#indigenous child welfare

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Content Warning for discussions of residential schools and the systemic violence and abuse of Indigenous children.

It was a reunion decades in the making and a kickoff to the new year the Quill family will never forget. Sisters Nita and Brandy Quill met for the first time at a SkyTrain station in Vancouver last week, more than 30 years after they were separated during a period of colonial violence against Indigenous families known as the ’60s Scoop. The pair found each other on Facebook in the years after their mother’s death. “It’s surreal. Nothing like this has ever happened in our lives before,” Brandy said, embracing her long-lost sister at Burrard Station downtown. “This is to me a miracle. I’m just trying to take it in. It will probably take a long time to process it. It’s a dream come true.”

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[alinahdee]

ICWA STANDS!

[gwydionmisha]

The Indian Child Welfare Act prevents the kidnapping of indigenous children to be raised by white people, and the adoption of indigenous children away from their community by non-natives, activities which have been part of the US Government's genocide against Native Americans.

[starlightshadowsworld]

ICWA literally just got saved from the chopping block and is being broken.

Chanel is a native baby who's mother was murdered by Chanel's father.

ICWA states a native child is to be looked by their community.

But Chanel, instead of being under the care of her grandmother is with a foster family in Alaska.

A very racist foster family.

Who fantasise about putting her work.

Dehumanise her by never calling her name and comparing her to a dog and Mowgli from the jungle book.

There is a petition here to request actions be made to bring Chanel back home to her grandmother.

Please sign.

This poor child deserves so much better than these awful people who compare her to animals and don't even try to hide their disdain for her people.

These people are actively breaking ICWA, which is protected by federal law.

Chanel is a baby and my heart breaks for her.

[thoughtportal]

The Christian Groups Fighting Against the Indian Child Welfare Act https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/the-christian-groups-fighting-against-the-indian-child-welfare-act/ 

https://lakotalaw.org/news/2021-09-17/icwa-sovereignty

https://abovethelaw.com/2022/11/supreme-court-indian-child-welfare-act-gibson-dunn/

https://www.gibsondunn.com/former-exxonmobil-counsel-david-woodcock-joins-gibson-dunn-in-dallas/

[jeannereames]

ICWA STANDS!!!!

[embraceyourdestiny]

Hello everyone please sign and share this petition to protect the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA)

They are trying to strip down the Native community and this needs to be stopped

(via)

[shamandrummer]

Court Case Threatens Native Sovereignty

A serious threat to Native American tribes across the United states looms large. A decision on the Supreme Court case Brackeen v. Haaland -- a direct assault on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and by extension, the very right of tribes to be classified as sovereign nations -- is expected later this year.

Enacted in 1978, ICWA was part of the federal government's efforts to rectify the incomprehensible harm it caused to Native families through the forcible removal of Native children from their communities into boarding schools or non-Native foster and adoptive homes. Between 1819 and 1969, hundreds of thousands of children were taken from their families and homes.

ICWA establishes minimum standards for a Native child to be removed from their home and empowers tribes to be more involved in adoption and custody procedures for kids enrolled or eligible to enroll in tribal nations. The law gives tribal courts exclusive jurisdiction over members who live on tribal land, in the hopes of keeping families together, and creates a process whereby they're noticed and involved in cases outside of these boundaries.

For years, people and organizations hostile to ICWA have tried to erode the legislation through the court system. Should ICWA fall, it's not only adoption and foster cases that will be gravely impacted; the basic foundations of tribal sovereignty could be unwound. Observers in Indian Country have long believed that attacks on the legislation have broader aims in mind than the well-being of children, and many anti-ICWA proponents are also perceived as gunning for access to natural resources, mineral rights and more.

Calling into question the authority of Congress to deal with tribal nations as distinct sovereigns would have ​major reverberations throughout the field of Indian law. These attacks on sovereignty can be traced back to the Trail of Tears, the deadly westward displacement of five tribes between 1830 and 1850 initiated by then-President Andrew Jackson. The argument made at the time was that the tribes were being overwhelmed by European settlers, and they would be annihilated if the government didn't take them into custody and move them. ​In truth, those tribes controlled the waterways, and Andrew Jackson said, "​We want it, and we are going to take it."

Tribal sovereignty predates the coming of the colonial powers. From 1778 to 1871, the United States federal government signed 370 treaties with tribal nations. Many were used as tools to forcibly remove Indigenous people from their native lands and relocate them to reservations. In exchange for the land they had lived on for generations, tribes were offered many now-broken promises from the government: of peace, the provision of health and education, hunting and fishing rights and protection against enemies.

According to the Constitution, treaties can only be enacted between two sovereign nations. That status and the right of tribes to self-govern was affirmed in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia Supreme Court case. It's also grounded in the Constitution through not one, but two clauses, and was reiterated yet again in the 1990s by a Department of Justice memorandum that tribal nations have the unique status of ​"domestic dependent nations." You can help protect tribal sovereignty by supporting the Native American Rights Fund.

[makingcontact]

The Rest of the Story: Indigenous Resistance

U.S. Supreme Court building, credit: wikimedia commons In this episode, we revisit two stories concerning indigenous rights we’ve covered in the past. In the first half, Rebecca Nagle joins us to discuss the Supreme Court decision to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act and why the legitimacy of the law is so important to tribal sovereignty. We also talk about the right’s legal strategy in the…

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The Supreme Court of Canada has unanimously upheld the Trudeau government's Indigenous child welfare law, dismissing Quebec's appeal in a landmark opinion affirming Indigenous Peoples' jurisdiction over child and family services. The high court sided with the Canadian government in a decision rendered Friday morning, reversing a Quebec Court of Appeal decision to declare the law partly unconstitutional. "The act as a whole is constitutionally valid," the court concluded. "Developed in co-operation with Indigenous Peoples, the act represents a significant step forward on the path to reconciliation."

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[averytiredbitch]

Bring Chanel Home

BRING CHANEL HOME

^ that is a link to the petition to bring Chanel home and away from her abusive foster family

[youjustgotlawyered]

ICWA IS SAVED BY A 7-2 VOTE! I anticipated it being a closer win due to Gorsuch, so this is great news!

[artsy-jandi]

When Christ told His disciples to go out and spread the good news He never intended for them and those following them to do with force. These people are making the body of Christ look bad.

I know I already made a post about this. But ICWA is LITERALLY being challenged by a white couple that wants to adopt indigenous children to erase their culture and Christianize them. The tribe, whom has a say in who can take their children, is like "Nah, we don't want our youth Christianized like you tride last time"

And the lawyer that's helping the white couple try to overturn ICWA (so that they can erase the cultures of indigenous children) is doing it pro-bono (which means he's not charging the couple anything).

AND that lawyer is a big time lawyer whose clients are usually oil and gas industries. He's literally fighting for indigenous children to be ripped from their tribes and culture so there's less indigenous people to protest big oil destroying their sacred land.

-fae

[quotesfrommyreading]

IN JULY 1980, just outside Bakersfield, California, the body of a woman who had been stabbed 27 times was found dumped in an almond orchard. She carried no identification, and Kern County detectives could not match her fingerprints with anyone, though they thought she might be Native American. The autopsy showed she had previously given birth and that she’d been sexually assaulted before her death. She had two tattoos: a rose surrounded by the words “Mother I love you,” and a heart with the words “Seattle” and “Shirley.” This particular “Jane Doe” was part of a horrific pattern: Throughout North America, Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit, trans and queer people are being murdered and disappearing altogether. According to a 2016 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women in the U.S. have experienced violence. In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to experience violence than non-Indigenous women.

Canada held a three-year federally mandated investigation, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). The final report, from 2019, acknowledged that “there is not an empirically reliable estimate of the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada” but concluded that it constituted a “genocide”. Advocates estimate that the number of cases is on the order of 4,000; meanwhile, a count in 2014 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — one of Canada’s largest policing agencies — tallied only 1,181 cases during a 32-year span.

Even with the RCMP’s lower estimate, Indigenous people account for 25% of Canada’s homicide victims between 2015-2020, despite comprising only about 5% of the country’s population. These statistics, already a decade old, appear to be the most recent of their kind reported by RCMP.

The National Inquiry was clear about the root causes of the epidemic: colonial structures, including the Indian Act; the removal of Indigenous children from their homes; forced attendance at residential schools and breaches of Indigenous rights, all of which directly resulted in increased rates of violence, death and suicide in Indigenous communities.

Of the 1,181 cases that the RCMP acknowledged, 225 remained unsolved as of 2013. For family members, the response is slow and disappointing. In Canada, 91% of homicides involving non-Indigenous women are likely to be solved, compared to just 77% for Indigenous women. The crisis is similar in the U.S. According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, more than 5,700 American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls were reported missing in 2016, and advocates believe the number could be even higher, given that authorities sometimes think victims are Latina or white.

A 2008 study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice found that women on some reservations are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average. The U.S Department of the Interior told HCN that they did not have any additional information about the percentage of cases solved relating to Indigenous women and girls.

In response to families’ demand for justice and attention to the crisis, Canada and the U.S. have developed initiatives both within and across their own borders. In the U.S. in 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) announced the creation of the Missing and Murdered Unit (MMU) inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Justice Services to address MMIWG cases and strengthen law enforcement’s resources. According to the Department of the Interior, the initiative’s funding level has grown from $5.5 million to $16.5 million over fiscal year 2020 through 2022. The fiscal year 2023 Omnibus Appropriations bill maintained Bureau of Indian Affairs MMIP funding at $16.5 million.

In Canada, the response to MMIWG cases has been fragmented. The Tyee reported in 2021 that the RCMP, Canada’s national police force, lacked a coordinated strategy, while the regular police force does not separately track MMIWG cases. A few months later, Canada launched a national action plan to address MMIWG cases.

Throughout North America, families have waited decades for information. “Every family that we heard from was waiting, waiting for an answer,” said Marion Buller, who is Cree and a member of Mistawasis First Nation as well as the chief commissioner of Canada's National Inquiry. “They were prepared for bad news and good news.

“A loved one was murdered or went missing 20, 30 or 40 years ago, and they were still waiting for something,” she continued. “They have not given up hope.”

According to Buller, people are not generally concerned with issues of privacy when they have been waiting so long; at this point, they're simply desperate to find their loved ones. “Some families would very willingly provide samples of their own DNA if that would somehow identify a lost loved one’s remains or provide a lead to locating their lost loved one,” Buller said, adding that she had heard from families who had made this offer to law enforcement and been turned down.

  —  New DNA technique could bring closure for families of missing and murdered Indigenous people

[shamandrummer]

Remembering Indigenous Rights Advocate James Abourezk

A few days ago, we lost a tireless champion of the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Retired South Dakota United States Senator James Abourezk, the architect of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), passed away at his home in Sioux Falls on Friday, Feb. 24 on his 92nd birthday. James George Abourezk was born in 1931 in Wood, South Dakota, the son of Lebanese immigrants. Growing up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, he spoke only Arabic at home and did not learn English until he went to elementary school.

After high school graduation in 1948, Abourezk served in the US Navy during the Korean War. Following military service, he earned a degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City in 1961, and worked as a civil engineer in California, before returning to South Dakota to work on the Minutemen missile silos. At the age of 32, he decided to pursue law, and earned a J.D. degree from University of South Dakota School of Law in Vermillion in 1966.

Abourezk began a legal practice in Rapid City, South Dakota, and joined the Democratic Party. He ran in 1968 for Attorney General of South Dakota but was defeated by Gordon Mydland. In 1972, Abourezk was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1973 to 1979, after which he chose not to seek a second term. He was the first chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. His legislative successes in the Senate included the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, as well as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act gives federal protection to the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians.

Abourezk's signature legislation was the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA, 1978), designed to protect Native American children and families from being torn apart. Native American children have been removed by state social agencies from their families and placed in foster care or adoption at a disproportionately high rate, and usually placed with non Native American families. This both deprived the children of their culture and threatened the very survival of the tribes. This legislation was intended to provide a federal standard that emphasized the needs of Native American children to be raised in their own cultures, and gave precedence to tribal courts for decisions about children domiciled on the reservation, as well as concurrent but presumptive jurisdiction with state courts for Native American children off the reservation.

In 1973, Senators Abourezk and George McGovern attempted to end the occupation of Wounded Knee by negotiating with American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders, who were in a standoff with federal law enforcement after demanding that the federal government honor its historical treaties with the Oglala Sioux nation. The Wounded Knee Occupation began on February 27, 1973 when about 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of AIM seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Lakota men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. It was a key moment in the struggle for Native American rights.

The summer after the occupation of Wounded Knee, Abourezk introduced the American Indian Policy Review Commission Act, which created the eleven-member commission to study legislation with the goal of addressing key issues in Indian Country. He served as its chairman until its landmark report was published in 1977. He took the gavel as chairman of the Select Committee on Indian Affairs from its creation in 1977 to 1979, when he left the Senate.

In 1980, Abourezk founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a grassroots civil rights organization. In 1989, he published his Advise and Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate. He was the co-author, along with Hyman Bookbinder, of Through Different Eyes: Two Leading Americans -- a Jew and an Arab -- Debate U. S. Policy in the Middle East (1987).

After his retirement from the Senate, Abourezk worked as a lawyer and writer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He continued to be active in supporting tribal sovereignty and culture. Since 2005, he chaired the Lakota People's Law Project Advisory Committee. The Lakota People's Law Project is committed to defending the rights of South Dakota's Native American families, exposing the epidemic of illegal seizures of Lakota children by the state of South Dakota, working towards the structural solution to end this injustice. Just last year, Sen. Abourezk assisted their legal team in filing an amicus brief supporting ICWA with the United States Supreme Court. Later this year, the High Court could overturn the senator's landmark piece of federal legislation -- and that poses an imminent threat to Native families and sovereignty.