NPR Coverage of DOJ’s Commitment to Enforcing the Indian Child Welfare Act

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Turtle Talk

Here is “Justice Department Vows To Fight States That Violate Indian Child Welfare Law.”
An excerpt:

This summer the Justice Department intervened for the first time in its history in a federal district court case in South Dakota, concluding that the state has violated the rights of Native American parents.
Two of the state’s largest tribes argued that the state has removed children in hearings where parents were rarely allowed to speak and often lasted less than 60 seconds. The children were then placed indefinitely in largely white foster homes.
Stephen Pevar, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit along with the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux tribes, called the hearings “kangaroo courts.”
“There was nothing — nothing — that any of the parents did or could have done,” Pevar said. “It was a predetermined outcome in every one of these cases.”

Janice Howe fought the state of South Dakota for a year and a half to bring her grandchildren back home after they were placed in foster care.

 

 

2011 coverage: READ MORE

Sadly, the comments on NPR in 2014 are stunningly bad, racist, belaboring the same myths about alcoholism, but not poverty or real concentration camps, and absolutely nothing about the reality and loss we face as children removed from our tribes...Trace