THIS WEEK’S PODCAST
A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided
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Reveal illustration; Charles Deluvio/Unsplash; Dukas/Universal/Getty
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In
2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in
Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview
with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a
startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of
that child.
He
describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his
connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At
the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the
child.
That
video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became
the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the
adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect
Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of
non-Native families.
This
week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the
story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it
circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some
of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was
taken from them.
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🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dig Deeper
Read: ‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’ (The Cut)
Read: Forever Home (Mother Jones)
Listen: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (Radiolab)
Listen: This Land podcast
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