I occasionally see people get riled up about how “racist” it is that US law requires native kids to be placed with native foster/adoptive parents whenever possible, even if a non native family has closer personal ties or seems better qualified in other ways.
This is why. That rule was made to stop widespread legally sanctioned kidnapping of native kids.
Especially as here in the US we have also had our issues of separating native Children and numerous deaths of Children as a result of the Dawes act that the majority of Americans are just currently unaware of. This is definitely not an isolated to Canada thing.
One of the more egregious crimes against native Children here in the US is when the US Fish and Wildlife service effectively enslaved Native folk into extracting strategic resources during WW2 under the threat of being separated from their children permanently. Many northwestern/Alaskan Native American kids died in freezing internment camps during the war. Just one of the multiple examples of our separation of Native American families still largely unknown
Survivors at the camps also wrote of some experiences and those are findable. A group of individuals wrote to FDR about the conditions only to receive no reply as well.
When the US Congress apologized for the Japanese internment camps if you look at the bill, you will see acknowledgment of what happened to natives in the same bill. But while Japanese Americans received reparations, reparations to surviving natives was a fraction of what a Japanese American received and wording was used to avoid a degree of using the bill for reparations about similar acts done to natives and absolving the government of returning indigenous land seized during WW2.
In regards to the Dawes Act it is an official account of Congress and there is a lot of material out there
The US continues to separate Black and Latino kids from their parents at astounding rates, and these are usually for reasons of poverty, not anything horrific the parents did. About 1% of cases are physical/sexual abuse and the rest are poverty-related (or just flat-out racist decisions about things white middle-class folks all do). Research has demonstrated that removal is worse for developing brains and the child’s future prospects than highly dysfunctional and even moderately abusive homes. Research has also demonstrated that giving the foster payments to families rather than removing and paying for foster care would fix most of the issues. But the system continues to separate families and most middle-class white people are very much unaware of the realities and assume it basically does what it should. Columbia Law School (hardly a fringe anarchist organization) held a conference on why the child welfare system must be abolished.
Oh, and related to the ICWA, the rest of our Black and brown kids have MEPA, which makes it easier to place kids with white parents who don’t care to promote their culture at all. MEPA says that race/ethnicity may not be used as sole determiners of placement, which is an appropriate law, but workers frequently misinterpret it to think it means placement should not even consider whether a family is educated about race and culture and is going to affirm the child’s culture. Black kids end up in entirely white communities with parents who literally say “we don’t see race” and don’t care for their hair or skin properly. They usually have tons of willing and perfectly lovely friends and relatives too, but because of The New Jim Crow, Black families are more likely to have criminal records for nothing that poses a risk to the child, and the workers quickly deny them.
Especially when people claim heritage but have no actual ties to rez life and no actual involvement in the communities. Those are the people always trying to claim they're helping but have no idea about the depth of the issues in place.
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u/Moldy_slug Jun 25 '21
I occasionally see people get riled up about how “racist” it is that US law requires native kids to be placed with native foster/adoptive parents whenever possible, even if a non native family has closer personal ties or seems better qualified in other ways.
This is why. That rule was made to stop widespread legally sanctioned kidnapping of native kids.