|
History > 2013 > USA > American-Indians / Native Americans (I)
U.S. Says It Pursues
More
Prosecutions on Indian Lands
May 31,
2013
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
The Justice
Department said this week that it had increased its rate of criminal
prosecutions in Indian country by more than 50 percent in the past four years, a
period in which violent crime on the nation’s Indian reservations has soared and
tribes have complained of lawlessness.
The data, part of a Justice Department report released Thursday, found that
United States attorneys had prosecuted about 69 percent of the 3,145 criminal
cases referred to their offices from Indian country last year — an improvement
over 2011, when the federal government tried 63 percent of 2,840 criminal cases
in Indian country.
The report comes amid a wave of violent crime on Indian lands and criticism of
the Justice Department by tribal officials who say United States attorneys
pursue far too few violent criminal cases on reservations.
Prosecutors say they must decline many Indian country cases — about 60 percent
of the total — because of a lack of evidence.
Federal prosecutions of crime on Indian lands rose by nearly 54 percent from the
2008 fiscal year, when the Justice Department prosecuted 1,091 cases, to the
2012 fiscal year, when it prosecuted 1,677 cases, the report said.
The department has jurisdiction over most serious offenses committed on
reservations, including murder, rape and white-collar crimes.
Previous government data have cited violent crimes, which presented a more
pessimistic picture: that the Justice Department files charges in only about
half of Indian country murder investigations and one-third of sexual assault
cases. The data also showed the number of prosecutions by United States
attorneys of violent crimes fell by 3 percent from 2000 to 2010, even as crime
on some reservations increased by 50 percent or more.
But the report released this week does not separate the number of federal
prosecutions for violent crimes. Instead, the report groups them with drug cases
and white-collar crime.
On Friday, Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, said the analysis did
not specify figures for violent crime because the department was not required to
do so by the Tribal Law and Order Act, a 2010 law that mandates that the
department release prosecution rates in Indian country. (This week’s report is
the agency’s first since the law went into effect.)
Figures included in the report, however, show that violent crime continues to
plague reservations.
For instance, United States attorneys with jurisdiction over serious crime on
Arizona’s reservations declined to prosecute 37 murders, 153 assaults and 164
sexual assaults in 2011 and 2012, the report said. The analysis did not say how
many murders, assaults and sexual assaults had been prosecuted on Arizona’s
reservations in the same period.
U.S. Says It Pursues More Prosecutions on Indian Lands, NYT, 31.5.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/us/j
ustice-dept-reports-rise-in-prosecutions-on-indian-lands.html
Save Wounded Knee
April 11,
2013
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BRINGS PLENTY
WOUNDED
KNEE, S.D.
THE Lakota Sioux word “takini” means “to die and come back” but is usually
translated more simply as “survivor.” It is a sacred word long associated with
the killing of scores of unarmed Lakota men, women and children by soldiers of
the United States Army’s Seventh Cavalry in the winter of 1890.
Wounded Knee was the so-called final battle of America’s war on its Native
peoples. But what happened was hardly a battle. It was a massacre.
A band of several hundred Lakota led by Big Foot, a chief of the Mnicoujou
Sioux, was intercepted and detained by troops as they made their way from the
Cheyenne River Reservation to Pine Ridge for supplies and safety. After a night
of drinking, the bluecoats were disarming warriors the next morning when a shot
went off. Soldiers opened fire with their Hotchkiss machine guns. At least 150
but perhaps as many as 300 or more Lakota died.
Our fight to survive as a people continues today, a struggle to preserve not
just our culture and our language but also our history and our land. Though I
now live on the western reaches of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, I grew
up in Pine Ridge, among my Oglala kin just a few miles from Wounded Knee. One
member of my family survived the killing; others died.
The killing ground stirs great emotion in all of our people — memories of bodies
frozen into twisted shapes, of those who were hunted down and murdered as they
fled, and of those who escaped in bitter cold across wind-swept plains. These
stories have been handed down to us and live within us.
One story I remember vividly was told to me when I was about 8 by a tribal
elder, a very old woman whose mother had survived the bloodshed as a child. The
old woman’s mother told her how her own mother had gathered her up when the
bullets started flying. Just then, a young horse warrior galloped past and took
the child up in his arms to help her escape. As she looked back, she saw her
mother shot down, her chest torn open by bullets. She told her daughter that she
remembered tasting the salt in her tears. The old woman told me all this after I
had knocked over a saltshaker. Salt still reminded her of her mother.
There are many such stories. The spiritual power of the place explains why
members of the American Indian Movement took it over in 1973 to call the
nation’s attention to the economic and cultural injustices against our Native
brothers and sisters.
Now, our heritage is in danger of becoming a real-estate transaction, another
parcel of what once was our land auctioned off to the highest bidder. The cries
of our murdered people still echo off the barren hills — the cries we remember
in our hearts every day of our lives. But they may finally be drowned out by
bulldozers and the ka-ching of commerce.
The Wounded Knee site passed from the Oglala into private hands through the
process known as allotment, begun in the late 1800s, by which the federal
government divided land among the Indians and gave other parcels to non-Indians.
The idea was to shift control of our land from the collective to the individual
and to teach the Lakota and other Native Americans the foreign notion of
ownership. But to us, the policy was just another form of theft.
The private owner of the Wounded Knee site, who has held title to the 40-acre
plot since 1968, wants to sell it for $3.9 million. If the Oglala of Pine Ridge
don’t buy it by May 1, it will be sold at auction.
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is one of the poorest places in the United
States, and the Oglala, who are deeply in debt, would be hard-pressed to meet
the price. Many elders properly ask why any price should be paid at all. The
federal government should buy this land and President Obama should then preserve
it as a national monument — just as he did last month at five federally owned
sites around the country, including one in Maryland honoring Harriet Tubman and
the Underground Railroad.
The massacre site has great meaning not just for the Lakota but for all First
Nations — and every American. Wounded Knee should remain a sacred site where the
voices of the Ghost Dancers, who more than a century ago danced for the return
of our old way of life, still echo among the pines, where the spirits of our
elders still walk the hills, and where “takini” still has meaning: the survival
of our collective memory.
Chief Joseph Brings Plenty, a former chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe,
teaches Lakota culture at the Takini School on the Cheyenne River Indian
Reservation.
Save Wounded Knee, NYT, 11.4.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/opinion/save-wounded-knee.html
The
Sequester Hits the Reservation
March 20,
2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The
Congressional Republicans who brought us the mindless budget cuts known as the
sequester have shown remarkable indifference to life-sustaining government
services, American jobs and other programs. So what do they make of the
country’s commitments to American Indians, its longstanding obligations to
tribal governments under the Constitution and treaties dating back centuries?
Very little, it seems. The sequester will impose cuts of 5 percent across the
Indian Health Service, the modestly financed agency within the United States
Department of Health and Human Services that provides basic health care to two
million American Indians and native Alaskans. It is underfinanced for its
mission and cannot tolerate more deprivation.
Here lies a little-noticed example of moral abdication. The biggest federal
health and safety-net programs — Social Security, Medicaid, the Children’s
Health Insurance Program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
Supplemental Security Income, and veterans’ compensation and health benefits —
are all exempt from sequestration. But the Indian Health Service is not.
The agency was supposed to be spared the worst of the automatic cuts; at least
that is what its officials believed. Under a 1985 law that served as the model
for the current sequester, annual cuts to appropriations for the Indian Health
Service could not exceed 2 percent.
Even a cut of that amount is very bad news for the main health care provider for
some of the poorest and sickest Americans, living in some of the most remote and
medically underserved parts of the country. Like care for veterans, Indian
health was supposed to be one area in which duty and compassion trumped
cheapness.
The agency’s officials were braced for that level of cuts, but they were
mistaken. The Office of Management and Budget interpreted the sequestration law
to mean that the 2 percent cap did not apply to most of the Indian Health
Service financing.
The agency’s director, Yvette Roubideaux, had to warn tribal leaders last
September to plan for a much bigger, $220 million cut, which it expects will
lead to 3,000 fewer inpatient admissions and 804,000 fewer outpatient visits
each year.
The Indian Health Service operates 320 health centers, 45 hospitals, 115 health
stations and 4 school health centers across the country. The vast majority of
these are on reservations, where poverty, disease, substance abuse, suicide and
other public health challenges are severe.
The government has been increasing its support for the service in the last
decade; at a hearing on Tuesday of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on
Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, the chairman, Mike Simpson, an Idaho
Republican, noted that between 2000 and 2012, financing rose to $4.4 billion
from $2.4 billion.
This has allowed some improvement and stability in services. But Dr. Roubideaux
told Mr. Simpson that the agency’s catastrophic health emergency fund, which
reimburses providers for trauma care and major surgeries, would still run out of
money before the end of the year.
The federal government cannot use its budget nihilism to avoid its moral and
legal obligations.
The Sequester Hits the Reservation, NYT, 20.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/opinion/
the-sequester-hits-the-indian-health-service.html
Mary Ellen Moore-Richard,
American
Indian Memoirist,
Dies at
58
March 3,
2013
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Mary Ellen
Moore-Richard, who was a member of the American Indian Movement during its
militant actions of the 1970s and who, under the name Mary Crow Dog, later wrote
a well-received memoir, “Lakota Woman,” died on Feb. 14 in Crystal Lake, Nev.
She was 58.
Her death was announced by Rooks Funeral Chapel in Mission, S.D.
Ms. Moore-Richard grew up poor on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota
in the late 1950s and ’60s. She was known throughout her life by several names,
including Mary Brave Bird and Mary Crow Dog, a reflection of her complex family
life and racial identity. Her father, Bill Moore, who was of mostly white
descent, left when she was a baby, and she was sometimes mocked and called
iyeska — half-breed — as a child.
“Always I waited for the summer, for the prairie sun, the Badlands sun, to tan
me and make me into a real skin,” she wrote in “Lakota Woman,” which was written
with the journalist and author Richard Erdoes and published in 1990. In 1994,
Jane Fonda Films produced a television movie for TNT based on the book.
Ms. Moore-Richard wrote that her stepfather had taught her to drink when she was
10.
“The little settlements we lived in — He Dog, Upper Cut Meat, Parmelee, St.
Francis, Belvidere — were places without hope where bodies and souls were being
destroyed bit by bit,” she wrote. “Schools left many of us almost illiterate. We
were not taught any skills. The land was leased to white ranchers. Jobs were
almost nonexistent on the reservation, and outside the res, whites did not hire
Indians if they could help it.”
She attended the St. Francis Boarding School on the reservation and, like
generations of American Indians, was instructed to practice Christianity and not
to speak her native Sioux language. As a teenager, she published a newspaper
describing abuse and misconduct at the school, and the school, run by Roman
Catholic priests and nuns, punished her for doing so, she said. Some of her
school experiences are described in a chapter of her book called “Civilize Them
With a Stick.”
By her late teens, Ms. Moore-Richard had joined the American Indian Movement,
also known as AIM, a sometimes violent civil rights group that led
well-publicized protests, including one in which demonstrators occupied the
offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1972.
Ms. Moore-Richard, who married one of the group’s leaders, Leonard Crow Dog,
gave birth to their first child during AIM’s violent two-month occupation of the
town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which began
in February 1973.
Violence on the reservation continued long after the occupation; her close
friend and fellow AIM member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was found dead in 1976.
“The police said that she had died of exposure, but there was a .38-caliber slug
in her head,” Ms. Moore-Richard wrote in 1990.
In 2004, an AIM member, Arlo Looking Cloud, was convicted of killing Ms. Aquash.
Prosecutors said AIM members believed that Ms. Aquash had been spying on AIM for
the F.B.I.
In 1993, Ms. Moore-Richard and Mr. Erdoes wrote a sequel to their first book,
called “Ohitika Woman.”
Mary Ellen Moore-Richard was born in Pine Ridge on Sept. 26, 1954. Survivors
include four sons, Robert He Crow, Francisco Olguin, Henry Crow Dog and Leonard
Crow Dog Jr.; two daughters, Jennifer Crow Dog and Summer Rose Olguin; her
mother, Emily Smith; two brothers, Robert Joe Moore and Michael Smith; and two
sisters, Kathleen Moore and Barbara Moore.
Ms. Moore-Richard was a regular presence on the set of the TNT film in 1994. In
an interview at the time with The Los Angeles Times, she said AIM should be more
appreciated by American Indians.
“Before AIM came, people didn’t have their long hair, people didn’t have their
Indian pride,” she said. “Everybody was assimilated. These people still put AIM
people down, but now they are having sun dances. Before, nobody did it because
everybody was Catholic and nobody knew about the Indian ways until the AIM
people came. Now they are a lot better off, but they still don’t recognize the
movement.”
Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, American Indian
Memoirist, Dies at 58,
NYT, 3.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/us/
mary-ellen-moore-richard-american-indian-memoirist-dies-at-58.html
Rape on the Reservation
February
26, 2013
The New York Times
By LOUISE ERDRICH
MINNEAPOLIS
TWO Republicans running for Congressional seats last year offered opinions on
“legitimate rape” or God-approved conceptions during rape, tainting their party
with misogyny. Their candidacies tanked. Words matter.
Having lost the votes of many women, Republicans now have the chance to recover
some trust. The Senate last week voted resoundingly to reauthorize the Violence
Against Women Act, the 1994 law that recognized crimes like rape, domestic abuse
and stalking as matters of human rights.
But House Republicans, who are scheduled to take up the bill today and vote on
it Thursday, have objected to provisions that would enhance protections for
American Indians, undocumented immigrants and gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender youth, among other vulnerable populations.
Here in Minneapolis, a growing number of Native American women wear red shawls
to powwows to honor survivors of sexual violence. The shawls, a traditional
symbol of nurturing, flow toward the earth. The women seem cloaked in blood.
People hush. Everyone rises, not only in respect, for we are jolted into
personal memories and griefs. Men and children hold hands, acknowledging the
outward spiral of the violations women suffer.
The Justice Department reports that one in three Native women is raped over her
lifetime, while other sources report that many Native women are too demoralized
to report rape. Perhaps this is because federal prosecutors decline to prosecute
67 percent of sexual abuse cases, according to the Government Accountability
Office. Further tearing at the social fabric of communities, a Native woman
battered by her non-Native husband has no recourse for justice in tribal courts,
even if both live on reservation ground. More than 80 percent of sex crimes on
reservations are committed by non-Indian men, who are immune from prosecution by
tribal courts.
The Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center says this gap in the law has
attracted non-Indian habitual sexual predators to tribal areas. Alexandra
Pierce, author of a 2009 report on sexual violence against Indian women in
Minnesota, has found that there rapes on upstate reservations increase during
hunting season. A non-Indian can drive up from the cities and be home in five
hours. The tribal police can’t arrest him.
To protect Native women, tribal authorities must be able to apprehend, charge
and try rapists — regardless of race. Tribal courts had such jurisdiction until
1978, when the Supreme Court ruled that they did not have inherent jurisdiction
to try non-Indians without specific authorization from Congress. The Senate bill
would restore limited jurisdiction over non-Indians suspected of perpetrating
sex crimes, but even this unnerves some officials. “You’ve got to have a jury
that is a reflection of society as a whole, and on an Indian reservation, it’s
going to be made up of Indians, right?” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of
Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So the non-Indian
doesn’t get a fair trial.”
Leaving aside the fact that most Native defendants tried in the United States
face Indian-free juries, and disregarding the fulsome notion that Native people
can’t be impartial jurists, Mr. Grassley got his facts wrong. Most reservations
have substantial non-Indian populations, and Native families are often mixed.
The Senate version guarantees non-Indians the right to effective counsel and
trial by an impartial jury.
Tribal judges know they must make impeccable decisions. They know that they are
being watched closely and must defend their hard-won jurisdiction. Our courts
and lawyers cherish every tool given by Congress. Nobody wants to blow it by
convicting a non-Indian without overwhelming, unshakable evidence.
Since 1990, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator from Delaware, drafted the
original legislation, the Violence Against Women Act has been parsed and pored
over. During reauthorizations in 2000 and 2005, language on date rape and orders
of protection was added. With each iteration, the act has become more effective,
inclusive and powerful. Without it, the idea that some rape is “legitimate”
could easily have been shrugged off by the electorate.
Some House Republicans maintain that Congress lacks the authority to subject
non-Indians to criminal trials in tribal court, even though a Supreme Court
opinion from 2004 suggests otherwise. Their version of the bill, as put forward
by the majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, would add further twists to the
dead-end maze Native American women walk when confronting sexual violence. John
Dossett, general counsel for the National Congress of American Indians, said it
would create “more off ramps for defendants by adding multiple levels of removal
and appeal, including the right to sue tribes.” A compromise backed by two other
Republicans, Darrell Issa of California and Tom Cole of Oklahoma, is vastly
preferable to the Cantor version. It would offer a non-Indian defendant the
right to request removal of his case to a federal court if his rights were
violated.
What seems like dry legislation can leave Native women at the mercy of their
predators or provide a slim margin of hope for justice. As a Cheyenne proverb
goes, a nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.
If our hearts are on the ground, our country has failed us all. If we are safe,
our country is safer. When the women in red shawls dance, they move with slow
dignity, swaying gently, all ages, faces soft and eyes determined. Others join
them, shaking hands to honor what they know, sharing it. We dance behind them
and with them in the circle, often in tears, because at every gathering the red
shawls increase, and the violence cuts deep.
Louise Erdrich
is the author, most recently, of “The Round House.”
Rape on the Reservation, NYT, 26.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/
native-americans-and-the-violence-against-women-act.html
Measure to Protect Women Stuck
on Tribal Land Issue
February
10, 2013
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
WASHINGTON
— At 26, Diane Millich fell in love with and married a white man, moving with
him in 1998 to a home on her native Southern Ute reservation in southern
Colorado where, in short order, her life was consumed by domestic violence.
Her story of beatings and threats, reconciliations and divorce — painfully
common among Native American women — had a twist. Because her husband was white,
the Southern Ute Tribal Police could not touch him, and because she was a Native
American on tribal land, La Plata County sheriff’s deputies were powerless as
well. She said she tried going to federal law enforcement, which did have
jurisdiction, but that went nowhere.
After one of his beatings, she said, he even called the county sheriff himself
to prove to her that he could not be stopped. Only after he stormed her office
at the federal Bureau of Land Management and opened fire, wounding a co-worker,
was he arrested. And even then, law enforcement had to use a tape measure to
sort out jurisdiction, gauging the distance between the barrel of the gun and
the point of bullet impact to persuade the local police to intervene.
Obscure as it might be, the issue of tribal court powers and Ms. Millich’s
jurisdictional black hole has become the last remaining controversy holding up
Congress’s broad reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act. The
Senate on Monday is expected to approve the 218-page bill with broad, bipartisan
support.
But in the House, Republican negotiators are still struggling over a 10-page
section that would, for the first time, allow Native American police and courts
to pursue non-Indians who attack women on tribal land. Supporters and opponents
of the language acknowledge the plight of women like Ms. Millich. Native
American women are two and a half times more likely to be raped. One in three
will be assaulted, and three out of five will encounter domestic violence, said
Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico.
“It was just crazy, now when I think back on how insane it was,” Ms. Millich
said in an interview.
If a Native American is raped or assaulted by a non-Indian, she must plead for
justice to already overburdened United States attorneys who are often hundreds
of miles away.
“Native women should not be abandoned to a jurisdictional loophole,” Mr. Udall
said.
But conservative opponents say the Senate’s language goes too far, empowering
courts that are not equipped for the job and depriving defendants of
constitutional rights without nearly enough recourse to federal courts and no
guaranteed protections like those afforded by the Bill of Rights.
“This is a bill which could do so much good in the battle for victims’ rights,
but unfortunately it is being held hostage by a single provision that would take
away fundamental constitutional rights for certain American citizens,” Senator
John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “And for
what? For what? In order to satisfy the unconstitutional demands of special
interests.”
The fight is pitting a dry legal position against an emotional and politically
potent one. Native American groups and women’s rights advocates say they are not
special interests. They are voters, however.
“Let’s just talk politics here,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of
Oklahoma, who has been leading negotiations to end the impasse. “This will have
passed the Senate. The president’s for it. And we’re holding up a domestic
violence bill that should be routine because you don’t want to help Native women
who are the most vulnerable over a philosophical point?”
Mr. Cole and another senior Republican, Representative Darrell Issa of
California, have met repeatedly with Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the
House majority leader, to try to get Republicans past the tribal courts issue.
They have proposed extending Native American court powers but also offering
non-Indian defendants a chance to appeal to federal law enforcement after arrest
and after a conviction. Representatives from the National Congress of American
Indians met with Cantor staff members last week as well — and they have backed
the Issa-Cole compromise.
But with the Senate’s action, native groups say they will feel less pressure to
water down the provision, not more. Jacqueline Pata, executive director of the
National Congress of American Indians, said the tribes have tried to assuage
Congressional misgivings, expanding financing and capacity, bolstering indigent
legal representation, and changing rules to ensure that non-Indian defendants
would face a jury of their peers, Indian and non-Indian alike.
At this point, said Ms. Pata, an Alaska Native, the opposition smacks of bias.
“When you see these amendments that give more rights to perpetrators than Native
women, you start to wonder where the balance is,” she said. “We would give any
other community in this country the resources and tools they need for justice,
but we won’t give them to the Indians.”
Mr. Cole, whose state has one of the largest Indian populations in the country,
agreed, to a point. He said some of his colleagues seem to “fear Indians are
going to take out 500 years of mistreatment on us through this.”
“It’s that kind of fear, veiled in constitutional theories,” he said.
Republican leaders are eager to tamp down such accusations. Mr. Cantor took to
the House floor last week to assure Democratic leaders that he cares “very
deeply about women in the abuse situation, that we need to get them the relief
that this bill offers,” and that he is even enlisting Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr. in the talks.
But, he warned, “There’s been the introduction of some issues that are not
directly related to the situation of domestic abuse on tribal lands.”
Advocates of the Senate’s tribal language — including some Republicans — say
they are not giving up. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, went to
the Senate floor on Thursday to denounce the violence endemic in her state’s
native communities, and to say she will urge the House to move forward.
“You don’t give up when the cause is right,” she said.
For Ms. Millich, the issue is very much alive. Her ex-husband is in prison, but
she said she still feels the threat.
“It would be really good,” she said, “that regardless of where violence takes
place, they’re able to be prosecuted.”
Measure to Protect Women Stuck on Tribal Land Issue, NYT, 10.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/us/politics/
violence-against-women-act-held-up-by-tribal-land-issue.html
Focus on Preserving Heritage
Can
Limit Foster Care for Indians
January 26,
2013
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH
FARMINGTON,
N.M. — In a small, brightly decorated room at the Childhaven youth shelter, a
group of Navajo children played a quiet game of Monopoly, their faces
registering the occasional faint smile. Abandoned, neglected or worse, the
children have been living here, on the edge of their tribe’s reservation, and
most have been waiting for months until the state can find foster homes or
relatives where it can send them.
In the often wrenching world of foster care, the plight of American Indian
children is especially fraught. Under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978,
local agencies must try to place Indian children with Indian families whenever
possible, and tribes may intervene in certain custody proceedings.
Congress passed the law after generations of Indian children were wrested from
their homes and placed in non-Indian foster facilities and boarding schools. The
law’s supporters say it has worked in many instances — allowing Indian children
to remain connected to their heritage, even when families fall apart.
But a chronic shortage of licensed Indian foster families in states like New
Mexico, coupled with the poverty and substance abuse endemic to American Indian
communities, has also made it challenging to apply.
In Bernalillo County, for instance, there are 65 Indian children in state
custody but only 5 Indian foster homes, prompting Gov. Susana Martinez to
publicly appeal for more families last March.
“Having enough families to meet the intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act is a
big problem,” said Jared Rounsville, the protective services director for New
Mexico’s Children, Youth and Families Department. “Which ends up resulting in
Native children at times being placed with non-Native families. And then often
times they are adopted by non-Native families.”
Recently, the law’s interpretation has been tested in a case that will be heard
by the United States Supreme Court this year and is being watched closely by
child welfare experts.
In that case, a family court judge ordered a white South Carolina couple to turn
over a 27-month-old girl they had raised since birth to her Indian biological
father.
The father, a member of the Cherokee tribe, was estranged from the mother and
had relinquished rights to the child. He said he was unaware his daughter would
be put up for adoption and sought custody when he found out, four months after
she was born.
Lawyers for the couple said the child, known as Baby Veronica, forged a deep
bond with her adoptive parents, who were present at her birth.
The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the decision after the couple appealed.
The court ruled that the birth mother made some efforts to conceal the father’s
Cherokee identity during the adoption and that federal law required Veronica to
remain with her father, whom the court found had created a safe, loving home.
In a 3-to-2 ruling, the court said it had reached its decision “with a heavy
heart,” conceding that the adoptive couple, Matt and Melanie Capobianco, were
ideal, loving parents.
Last year, supporters of the Capobiancos delivered a petition signed by more
than 20,000 people to South Carolina lawmakers, urging them to revisit the law.
But its proponents say the case illustrates, with heartbreaking consequences,
what happens when information about a child’s tribal status is withheld.
“What is at stake is whether or not we not we go back to the days where
deception and coercion are the norm in adoptions,” said Terry L. Cross, the
executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association.
According to the child welfare group, Indian children are still overrepresented
in foster care at twice their rate in the general population — evidence, Mr.
Cross said, that child welfare agencies are still too quick to pull Indian
children from their homes.
Fewer than 2 percent of Minnesota children are Indian, for instance, but they
make up 15 percent of the foster care system, according to the group. In
Montana, the group found that Indian children make up about 9 percent of the
population but represent 37 percent of foster care children.
Mr. Cross said that a child’s welfare was always paramount, and that the ideal
situation was to place the child with relatives or a stable foster family — even
a non-Indian family — so long as a tribal bond was emphasized.
While the current law is imperfect, he said, it seeks to balance the rights of
the child, the birth parents and the interests of the tribe, which needs to
protect its members.
Mark Fiddler, one of the lawyers acting as counsel for the Capobiancos, would
not comment on the case. While he said the act was well intentioned, he
contended that its application had become misguided, where a stable family
environment was too often eclipsed by a desire to keep children linked to their
tribe.
An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Mr. Fiddler
once supported the law as a Minneapolis public defender.
But he changed his mind after a case from the 1990s, during which he opposed the
adoption of an Indian girl, Sierra Goodman, by her white foster parents, Eugene
and Carol Campbell.
After Sierra’s tribe successfully challenged the adoption, she was taken to live
with Indian relatives despite her pleas to stay. According to accounts of the
case in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, she lived in more than 20 foster homes and
became deeply troubled, aiding her boyfriend in a failed attempt to murder the
Campbells.
The Campbells eventually adopted her as an adult, after she spent time in a
juvenile treatment facility.
“After many years of handling these cases, I got to the point where I became
much more focused on the child’s developmental needs than the child’s cultural
needs,” Mr. Fiddler said. “I’m not saying there aren’t some issues of loss when
a child is placed out of their culture. But those are more remediable than the
profound psychological damage we risk by moving them from a stable family.”
But for every failed case, there are dozens that end well, said Therese Yanan, a
director of the Native American Disability Law Center in New Mexico.
The bond between child and tribe, Ms. Yanan said, is vital to giving Indian
children a clear identity.
“It’s difficult for non-Natives to fully understand the connection individuals
have with their Native community,” she said.
Brenda Riggs-Valle, who is Navajo, has been fostering mostly Indian children in
Farmington while raising her own two children as a single mother.
She said there is a shared experience between Indian foster families and Indian
children that creates a comfortable foster environment. But she worries about
might happen when they leave her care.
“What we give them is a glimpse of happiness,” Ms. Riggs-Valle said. “And when
they go back, they are going to have to be strong.”
Focus on Preserving Heritage Can Limit Foster Care for Indians,
NYT, 26.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/us/
focus-on-heritage-hinders-foster-care-for-indians.html
|
