“Keep Our Families Together”: A Law That Protects Native Families is at Risk
Two Native people share how the Indian Child Welfare Act impacted
their lives as the law faces a challenge at the Supreme Court.
Marshal Galvan Jr., Little Shell Chippewa
Marshal Galvan Jr.
Credit: Marshal Galvan Jr.
When
I was a child, I remember going to powwows. I remember seeing Native
people. I remember being happy in these spaces with my family, and in my
eyes and in my sisters’ eyes, my parents could do no wrong. But for
whatever reason, the child welfare system decided that my parents
weren’t good parents, and they decided to take that right of parenthood
away from them.
When my sisters and I were placed in the child
welfare system, we were initially placed together, but we got split up
and placed into different homes over the years. They said we were bad
kids and no one would take all of us on because we were a handful to
deal with. Looking back now, we were just kids who were traumatized. We
were kids that just wanted to go back to the safety of our parents.
My
first placement was in a foster home with a white family. I didn’t
learn about Catholicism or Christianity until I entered foster care. As I
went through the system, I started landing in different homes with
different cultures and languages being spoken, in different cities,
schools, and neighborhoods. Everything constantly changed, and it
constantly reinforced an identity crisis in my life.
By the time I
was a teenager, I was gravitating towards anything and everything that I
felt was going to connect me to something — whether it was the gang,
drugs, or alcohol. It gave me a false sense of pride, ego, and meaning
to life. I was putting myself in risky situations so that I could feel a
part of my community. In my young adult life, things started shifting
for me. I started getting incarcerated. I turned 18 and became homeless
immediately. My addiction took a turn for the worse. Suicidal ideation
and hopelessness started setting in. All along, I was grappling with my
identity and just really seeking to know my roots.
Marshal Galvan Jr. as a child.
Credit: Marshal Galvan Jr.
In
1997, when my parents lost their rights, there was no support and there
certainly wasn’t any communication between our tribe and our family or
the courts. At the time, the social workers and courts weren’t making
active efforts to help our family bridge those gaps. My family’s tribe,
Little Shell, wasn’t federally recognized until 2019. Because of that
lack of federal recognition, my family was glossed over and wasn’t
protected under ICWA.
My tribe allowed me enrollment membership
into the tribe on August 23, 2022, but I’ve never lived in Montana and I
don’t know the practices of my tribe. I acknowledge that. But through
my enrollment, I am learning and rediscovering things about my tribe,
and it has given me the ability to share that with my family. I started
to reconnect with my family, and my enrollment is helping 16 other
family members reconnect with the tribe, including my dad who wants to
relearn his roots. I think it’s a beautiful thing.
It’s been a
journey to unlearn, decolonize myself, and decolonize my mind. It’s an
ongoing process, and I still have to do a lot of healing. To this day,
as a tribal person, I still am facing an identity crisis. But no one
should ever feel like they’re not Native enough, or enough, period.
It’s been a journey to unlearn, decolonize myself, and decolonize my mind.
Now,
my passion is helping people that have similar stories to mine.
Currently, I’m a counselor and work with youth in the Berkeley area. I
would like social workers that are working in the child welfare system
to continue to educate themselves on their own biases, because we’re
hurting families. We’re keeping kids away from their parents and
families when they don’t need to be.
The Indian Child Welfare Act
is important because it keeps people like myself connected to our
cultural roots, our family lineage, and our birthright. Not only does it
respect tribal sovereignty, it also gives Native kids an opportunity to
choose whether or not they want to embark on a journey that’s a
birthright. To have the opportunity to have community, to be able to
have folks that I can look around at and say, these are my people.
That’s the most important thing — family, community, and cultural roots.
Mondae Vanderwalker, Rosebud Sioux Tribe
Mondae Vanderwalker
Credit: Mondae Vanderwalker
It
took me three and a half years of jumping through hoops and dealing
with wrongdoings from the Department of Social Services (DSS) and the
court system to adopt my two nephews.
My oldest nephew was taken
away from my brother when he was around 3 years old. He was put in the
system, and I called the local DSS office and told them that I wanted to
get custody and adopt my nephew. The DSS representative told me “No,
we’re not going any further or moving forward with this case,” just
because they heard some hearsay about me. But they never looked into the
allegations. I asked DSS, “Well, how come you won’t do a background
investigation or whatever you have to do so that I can get my nephew?
He’s an important part of my life.” And they just kept saying, no, we’re
done here.
I had no money to fight this, and didn’t know what to
do. A few years later, my younger nephew was born, and he was also
taken away from my brother when he was just a few months old. After he
was taken, a woman from a different DSS office contacted me and asked,
“Would you be interested in taking him?” and I said, “Yes,” in a
heartbeat. I was waiting for that phone call for many years.
DSS
had me and my husband go through a program to get a foster parent
certificate to start the process of adopting our nephews. Once we were
finalized for the adoption process, DSS finally let us go see my nephews
at their foster family’s home. We had to drive from Sioux Falls two and
a half hours away each weekend to go see them. But on our third visit,
the foster family tried to keep us from visiting. I thought the
agreement was that we were working on getting these children placed back
with us, but the foster family kept trying to block our visits. DSS
representatives warned me: “You’re going to have a battle on your hands —
the foster family wants to adopt these children.”
I kept
thinking, “I need to do something about this, because I’m going to lose
my nephews.” I talked to someone I knew on our tribal council and then
to our tribal president and told them what was going on. I told them I
was afraid I was going to lose my nephews, because we were coming down
to the wire, and the foster family got a lawyer to try to keep our
nephews from us. They even tried to argue that my oldest nephew was not
an enrolled tribal member, which would have made him ineligible for
protection under ICWA. If that had happened, the foster family would
have been able to adopt him right away. But thankfully, my brother did
fill out tribal enrollment papers for my older nephew years ago — it
turned out that DSS just had never turned them into the court.
Our
tribal president ended up hiring a lawyer to help me fight for my
nephews and we went to court. ICWA ended up saving us. If one of my
nephews was not a Native American child, a non-Native person would have
been able to adopt them without any question, and I would have lost
them. But after a three and a half year battle, I was finally able to
legally adopt my nephews under ICWA.
My two nephews are now 8 and
4 years old. Once we were reunited, I felt relieved, like a lot of
pressure was taken off my shoulders. I was happy that the fight was
finally over and that we could finally just live our lives. I want to
help more people to understand ICWA and to tell them to not give up. If I
didn’t talk to somebody and try to get help, they would have been gone.
But I fought and fought and never gave up. It makes you think — how
many more people, how many children who are sacred to Native American
people, do you think we lost like that, in this system?
My
nephews love me for what I’ve done because now they know a lot about
powwows, everything to do with the tribe, and our ancestors. Before,
they didn’t know any of that. They didn’t know what a powwow was. They
didn’t know what fry bread was, or what Indian tacos were. But they do
now. Now, they can have a better understanding of their culture and
where they came from.
If ICWA was not put in place, I would have
lost my nephews. The ICWA guidelines are important, but the state has to
follow them. When my nephews were first placed in the system, my tribe
was supposed to be involved from the get go, but they weren’t. Under
ICWA, it was the responsibility of a DSS worker to call our family and
tribe to let them know that these children were placed in a foster home
with non-Native American families, but that didn’t happen. Our tribe
needs to know that these children are in this system. And they should
have known about it a long time ago.
If ICWA was not put in place, I would have lost my nephews.
When
government workers don’t follow the ICWA guidelines, it hurts our
people by allowing our children to be adopted out to other families and
away from their tribe. ICWA is there to protect us, and DSS needs to do
more to help these Native American children be placed back with their
families.
ICWA helps us keep our children with their families
like they should be. Our children need to stay with us, and we need to
keep our families together.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment.