Promoting Indian Child Welfare Through Inquiry and Data

 

Data collection on Native American involvement in adoption and foster care is needed to remedy courts’ failures.

More than four decades after the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), state courts still do not reliably fulfill their obligations under the statute. As a result, Native American children, families, and communities are too often denied the very protections the ICWA sought to establish.

Congress enacted the ICWA in 1978 to address the disproportionate rates at which Native American children were—and continue to be—removed from their homes and placed with overwhelmingly non-Native adoptive and foster families. These removals, Congress recognized, were frequently unwarranted, harmful to Native families and communities, and infringed upon Tribes’ inherent rights of sovereignty and self-governance.

The Interior Department sought to address this problem through a second ICWA rule also issued in 2016.

GOOD READ: Promoting Indian Child Welfare Through Inquiry and Data | The Regulatory Review