Fostered or Forgotten is a Teen Vogue series about the foster care system in the United States, produced in partnership with Juvenile Law Center and published throughout National Foster Care Month. In this op-ed, writer Ruth Hopkins explains how the foster care system in South Dakota fails Native youth.
For Natives, foster care is a sensitive subject, and with good reason.
Removing Native children from their families and tribes of origin was once federal government policy in the United States. As the Indian Wars drew to a close in the late 1800s, punctuated by massacres and the establishment of the prisoner-of-war camps that would become known as reservations, the assimilation era began.
One of the key aspects of assimilation is found in the phrase “kill the Indian, save the man,” which was uttered in 1892 by Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer best known as the founder and superintendent of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school served as the model for boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada. Pratt preached that education — with a curriculum determined by white people — could be used to “civilize” the Natives.
Assimilationists sought to strip Natives of their language, culture, kinship, and belief system. Thousands of Native children were taken to boarding schools, where many were abused. They were given English names. Their braided hair, which possesses cultural and spiritual significance, was shorn. Once stripped of their Native identity, the children were forced to speak English and convert to Christianity. My uncle, of Spirit Lake Tribe, said that he was beaten on a regular basis in boarding school during the 1930s because he would not stop speaking the Dakota language. (As an adult, he became a Dakota language teacher.)
Removal didn’t just happen through boarding schools. Native children were also taken from their families and communities and placed with non-Natives. Lost Bird was among the first. She was found as an infant under her mother’s frozen body after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, when more than 150 unarmed Lakota were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry. She was adopted by Gen. Leonard Colby. Her life was difficult and marred with rejection and abuse: Her adoptive father was indifferent to her existence, and her adoptive mother attempted to raise her as white, but society would not accept her. No one could erase her desire to learn about her Lakota roots, either.
By the 1970s, research found that approximately 25% to 35% of all Native children in the U.S. were being placed in foster homes, adoptive homes, or institutions, and 85% of these children were being placed outside of their families and communities, even when fit and willing relatives were available to care for them. Research has shown that Native children in foster care who stayed connected to their culture did better, and those who weren’t were at greater risk for behavioral and mental health problems.
In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to combat the cultural genocide that was taking place because of the systematic removal of Native children. An effort designed to help preserve families and tribal communities, ICWA still requires state courts to place Native children who have been removed with relatives, members of their tribe, or Natives from other tribes before placing them with non-Natives.
Despite ICWA, and this history, serious disparities continue to occur. American Indian children in foster care are represented at nearly two times the level of white children, according to a 2007 report by the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA).
The statistics for Native children in foster care in South Dakota, home to nine Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) tribes, are much worse.
In South Dakota, a Native child is 11 times more likely to be placed in foster care than a white child, according to statistics from the South Dakota Department of Social Services, as reported by the ACLU last year. Those statistics also showed that Natives comprise less than 9% of state’s population, but 52% of the kids in South Dakota’s foster care system are Native. Even though the ICWA mandates that Native children be placed in Native homes first, the ACLU reported that since 2010 more than 1,000 Native kids have been removed from their families and placed in non-Native homes at a disproportionate rate in Pennington County, which includes Rapid City. Also, South Dakota doesn’t extend foster care beyond the age of 18, meaning Native kids can be dropped off and deserted by foster parents literally on the day that they reach the legal age of adulthood.
ICWA is also still under attack by non-Native people who want to adopt their own Native baby or child. Some envision themselves as saviors, maintaining that Native children are better off growing up in white homes. Some only see dollar signs. Even those with good intentions fail to understand or disregard the importance of protecting the bond Native children have with their own kin and the birthright they possess that is their Native ancestry and culture.
One of the most recent prominent cases where ICWA was challenged was Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (Baby Veronica), where the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that three-year-old Veronica’s Cherokee father did not have the parental rights necessary to trigger implementation of ICWA, because he had “abandoned the Indian child before birth and never had custody.” In February, the Supreme Court turned down another ICWA case that conservatives were hoping would overturn the law.
For now, ICWA stands. Invaders of Indigenous territories have tried to take everything from us — our lands, resources, cultures, languages, identities, spirit, dignity, freedom, lives, and even our children. We cannot tolerate that theft any longer. To the spirit eater, nothing is sacred and everything has a price tag. But our children are not for sale. They are our future.
