Story here.
Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services is looking into a Tulsa adoption agency.
Heritage Family Services and its director Mike Nomura are contracted with the state to administer a report that’s done for every case where a child is adopted across state lines.
The chairman of the board for Heritage Family Services is the attorney who represented Matt and Melanie Capobianco as they fought for custody of Veronica Brown.
Not Native children specific, but an issue we’ve been talking about internally for some time. It’s a nice piece by Sarah Alverez with an interview with Vivek Sankaran.
Here.
Moss has not seen her grandsons since they were removed from her care and placed with another relative in a different city. She blames the system, and she knows the system blames her. This deep mistrust is common in child welfare cases, says Vivek Sankaran, a lawyer and a law professor who runs a child welfare legal clinic in Detroit.
“You’re not going to change the child welfare system until you have parents and relatives viewed as partners in this process with the child welfare agency,” he said.
Sankaran has said for years that what could make these care givers more equal partners is a good lawyer working on behalf of the parents and relatives. All the lawyer jokes we’ve ever heard might make that suggestion seem counter intuitive.
But judges, sections of the Michigan State bar, and parents have long said more lawyers are needed. Without them, Sankaran says it’s hard to know if the decisions being made, serious decisions about whether to separate a family or not, are the right ones.
Here.
[¶46] The ICWA director of the Round Valley Indian Tribes explained the father’s relationship with the tribe:
[The father] and his children are eligible for enrollment with the Round Valley Indian Tribes.
When the children were removed from the care of the parents [the father] was not an enrolled member with the Round Valley Indian Tribes, ICWA did not apply.
[The father] is still not an enrolled member with the Round Valley Indian Tribes, ICWA does not apply.
. . . .
This is the parent(s) responsibility to apply for enrollment with the Round Valley Indian Tribes during open enrollment.
This is a big week at Michigan State. Our Spring Speakers event is this Thursday at 2pm in the Castle Board Room at MSU Law. The 1491s will be on campus Friday.
Here.
It is clear from the record that the trial court had information, however slight, “suggesting that [a] child, a parent of [a] child, or members of a parent’s family are tribal members,” which was one of the five situations the Supreme Court listed as “sufficient to trigger tribal notice.” In re Morris, 491 Mich at 108 n 18. Specifically, respondent’s attorney informed the court that “there might be some [Indian ancestry] on the grandmother’s side.” Because it is for the tribes to determine a child’s eligibility for membership, In re Fried, 266 Mich App 535, 540; 702 NW2d 192 (2005), the trial court clearly erred when it found that the possibility of Indian heritage in a great-grandmother of one or more of the minor children was too remote to justify the notice required by the ICWA and MCL 712B.9(1).
Press release here (pdf) and here.
Details here.
WASHINGTON – Three American Indian tribes – the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona, the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, and the Umatilla Tribes of Oregon – will be the first in the nation to exercise special criminal jurisdiction over certain crimes of domestic and dating violence, regardless of the defendant’s Indian or non-Indian status, under a pilot project authorized by the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (VAWA 2013).
Here, from NICWA, NCAI, NARF, and AAIA:
The undersigned American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) organizations request that the Civil
Rights Division of the Department of Justice commences a prompt investigation into the unlawful treatment of
AI/AN children in the private adoption and public child welfare systems throughout the United States.***
Yet, despite all the protections provided by ICWA, each year thousands of parents, grandparents, aunties,
uncles, and child advocates reach out to the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) desperate for
help. Their rights under ICWA and the Constitution continue to be violated by state child welfare and private
adoption systems. NICWA frequently hears stories of adoption agencies ignoring the tribal membership of
children, of state attorneys failing to provide notice to a tribe when a child is taken into custody, of child
welfare workers sometimes knowingly placing children outside ICWA’s placement preferences, and of judges
denying tribal representatives a presence in the court room. NICWA also often hears stories of Guardians ad
Litem scoffing at the importance of Native culture, state workers demeaning AI/AN parents and traditional
ways of parenting, and attorneys using professional networks to encourage other attorneys to purposefully
circumvent the “ridiculous” or “unnecessary” adoption requirements of ICWA.
New Mexico Legal Aid Santa Ana Staff Attorney Native American Program 2014
Eastern Band Cherokee Legal Counsel
MI AG:
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We’re very much looking forward to this event. Please join us.
Turtle Talk 
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