-Today the Supreme Court voted to uphold a decades-old law that
governs tribal adoptions.
-It’s known as the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA.
So, what is the Indian Child Welfare Act?
And why is it relevant today?
The story goes back to the 1950s and 60s,
when Native children were routinely taken from their
families by social workers and placed in white homes.
-Lately here, we've had a lot of trouble with the social welfare at
Benson County coming in and taking children away from the
mothers and fathers and grandmothers.
-We want our children and our grandchildren, but we are not
allowed to keep them.
-We call it the scoop era, because your children weren't
safe playing in their front yards.
Your children weren't safe walking home from school.
-When a new car comes into the yard, they run in the house and
– Mama, are they coming after us now?
And they are always, every day and every night, when
a car comes, they're afraid that they're coming now to get them.
-Native families were basically under surveillance by social
welfare agencies, and they used any excuse they could
to remove Native children.
-Back then, there wasn't any running water.
There was no electricity.
So if you have a caseworker coming in and
seeing somebody living what they thought in – not in very good
living conditions – and they had kids,
they would remove those kids.
-My very first recall is being lifted into the window of a red truck
and placed between two strangers.
And the smell.
The smell of the skin of the woman next to me.
The smell of the dust of the, the man, when these
became my parents, my adoptive parents.
-Starting in 1968, I was tasked with trying to determine what
was going on with tribes nationwide.
Virtually every tribe in the country was experiencing
somewhere in the 25 to 35 percent, uh, out-of-home
placement situation for all their kids.
There was frequently not an allegation of child abuse.
Almost never of child abuse.
Child neglect, yes.
Neglect by the lights of what these caseworkers
or social workers wanted to define as neglect, which was
almost always conditions of poverty.
They weren’t doing the same thing to white poor folks.
They weren’t doing that.
-My mother was taken during that era from our people, from
my grandparents and my great-grandparents.
While my grandma and my
great-grandparents are fighting to regain custody, my mother
has already been transported out of state, into white adoption.
The family that adopted my mother was really abusive, and
when she got pregnant with me they sent her away to a Catholic
girls' home.
She went into labor, and then the nuns brought, uh,
paperwork for her.
They said, you just need to sign these.
And I was taken from the room, and
she asked, where's my child?
Where's my little girl?
I want to hold my baby.
And, they told her, you will never see your child.
You signed papers, adoption papers for her.
-The Bureau of Indian Affairs established this project called
the Indian Adoption Project, which was funded and financed
by the federal government, but it was carried out by the Child
Welfare League of America and its affiliated adoption agencies.
-These are the papers that changed my life forever.
-The market for Indian children emerged because the white
families wanted to adopt a white baby.
But white babies were in short supply.
And so they started to look elsewhere, and the next,
best thing, it seems, was a Native American kid.
-We were being advertised to middle-class white America as of
these, like, poor Indian waifs who have no one, who have nothing.
-And they made sure they used words that made us seem like
we were orphans.
The child that nobody wanted.
I wasn’t needing a home.
I had a home.
And I had a family.
I had a huge family that cared and loved for me.
But I remember my adoptive mom said,
your mother didn’t really want you.
She just wanted to keep you so she would get a
welfare check so she could drink.
That I needed to be grateful, more grateful because
any Indian kid on the reservation would be happy to be where I’m at.
-Everybody knew that there were children in out-of-home
placements, but nobody connected the dots and realized
that this was an epidemic.
-We have called these hearings today to begin to define the
specific problems that American Indian families face in raising
their children.
-This was an unknown issue in the Congress, and we had to
make it a known issue.
-Well, they always come to me and said that I wasn't – I wasn't
a very good mother and everything, and that my children
would be better off if they were in a white home or if they were
adopted out.
-They said that, but did they ever
– were they ever able to prove that in court, or did they give
anybody a specific example of why you weren't a good mother?
-It was never proven in court that she was unfit.
-We saw an issue that had to be addressed, and you had
grandmas and aunties gathering together, and they were out
there fighting for our children.
-Several hundred Indians and their supporters walked from the
Lincoln Memorial past the Washington Monument up to
Capitol Hill today to support certain legislation, including one
proposed law that will affect their right to decide what can happen
to Indian children.
-We mounted a massive campaign to get this law through.
It was just jubilation, you know, just total jubilation.
Hirsch was the main author of the Indian Child Welfare Act,
which passed in 1978.
It affirmed the authority of tribes over their
children, and enacted legal protections for Native families.
If a child had to be removed,
it prioritized placement with relatives, tribal members
and in other Native homes.
-The Indian Child Welfare Act, that was a blessing for our children.
Some of the kids were coming from being out in foster care,
and they were hurt.
Their spirit was hurt.
They didn't know where they belonged, their
identity was gone.
You want to make sure that your kids are safe.
Let us do our job.
Let us take care of our children.
And it is our right.
It's our right to take care of them.
But more than four decades after the law was passed, it was the
target of a lawsuit and ended up before the Supreme Court.
-Petitioners argued today ICWA went beyond Congress’ authority
to govern Indian affairs.
-That law is being challenged by a white evangelical Christian
couple who allege that it discriminates against them on
the basis of race.
-One Texas family wants the justices to strike it down and
make it easier for non-Native families to adopt Native American kids.
Native communities and supporters were galvanized
by the threat to the law and the threat to tribal sovereignty.
-We will not go back to a time when our children were stolen
and taken away from their homes.
We will not go back to a time when we lost our voice and
our power to protect our families.
-This legislation is so important.
It is about the future of our nations, the future of our communities.
But in June 2023, the Supreme Court rejected the challenges to the law.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that Native American
tribes “remain independent sovereigns with the exclusive power
to manage their internal matters.”
-I think of the generational suffering that my family has
endured, and I think about my life and the disconnection that I
felt, and I searched, and I longed for, um, my whole life.
And had ICWA been in place at the time
of my forced adoption, I would have been placed with someone
within our extended family.
I would have grown up immersed
with my community and my culture.
And so, healing for me has taken a long time.
And it wasn't until connecting to our
culture and our ceremony that I started this healing of my own.
For Rebecca Black, witnessing her daughter and grandsons
develop their own connection to their culture is another step
forward in rectifying the past.
-During the ceremonies, like when I’m dancing and I’m
singing and I’m able to be a part of that, um, it feels powerful
because it’s healing, it’s beautiful.
It’s amazing to know that you’re
there witnessing me doing my thing, and each time that we do
it I feel stronger.
-Yeah.
-I feel my Indian is stronger. -Yes.
-It took four generations to heal the trauma that was created
from my mother being taken from our people.
-And so the hope is, is that with each generation, it’s going to get
a little bit easier on them, you know, a little bit less that they’re
going to have to heal from.