Indian Child Welfare Act 101

Indian Child Welfare Act 101

Land Loss: This is what colonization looks like

The loss of Native American lands within the U.S. year by year. 2-min video https://t.co/fjJDcGkIZi pic.twitter.com/GYeAfd5Vrt

— Century Past History (@lienhart85) December 29, 2016

We must de-colonize history and educate ourselves...

Standing Rock and the Battle Beyond - Fault Lines

The Heart of ICWA: Lukas

The Heart of ICWA: Rhonda

Heart of ICWA Video Series

NICWA Launches Heart of ICWA Video Series

Posted on December 19, 2016 by Kate Fort

Press Release.

The first video is here, and features Quinault President Fawn Sharp and her family. Deepest thanks to her for being a leader unafraid to share her story to help Native families.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was borne out of the forced removal of one out of every three children from their homes in the late 1970’s. This issue is far from ancient history, as we continue to see the devastating effects of non-compliance with ICWA. That is why at NICWA, we are committed to keeping families together.

Becky (second video) contributed her story to the anthology STOLEN GENERATIONS... We thank everyone for making this series... AHO! MEGWETCH!

South Dakota: Changes ordered

Changes ordered in '48-hour hearings' involving Native children

Tiffany Tan Journal staff

 

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.

The suit, filed in 2013 by Native American parents and the Oglala and Rosebud Sioux tribes, claimed that procedures in the state’s so-called 48-hour hearings violated the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). The defendants are the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office, the state Department of Social Services and the 7th Circuit Court.

An attorney for the plaintiffs, Dana Hanna, said the decision by Chief Judge Jeffrey Viken will “radically and fundamentally” change the way the hearings are being conducted, adding that the changes are supposed to take effect immediately.

In March 2015, Viken found that local court procedures violated Native American rights by not advising parents they had a right to contest the state’s petition for temporary custody and by not requiring the state to present live sworn testimony from a witness.

Jii-Anishinaabe-Bimaatiziwag Partnership Project

Federal grant for UMD aims to help Native American children

By Jana Hollingsworth | Dec 14, 2016 | DULUTH NEWS TRIBUNE

Minnesota has the most disproportionate rate in the country of Native American children in foster care, and St. Louis County's rate is among the worst in the state.

The University of Minnesota Duluth's social work department has been tackling that issue for some time, and was just awarded one of three federal grants to further its work.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded a five-year grant to UMD worth more than $2 million to create a better delivery system for the Indian Child Welfare Act, a federal law meant to keep Native American kids with Native American families.

"People in the systems care a lot about children and families, but there is something about the way the system is responding that is leading to high levels of disparity," said Priscilla Day, director of the Center for Regional and Tribal Welfare at UMD, and head of the university's social work department.
The center will lead the work and partner with Duluth's 6th Judicial District, St. Louis County Public Health and Human Services, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Leech Lake Tribal Court and both the Fond du Lac and Grand Portage bands of Lake Superior Chippewa.

UMD has been working with the county and local court system for several years as part of another grant to see how Indian child welfare cases are handled and to try to make that work more effective. The national grant was a chance to further those efforts. The ultimate goal, Day said, is to devise a system of policies and practices for social workers, the court system, tribes and the county to use when dealing with Indian child welfare cases.

"This isn't about blaming or pointing fingers," Day said, but about better outcomes for kids. The goal is to establish methods that can be used across the country.

The project likely will involve studying data and how it is or isn't shared between schools, tribes and the county. It could look at neglect — a driver of high numbers — and whether intervention can take place before it leads to a report, Day said. And training in historical trauma will most certainly be a part of it, building on training that already is being done.

"My grandmother was taken out of her family when she was 4 years old and sent to a boarding school," Day said, referring to federal boarding schools where Native American children were forced to assimilate, forbidden to use their native language. "That certainly impacted the way she went on to parent, because she missed all those formative years of interacting with a parent. And I am sure that impacted my parent. And so it goes on and on."

Boarding schools also introduced neglect and physical and sexual abuse. But native families are resilient, and many are working to revitalize cultural ways and traditions, she said, which is why it's so important to try to keep native children with their families as much as possible, and within their communities, if it's not.

The county is hoping for better coordination of responses to child safety and protection issues, and those that are culturally responsive. Are searches for relatives rigorous enough; is the Indian child welfare law being followed in the placement of kids? Those are questions that will be studied, said Holly Church, division director for children and family services for St. Louis County's public health and human services.

The idea is to reduce the disproportionality the county is seeing with out-of-home placements, and to find ways to stabilize families and get them the support they need.

"We want to see more kids remain in the family home, and for those kids who do need placement, we want them to be able to be with relatives when at all possible and to hasten unification of the family when kids are placed out of the home," Church said.

There are several barriers stemming from historical trauma that helped lead to the disproportionality, Church said, citing poverty, addiction, mental health, racism and a lack of resources to deal with those things.

"On top of that, we have a lot of work to do as a child protection workforce to continue to build our ability to work in culturally responsive ways with Native American families," she said, noting an already strong partnership with UMD, which has educated some of the Native American social workers on the county's staff.

"This is a really important issue to us," Church said. "It's a significant part of our work with families, and that's why we continue to devote a lot of time and energy ... to try to reduce these disparities."
The project is called Jii-Anishinaabe-Bimaatiziwag Partnership Project, which means "so they can live the Indian way of life."

NEW: ICWA guidelines | Standing Rock Art at IAIA

2016 BIA ICWA Guidelines Released

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Kate Fort

Here are the 2016 Guidelines. For those keeping track at home

February 2015, Updated Guidelines replacing the 1979 Guidelines (No Longer in Effect)

June 2016, Federal Regulations released (Became Binding on December 12)

December 2016, Updated Guidelines replacing the February 2015 Guidelines

What this means:
25 USC 1901 et seq (ICWA) has not changed in 1978, and provides the minimum federal standards for Indian families. State ICWA laws (and corresponding court rules) that provide higher standards still apply. The federal Regulations are now binding and are like the federal law. The December 2016 Guidelines are now in effect and non-binding interpretation of the Regulations.

*****

Eliza Moaranjo Morse hard at work. Photo courtesy of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

Standing Rock depicted in IAIA art exhibit: http://wp.me/p442Tb-8Uy

California Owes Reparations To Victims Of Forced Race & Intellectual-Based Sterilization, Study Finds

  News One |FIRST NATIONS BLOG

Historians want to mobilize reparation efforts for California sterilization victims who suffered under a government mandated program in the early 1900’s. A new American Journal of Public Health report titled, “California’s Sterilization Survivors: An Estimate and Call for Redress,” examines the scope of the state’s sterilization recommendations. Sterilization was an option spurred by eugenics–a controversial practice aimed…

READ California Owes Reparations To Victims Of Forced Race & Intellectual-Based Sterilization, Study Finds — News One

Dehumanizing myths and misconceptions hurt Native students

The Miseducation of Native American Students

Commentary By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Autumn, the beginning of the school year, is the cruelest season for Native American students in the United States. Between sports games where entire crowds chant about "redskins" and other school mascots and the federal holiday of the Indian-killing mercenary Christopher Columbus, there is the misguided national celebration of "Thanksgiving" to mark the arrival of the religious Europeans, who set the stage for Native American genocide.

These rituals dominate the first months of school, putting Native children in their place, holding up the traditions of white children, and championing the ideals of white supremacy and imperialism. As November's recognition of Native American Heritage Month ends, educators should resist the urge to regurgitate the usual narrative and instead discuss the reality of life, historical and current, for the more than 600,000 Native American students in our nation's K-12 public schools.

In researching and writing "All the Real Indians Died Off," our book about Native American myths and misconceptions, my co-author Dina Gilio-Whitaker and I were aware of how these Native American stereotypes affect all children in schools today. Internalizing harmful images most acutely damages Native children, but absorbing racist and dehumanizing ideas about fellow classmates also diminishes the understanding and compassion of non-Native children, warping their conception of a history that often erases Native Americans altogether.

Sadly, the education system lies at the heart of maintaining the erasure of Native Americans. Native children have been miseducated for generations under deliberately repressive federal policy, and all children in public schools are miseducated in U.S. and Native history. Education scholar Timothy Lintner wrote that U.S. history classrooms "are not neutral; they are contested arenas where legitimacy and hegemony battle for historical supremacy."

While distortions and myths of Native American culture plague many schools, textbooks often fail to mention Native history after the 19th century. In a 2015 study, scholars Antonio Castro, Ryan Knowles, Sarah Shear, and Gregory Soden examined the state standards for teaching Native American history and culture in all 50 states and found that 87 percent of references to American Indians are in a pre-1900s context. (Washington is the only state in the union that uses the word "genocide" in its 5th grade U.S. history standards and teaching of Native peoples' history.) In short, existing Native nations and land bases aren't identified, and Native people are dealt with as historical figures, implying their extinction.

"Indigenous students are vital and active participants in our society —not a vanished population."

No student can have a full understanding of U.S. history and contemporary society, nor can educators understand the inherited trauma Indigenous students still experience, as a result of this denial. From the colonial period to the nation's founding to the 20th century, Indigenous people have endured torture, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals from their ancestral territories, and forced attendance at military-style boarding schools. Both the U.S. Army and the federal government experimented with residential schools during the 19th century. In 1879, Richard H. Pratt established and became the superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania—the prototype for the many militaristic federal schools that would soon crop up across the continent. And dozens of Christian missionary boarding schools augmented this landscape.

The stated goal of the boarding schools was assimilation into the dominant culture, but the intent was cultural genocide. Indigenous children were prohibited from and beaten for speaking their mother tongues or practicing their religions, among other infractions that expressed their humanity. This while being indoctrinated in the beliefs of Christianity. Generations of Native students, stripped of the languages and skills of their communities, were traumatized—an effect that has contributed significantly to the family and social dysfunction still found in Native communities.

By the mid-1960s, educators developed multiculturalism in response to Native peoples' demands for decolonization. But in order to affirm the U.S. origin story of democracy and progress, Indigenous nations and histories were excluded. Treaty- and territorially based Native people in North America were transformed by multicultural education into an inchoate oppressed racial group.

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Multiculturalism emphasizes the "contributions" of oppressed groups to the United States' presumed greatness. Indigenous people were credited with contributing corn and maple syrup, buckskin and parkas, log cabins and canoes, and even the concept of democracy. This idea of the gift-giving Native who enriched the development of the United States, still perpetuated in schools today, is an insidious smoke screen. It obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of looting an entire continent and displacing Indigenous people.

It is essential that U.S. schools finally come to terms both with the profound miseducation of Indigenous students and with an inaccurate K-12 curriculum of Indigenous history. Indigenous students are vital and active participants in our society—not a vanished population. Though schools have not done right by Native students in the past, it is now, more than ever, the responsibility of educators to admit education's stereotypes and flaws; accurately teach Native students about the past; honor their history; and prepare them for their future. If schools begin to address the injustices of the past, they can start work toward a more just and equal future for Native students.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of eight books, including "All the Real Indians Died Off" and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans with co-author Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Beacon Press, 2016) and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Originally from rural Oklahoma, she is the daughter of a tenant farmer and a mother of American Indian descent.

Vol. 36, Issue 14, Pages 22-23

Published in Print: November 30, 2016, as On Not Erasing the Native American

Blessing the Baby

Practiced in many Native American cultures, the Blessingway Ceremony was traditionally held to honor major life transitions. During late pregnancy and to prepare for birth, an important rite of passage for women, a woman's close female friends would host a Blessingway Ceremony to honor her transition into motherhood. This initiation helps to prepare a woman physically, mentally and spiritually for her journey through birth and into motherhood. It allows her to strengthen her social support, which she will need to nourish her postpartum, and to deepen the bonds that she has with her community of support.

Do your own Blessingway Ceremony: Invite a group of women friends/relatives for a relaxing time to share food, pamper mom-to-be and honor the new baby who is making the way to join the circle. 

Our ancestors will help you remember how...

Ceremony for adoptees