American Indian Quarterly

Rebecca Webster on Service Agreement Payment Formulas for Tribal Trust Lands on the Oneida Reservation

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Rebecca M. Webster has published “Service Agreements: Exploring Payment Formulas for Tribal Trust Lands on the Oneida Reservation” in the American Indian Quarterly.

Here is the abstract:

Many tribal governments throughout the US struggle with developing and maintaining positive relationships with other governments that have overlapping boundaries. Sometimes a tribe and other governments are able to strike an accord and realize a wide array of ways their respective governments can complement each other in order to provide the best services to their shared communities. Other times tribal and local governments find themselves tied up in litigation and negative public relations campaigns due to their inability to find a way to peacefully coexist. The Oneida Reservation has a unique history leading to checkerboard landownership patterns and the presence of tribal and local governments providing varying levels of government services. With respect to tribal trust land, the Oneida Tribe and local governments have been working together for the past two decades to find equitable ways to recognize each other’s government services through service agreements.

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Prof. Karen Tani Writes About “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child'” in Light of Adoptive Couple at Jotwell

Kate Fort

Here.

These revelations are sure to disturb any reader, but the point of Jacobs’s important article is not to expose adoption proponents as disingenuous or malevolent. It is to place an ongoing phenomenon—Indian children’s disproportionately high rate of separation from their families—in proper historical context. (P. 154.) “It is no coincidence,” Jacobs writes, “that the IAP arose during the era in which the federal government promoted termination [of tribal nations’ special status] and relocation policies for American Indians.” (P. 152.) Adoptions enabled the federal government to terminate its responsibilities, child by child, by shifting them to “the ultimate ‘private’ sector.” (P.154.) By extension, Jacobs argues, adoptive families also advanced the government’s long-term “effort[] to eliminate Indianness.” (P. 154.) This, Jacobs demonstrates, was the backdrop for the ICWA. When tribal leaders and advocacy organizations convinced Congress to enact the new law, it was a small victory in a long war. And when plaintiffs invoke the ICWA today, they raise a hard-won shield.

We agree that Margaret Jacobs “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s” 37 American Indian Quarterly 136 (2013) is an excellent and important article.

New Scholarship on the “American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher2 Comments

Margaret D. Jacobs has published “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s” in the American Indian Quarterly. Email me for a pdf.

Here is an excerpt:

On Christmas Day 1975, Marcia Marie Summers was born to Charlene Summers, a member and resident of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in North Dakota. A few months later, a white couple from Indiana approached the young mother and offered to care for her infant while Summers attended school. (Just two months before, the couple had filed an adoption petition in the Standing Rock Tribal Court for another Indian child, but the court had denied their request.) Assuming she was making a temporary arrangement, Summers agreed and signed a document giving the Indiana couple power of attorney over Marcia Marie in parent-child-related actions. Immediately, the couple departed with the baby from the reservation and returned to Indiana. Summers realized that the couple intended to permanently adopt her daughter, so she asked the Standing Rock Tribal Court to intervene. When the couple ignored the tribal court’s order to return the child to her mother, Summers and tribal authorities requested the help of the Association on American Indian Affairs ( AAIA). Their attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus on Summers’s behalf in the Washington County, Indiana, Circuit Court, and the judge ordered Marcia Marie returned to her mother, noting the tribe’s exclusive jurisdiction in the case.

Like Summers, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of other American Indian parents, grandparents, and caretakers suffered the removal of their children and their placement in non-Indian foster or adoptive homes. Unlike Summers, however, many Indian families struggled for years to regain their children, and some were never able to effect their return. By the late 1960s, many Indian tribes had become deeply troubled by this practice. In 1968, having endured an inordinate number of such cases, the Devils Lake (now Spirit Lake) Sioux Tribe of North Dakota requested that the AAIA conduct an investigation into the practice. The AAIA found that of 1,100 Devils Lake Sioux Indians under twenty-one years of age living on the Fort Totten reservation, 275, or 25 percent, had been separated from their families. Suspecting that this practice devastated other Indian communities as well, the AAIA engaged in a painstaking process to amass similar data from state social services agencies and private placement agencies across the nation. They discovered that in most states with large American Indian populations, 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families and placed in foster or adoptive homes or in institutions at a per capita rate far higher than that of non-Indian children.

How did it come to pass that the fostering and adoption of Indian children outside their families and communities had reached these crisis proportions by the late 1960s? State welfare authorities and Bureau of Indian Affairs ( BIA) officials alleged a dramatic rise in unmarried Indian mothers with unwanted children and claimed that many Indian individuals and families lacked the resources and skills to properly care for their own children. Claiming to be concerned with the best interests of the Indian child, the BIA promoted the increased fostering and adoption of Indian children in non-Indian families. Indian families and their advocates charged instead that many social workers were using ethnocentric and middle-class criteria to unnecessarily remove Indian children from their families and communities. Through creating their own child welfare organizations and legal codes, as well as working for the Indian Child Welfare Act ( ICWA), Indian activists and their allies sought to bring Indian child welfare under the control of Indian nations.

Schaap on the Growth of Indian Gaming

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

James Schaap has published The Growth of the Native American Gaming Industry: What Has the Past Provided, and What Does the Future Hold? (Schaap on the Growth of Indian Gaming) in the American Indian Quarterly. Here is a quick excerpt:

What can we say about the phenomenal growth of the Native American gaming industry? In order to evaluate the industry’s development we first need to consider its economic, social, and political history. Then, building on this foundation, it will be possible to predict, strictly from an observational perspective, what the future may hold for Native Americans.

Richard Loudbear on Indian Country Politics

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Richard Loudbear has published “Indian Country Politics: Theories of Operation and a Strategy for the Nonviolent Seizure of Political Power” in American Indian Quarterly. This provocative essay explores how the thought of Aldous Huxley and Machiavelli could be used for nonviolent tribal government coups (pun intended?).

loudbear-indian-country-politics