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Showing posts with label Letter From National Native Groups to DOJ to Investigate Child Welfare Issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Letter From National Native Groups to DOJ to Investigate Child Welfare Issues. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

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


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

Monday, February 3, 2014

Letter From National Native Groups to DOJ to Investigate Child Welfare Issues

... we all prayed for this a very long time...Trace

READ Here, from NICWA, NCAI, NARF, and AAIA:
The undersigned American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) organizations request that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice commences a prompt  investigation into the unlawful treatment of AI/AN children in the private adoption and public child welfare systems throughout the United States.
 ***
Yet, despite all the protections provided by ICWA, each year thousands of parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, and child advocates reach out to the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) desperate for help. Their rights under ICWA and the Constitution continue to be violated by state child welfare and private adoption systems. NICWA frequently hears stories of adoption agencies ignoring the tribal membership of
children, of state attorneys failing to provide notice to a tribe when a child is taken into custody, of child welfare workers sometimes knowingly placing children outside ICWA’s placement preferences, and of judges denying tribal representatives a presence in the court room. NICWA also often hears stories of Guardians ad Litem scoffing at the importance of Native culture, state workers demeaning AI/AN parents and traditional
ways of parenting, and attorneys using professional networks to encourage other attorneys to purposefully circumvent the “ridiculous” or “unnecessary” adoption requirements of ICWA.
ICWA SUMMIT 2013

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