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.
In October 2017, a group of non-Native families, along with the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana, filed a lawsuit in a Texas federal district court. Their claim: A law called the Indian Child Welfare Act is unconstitutional, because it tramples on the States’ rights and racially discriminates against both the non-Native families and the Native children they are trying to adopt.
In the late 1800s, in what we call the “assimilationist era” of federal policy toward Native nations, the United States took Native children away from their families and put them in government-run boarding schools aimed at erasing their tribal identities and ties to their communities. As Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt, the architect of these schools described it, these schools were always acts of political violence.
The law protects Native families and the integrity of Native nations in multiple ways. Tribes are notified whenever one of their children is being put up for adoption and are given the right to intervene or transfer these cases in tribal court. There are also safeguards designed to prevent cultural bias and socioeconomic disparities from stacking the deck against Native families.
I don’t doubt that the non-Native families in this case have good intentions, that they believe they are fighting for what is best for these children. But unfortunately, the road to Native genocide has often been paved with good intentions and the belief that non-Natives know better than Native people do about what’s best for them. And Native people, indeed, disagree; 497 of the 574 federally recognized Indian tribes signed on to a brief supporting ICWA.
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