal lands, especially when they involve children
Read the full article at the ABA Journal website.
In court filings Friday, attorneys for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the state Department of Child Safety federal agency acknowledged the Indian Child Welfare Act does require state courts when placing Indian children for adoption to give preference to a member of the child’s extended family. That is followed by priority by other members of the child’s tribe and, ultimately, other Indian families.
But they told U.S. District Court Judge Neil Wake that Congress had a valid reason for approving the law.
Read the full article at the Casa Grande Dispatch website.
HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance awarded $1.8 million to eight tribes and tribal organizations in Alaska, Montana, California and Washington to help strengthen vulnerable families through the tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) child welfare coordination grants. The grants fund tribes to demonstrate models of effective coordination between tribal TANF programs and child welfare services for low-income tribal families at risk of child abuse or neglect.
Read the full press release at the Dept. of Health and Human Services website.
For nearly four decades, couples wishing to adopt American Indian children out of troubled situations have faced several hurdles, including giving the child’s tribe a chance to find suitable tribal parents first.
Now some prospective adoptive parents, Indian birthparents and members of the adoption industry are challenging the laws and regulations involved.
Read the excerpt at the Family Law Prof blog or read the full article at the Wall Street Journal website.
This annual conference will include the following tracks:
Learn more and register at the conference website.
The Pala Band of Mission Indians is the first tribe in California to receive clearance to conduct LiveScan background checks for tribal foster homes under new State law (Senate Bill 1460). The tribe is also the first to apply to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Justice Services (BIA-OJS) program, Purpose Code X, to assist tribal services agencies within federally recognized tribes that are seeking to place children in safe homes during an emergency situation, when parents are unable to provide for their welfare.
Read the full article at the PR Newswire website.
The Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona and the National Indian Child Welfare Association have released a report detailing the second part of a study on tribal welfare codes designed to protect children and youth….
Based on the study’s findings, the team affirms that:
· To help protect children from abuse and neglect, 70 percent of the tribal codes make specific requirements for reporting suspected child abuse and neglect.
· To ensure paternal rights and responsibilities, 60 percent of tribal codes create processes for establishing or acknowledging paternity.
· Whereas the Indian Child Welfare Act acknowledges that tribes may take jurisdiction over their children, 61 percent of tribal codes assert explicit jurisdiction over tribal citizen children on and off the reservation.
Read the full article about the study at the Native Times website.
Download the reports:
Oct. 1, 2015. Keeping tribal children in their tribal communities is the solution to improving regional child welfare, according to a Tribal-State Child Welfare panel yesterday during the Association of Village Council Presidents 51st Annual Convention at the Bethel Cultural Center.
Read the full article at the Alaska Public Media website.
Fourteen tribes and tribal organizations received demonstration grants from the Office of Family Assistance for Coordination of Tribal TANF and Child Welfare Services to Tribal Families in 2011. The purposes of these grants were to provide innovative and contextually relevant approaches to coordinating services between welfare and child welfare systems. The grantees were expected to provide one or more of the following services: (1) improved case management; (2) supportive services and assistance to tribal children in out-of-home placements; and (3) prevention services and assistance to tribal families at risk of child abuse and neglect. This report summarizes grantees’ midterm experiences with direct services and inter-agency coordination gleaned from interviews, observations, and document reviews.
Download:
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the tribe a $300,000 grant to create an independent tribal-run family services program for enrolled Omaha members.
“We know what’s best for our children and our youth,” Omaha Tribal Council Chairman Vernon Miller said Thursday. “The federal government recognizes that.”
Read the full article at the Sioux City Journal website.
Race is ugly business. The business of race can be seen in the higher rates of incarceration of black Americans. It is in the higher rates black Americans and Native Americans are killed by law enforcement. It is an aspect of our existence that we created, and one that has no basis in fact. George F. Will attempts to attack the issue of racial separation by targeting the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). He fails.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
When we talk about “blood-stained” laws, we should talk about the history of the treatment of Native Americans: laws of genocide, sterilization, forced removal and assimilation; compulsory boarding schools; underfunding of critical health care; and a trail of broken promises.
Read the full letter at the Washington Post website.
And a related Letter to the Editor also at the Washington Post website.
By treating children, however attenuated or imaginary their Indian ancestry, as little trophies for tribal power, the ICWA discourages adoptions by parents who see only children, not pawns of identity politics. The Goldwater Institute hopes to establish the right of Indian children to be treated as all other children are, rather than as subordinate to tribal rights.
Read the full opinion at The Washington Post website.
CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) of Cherokee Country is a local volunteer program that recruits and trains community volunteers to serve as advocates for abused and neglected children in juvenile deprived proceedings, an volunteers are greatly needed….CASA volunteer child advocate training will be offered to individuals age 21 or older in October. Certification will be granted upon completion of the 30-hour training course and six hours of courtroom observation.
Visit the Muskogee Phoenix website for more information.
Aug. 19, 2015 – Assistant Secretary, Indian Affairs Kevin K. Washburn today announced a new Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Justice Services (BIA-OJS) program to assist federally recognized tribal social services agencies seeking to place children in safe homes.
Read the full press release at the U.S. Department of the Interior website.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs will help tribes conduct background investigations to ensure children are being placed in safe homes. The agency’s Office of Justice Services will be on-call 24 hours a day for tribal social services agencies. They will be able to check the names of adults before placing children in a foster or temporary home.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
Read related coverage at the Spokesman-Review website and on the Lexology blog.
Aug. 4, 2015 – Senator Jon Tester, a former teacher and Vice Chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, today is introducing a bill that will help recruit and retain more teachers in Indian Country to eliminate the teacher shortage that is widening the achievement gap for Native American students.
See the full press release at Senator Tester’s website.
On August 4, 2015, the American Bar Association House of Delegates unanimously adopted Resolution 113, which adopts and urges prompt implementation by the Administration, Congress, and state and tribal governments of specific recommendations contained in the November 2014 report of the U.S. Attorney General’s Advisory Committee on American Indian/Alaska Native Children Exposed to Violence…
Read more and find the resolution at the Turtle Talk blog.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: The Department of Health and Human Services initiated child protection proceedings with regard to mother’s child. The District Court, Portland, Powers, J., entered judgment terminating mother’s parental rights. Mother appealed.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The Supreme Judicial Court held that:
(1) the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) did not apply to child protection proceeding, and
(2) evidence was sufficient to support a finding of parental unfitness.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
September 11, 2015 (White Cloud, KS): 14th Annual Native Nations Law Symposium. The Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska presents the 14th annual Native Nations Law Symposium. The symposium includes an overview on the Indian Child Welfare Act – Revised Bureau of Indian Affairs Guidelines for State Courts & Agencies. Learn more and find a registration form at the Turtle Talk blog.
This must-attend conference will address the past, present and future of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, emphasizing the need for education, reform and implementation of the Act. Tribal leaders, tribal members and professionals in the legal field will benefit from this comprehensive conference.
Learn more at the Mesa Grand Band of Mission Indians website.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2015 Kids Count report found that nearly 22 percent of children nationwide were living in poverty in 2013, compared with 18 percent in 2008. The poverty rates, families of four living on $23,624 a year, nearly doubled among black and American Indian children, with the biggest problems in the Southwest and the South.
Read the full UPI article.
Read the full article at Indian Country Today.The announcement of A.D., et al. v. Washburn by the conservative group known as the Goldwater Institute comes with a bitter deja vu of “haven’t we heard this before?” I’ve got a few things that I can say are wrong with the pleadings filed by Goldwater on behalf of minor American Indian children, “next friend,” and potential adoptive parents. Mostly, however, I’ve got even more to say on the one-sided EPIC report they have produced to coincide with their summation that ICWA should be declared unconstitutional.
“We want to spend a moment to celebrate the successful reunification of families in foster care and honor the professionals who work in this field,” Sankaran began. “This is one of many celebrations across the country but the only one in the state. We are proud as a community to put together this event and this is something we believe in.”
Read the full article at the Legal News website.
More than 1,000 Native American children gathered Thursday for the first-ever Tribal Youth Gathering at the White House, where first lady Michelle Obama called them precious and sacred members of society.
“Each of you was put on this Earth for a reason. Each of you has something that you’re destined to do, whether that’s raising a beautiful family, whether that’s succeeding in a profession or leading your community into a better future,” she said. “You all have a role to play and we need you.”
Read the full article at the Newsweek website.
“At this point it is pretty clear that anti-ICWA advocates, who primarily represent adoption interests, have started a coordinated attack on ICWA,” said Kate Fort, Staff Attorney and Adjunct Professor for the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law. “They are looking for cases of opportunity in courts across the country by inserting themselves and trying to make the same constitutional arguments against ICWA. But this lawsuit will absolutely hurt vulnerable children and families in our state child welfare systems. Their claims that ICWA’s protections are substandard is simply not true. ICWA’s standards are considered the gold standard of child welfare practice. To say these lawsuits to dismantle ICWA are in the best interest of the child is really contrary to what is considered best practices by child welfare professionals.”
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
Title: Tribal rights, South Dakota class action highlights violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act
Author: Laird, Lorelei
Blue book cite: 101-MAY A.B.A. J. 15 (May 2015)
What: Press conference announcing anti-ICWA lawsuit and campaign
When: Tuesday, July 7, 2015, 9:00 a.m. Pacific time
Where: https://www.youtube.com/user/GoldwaterInstitute
Who: Goldwater Institute representatives
From the press release:
Goldwater Institute to File Class Action Lawsuit Against Indian Child Welfare Act
Phoenix—Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 7, the Goldwater Institute will launch a new project to reform the Indian Child Welfare Act and similar state laws that give abused and neglected Native American children fewer rights and protections than other American children. Part of this project will be a class action lawsuit.
“When an abused child is removed from his or her home and placed in foster care or made available for adoption, judges are required to make a decision about where the child will live based on the child’s best interest. Except for Native American children. Courts are bound by federal law to disregard a Native American child’s best interest and place the child in a home with other Native Americans, even if it is not in his or her best interest,” said Darcy Olsen, president of the Goldwater Institute. “We want federal and state laws to be changed to give abused and neglected Native American children the same protections that are given to all other American children: the right to be placed in a safe home based on their best interests, not based on their race.”
On July 7, the Goldwater Institute will file a federal class action lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of core provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act. The same day, the Institute will release an investigative report that documents how federal law leaves Native American children with fewer protections under the law than all other American children, and the serious consequences that have resulted from this unequal treatment. Recommendations for changes to state and federal law will also be announced.
Read more at the Turtle Talk blog.
The final report of the Maine Wabanaki‑State Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was released at a closing ceremony on June 14 in Hermon. In their letter in the final report, the five commissioners… state that to improve Native child welfare, Maine and the tribes must continue to confront underlying racism still found in state institutions and the public; the ongoing impact of historical trauma on Wabanaki people; and differing interpretations of tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction that “make encounters between the tribes and the state contentious.”
Read the full article at the Quoddy Tides website.
Senator Jon Tester, Vice-Chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, today held a committee hearing on efforts to prevent youth suicide in Indian Country.
During the hearing, Tester heard from administration and tribal leaders about the lack of resources accessible to Native American youth struggling with mental health issues.
Read the full press-release at Jon Tester’s website.
For more than a century, the governments of Canada and the United States pursued a policy of forcible removal of indigenous children from their homes and communities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada recently released a report on these removal practices, recognizing them to be part of a policy of “cultural genocide.”
On June 14 the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its own official findings on the widespread removal of Wabanaki children in that state. This is not a story unique to Maine or Canada, nor is it a story of the past. These removals occurred throughout the United States and continue today. According to the Maine Wabanaki TRC, indigenous children are five times more likely than non-indigenous children to be removed from their homes. Nationally, there are similar disparities in foster care and adoption rates, leading one United Nations human rights body in 2014 to express “concern over the continued . . . removal of indigenous children through the U.S. child welfare system.”
Read the full article at The Hill website.
The organizations will work together to provide early childhood training for teachers and service providers in underserved rural Native American communities…. The program will impact more than 660 Native families and their children across six tribal nations.
Read the full article at the PR Newswire website.
Congress has before it several pieces of legislation that could have major impacts on the education of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children.
The bills include exemption from budget cuts, Native Language Immersion Student Achievement Act, Native American Languages Reauthorization Act, Building up Unique Indian Learning, Native Hawaiian Education Reauthorization Act, Native American Indian Education Act, and American Indian Teacher Loan Forgiveness Act. Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
A local Native American couple wishing to place their newborn with a non-native family has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Minnesota’s adoption law, which they say could hinder their ability to make that decision.
Read the full article at the Duluth News Tribune website.
Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, praised the Senate’s passage of S. 184, the Native American Children’s Safety Act and S. 246, the Alyce Spotted Bear and Walter Soboleff Commission on Native Children Act.
Read the press release from the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.
Highlights of the Native American Child Safety Act:
The legislation:
Applies to tribal foster care placement of Native American children for the purpose of ensuring the safety and well-being of those children
Requires that all prospective foster care parents and adults living in the home undergo a background check prior to the placement of a Native American foster care child
Requires that background checks include checking for criminal activity as well as checking child abuse and neglect registries
Requires that adults who join the household after the foster care child has been placed there also undergo background checks
Requires that foster care homes undergo recertification periodically, to ensure they remain safe for foster care children
The bill sets out that the Department of Interior will work with Tribes, as well as Indian Country, to establish necessary procedures to ensure that these safety standards for foster care children are established
The bill requires the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which currently does not conduct these background checks in every case when placing Native American foster care children in foster care homes, follow these same requirements when acting on behalf of the Tribes
Read the press release from Sen. John Hoeven.
The United States Senate unanimously passed bipartisan legislation introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski and Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) to create a Commission on Native American Children that would efficiently combine and coordinate the federal government’s resources and expertise to best address the complicated threats and challenges facing Alaska Natives, Native Americans and Native Hawaiians.
Read the press release from Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
Also see media coverage at the Alaska Public Media website and the Durango Herald website.
The same critics of ICWA that assert that ICWA far exceeds its original purpose; do not understand that ICWA is the only federal law that requires a fair process that considers the unique needs of Indian families and children, and requires consideration by state and private child welfare agencies and courts.
Read the full piece at the Indian Country Today Median Network website.
The Turtle Talk blog has posted the legal complaint filed by the National Council for Adoption on May 27, 2015 regarding the new Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian Child Welfare Act Guidelines.
See a copy of the court filing at the Turtle Talk website.
A husband-wife team from two Washington, D.C., law offices filed suit Wednesday challenging strict new government guidelines for adopting Native American children in the aftermath of a landmark 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Read the full article a the National Law Journal website.
Throughout the day, one after the other, witnesses on both sides had pulled back and forth in a tug-of-war regarding perhaps the most seminal issue confronting American Indian tribes in the 21st century: The right to raise their own children in their home communities.
The debates at the public hearings reopened old grievances and unhealed wounds at the core of an ongoing conflict over Indian children that has been raging for more than 500 years. Beginning with the Spaniards, who landed in the West Indies in the late 15th century, Indian tribes have been at war over possession of their children with one power after another—including the British, the French, the Dutch and the United States—ever since.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website
Read the related opinion from Matthew Scraper, “In Response to War of the Words: ICWA Hearings Reignite Ancient Battle Over Indian Children.”
Chief Justice David Gilbertson issued an order this week removing Judge Jeff Davis as presiding judge of the 7th Circuit, a position the 67-year-old Davis had held since 2006.
Read the full article at the Capital Journal website.
These proposed regulations will provide much needed guidance and consistency in state court proceedings involving Indian children. These regulations, supported as they are by ICWA and the great weight of federal Indian law, provide balance and clarity between competing interests, and are well within the authority of the Department of the Interior to promulgate.
Read the full comment at the Turtle Talk website.
U.S. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., will be chairing a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing Thursday to examine the federal government’s mismanagement of Native American schools, including in northern Minnesota, according to a release from his office.
Read the full article at the Bemidji Pioneer website.
[G]rants ranging from $25,000 to $150,000 per fiscal year are available for federally recognized tribes and their education departments. The grants are designed to help tribes assume control of Bureau of Indian Education (BIE)-funded schools in their communities, promote tribal education capacity, and provide academically rigorous and culturally appropriate education to Indian students on their reservations and trust lands.
Read the full article at the Lake County Leader website.
They come to Pine Ridge every few years, these suicide epidemics, with varying degrees of national media attention and local soul-searching. What the news media often misses though, and what tribal members understand but rarely discuss above a whisper, is that youth suicides here are inextricably linked to a multigenerational scourge of sexual abuse, with investigations into possible abuse now open in at least two of the nine recent suicides.
Read the full opinion piece at the New York Times website.
The nation’s largest constituent group of adoption attorneys, law professors and judges submitted a 45-page response to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) concerning the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law established in 1978. The BIA announced earlier this year its attempt to amend the federal law. The AAAA’s formal response outlines a series of concerns the organization has with the BIA’s proposed amendments. The response, submitted to the U.S. Department of Interior, points out constitutional issues, as well as concerns addressing the Department’s possible violation of its statutory authority to develop such regulations.
Read the full article at the Business Wire website.
“The first week of hearings and consultations demonstrated a tremendous groundswell of support in Indian Country,” said Dr. Sarah Kastelic. “It’s exciting to see the momentum created by such a diverse cross section of our communities. Foster and adoptive parents, Native adoptees, foster youth, attorneys and law professors, child psychologists, families still searching for displaced relatives, and staff from state agencies all stood up to express their support for the proposed regulations. Their message is clear. Our children need these protections.”
Visit the NICWA website to see the above press release as well as the proposed regulations and resources on how to comment on them.
See related news coverage at the Native Times website and at the Indianz.com website.
May 13th, 2015. The Lakota People’s Law Project released a 35-page report today that reveals how private institutions and their cozy relationships with those in the highest seats of power in South Dakota are responsible for the daily violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act and the systemic human rights abuses against the Lakota population in Indian Country.
Read the full press release and download the report from the Lakota People’s Law Project website.
A South Dakota state judge and other defendants have filed motions requesting a federal judge reconsider his ruling in which he found state officials in Rapid City set policies that violate the federal Indian Child Act Welfare Act.
Read the full article at the Seattle PI website.
See related article, “Circuit judge and others claim federal judge erred” at the Rapid City Journal website.
Four South Dakota tribes have applied for federal planning grants to help establish their own child and family services programs.
Read more at the Rapid City Journal website.
Today, the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing to discuss the educational challenges impacting American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students and schools. The hearing entitled “Examining the Challenges Facing Native American Schools” is the first hearing exploring this topic since 2008.
Read the full press release at the Committee on Education and the Workforce (Democrats) website.
There were more than a few teary eyes in the governor’s conference room on Thursday, when Gov. Bill Walker announced plans for a significant overhaul to Alaska’s adoption process for Alaska Native children.
The move comes after a high-profile Alaska Supreme Court case added potentially impossible-to-clear hurdles to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act’s provisions that Alaska Native children be adopted to extended family or tribal members.
Read the full article at the newsminer.com website.
Read related coverage at the Alaska Dispatch News website on April 15, 2015, and April 16, 2015.
“With the Indian Child Welfare Act, we can look at the glass as half-empty or half-full,” said Dr. Diane Hammons, assistant professor of criminal justice at NSU. “We can say we’ve made strides and come a long way, or we can say there is still a lot of work to be done. There are a lot of judges and adoption agencies and attorneys who don’t know ICWA exists.”
Read the full article about ICWA coverage at the 43rd Symposium on the American Indian (Northeastern State University, Oklahoma) at the Tahlequah Daily Press website.
Washington tribes and the country’s largest group representing Native Americans are asking for state and federal help in getting background checks when a tribe needs to place a child with a foster parent in an emergency situation.
The state’s Children’s Administration, a division of the Department of Social and Health Services, had conducted the criminal background checks for the tribes for years. But Jennifer Strus, the agency’s assistant secretary, sent a letter to the tribes in June saying that service would no longer be provided effective July 1, 2014.
Read the full article at the Bellingham Herald website.
On Monday, March 30 a federal judge issued a landmark decision affirming that officials in South Dakota violated numerous provisions in the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and denied Indian parents their rights under the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. Referencing widespread and systemic failure to protect the integrity of Indian families, Judge Jeffrey Viken issued a partial summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in Oglala Sioux Tribe v. Luann Van Hunnik on seven issues before the court regarding emergency removal hearings, also known as “48-hour hearings,” in Pennington County, South Dakota.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
Read an opinion piece by attorney Stephen Pevar at the ACLU website.
Read related coverage at the NPR website, the People’s World website, and Indianz.com.
See court documents at Turtle Talk.
The federal funding [to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota] will support Early Head Start and Head Start programs as the tribe works to improve its governance, children’s health and safety and provide comprehensive early education services to improve school readiness for American Indian children, according to a news release. The funds will support the programs over the course of five years.
Learn more at the Grand Forks Herald website.
Gov. Doug Ducey has signed a bill that makes all children living on Indian reservations qualified for private school vouchers.
Learn more at the Education Week website.
The USDA says the tribe will help feed children through the At-Risk Children’s Feeding Program on the campus of the Chickasaw Nation Medical Center in Ada. A child who is examined or has a routine appointment at the medical center is provided a nutritious, healthy meal if the child is hungry.
Learn more at the Tri-City Herald website.
“The federal government’s unwillingness to hear from those groups who have been in the field for many years working directly with those families and children who will be negatively impacted by these guidelines is alarming,” said [American Academy of Adoption Attorneys President] Goldheim. “As a nonprofit organization comprised of child welfare experts, we are committed to the ethical practice of adoption law. It is our mission to support and advocate for the rights of families and to consider the interest of all parties, especially children. Sadly, there are entire sections of the newly published BIA guidelines that completely disregard the best interest of children.”
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
The federal government and the state of Michigan show concern over potential separation of Indian children from their families and tribes through the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and the Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act (MIFPA), which include adoptive placement preference requirements for individuals seeking to adopt Indian children.
Those laws again came into play in a recent opinion of the Michigan Court of Appeals which reversed the adoption of an Indian child by a non-Indian family where an Indian family had filed a delayed petition to adopt the same child.
Read the full blog post at the jdsupra.com website.
March 23, 2015, WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp today reintroduced her bipartisan bill to ease the financial challenges of adopting children in tribal communities in North Dakota and across the country.
In all 50 states, parents who adopt children with special needs are able to claim the full adoption tax credit, helping to reduce the financial cost of adoption. However, if they open their homes to a child with special needs from Indian Country through tribal courts, that child cannot receive the same designation – preventing adoptive parents from claiming the full adoption tax credit. Heitkamp reintroduced the bipartisan Tribal Adoption Parity Act with Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, to allow tribal governments to designate children as having special needs – just as states can – enabling adoptive parents to claim the full adoption tax credit.
Read the full press release at Senator Heitkamp’s website.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., March 26, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities (CECANF) held a public meeting on tribal lands today at the Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. The focus of the meeting was for Commission members to explore key issues related to addressing and preventing child abuse and neglect fatalities in Indian Country. It included presentations and discussions on the impact of growing up in the midst of multi-generational trauma and loss within native communities, jurisdictional considerations, challenges and successful strategies, data collection, best practices and effective interventions. Speakers included tribal leaders, federal agency representatives, and practitioners.
Read the full press release at the Reuters website.
The Department of the Interior will be conducting tribal consultations and public meetings on the proposed rule through May 2015 to facilitate input and comment on the proposed rule. Meeting times and dates are listed below.
The proposed regulations can be found at http://www.indianaffairs.gov/WhoWeAre/BIA/OIS/HumanServices/IndianChildWelfareAct/index.htm
Comments can be submitted via any of the following methods:
• By e-mail to comments@bia.gov (please include “ICWA” in the subject line of the message),
• By postal service or hand-delivery to Ms. Elizabeth Appel, Office of Regulatory Affairs & Collaborative Action – Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1849 C Street, N.W., MS-3642-MIB, Washington, D.C. 20240; Phone (202) 273-4680, or
• At www.regulations.gov.
Public Meetings (open to everyone)
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 — 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. — Portland, Oregon
BIA Northwest Regional Office
911 NE 11th Ave Portland, OR 97232*
Thursday, April 23, 2015 — 1-4 p.m. — Rapid City, South Dakota
Best Western Ramkota Hotel
2111 N Lacrosse St Rapid City, SD 57701
Tuesday, May 5, 2015 — 1-4 p.m. — Albuquerque, New Mexico
National Indian Programs Training Center
1011 Indian School Road, NW Suite 254 Albuquerque, NM 87104*
Thursday, May 7, 2015 — 1-4 p.m. — Prior Lake, Minnesota
Mystic Lake Casino Hotel
2400 Mystic Lake Blvd Prior Lake, MN 55372
Tuesday, May 12, 2015 — 1 p.m.-4 p.m. Eastern Time
Via teleconference
888-730-9138
Passcode: INTERIOR
Thursday, May 14, 2015 — 1-4 p.m. — Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa Marriott Southern Hills
1902 East 71st Tulsa, OK 74136
Tribal Consultation Sessions
Tribal consultation sessions are for representatives of current federally recognized tribes only, to discuss the rule on a government-to-government basis with the Department. These sessions may be closed to the public.
Monday, April 20, 2015 — 3:30-5:30 p.m. — Portland, Oregon
Hilton Portland & Executive Towers
921 SW Sixth Avenue Portland, OR 97204
(at the same location as NICWA conference)
Thursday, April 23, 2015 — 9 a.m.-12 p.m. — Rapid City, South Dakota
Best Western Ramkota Hotel
2111 N Lacrosse St Rapid City, SD 57701
Tuesday, May 5, 2015 — 9 a.m.-12 p.m. — Albuquerque, New Mexico
National Indian Programs Training Center
1011 Indian School Road, NW Suite 254
[*Please RSVP for the Portland and Albuquerque meetings via consultation@bia.gov. As these are federal buildings, bring photo identification and arrive early to allow for time to get through security. No RSVP is necessary for the other locations.]
View the full press release at the Bureau of Indian Affairs website.
When the federal government opened foster-care assistance to Native American tribes in 2008, more than 80 expressed interest in the program.
By 2014, however, just 27 tribes had applied and only five had been approved for the federal program, their efforts hobbled by a lack of resources, inflexibility by federal bureaucrats and cultural insensitivity, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Read the full report at the Arizona Daily Star website.
“The state has requested an additional 30-day extension because the administration needs additional time to determine its response to the issues raised in the petition and the amicus brief,” Jacqueline Schaffer, an assistant attorney general with the Alaska Department of Law, told KNBA.
Read the March 18 article at the Indianz.com website.
Related links:
March 18, 2015. “State Upholds Decision in Case of Native Child Adoption.” at the Newsminer website.
March 11, 2015. “Native Nonprofits Want State to Change on Adoption Case.” at the Alaska Public Media website.
March 9, 2015: “Alaska tribes want state to join rehearing request in ICWA case” at the Indianz.com website.
The class action lawsuit, which involves the first 48 hours after an Indian child is taken from his or her family, alleges the State of South Dakota regularly violates the Constitutional Rights of Indian parents and provision 1922 of the Indian Child Welfare Act during the “show cause” hearing. The case, OST et. al vs Van Hunnik et. al., being heard in the Federal Courthouse in Rapid City before Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffery Viken, was filed two years ago by ACLU attorneys Dana Hanna and Stephen Pevar on behalf of the Oglala and Rosebud Sioux Tribes and all Indian parents in Pennington County against the Department of Social Services, Judge Jeff Davis and the States Attorney Mark Vargo. Last week attorneys argued on the scope of judicial privilege when it comes to conversations Davis had with other judges and his staff. Plaintiffs have asked for “discovery” of those conversations.
Read the full article at the Indianz.com website.
In a speech at the 2015 National Anti-Hunger Policy Conference today about the extent of childhood hunger in America and the impact of USDA programs on reducing food insecurity, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced more than $27 million in grants to fund innovative projects designed help end childhood hunger. The announcement was part of USDA efforts during National Nutrition Month to focus on poverty and food insecurity among children, especially in rural areas. These projects will be tested in Kentucky, Nevada, and Virginia, as well as the Chickasaw and Navajo tribal nations.
Read the full news release at the USDA website.
Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Viken delayed a ruling on whether … 7th Circuit Judge Jeff Davis, of Rapid City, would have to turn over records of his discussions with other 7th Circuit judges…. Viken’s ultimate decision may be a key ruling in the 2-year-old lawsuit brought by the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux tribes and Native American parents against Davis, the South Dakota Department of Social Services officials and Pennington County State’s Attorney Mark Vargo.
Read the full article at the Rapid City Journal website.
A major development in tribal child welfare policy was announced on February 25, 2015. The Bureau of Indian Affairs announced that it had revised–effective immediately–the Guidelines for State Courts and Agencies in Indian Child Custody Proceedings for the first time since 1979. NICWA is hosting a free webinar on Friday, March 13, 2015, at 10 a.m. PDT to explain the revisions.
Since the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978, there has been increasing movement to enhance state policy to support ICWA and address several of the challenges to American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) children’s well-being. The efforts that have proven most successful have been initiated by tribal governments and AI/AN Indian organizations in collaboration with state governments. After providing some history on ICWA and the problem of noncompliance, this article describes specific examples of promising developments in the area of tribal-state collaboration. Through enhanced partnership, tribes and states can work together to not only address the pervasive problem of ICWA noncompliance, but also work toward strengthening other programs and policies.
Read the full article at the NICWA website.
Legal Topics: Indian Child Welfare Act – Placement
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
The updated guidelines, said Washburn, will provide much-needed clarity and comprehensive direction in for [sic] determining whether a child is an Indian child, identifying the child’s tribe, and notifying its parent and tribe as early as possible before determining placement. Further, they will provide clear instruction on the application of “active efforts” to prevent the breakup of the Indian family and provisions which carry the presumption that ICWA’s placement preferences are in the best interests of Indian children.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
Read related Indian Country Today article, Cherokee Nation Applauds BIA’s Indian Child Welfare Act Guideline Revision.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has updated the Guidelines for State Courts and Services in Indian Child Custody Proceedings.
These updated guidelines provide guidance to State courts and child welfare agencies implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act’s (ICWA) provisions in light of written and
oral comments received during a review of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Guidelines for State Courts in Indian Child Custody Proceedings published in 1979. They also reflect recommendations made by the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee on American Indian/Alaska Native Children Exposed to Violence and significant developments in jurisprudence since ICWA’s inception.
See a full copy of the updated guidelines in the Federal Register. 80 FR 10146-02, (PDF).
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell is visiting with American Indian youth to get their thoughts on how federal policy can improve their lives.
The visits Tuesday to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Gila River reservation mark the start of a Native youth listening tour…
Read the full AP article.
JUNEAU, Alaska – Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Dana Fabe stressed the importance of collaboration with tribal courts and the need to maintain rural access to the court system during her annual address to lawmakers…
Read the full article at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner website.
Genocide is not too strong a term for what is now happening in South Dakota. The huge, shocking violation of legal and human rights being carried out by the state is tantamount to genocide against the Native American nations, the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Sioux, residing within its borders. It is the abduction and kidnapping by state officials, under the cover of law, of American Indian children…
WASHINGTON – Senator John Hoeven today announced that the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs has approved the Native American Children’s Safety Act, legislation he authored to implement protections for Native American children placed by tribal courts into the tribal foster care system.
Read the full press release at Senator Hoeven’s website.
U.S. Senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), recently re-introduced their comprehensive bi-partisan plan to find solutions to the complex challenges facing Native American children throughout Indian country.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today website.
Every parent of color hopes that their children will grow up without exposure to the brutality of racism and other forms of social injustice. That is the promise we hold when we give birth to them and first grasp their tiny hands and look into their eyes as parents. Few parents of color, however, are so lucky and can chronicle example upon…
Read the full article on the InsightNews webpage.
The Cherokee Nation recently donated $15,000 to the Murrow Indian Children’s Home in Muskogee to help the nonprofit provide essential care for Native youth.
Read the full article on the Tahlequah Daily Press website.
The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of South Dakota filed an Indian Child Welfare Act notice in a custody case in Omaha, Nebraska. Three Indian children are in temporary foster care after a three-year-old girl was found alone on the street…
Read the article at Indianz website.
The Affordable Care Act provides funding for home-visiting programs to reduce health care disparities, despite limited evidence that existing programs can overcome implementation and evaluation challenges with at-risk populations. The authors report 36-month outcomes of the paraprofessional-delivered Family Spirit home-visiting intervention for American Indian teen mothers and children…
Read the full article at PubMed website.
Enrollment in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation is based on descendancy only. A biological parent must be an enrolled member for the applicant to be eligible to become a Tribal citizen. The application process is very simple, but it must be filled out completely and a birth certificate is needed to confirm descendency. Copies are not acceptable; the birth certificate must be state issued or be a notarized copy…
Read the full article at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation website.
Four books dealing with Native history that were supposed to be introduced during the spring semester have been taken off the elementary-school curriculum in Juneau in the wake of concerns about their accuracy and sensitivity…
Read the full article at Indian Country Today website.
President Obama’s budget request will include $1 billion for American Indian schools next year, including millions of dollars to renovate crumbling buildings and connect remote classrooms via broadband Internet…
Read the full article at the Washington Post website.
A Seattle elementary school teacher and a University of Washington researcher testified Tuesday before Congress on the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, as lawmakers consider how to revise the framework for public…
Read the full article at the SFGate website.
It has been eight years since a Republican Majority was elected to lead the United States Senate. No matter which party is in charge, the American people want action and solutions, not dysfunction.
As Chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, I am committed to a results-driven agenda focusing on enhancing tribal self-determination and self-governance. I think former President Reagan said it b…
Read the full article at the Bloomberg BNA website.
It’s not by choice. The girl’s mother, Tricia Taylor, is accused of taking the child and her 7-year-old sister from Fargo last August to the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Taylor w…
Read the full story in the Grand Forks Herald.
U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., reintroduced a bill Thursday to address problems faced by Native American children. The bill, which has 22 supporters, would create a national Commission on Native Am…
Read the full article in the Grand Forks Herald.
Brandon Indian Residential School students in 1946. (Library and s of Canada) Canada’s residential schools for aboriginal children were places of hunger, isolation and misery. Children as young as 3…
Read the full article at the Washington Post website.
Hon. John Hoeven, R-N.D., has introduced legislation (S. 184) to amend the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act to “require background checks before foster…
Read the full article at Bloomberg BNA website.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the North Dakota Department of Human Services have signed an agreement to collaborate on child support services, the department announced Tuesday.
The tribe began operating a child support program in 2013 funded by a federal start-up grant. Under the…..
Read the full story at the Bismarck Tribune website.
The National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) Board of Directors welcomed Sarah Kastelic as new executive director of the organization this week. Dr. Kastelic has served NICWA as both chief of staff and deputy director for the past four years. She assumes the role as part of a carefully designed succession and leadership transition plan. Dr. Kastelic replaces founding director Terry Cross, who now becomes a NICWA senior consultant and will continue to serve the organization.
Read the full news release at the PR Newswire website.
From Casey Family Programs
Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 1:00 p.m. ET
Please save the date and join a webinar on January 21st introducing the Children’s Bureau’s new structure for delivering training and technical assistance. The Capacity Building Collaborative, a partnership of three centers, will serve Tribal and State child welfare agencies and Court Improvement Programs. JooYeun Chang, Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau, and representatives from the centers will provide an update on start-up activities and information about what to expect over the coming months.
Webinar registration with call-in information is below.
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/907143570
If you only wish to access the audio portion of the webinar, you may call:
888-955-8947; Access Code: 9815319
For assistance accessing the meeting: rgiordano@childwelfare.gov<mailto:rgiordano@childwelfare.gov>.
“This is preservation of our identity, that’s who we are,” said Angela Peters, interim director of language revitalization for the Saginaw Chippewa tribe. “Once we revitalize our language, we revitalize our cultural teachings.”
Read the full story at the Port Huron Times-Herald website.
The chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma has confirmed ancestry of a baby born earlier this month in Columbia and given to another family for possible adoption, a prominent Choctaw and former U.S. Senate candidate Matt Silverstein said in an interview last week…
Two of the largest newspapers in the country are focusing today on justice — or lack of it — on Native American reservations in the Dakotas.
First, the Washington Post is exploring child sexual abuse on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, where Charles Chipps Sr., a medicine man, has not yet stood trial on charges he sexually abused and raped girls, including his own daughters and granddaughters…
Read the full story at the Minnesota Public Radio website.
He was a world-famous medicine man, a traditional healer and spiritual leader. Followers would travel long distances to this tiny hamlet on the Great Plains to be in his presence and pray in the darkness with him in a sacred sweat lodge…
Read the full article in the Washington Post.
In June of this year, President Barack Obama and the First Lady visited the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in North Dakota. This was a historic visit. He was only the fourth sitting president…
Read the full article at the Wahpeton News website.
Today, after the public apologies and restitution over the government’s residential school system, disproportionately high rates of aboriginal child apprehensions continue across Canada.
“There are more First Nation children in care today than during the height of residential schools,” said Shawn Atleo, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. “We cannot lose another generation to the mistakes of the past. First Nations are the youngest and fastest growing segment of the population. We are the future. This is about Canada’s future.”
Read the full article at the National Post website.
“The Condition of Education for Members of Oregon’s Indian Tribes” was a study completed by ECONorthwest and the Chalkboard Project. The Spirit Mountain Community Fund paid for the study, which looked at students enrolled in seven of Oregon’s federally recognized tribes, including the Klamath Tribes.
Read more about the report at the Herald and News website.
Read the report at The Chalkboard Project website.
Tribes and race: the court’s missed opportunity in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. Deluzio, Christopher, 34 Pace L. Rev. 509-561 (Spring 2014)
Part I of this article will provide an overview of the legal doctrines implicated in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. First, Part I will discuss both Indian Child Welfare Act’s text and purpose and scholarly attention given to the law. Second, Part I will examine the law of putative fathers insofar as relevant to understanding ICWA’s application in Adoptive Couple. Part II provides insight into the Court’s equal protection jurisprudence with a particular emphasis on considerations of race in adoption and laws implicating Indian tribes…
Read the full article here.
The teach ICWA initiative: an action plan. González, Lizbeth, 86-APR N.Y. St. B.J. 31-32 (March/April 2014)
Indian Child Welfare Act compliance protects Native
traditions and families; noncompliance can have
far-reaching and even tragic consequences. Consider
these suggestions so you can play a greater role in
increasing ICWA compliance within your local, state and national community…
Read the full article here.
The real meaning of ICWA noncompliance. González, Lizbeth, 86-APR N.Y. St. B.J. 29-30 (March/April 2014)
During my tenure as Director of Legal Services of
the American Indian Law Alliance, then located
at the American Indian Community House in
Manhattan, I represented several expatriated Native
young adults. Their protracted attempts to reunite with their people had been remarkably unsuccessful…
Read the full article here.
Best interests of an Indian child. Herne, Peter J., 86-APR N.Y. St. B.J. 22-25 (March/April 2014)
Family law treatises summarize New York’s “Best
Interest of a Child” standard as follows:
1. Maintaining stability for the child(ren)
2. Child(ren’s) wishes
3. Home environment with each parent
4. Each parent’s past performance…..
Read the full article here.
Why applying the Indian Child Welfare Act is worth the hassle. Kane, Julie Sobotta, 57-OCT AdvocateIdaho 28 (October 2014)
After practicing for many years in the area of Indian
Law, I often heard complaints about the application of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in child protection cases….
Read the full article here.
Adopting biology plus in federal Indian law: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl’s refashioning of ICWA’s framework. Fadia, Shreya A., 114 Colum. L. Rev. 2007-2044 (December 2014)
This Note argues that the Supreme Court’s decision in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl creates an apparent tension in federal Indian law. The Court’s characterization of the broader aims of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and of biology’s role within it appears irreconcilable with previous interpretations of the Act—including the Court’s own reading in Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield and that of lower courts that have adopted the existing-Indian-family exception. This Note looks to an area outside of federal Indian law—immigration law—to resolve this tension. Specifically, this Note suggests that the Court adopted the “biology plus” standard from its unwed-father cases as further developed in the context of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Reading Adoptive Couple as a continuation of the Court’s “biology plus” jurisprudence not only resolves the apparent tension, but also reveals new insights about the role of the Indian family in transmitting tribal membership in its cultural, social, and political sense.
Read the full article here.
From kindergarten retention to high school graduation rates, education data show that American Indian and Alaskan Native students are faring the worst of all U.S. ethnic groups, according to a new White House report on Native youth.
Read the full article at the EdSource website.
In any child custody proceeding involving Indian children, all parties should understand there are significant legal and procedural requirements that must be met before parental rights to Indian children may be terminated. The federal government and the State of Michigan show concern over potential separation of Indian children from their families and tribes through the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and the Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act (MIFPA), which require a heightened evidentiary standard. This heightened evidentiary standard is supplemented by additional procedural requirements contained in the Michigan Court Rules.
See the full post at the JDSupra website.
At the conclusion of the White House Tribal Nations Conference in Washington, D.C. this month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder briefly outlined the plan to require more compliance with ICWA.
“This federal initiative represents a long overdue recognition by the Department of Justice that, 38 years after Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted into law, the illegal and unnecessary removal of Indian children from their families continues,” said A. Gay Kingman, executive director of the Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association in Rapid City.
Read the full article at the Rapid City Journal website.
See related coverage at the NPR website.
See the ICWA INFO post with the full-text of Holder’s remarks.
Pledging to fulfill a “sacred responsibility,” President Barack Obama unveiled an initiative Wednesday aimed at improving dire conditions and creating opportunities for American Indian youth, more than a third of whom live in poverty.
Read the full article at the Huffington Post website.
Read the president’s remarks, a related fact sheet and the 2014 Native Youth Report at the White House website.
The removal of indigenous children from their cultures by colonial governments is recognized by the United Nations as a form of cultural genocide. The trauma is recognized, pervasive, and long term. Yet the practice continues in the United States despite federal laws designed to end it. It would seem that the routine removal of Native children from their families and culture has been, and is, part of the American culture. The intent to protect Indian children, to give them a better life (understood in this context as “a white life”), is offered in the spirit of Colonel Richard Henry Pratt—chief architect of the Indian boarding school system—whose motto was, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
Read the full article at the Health Affairs website.
Elise wanted her granddaughter, but after nearly six years in court fighting to assert her rights under federal law, time was not on her side. The Inupiaq elder, who has eight children and 26 grandchildren, had steadfastly refused to give up on a child whom she felt needed—and deserved—to be raised by her own family in Tununak, a Yup’ik village on the westernmost edge of the American continent.
Read the October 28 article about Elise’s struggle at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
Though many points of the case are in dispute (if they were not, there would be not disagreement), in the interest of clarity and to offer our readers the state’s position as accurately as possible, we present here the unvarnished bulk of the rebuttal.
Read the December 4 follow-up article with the state’s rebuttal at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
Synopsis from Westlaw: Father filed emergency motion to modify custody after State initiated Child In Need of Aid (CINA) action against mother. Tribal council which had issued original custody order was permitted to intervene. The Superior Court, Third Judicial District, Anchorage, Andrew Guidi, J., awarded father primary physical custody. Council appealed.
Holding from Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Fabe, C.J., held that council lacked standing to appeal order modifying custody from which neither father nor mother appealed. Appeal dismissed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
A Federal Register Notice by the Indian Affairs Bureau made on 12/04/2014.
The regulations implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act provide that Indian tribes may designate an agent other than the tribal chairman for service of notice of proceedings under the Act. This notice includes the current list of designated tribal agents for service of notice.
During his remarks on December 3, 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new initiative to promote compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act :
Under this important effort, we are working to actively identify state-court cases where the United States can file briefs opposing the unnecessary and illegal removal of Indian children from their families and their tribal communities. We are partnering with the Departments of the Interior and Health and Human Services to make sure that all the tools available to the federal government are used to promote compliance with this important law. And we will join with those departments, and with tribes and Indian child-welfare organizations across the country, to explore training for state judges and agencies; to promote tribes’ authority to make placement decisions affecting tribal children; to gather information about where the Indian Child Welfare Act is being systematically violated; and to take appropriate, targeted action to ensure that the next generation of great tribal leaders can grow up in homes that are not only safe and loving, but also suffused with the proud traditions of Indian cultures.
Read Attorney General Eric Holder’s full remarks at the Department of Justice website.
Around the country, juveniles on reservations are left to languish in cash-strapped facilities that cannot afford to provide the kind of rehabilitative services afforded to most young offenders in the United States. Because some reservations have no juvenile detention centers, offenders often are shipped to facilities far from their homes, compounding the isolation of incarceration.
Read more at the Washington Post website.
Synopsis from Westlaw: In child protection case involving Indian child, the Circuit Court, Jackson County, Patricia Crain, J., entered order determining that Department of Human Services (DHS) made active efforts to provide remedial services and rehabilitative programs designed to prevent the breakup of an Indian family. Mother appealed.
Holding from Westlaw: The Court of Appeals, Ortega, P.J., held that DHS made active efforts.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis from Westlaw: The Office of Children’s Services (OCS) petitioned to terminate mother’s parental rights to Indian child. The Superior Court, First Judicial District, Juneau, Louis J. Menendez, J., terminated parental rights. Mother appealed.
Holdings from Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Fabe, C.J., held that:
(1) counsel’s decision to enter into a stipulation as to psychiatrist’s proposed testimony, rather than request a hearing to address the statements psychiatrist made in his affidavit, did not prejudice mother;
(2) evidence supported finding that mother failed to remedy the conduct that placed child at substantial risk of harm;
(3) evidence supported finding that the Office of Children’s Services (OCS) made active efforts to prevent the breakup of mother’s Indian family; and
(4) evidence supported finding that returning child to mother would likely result in serious harm.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: Father appealed order of the District Court, Shawnee County, Jean M. Schmidt, J., terminating his parental rights.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeals, Leben, J., held that:
(1) state sufficiently proved that it had complied with requirement of Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA);
(2) clear and convincing evidence showed that father was unfit; and
(3) termination was in child’s best interests.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Ensuring access to safe, good and affordable child care is crucial for helping to lift low-income parents out of poverty and build futures for their children. The child care bill signed on Wednesday by President Obama is a bipartisan step in the right direction, and it holds promise for further progress.
Read the full article at the New York Times website.
Read Senator Murkowski’s press release about the amendments she introduced to address the needs of tribal child care providers.
Read Senator Hirono’s press release about the affect of the legislation on Native Hawaiian children.
A panel of Indian-country experts will recommend to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday that tribes be allowed to criminally prosecute non-Indians who sexually or physically abuse Native American children on tribal land, saying that juveniles on reservations are living with “dire” levels of violence and poverty.
Read the full article at the Washington Post website.
Read the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee on American Indian and Alaska Native Children Exposed to Violence 120-page report on the Washington Post website.
The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that a lower juvenile court erred in failing to apply a federal law that seeks to prevent the removal of Native American children from their homes to a Nebraska case involving three Native American children.
Read the full article at the Journal Star website.
Read more about the lower court’s decision at the ICWA Info blog.
Nov. 12, 2014 – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today awarded $3.9 million for outreach and enrollment efforts aimed at American Indian and Alaska Native children eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The grant awards will fund activities to engage schools and tribal agencies in Medicaid and CHIP outreach and enrollment activities.
See the full press release at the CMS website.
The Washington Post reports:
A panel of Indian-country experts will recommend to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday that tribes be allowed to criminally prosecute non-Indians who sexually or physically abuse Native American children on tribal land, saying that juveniles on reservations are living with “dire” levels of violence and poverty. See the article.
Read the full report.
Synopsis: (from the opinion) “This consolidated child welfare dispute involves three dockets. In Docket No. 315510, respondent-mother, M. McCarrick, appeals of right the trial court’s March 13, 2013 order removing her three minor children from her home. In Docket No. 317403, McCarrick appeals of right the trial court’s June 28, 2013 order removing her minor daughter from her father’s care and custody. The child’s father is not participating in these appeals. In Docket No. 318475, McCarrick appeals by delayed leave granted FN1 the trial court’s orders removing the children from her care.”
Holding: (from the opinion) “Because the trial court failed to comply with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and the Michigan Indian Family Preservation Act (the Family Preservation Act), we conditionally reverse and remand for further proceedings.”
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
The Michigan Tribal State Federal Judicial Forum convened October 27-28 in Petoskey to review and adopt its charter and address the importance of judicial leadership in child welfare issues. The Forum was created by Michigan Supreme Court Administrative Order in June and is the first entity of its kind to meet since the previous Tribal State Court Forum was created in 1992.
Read more at the Flint Genesee County Legal News website.
An article describing a recent social welfare conference at Chadron State College includes some ICWA references:
During a panel discussion following the keynote, William Cross of Gordon, Nebraska, social worker with the ICWA ONTRAC office in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, challenged the Oglala Sioux tribe and CSC to collaborate more often to support Native American children.
The Michigan Tribal State Federal Judicial Forum, which was created this year and held its first meeting in Petoskey this week, provides an ongoing venue for all three jurisdictions to convene and improve working relations and communications. A priority for the Forum is addressing child welfare issues, and ensuring that our courts systems are meeting the needs of Native children and families in a way that’s culturally sensitive and appropriate in accordance with the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA).
Read the full column by Justice Michael Cavanagh at the MLive Media Group website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: Department of Public Health and Human Services filed petition to terminate parental rights of mother and Indian father to Indian child. Notice was given to father’s tribe, and tribe intervened. The petition was dismissed and then refiled. Mother voluntarily relinquished her parental rights. The Eighth Judicial District Court, County of Cascade, Dirk M. Sandefur, J., entered order terminating father’s parental rights, and he appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Beth Baker, J., held that:
(1) evidence did not show that Department strictly complied with requirements for notice to tribe under Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA);
(2) Department’s failure to strictly comply with notice requirements was harmless error;
(3) Department made active efforts to provide remedial services and rehabilitative programs designed to prevent breakup of Indian family, as prerequisite to termination of father’s parental rights;
(4) district court adequately found that continued custody of child by father was likely to result in serious emotional or physical damage to child; and
(5) termination of parental rights was not by summary judgment.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision on the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: County department of children and family services (DCFS) filed dependency petition. The Superior Court, No. CK98476, Los Angeles County, Jacqueline Lewis, Referee, sustained jurisdictional allegations and removed child from adoptive mother’s care. Mother appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeal, Kitching, J., held that:
(1) child’s sister had been abused or neglected by adoptive mother;
(2) child had been “subjected to an act or acts of cruelty” by mother; and
(3) there was a substantial risk to the emotional and physical well-being of child.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision on the National Indian Law Library website.
Justice Department (DOJ); Office of Justice Programs (OJP); Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (F.R. Page 56405) – Meeting
(Webcast of meeting also available.)
TIME: 10:30 a.m.
EVENT: Justice Department (DOJ); Office of Justice Programs (OJP); Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (F.R. Page 56405) holds a meeting of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Advisory Committee of the Attorney General’sTask Force on American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Children Exposed to Violence, to review and release the findings and recommendations of their report to the Attorney General and members of the Coordinating Council.
DATE: November 18, 2014
LOCATION: Justice Department, Office of Justice Programs, 810 7th Street NW, Third Floor Main Conference Room, Washington, D.C.
CONTACT: Kathi Grasso, 202-616-7567, Kathi.Grasso@usdoj.gov [Note: Registration required by November 12 at http://www.juvenilecouncil.gov ]
On October 17, 2014, the Winnebago community celebrated the grand opening of Educare Winnebago, a new state-of-the-art early childhood education school that ultimately will serve 191 children on the Winnebago Indian Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. The school is the first Educare in a Native American community, the fourth Educare in Nebraska and the 20th Educare in the country.
Read the full article at the Indian Country Today Media Network website.
The 183 schools are spread across 23 states and fall under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education. The schools serve about 48,000 children, or about 7 percent of Native-American students, and are among the country’s lowest performing.
They are in some of the most out-of-the-way places in the country; one is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, reachable by donkey or helicopter. Most are small, with fewer than 150 students.
Read the full article at the Seattle Times website.
Native American children are disproportionally represented in child welfare. Efforts to effect change must be culturally competent and protect the best interests of Indian children and strengthen Native families. This month, we look at cultural adaptations of trauma treatments, research on the use of social services by urban American Indian families, and a guide to help CASAs [court appointed special advocates] advocate for Native children.
See the October 2014 issue at the Children’s Bureau Express website.
Two tribes of the Lakota Sioux Nation in South Dakota Indian Country have been awarded planning grants by the Department of Health and Human Services, marking a historic moment in the ongoing effort to stop the illegal State seizure of Lakota children by creating an independent tribal-run family services program administered for Lakota, by Lakota.
See the press release at the PRWeb website.
In a split decision, the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled against the village of Tununak, which was appealing a lower court’s decision that allowed an Alaska Native infant to be adopted by non-Native parents rather than giving custody to her extended biological family in the tiny Western Alaska community.
The Supreme Court’s ruling this month upholds an earlier Superior Court ruling that concerns about the baby girl’s well-being trumped legal preferences built into a federal law designed to keep children from being adopted away from their Native American communities when possible.
Citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a similar case, three of the Alaska Supreme Court justices said the lower court was correct in letting a non-Native couple in Anchorage adopt the girl, because an approved member of her biological family had not officially filed to adopt her. Two of the justices disagreed, saying that was not enough reason to override the Native preference.
Read more of the article at the News Miner website and a related article at the Reuters website.
Read a copy of the court decision at the National Indian Law Library website and copy of the briefs files in the case at the Turtle Talk blog.
State, county, and tribal leaders from Minnesota gathered at Fortune Bay Resort Casino on Thursday [Sept. 25] to talk about what they are calling a crisis of Indian children.
Native Americans account for one percent of Minnesota’s population. However, Native American children are four times more likely to live in poverty than the state’s white children, and one and seven are placed in foster care, according to tribal leaders.
Read more at the Northland News Center website and a related article at the Grand Rapids Herald website.
[September 19, 2014] Last night, the U.S. Senate passed the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act, bipartisan child welfare legislation aimed at reducing child sex trafficking, increasing adoptions and improving child support collections. The bill includes a number of proposals from legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) last September (S. 1518, the Improving Outcomes for Youth at Risk for Sex Trafficking Act, I O Youth). After passing the Senate last night and the House of Representatives in June, the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act will be sent to President Obama to be signed into law.
Read more at Senator Hatch’s website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: Children and Family Services (CFS) filed a dependency petition alleging that child, age four, came within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Indian tribe responded indicating that child was eligible for membership and that tribe was intervening. The Superior Court, San Bernardino County, No. J239345, Cheryl C. Kersey, J., found that child was adoptable and terminated parental rights, and also found, inter alia, that CFS had complied “with the noticing requirements” of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Mother appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeal, Ramirez, P.J., held that mother failed to show a reasonable probability that compliance with the procedural requirements of tribal customary adoption (TCA) would have resulted in an outcome more favorable to her. Affirmed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: State filed petition to have child adjudicated as lacking proper parental care. Parents, one of whom was member of Indian tribe, entered no contest admission to petition, and child was allowed to remain at home under supervision. Guardian ad litem (GAL) subsequently moved to remove child from home. Following a hearing, the County Court, Buffalo County, Graten D. Beavers, J., ordered the child to be placed in foster care and declared a provision of the Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) unconstitutional. Parents appealed.
Holdings provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeals Moore, J., held that:
(1) there was not clear and convincing expert evidence that serious emotional damage would result if child, who became subject of original adjudication petition because of excessive school absences, were not removed from parents’ home, as
required for foster care placement under Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA); (2) juvenile court’s sua sponte determination, that provision of Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was unconstitutional as applied, was void; and
(3) in proceedings under the Nebraska ICWA for foster placement of, or termination of parental rights to, an Indian child, proof by a preponderance of the evidence is the standard for satisfying the court of active efforts to prevent the breakup of Indian family.
Reversed and remanded.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: The Office of Children’s Services (OCS) filed a petition to terminate mother’s parental rights to child. The Superior Court, Third Judicial District, Palmer, Eric Smith, J., terminated parental rights. Mother appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Supreme Court, Bolger, J., held that:
(1) evidence supported finding that child was a child in need of aid (CINA);
(2) evidence supported finding that mother suffered from a mental illness that placed child at risk of harm;
(3) evidence supported finding that child would likely suffer serious emotional or physical damage if mother’s custody of child were to continue; and
(4) trial judge was not required to appoint another judge to hear mother’s requests for substitution of counsel.
Affirmed.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: County department of children and family services (DCFS) filed dependency petition. The Superior Court, Los Angeles County, No. CK58667, Amy M. Pellman, J., sustained jurisdictional allegations, terminated father’s reunification services and scheduled a hearing for termination of parental rights, granted de facto parent status to foster parents, found that foster parents had not demonstrated good cause to depart from Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) placement preferences, and ordered a gradual transition for the child to move from the foster parents’ home to pre-adoptive placement in child’s paternal step-grandfather’s niece’s home. Foster parents appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeal, Kriegler, J., held that:
(1) foster parents lacked standing to challenge constitutionality of ICWA placement preferences;
(2) child’s tribe’s consent to foster care placement with a family outside of foster care placement preferences identified in ICWA did not waive ICWA adoption placement preferences;
(3) clear and convincing standard of proof applies to determinations of good cause to depart from ICWA placement preferences;
(4) departure from ICWA placement preferences requires significant risk of serious harm to child, not certainty of serious harm;
(5) trial court was required to consider the bond between child and her foster family in determining whether to depart from ICWA placement preferences; and
(6) trial court was required to consider best interest of child in determining whether to depart from ICWA placement preferences.
Reversed and remanded with directions.
Read the full decision at the National Indian Law Library website.
Synopsis provided by Westlaw: In termination of parental rights proceedings involving Indian child, the 392nd Judicial District Court, Henderson County, terminated mother’s parental rights to child. Mother appealed.
Holding provided by Westlaw: The Court of Appeals, James T. Worthen, C.J.,
