Missing Threads Best Documentary award! #WICWA

Adoptee Loa Porter (HoChunk)

One Native film, Missing Threads, was selected as the festival’s Best Documentary. The film chronicles the creation and passing of the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act (WICWA). This important piece of state legislation has far-reaching implications, and sets an important precedent for all tribes as they navigate the sensitive subject of the foster care system and its impacts on Native children. According to the ABQfilmx website the film reinforces the significance of the "thread that connects a child to their culture, to their sense of self, home and belonging. When that thread is broken or missing, the individual and the culture suffer. Can the thread be mended? Can connection be restored? This documentary explores the pivotal influence of tribal culture and connection for Native children, and the negative impacts for the child, the family and tribal culture when that connection is missing." 

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/05/24/albuquerque-film-and-music-experiences-native-stars-stories-164570

 

More about this film is in the new anthology STOLEN GENERATIONS!

Wisconsin ICWA: best outcomes? #flipthescript #adoptees #lostbirds

By Trace

 

This always gets me: "improve outcomes" or "best outcomes." What does that mean - that First Nations and American Indian children who are put into a non-Indian home, who lose language, culture, contact with their elders, do they mean improve that? How?  Do academics and social workers embrace an adoptee's tremendous loss of culture and contact? Do they work for family preservation and eradicate poverty that still plagues many reservations? Hardly. 

The best outcome: a child is never taken from their first parents and their tribes. Period.

 

Scholarship on the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act

by Matthew L.M. Fletcher on Turtle Talk

Loa Porter (Department of Children and Families, State of Wisconsin), Patina Park Zink, Angela R. Gebhardt (University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Center on Children, Families, and the Law), Mark Ells (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Michelle I. Graef, Ph.D. (University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Center on Children, Families, and the Law) have posted "Best Outcomes for Indian Children" on SSRN. It was previously published in Child Welfare.

Here is the abstract:

The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Midwest Child Welfare Implementation Center are collaborating with Wisconsin’s tribes and county child welfare agencies to improve outcomes for Indian children by systemically implementing the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act (WICWA). This groundbreaking collaboration will increase practitioners’ understanding of the requirements of WICWA and the need for those requirements, enhance communication and coordination between all stakeholders responsible for the welfare of Indian children in Wisconsin; it is designed to effect the systemic integration of the philosophical underpinnings of WICWA.

Veronica deserved better #BABY VERONICA #WICWA

Published on Sep 28, 2013

This 40-minute documentary explains the reason for and the process of creating and implementing the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act (WICWA). This historic piece of Wisconsin legislation passed both houses unanimously in 2009, a rare feat, especially given the opposition its enactment faced.

By Trace A. DeMeyer

I've had a hole inside me for my entire life. Veronica will, too.

I was born in Minnesota in 1956.  In 2013, Minnesota still has my original birth certificate locked away in a file somewhere.  Because of archaic adoption laws, I am NOT able to have a copy of my original birth certificate with my birth name Laura Jean Thrall and my mother's name Helen Thrall.  Until laws change, I have to live with my amended "fake" birth certificate which lists my adoptive parents as my biological parents. Veronica will have a fake birth certificate, too.

In 1958, I was adopted in Wisconsin. In 2010, I paid for a court order in Wisconsin to have my adoption file released to me.  I wrote about what was in this file in my memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE (the second edition) and on this blog.  Years earlier I went to a judge in Wisconsin and at his discretion, he let me read my sealed adoption records when I was 22 years old.  I didn't get to keep a copy of any papers, just my notes. I started my search for Helen and my unnamed father that day.

Since I was illegitimate, there was nothing about my Native father or his ancestry or history in my adoption file.  As this video describes, I was denied truth. I was lost. I was denied my birthright. I was deprived of my family stories. I was denied my culture which would have been handed down by my father and grandparents. I was denied medical history of both my birth parents because I was placed in a stranger adoption and no vital information was given to my adoptive parents to give to me.

Did a closed adoption consider my rights? Absolutely not.

Because the Veronica Brown case threw a light on the atrocity of her adoption, we see how her father lost custody of her, and how adoption lawyers cleverly bypassed ICWA federal law. How? The adoption attorneys made sure Veronica's mother cut off all contact with Dusten - so the Supreme Court could rule he didn't support his pregnant girlfriend or their baby and was a deadbeat.

According to South Carolina court records, Christy Maldonado (Veronica's birthmother) and the Capobiancos were connected by the Nightlight Christian Adoption Agency. It is a fact the adoption lawyers connected to the adoption of Veronica filed error-filled ICWA paperwork to the Cherokee Nation.  Even the original South Carolina Supreme Court decision stated that though Maldonado alerted the agency of the father’s status as citizen of the Cherokee Nation, “It appears that there were some efforts to conceal his Indian status.” 

Private adoption lawyers like Raymond W.  Godwin and private adoption agencies like Nightlight Christian Adoption Agency will continue to work behind the scenes to profit from adoptions - but they will lose money if ICWA is understood and implemented nation-wide.  Godwin's wife Laura is the director of the adoption agency that handled Veronica's adoption.

Many more tribes need to unite like in Wisconsin to draft new legislation in their states to layout how to implement the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and make ICWA stronger and clearer for judges. Social workers and courts in EVERY STATE need to ask if it is an Indian child (even with one Indian parent like me and Veronica) and then abide by ICWA.

No child should ever be lost to her own father and tribal nation. I was lost. Baby Veronica was lost.

As Cassi wrote on her Adoption Truth blog:

"...Veronica deserved better than this.  She deserved protection from an industry that used her for gain.  She deserved her rights to her family to be recognized instead of trampled on...."