By Sasha Irby
On March 14 a delegation of leaders from a coalition of 325 tribal Nations came to New Orleans’ Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to defend the Indian Child Welfare Act against a legal challenge from the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing legal organization that works for ultra rich capitalists like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family. The Goldwater Institute supports lowering workers’ wages, privatizing schools, denying workers healthcare, and opposing any regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Now they have the audacity to claim to be champion of civil rights. They allege that ICWA is a form of ‘race’ based discrimination because the federal law privileges the rights of Native people to adopt their own children over the adoption rights of non-Native families. This “civil rights” challenge is a cynical smoke-screen: by attempting to reduce the people of the many Indigenous Nations to a mere race, they aim to diminish Native people’s sovereign claims to their own children, their own governments, and their own land. The capitalists who are heading up the challenge to ICWA are eager to get their hands on the land and resources currently under the political control of Indigenous Nations.
The idea that right-wing advocacy groups are fighting against ICWA because they feel that it is ethically unjust is an insult to those who know the painful history that necessitated the law’s creation. IWCA was passed in 1978 to help stop the widespread kidnapping of Native children from their families by state and federal agencies. These children were then “adopted” into non-Indigenous households. For over a century the United States government operated according to the genocidal philosophy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Governmental policies sought to assimilate Native children into white society by removing them from their families, elders, and communities and placing them with white families or forcibly sending them to boarding schools to be stripped of their language, culture, spiritual practices, and identity. Even after the boarding school era, Native children were torn from their families at an alarming rate. Before the passing of ICWA, up to 1 in 3 Indigenous children were adopted into non-Native households.
ICWA is vital for the future of Indigenous Nations, and attempting to dismantle the law is a direct attack on the sovereignty of our peoples. Children remaining in families of their own tribal membership allow them access to their culture, their lifeways, and – key for maintaining tribal sovereignty – their tribal citizenship. The destruction of Indigenous sovereignty has always been the goal of imperial project of the colonizers. By leaving our children vulnerable to forced removal from their Nations, you strip that child of access to their identity and their part in their Nation’s future. By stealing the children, you drain the lifeblood of our Nations. Our tribal cohesion crumbles and eventually our numbers dwindle and we die out. Without our children, our future is written in sand.