The US Supreme Court delivered a big win for tribal sovereignty today, ruling that
indigenous people will continue to have priority in adopting indigenous children.
But it doesn't stop there, cuz this victory not only helps slow our
nation's continued genocide of the Native population,
but it also deals a big blow to Big Oil.
First to the ruling.
So in a 7-2 decision, the court left in place the 1978
Indian Child Welfare Act, also known as ICWA.
Which was passed to remedy what Congress said was a disgraceful history in which
hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes by
adoption agencies.
And placed with white families or in group settings.
Now, that's exactly how we got to this case, Brecken versus Holland.
It came to pass by way of three white evangelical families being upset
because they couldn't adopt Native children.
These three white families, the State of Texas claimed.
Excuse me, the State of Texas and a small number of other states claimed the law is
based on race and is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
They also contended it puts the interests of tribes ahead of children and
improperly allows the federal government.
Too much power over adoptions and
foster placements areas that typically are under state control.
Now, the tribes and their supporters argued that the law is based on political
distinctions, not racial ones, and that Congress had decided the law was necessary
in part to ensure the tribes had a future.
They said the law was meant to rectify a past in which studies showed about a third
of Native children were removed from their parents for foster care or adoption.
Upward of 85% of placements were in non-Native homes.
That's significant, especially given that you lose a lot of your cultural
connections, your language and your background if you are moved into a home of
a different culture and it's a problem.
And I think these individuals thought that given
the conservative majority of our Supreme Court pretty much
opposing any race-based distinctions like affirmative action.
Well, these white families really figured that the High Court would strike down
ICWA, but they were wrong.
The issues are complicated.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a seven justice majority that included
the Court's, three liberal and four of its six conservatives.
But the bottom line is that we reject all of petitioner's challenges to the statute.
Congress said things like there's no resource that is more vital to
the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children.
That's Justice Kantanji Brown Jackson said.
Now, they constantly cast regulations regarding children, Indian children,
as a matter of tribal integrity, self-governance, existence.
Ye, and this big win that came down today in that seven to two majority, of course,
Alito and Thomas went ahead and dissented.
Well, people still celebrated.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland,
who is the first Native American to serve in a presidential Cabinet,
went ahead and praised the ruling in a statement that read in part.
Today's decision is a welcome affirmation across Indian country of what presidents
and congressional majorities on both sides of the aisle have recognized for
the past four decades.
For nearly two centuries, federal policies promoted the forced removal of Indian
children from their families and communities through boarding schools,
foster care and adoption.
Those policies were targeted attacks on the existence of tribes, and
they inflicted trauma on children, families and
communities that people continue to feel today.
Congress passed ICWA in 1978 to put an end to those policies.
The act ensured that the US new policy would be to meet its legal and
moral obligation to protect Indian children and families and
safeguard the future of Indian tribes.
Now, before we get into how Big Oil lost out today and
really what was going on behind closed doors.
Let's go ahead and talk about this ruling as it is, on the surface,
in terms of not allowing non-Native families to have that first right to go
ahead and adopt children who are Native.
This is very, very significant given the past history the United States has of
taking these children from their homes and making sure that they were devoid and
scrubbed of their culture.
>> Yeah, so, first and foremost, we need to recognize the sad and
cruel reality that is the fact that the United States has a very long history of
stealing children away.
Both from indigenous folks in the United States and, like more recently,
after the Korean War, for example.
There was a lot of people who were basically forced into adoption and
were adopted into the United States, right?
So unfortunately, there's a lot of and they tend to be like
white evangelicals that try to adopt children from all over the world.
In really what is part of a sort of larger, like, genocidal campaign to really
just kind of, like, erase the cultures of lots of different people around the world.
But specifically with Indigenous folks, it was taken to the extreme, right?
Where quite literally,
a lot of indigenous folks were not allowed to speak their own languages.
They were not allowed to learn their own languages.
They weren't allowed to go to their own schools.
And so on some level,
this is a really huge ruling in the sense of protecting what exists.
But on another level, this is really, really small in regards to what
really should be done because the reality is the federal government still
does not allow tribal authorities to be dictated organically.
Like, the federal government quite literally sets the standards for
what tribal government has to look like.
Quite literally the federal government still holds reservations as land in trust,
as opposed to letting indigenous folks actually have true sovereignty over
their land.
And so this is really protecting a small sliver of sovereignty that is granted
when, in actuality, there should be far,
far more sovereignty that is actually respected.
And we should have the basic human decency to actually recognize the sovereignty
of tribal leadership, because this is something that's been going on for
a very, very long time and it is still going on today.
We are still keeping reservations systemically impoverished.
We are still fundamentally denying basic rights to Indigenous folks across
the country.
>> Absolutely, >> It's not where it was 50, 60,
100 years ago, but it also is not fundamentally where it needs to be.
And this is why and where the land back movement is so important,
because fundamentally, it's not just about recognizing tribal sovereignty.
But actually trying to reclaim some of the very important things that have been
actively taken away from Indigenous folks.
And as the United States of America,
we can definitely afford to do that at a bare minimum.
>> Seriously, the big colonizer energy is very much in terms of taking
Native land and also taking Native children, Trey.
>> Yeah, I mean, I agree completely.
I was gonna say the same thing.
You all covered it very well when you take the historical context into consideration.
With the long history of taking everything from these people up to and
including their children,
I don't really know how you could be on the other side of this particular issue.
But nothing would have surprised me coming from this court.
So I guess I'm relieved.
But like Benny said, there's no quicker way to kind of erase people's
culture than to abduct and assimilate their kids.
These evangelical white families, they were not gonna raise these kids with
an appreciation for their culture, for Native culture or anything like that.
I think everyone knows that to be true.
So, yeah, it seems like justice prevailed here.
I suppose I agree with Benny, though, that more needs to be done.
And on a lighter note, I'll say that I'm kind of surprised that the three white
families at the heart of this didn't claim to be part Native themselves.
Because my experience coming from the south, that's a hugely popular strategy.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, still talking about, my mama is one quarter Cherokee, so
I think I know what I'm talking about.
I bet they did try to do that.
And their lawyers like, you know, you're going to need to prove that, right?
They're like, well, if we just my aunt always said, yeah,
that's not gonna hold up in court.
I have to imagine they tried to play that card.
I'd be surprised otherwise.
>> Well, see, it's interesting because there was shown to be a spike in
the number of Indigenous individuals in the United States a few years back.
And that was because, just as you have indicated a lot of white people were all
of a sudden claiming to have Indigenous heritage.
And it's so incredibly disheartening, especially given how many members of
the Indigenous community are struggling, are suffering.
Not having running water that is drinkable on the reservations,
not having full access to employment, economic opportunities.
Also something that is interesting and incredibly sad, I will say,
about Indigenous sexual assault.
The women who are on reservations who are sexually assaulted are the only group that
is far more likely to be sexually assaulted by individuals who are not
Indigenous.
Which means that it's people coming from the outside of the reservation and
harming them.
That's the only racial group to have that experience where they are more likely to
be attacked by someone who is not of their own racial group.
It's incredibly, incredibly disheartening.
But I can tell you that there are people who are okay with continuing to
strip Indigenous people of their rights and any kind of resources they may have.
And that's Big Oil, and they lost big today.
How do they come in?
Well, just look at who's really bankrolling these white evangelical
families challenging ICWA.
It's the Goldwater Institute.
So check this out from the Nation.
The Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute is a nonprofit right-wing think tank with
a donor roster that includes the Mercer family,
Donald Trump's biggest campaign contributors.
And donors trust a dark-money funnel for
the Koch brothers, the DeVos family and others.
Goldwater has launched a coordinated attack against ICWA alongside evangelical
and anti-Indian-sovereignty groups,
adoption advocates, and conservative organizations like the Cato Institute.
Many tribal members fear that if Goldwater is successful,
it could undermine the legal scaffolding of Native American self-determination.
Indeed, that is the point undermining that legal determination, that sovereignty.
And Goldwater has funded at least four legal attacks so far on ICWA,
trying to use it as a vehicle for undermining Indigenous sovereignty.
And the reason why is clear here.
A ruling in Goldwater's favor, according to Katheryn Fort and other legal experts.
Could undermine the authority of tribal courts, shutter tribal casinos, and
open up reservations to privatization,
something that could benefit oil and gas developers like the Koch brothers.
All said, today's case appears to simply be about adopting children who
are Indigenous on its face, but clearly it's not.
It's simply a way that the right is using an avenue, as in children and
the federal law, ICWA, to try to gain the resources and
land of the Indigenous communities here.
Even though we know it's scarce and it is far, far inadequate,
as Benny mentioned, Benny.
>> Yeah, I think there's another layer that I wanna add on to this,
actually, which is a really big problem with the oil industry.
Specifically in regards to how the oil industry affects reservations,
because there's a very well known phenomena of missing and
murdered Indigenous women and girls.
And unfortunately, a lot of that is driven by the oil industry.
It turns out that basically surrounding any type of oil field or
oil production system that exists, there's going to be a lot of human trafficking.
And this is something that is pretty well known, actually.
Like anywhere there's a lot of oil in town, you're gonna have a lot of human
trafficking that is following those oil workers.
That are obviously purchasing sexual favors from trafficked individuals and
things like that, right?
And so it is a huge, huge problem that greatly disproportionately affects
indigenous folks and it is something that has gone really understated and
under policed, right?
There's like very little enforcement against things like that.
And then on top of that,
when you talk about pulling the thread of unraveling indigenous sovereignty.
I mean, it really seems like these giant companies just want to turn reservations
into what Cuba was before Fidel Castro got rid of Batista's government, right?
Where they just wanted it to be an area that's stuff full of extreme
privatization, people forced into desperate situations.
And just like loads of organized crime and loads of human trafficking
all to the benefit of private corporations in the United States, right?
And so fundamentally, giant companies in the United States see
reservations as an opportunity to try and gut what little they already have and
to turn them into these even more desperate places.
And unfortunately, this ruling is just a lateral move.
It's just keeping the status quo.
It's not actually moving things forward or improving anything in these regards.
But it's important and telling to see some of the root problems that reservations
are dealing with right now already stem from these
same companies that are actively trying to make things worse.
And so, fundamentally, it's good to push against them making these things worse,
but we need to have real movements to actually push to make these things better.
And resolve some of these problems that really rest a lot with oil companies who
hold a great deal of responsibility for
some of the victimization that indigenous folks are dealing with today.
>> Thank you so much for sharing that, Benny.
Trey, any closing words?
>> I for one, I'm shocked that Big Oil is engaging in these kind of shady and
nefarious tactics like this.
This is wild and out of character for them.
I mean, no, it makes all the sense.
It's always take tactic, it'll never be enough for them.
But it's like it shows how kind of far reaching and
scary these right-wing dark money efforts are.
Because as you already pointed out, you wouldn't on the face of it,
you look at this case and what it has to do with children being adopted and
things of that nature.
You wouldn't tie that to Big Oil and
their strings that they're pulling automatically.
But then you pull back the curtain a little bit and
of course they're back there behind the scenes trying
to chip away whatever sovereignty these people have.
And just do whatever they can to undermine any of their independence and
take whatever they can from them because greed rules the day specifically where
Big Oil is concerned.
So, like Benny says, just a lateral move.
But I guess I'll take it better than a big win for them.