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| Source: NPR |
NPR has a fantastic and highly disturbing news investigation series on whether the state of South Dakota is forcibly removing Native American children from their homes without proper cause.
According to the investigation, Native American children make up roughly 15% of South Dakota's child population, yet account for over half of the children in foster care. The state removes almost 700 Native American children a year from their families and despite regulations in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which mandates that Native American children be placed with family members, another member of the tribe, or a Native American family, most of these children are ending up in state-run foster care homes or with white families. They're losing touch with their culture, their families, and their tribes.
So is the state really "stealing" Native babies? I wouldn't put it past them.
The US government has been "stealing" Native American children for over a century. Missionaries and families frequently took young Native children, who they thought would be "better off" with them. Up until 1978 (1978 people!!!), the government shipped thousands of children to boarding schools for Native Americans - with slogans like "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." In college, I wrote a series of papers on Native American boarding schools, and the conditions were awful. Children died from lack of proper clothing, schools burned letters from parents without the children's knowledge, and children were beaten or worked to death for speaking in their native tongue or refusing Christianity. It was nothing short of cultural genocide.
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| Students at Carlisle Indian School - one of the largest and most well-funded schools in the country. Source: Wikipedia. |
Accounts of life within the schools are heartbreaking. Last fall, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks came to Yale and still teared up when he talked about how his mother had taken on extra jobs and gone without heat to save up enough money to bring him home for Christmas break. She mailed the money down to him, but Banks was told by the school that his mother had left instructions for him to spend Christmas at the school - that she didn't want him to come home. Years later, his mother had confronted him about what he had done with all that money that she had worked so hard for. He had no idea what she was talking about, but much later in life, while going through the school's records, he found her letter. The school had not only lied to him to keep him from going home, they had stolen his poor mother's money. Other children talk of getting on the school bus to go home, only to be redirected to a boarding school. Parents waited for their children to come home and they simply never arrived.
This atrocious history doesn't read much differently than what has been occurring in South Dakota lately. Erin Yellow Robe's two infants were taken from her suddenly one day on "suspicions of drug abuse." But drug abuse was never proved, and in fact, never investigated. No one came to take Erin to jail or drug test her or even ask her questions. They just pulled up, put the babies in the car, and took them to a white foster family. They left her two older children, 5 and 6, until months later when they were removed from the school and also put into a white family's care. Erin got a call from social services simply saying they weren't coming home. A year and a half later, Erin finally has her children back. The tribe, in an unexpected and unprecedented move, told the state that they would charge the state with kidnapping if they didn't return the children. The next day, a car pulled up, and the children were dropped off with no explanation or apology from social services. Their hair had been cut to their shoulders - defying their cultural tradition of not cutting their hair unless someone has died.
The state has responded to allegations that they are unlawfully taking Native American children by saying that all the children they take are "in danger" and have been either abused or neglected. But, as Bob Walter, a councilman from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe says in an interview with NPR, what constitutes neglect is subjective. Moreover, it often isn't neglect. It's poverty. I would argue that what constitutes harm to the children is also highly subjective. Cultural bias and racism play a role, and it is likely that many social workers find Native practices and traditions harmful simply because they are Native.
Furthermore, even if the state has reason to remove these children from their immediate situation, the Indian Child Welfare Act should mean that they are placing these children with an extended family member or someone from the tribe. Yet, the NPR investigation reveals that 90 percent of Native American children are placed in non-Native foster care. The state says there are no Native foster cares to place them in, but there are multiple licensed Native foster care providers on reservations in South Dakota, and the state hasn't sent them a single Indian child.
This heartbreaking article is a sad reminder that the exploitation and cultural genocide of Native Americans is still occurring. It isn't a remnant of the past - it is happening now.
For centuries, we've taught Native Americans to be ashamed of their culture; we've literally beaten it out of them. People didn't care about taking a child's life if it meant "killing the Indian." And today, it seems, people don't care about taking children from their families if it might do the same thing.
A great chart on the disproportionate rates of Native American children in foster care.
The NPR article.
