Our Children/Our Future: Examining How Indigenous Peoples in the US Assert Self-Determination and Prioritize Child Wellbeing

Abstract

Our children are our future. As noted in the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), “There is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children”. Native Americans have always fought for and prioritized child wellbeing and will continue to strive for self-determination. Primarily focusing on Indigenous people in the area now known as the United States, this article first discusses the historical underpinnings of Native American experiences in child welfare systems and the ways Native Americans have historically exercised self-determination in child protection matters, including resistance to boarding schools and child removal, and strategies to retain authority with ICWA. Next, it offers examples of exerting self-determination to repair past harms of child welfare systems and relational severance, and prevent future harms, through efforts involving truth and reconciliation, homecoming ceremonies, child-environment reconnection and protection, legal systems, and social work education initiatives. Centering content in ways that are relevant for Indigenous Peoples, it then explores how child welfare systems can be transformed to ensure Native Peoples’ rights to raise our children within our families, cultures, and communities, with emphases on cultural strengths and relational understandings.

1. Introduction

Our children are our future. They are essential to the continuity and wellbeing of Indigenous cultures and nations. It is for this very reason that they have been, and continue to be, targeted by colonial forces as the most expedient means to subjugate and forcibly assimilate Native Peoples and take the land. This essay focuses on Indigenous people in the United States. However, we recognize that colonial borders are artificial divisions that severed Indigenous Territories, communities, and families, and that these imposed boundaries have had relevance historically in matters of Indigenous child removal and continue to have bearing on the lives of Indigenous people who were displaced from their homes through child welfare systems. Therefore, we incorporate broader examples when relevant, to explore how the child welfare system undermines Indigenous Peoples, and how Native Americans have always fought for and prioritized child wellbeing. The essay provides examples and explores opportunities for transforming systems and ensuring our rights to raise our children within our families, cultures, and communities are honored.

First Peoples in the United States use a variety of terms to refer to themselves in collective (Weaver 2001; Yellow Bird 1999). To honor these diverse preferences, we incorporated multiple terms (e.g., Alaska Native, American Indian, Indigenous, Native, Native American) into this essay. We also use the terms Indian and Tribe/Tribal for consistency with legal and government language.

2. Foundations and Continuum of Native American Experiences in Child Welfare Systems and Social Worker Involvement

The child welfare system is a tool of colonization and cultural destruction. Communal Indigenous societies were seen as uncivilized and antithetical to individualistic American values including capitalism and private property ownership. The fact that Indigenous Nations largely remained intact despite colonial onslaughts, rather than disintegrating and their members readily integrating into American society, was deemed problematic. Thus, through so-called civilizing projects, Native Americans were subjected to a series of continuous removals, beginning with separations from lands, then from families and communities with children taken to carceral boarding schools, and ongoing separation and removal into the child welfare system; all forms of colonial violence that promote assimilation and foster an on-going climate of fear of removal (Waubanascum and Sarche 2023). It is also imperative to name the genocide constituted by polices that involve “forcibly transferring children” (United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948, art. II, § e), or “forcibly removing children” (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, art. 7, § 2), of one nation or ethnic group to another group.

The federal policies were implemented by governmental, private, and religious institutions, and social workers played key roles in their execution (National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA] 2021; Weaver et al. 2021). Despite espoused values of social justice, social workers have functioned as agents of social control, reinforcing colonial norms and values (Weaver et al. 2021). Working within colonial structures and guided by colonial policies, social workers have facilitated removal of Native children from their communities, promoted assimilation into the dominant culture, undermined and devalued Indigenous practices of caring and childrearing, and pathologized and depicted Native families as deficient and Native children in need of rescuing (Weaver et al. 2021).

2.1. Boarding School System

Being Indigenous has always been problematized in the United States, and eradication of Indigenous nations and ethnicities was/is the intended solution to this problem. The Meriam Report, formally titled The Problem of Indian Administration, stated that the policy of removing Native children from their homes and confining them in boarding schools for years, often far from their families and communities, was long continued under the belief that “the shortest road to civilization is to take children away from their parents and insofar as possible to stamp out the old Indian life” (Meriam 1928, p. 15). Prior to a formalized child welfare system, many Native American children were placed in boarding schools, which were common in the United States from the 1860s through World War II with some operating into the 1970s (Weaver et al. 2021). A recent federal inquiry into these boarding schools documented that removing Indigenous children from their families was a targeted strategy to destroy Indigenous cultures, thus creating opportunities to take the land (Newland 2022, 2024).

Social workers and their professional predecessors promoted boarding schools to redeem Native children, making them into Christian citizens who could participate in the American labor force as farmers and domestics (Waubanascum and Sarche 2023; Weaver et al. 2021). Indigenous families were often threatened or coerced to surrender their children to the boarding schools or face the loss of food and shelter (National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA] 2021).

These institutions attempted to strip children of their cultures, languages, spiritual traditions, and family connections, leaving families and communities with no role in how their children were raised; acts that created and compounded a legacy of intergenerational trauma (National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA] 2021; Weaver et al. 2021). Moreover, many children died from “inadequate food and medical care, hard labour, torture, and murder” (Engel et al. 2012, p. 285). Intergenerational effects among survivors’ children and grandchildren include greater incidence of stressors and adverse childhood experiences, with higher-level consequences including depression, suicidality, and child welfare system involvement (Bombay et al. 2011, 2014, 2020).

2.2. Indian Adoption Era and Child Removal

Transitioning from boarding schools, the Indian Adoption Project (IAP) and Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), which placed Indigenous children in non-Indigenous adoptive homes from 1958 to 1978, were more economical and became more socially acceptable to mainstream society than massive removal of children to distant boarding schools (Balcom 2007; Thibeault and Spencer 2019). Since the close bonds of extended Indigenous family networks and Indigenous cultural identity were seen as hinderances to civilizing and assimilating Native people, severing these connections was considered a pathway to a better life and a solution to the long-standing Indian problem (Jacobs 2013). The IAP and ARENA were thought to offer a “bold, progressive policy to help provide healing and permanency to Indigenous children… [keeping them] from their parents, relatives, and tribal communities in an effort to destroy cultural identity” (National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA] 2021, p. 1).

Removal of Native children into adoption was articulated in paternalistic language as rescuing them from dire life circumstances including abject poverty and backwards living conditions, continuing the long-standing policy of forced assimilation while forcibly and coercively transferring babies from their Indigenous families to meet the growing demand of White families wanting to adopt (Thibeault and Spencer 2019; Weaver et al. 2021). Deficit narratives included stereotypical depictions of unfit mothers and unwanted children, and the assertion that reservations were unsuitable for habitation. In an example from the 1970s, “social workers asserted that, although they had no evidence that the mother was unfit, it was their belief that an Indian reservation is an unsuitable environment for a child” (de Bourbon 2013, p. 150).

While social workers often justified removals by poverty-related conditions such as overcrowding and neglect, parents reported they used deception and high-pressure tactics to take children (Thibeault and Spencer 2019; Weaver et al. 2021). Between 1941 and 1967, social workers removed 25–35% of American Indian children from their homes with as many as 85% of these being placed in White homes or institutions (Thibeault and Spencer 2019; Weaver et al. 2021). Similar tactics were used to take and adopt-out Native Hawaiian children, with the large military presence of highly mobile families in the state exacerbating the risk that children would be taken far away from their communities and cultures (Weaver et al. 2021). While the damage done to Indigenous children and families was not always ill-intended, the paternalistic, child rescuing mindset that fueled massive child removals was far from benign.

2.3. Contemporary Child Welfare System

More than 40 years after the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA 1978) enactment (see Section 3.2), which ended the Indian Adoption Era, Indigenous children continue to be overrepresented in the US child welfare system (Haight et al. 2019), and this disproportionality reflects systems that criminalize Indigenous people rather than supporting families (Chase and Ullrich 2022). Furthermore, the damage done to Indigenous families, communities, and nations continues in contemporary child welfare practices that mirror other colonial entities, framing problems within individuals rather than colonial structures (Waubanascum and Sarche 2023).

A recent study of Indigenous relative caregivers within the child welfare system documented ongoing coloniality rooted in a legacy of control over gender and family (Waubanascum and Sarche 2023). These relatives provided evidence that the child welfare system continues to practice forced removal and separation of children from their families and nations, imposes the modern colonial gender system, and perpetuates colonial violence through negligence, invasion, punishment, and racism. They also described the child welfare system as a “colonial stressor” that “triggers historical trauma” (p. 354). Finally, they indicated that Tribal child welfare systems perpetuate “internalized oppression, [and] colonization” (p. 358).

2.4. Continuum and Continuance

Past policies and practices have created intergenerational losses and disruptions in Indigenous cultures, traditions, customs, and extended families that continue to impact Native American communities (National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA] 2021). Functioning as oppressive structures of power and control using judgment and intimidation, the boarding school, adoption, and contemporary child welfare systems have successively exploited Native children for labor and subjected them to multiple forms of abuse with equivalent intergenerational repercussions for Native families and communities (Engel et al. 2012; Landers et al. 2021; Landers et al. 2023; Waubanascum and Sarche 2023). “Understanding this history reveals the current child welfare system as a mutation of past assimilative federal projects and policies and confronts its colonial complicity” (Waubanascum and Sarche 2023, p. 346).

3. History of Self-Determination in Child Welfare Matters

Despite the onslaught of assimilationist policies and programs, Indigenous worldviews that value and prioritize the wellbeing of children and shared caretaking roles persist (Haight et al. 2019). Native Americans have always fought for their children and families, exercising self-determination in many ways, beginning with calling attention to injustices that threatened their wellbeing. Detrimental policies and practices have been exposed and challenged by Indigenous activists. Examples include the advocacy leading to the 2001 apology from the Child Welfare League of America for their role in the widespread removal of Native American children from their families, and the 2021 Council on Social Work Education’s Statement of Accountability and Reconciliation for Harms Done to Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (Weaver et al. 2021). These acknowledgements of harm are notably decades apart and despite these milestones, harm, including disproportionate child removals, are on-going. Additional acts of resistance through the continuum of Indigenous child protection are described below.

3.1. Resistance to Boarding Schools

Families often resisted children being taken from their care and placed in boarding schools. At times, this resistance came at great cost. For example, in 1895, 19 men who refused to relinquish their children to attend boarding school were arrested and incarcerated for a year on Alcatraz Island (de Bourbon 2013).

Student resistance to forced assimilation at boarding schools took many forms, most notably running away in attempts to return to their families (Engel et al. 2012; Klotz 2021). Other forms of resistance included hunger strikes (Klotz 2021), committing arson, and engaging in passive aggressive behaviors (Engel et al. 2012). Students also defied prohibitions on speaking their languages, risking severe punishment. As a form of covert communication, Carlisle students used pictographic writing on slates to represent their experiences (Klotz 2021). Additionally, a form of sign language common on the Southern Plains allowed students to communicate with each other using a method beyond teachers’ understanding (Klotz 2021). Teachers viewed this communication as a primitive tool that would be abandoned as students’ English skills improved, but a recent analysis of student writing reveals students employed it to circumvent the English-only policy (Klotz 2021).

Boarding schools were not just locations of trauma but of long-standing resistance. Intertribal connections made at boarding schools sowed the seeds of future intertribal organizations, resistance, and activism, from the founding of the Society of American Indians in 1911 to the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Klotz 2021). Indigenous resistance to boarding schools and related advocacy efforts helped lead to their discontinuation (Hahn et al. 2020).

3.2. Resistance to Child Removal Including ICWA Enactment

Native American families have demonstrated clear and consistent resistance to having their children taken into child welfare systems. When parents are unable to care for their children, there are many examples of relatives, including those undefined as such according to Western family conceptualizations, assuming caregiving responsibilities, even when this results in significant hardships, to prevent young family members from entering foster care (Weaver 2019; Waubanascum and Sarche 2023). Native Americans have created their own child welfare organizations, and Tribal legal codes (National Indian Law Library 2015), to strengthen their ability to resist having their children taken into dominant society systems and have also sought remedies through US legal channels when Native children were taken by White families for adoption without consent (Jacobs 2013).

Resisting child removal also could come at a great cost as families were sometimes harassed by police, threatened with imprisonment, having food withheld, or losing their driver’s license. For example, “Elsie Greywind was jailed several times, explicitly because she refused to hand over her grandchildren to foster care. She stated, ‘I’ll starve before I’ll give up my grandchildren’” (de Bourbon 2013, p. 154). Rather than an isolated incident, there is a long history of threatening and incarcerating Native Americans who refuse to relinquish the children in their care (de Bourbon 2013).

Native women led the fight against removal of their children, joined by social workers and community activists, to raise the alarm about disproportionate removal of Native American children into the child welfare system (de Bourbon 2013; Jacobs 2013; Weaver et al. 2021). In 1974 and 1977, Native American parents, adoptees, and allies testified in a series of hearings in the House and Senate using national studies to highlight the devastating statistics and describing their personal experiences of the impact of the loss of Native children on their families and communities (Weaver et al. 2021). “During Congressional debates, advocates challenged the racialized logics used in child welfare practice. They asserted that federal policy should honor the unique, sovereign status of tribes and ensure tribes could assume jurisdiction over child welfare cases involving their eligible members” (Brown 2020, p. 781).

Protests and media attention highlighted how child removal led to cultural losses for both individuals and communities (de Bourbon 2013; Engel et al. 2012). In her Congressional testimony, Mrs. Alex Fournier, a grandmother from Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota, described how she persuaded her Tribal council to pass a resolution against removing her grandson, an action that infuriated the County Welfare Department. They retaliated and canceled her benefits and those of other Tribal members, withholding monies from Native American foster parents to apply pressure, forcing them to relinquish their children (de Bourbon 2013). This and similar examples brought national attention to Native American child removals taking place on a massive scale under dubious circumstances, laying the groundwork for passage of ICWA in 1978 (Weaver et al. 2021). “The fight for ICWA represents one of the most fierce and successful battles for Indian self-determination of the 1970s, it took place at kitchen tables and in community centers, courtrooms, and the halls of Congress” (Jacobs 2013, p. 138).

ICWA, which applies to children who are enrolled in a federally recognized Tribe or the biological child of a Tribal citizen and personally eligible for enrollment, affirmed Tribal authority over foster care, pre-adoptive, and adoptive placements for these children and the termination of parental rights (ICWA 1978). It includes requirements for Tribal notification and case transfer of child welfare proceedings arriving in state courts and qualified expert witness testimony about likely outcomes of continued parental custody (ICWA 1978; Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] 2016). It also prioritizes out-of-home placements with (1) an extended family member; (2) another member of the child’s Tribe or foster home licensed or approved by the Tribe; (3) another Indian family or Indian foster home; or (4) an institution approved by the Tribe that can meet the child’s needs (ICWA 1978).

ICWA is considered the ‘gold standard’ of child welfare practice, prioritizing family and cultural preservation by requiring that child welfare workers make active efforts, not just reasonable efforts, before removing children (Waubanascum and Sarche 2023, p. 344). While centering child welfare, ICWA is a crucial recognition of Indigenous self-determination on a broader scale, affirming sovereignty as a guiding tenant of federal law:

In ICWA, Congress affirmed Tribal authority to protect American Indian children through their own laws, courts, and services. It recognized that Tribal courts are of commensurate standing to state courts. ICWA established minimum standards for states to follow in issues of custody and adoptions, giving tribes the right to intervene in state court proceedings as full parties. In an extraordinary acknowledgment of Tribal sovereign authority for the time, ICWA provided protection to all tribal citizens no matter where they resided. As such, ICWA served as a catalyst for subsequent legislation that further restored the capacity of tribes to govern themselves and reinforced the era of self-determination for tribal nations.

(Cross 2014, p. 24)

3.3. Retention of Authority with ICWA

While ICWA supports sovereignty and is designed to protect Native American children, Tribes, and cultures, it has never been adequately implemented, and its opponents consistently challenge this important federal law. Advocacy for its protection takes multiple forms. For example, Indigenous adoptees and the families that they were removed from continue to tell their stories, recounting the devastating consequences of the Indian Adoption Era and calling attention to on-going harms of disproportionate child removal that continue in Indigenous communities (Landers et al. 2023; Linjean and Semanchin Jones 2024; Simpson et al. 2023).

Coverage under ICWA is based on eligibility for Tribal citizenship. Tribal Nations self-determine their own citizenship eligibility criteria, such as having a minimum Tribal blood quantum or lineal descendancy from someone on the Tribe’s base roll/original list of members (U.S. Department of Interior n.d.). In the United States, many issues are viewed along racial lines, thus the distinct legal status of Indigenous people and Tribal Nations is frequently ignored or misunderstood. Erroneous assessment of ICWA cases through a racialization lens has resulted in ICWA breaches among state agencies and erosion of the law via legal precedents (Brown 2020). For example, the Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013) ruling, which held ICWA was inapplicable in the case of an unmarried Cherokee father trying to retain custody of his daughter, because he had been the non-custodial parent, was entangled with “an unsettled preoccupation with race” (Beardall 2016, p. 128). The US Supreme Court’s decision repeatedly referenced the child’s limited blood quantum despite the father’s Cherokee Nation enrollment, which requires lineal descendancy but not a minimum Tribal blood quantum (Cherokee Nation n.d.).

There has been continued resistance to policing Indigenous authenticity in the face of such narrow legal interpretations of ICWA by the Supreme Court. Toward promoting appropriate interpretation and application of ICWA and preventing judicial rulings that diverge from its intent, in 2016, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issued new regulations that are legally binding on state courts (Indian Child Welfare Act Proceedings Final Rule 2016). They require that unwed fathers with acknowledged paternity be notified of child custody proceedings (Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] 2016). They also prohibit consideration of whether a parent ever had child custody; the child’s Native blood quantum; or child/parent participation in Tribal activities, when determining ICWA applicability, and clarify that any bonding or attachment developed during a non-preferred placement made in violation of ICWA cannot be the sole reason to depart from ICWA placement preferences (Indian Child Welfare Act Proceedings Final Rule 2016).

Yet attempts to overturn ICWA have continued. In the recent Haaland v. Brackeen (2023) ruling, the US Supreme Court upheld ICWA’s constitutionality against a multi-pronged attack. However, the claim alleging that ICWA’s placement preferences are race-based, thus violating the Fifteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, was dismissed on the technicality that the plaintiffs lacked standing. With the door left open to a plaintiff with standing, and continued corporate efforts to derail Tribal sovereignty, there is reason to anticipate future legal challenges that erroneously frame ICWA as a race-based law (Gilio-Whitaker 2024). Linjean and Weaver (2022) offer resources and strategies for following new developments and taking action to protect Native children, families, and Nations by upholding ICWA. As Terry Cross, a Seneca social worker and founder of the National Indian Child Welfare Association implored,

It is time to send a message of our own to those who would target our children for removal…Stop violating ICWA for personal gain and profit. As American Indian people, we will bring the darkness of such acts into the light to protect our children. We will continue to advocate that ICWA, the federal law whose protections we are guaranteed as citizens of the United States and of sovereign tribal nations, is enforced. We will hold accountable those who believe they can violate it without consequence. … Indian Country is prepared to do everything in its power to see that ICWA continues to remain the law of the land. Too much is at stake to do anything less.

(Cross 2014, p. 24)

4. Repairing Past Harms and Preventing Future Harms

It is vital to think intergenerationally about child protection with a vision to heal past harms as a means of mitigating the repercussions for future generations. Examples of Native Peoples’ assertion of self-determination in these areas involve truth and reconciliation, homecoming ceremonies, child-environment reconnection and protection links, legal systems, and social work education initiatives.

4.1. Truth and Reconciliation

Promotion of truth and reconciliation occurs at multiple levels, including the child welfare system, the social work education system that prepares child welfare workers, and family and community. For example, the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first TRC within the United States collaboratively developed in government-to-government partnership to focus on matters of Indigenous child protection. It specifically focused on the period after ICWA enactment when Maine child welfare workers were continuing to discriminate against Wabanaki child welfare workers and leave them out of processes for protecting their children (Attean et al. 2012). Its goals were to develop common understandings of the historic and continued circumstances for Wabanaki children in the Maine child welfare system and their families; acknowledge these as a collective, generational trauma; act on TRC findings to improve the child welfare system and its practices; and promote healing for Wabanaki communities (Attean et al. 2012). To realize these goals, it was deemed imperative that the voices of Wabanaki people affected by the child welfare system be heard (Bjorum 2014). The TRC resulted in 14 recommendations including those that center Wabanaki sovereignty, healing methods, and cultural resurgence. Specific recommendations to expand protections for Native children and strengthen ICWA compliance included cultural awareness and bias trainings for settler social services, legal, and judicial systems; supports that help non-Native foster and adoptive families keep Native children tied to their cultures; policy and dedicated staffing to monitor ICWA compliance; expanding Tribal courts; and continued promotion of truth telling, including via settler education systems (Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015).

Social workers and other human service professionals have played significant roles in disrupting Native American families. Social work education must take the lead in breaking this cycle of cultural loss. The second author of this essay facilitates the Indigenous and Tribal Social Work Educators Association (ITSWEA), a collective of Indigenous educators, students, and allies. Seeing statements by the Canadian Association of Social Workers and the Canadian Association for Social Work Education acknowledging social workers’ role in colonization and on-going harms to Indigenous people, she reached out to ITSWEA membership and began discussions about creating similar statements in the United States.

A small working group of ITSWEA members discussed the merits of an apology, one member having been present in 2001 at the powerful moment when the Child Welfare League of America apologized for their organization’s pivotal role in taking Native children from their families. We determined that we wanted something beyond an apology that could be a resource with clear undisputable, documented examples of harm, past and present, caused by social workers. The resource, referred to here as the Accountability Statement, was designed to equip social work educators to teach about past harm and raise awareness that would prevent future harm.

Acknowledging injustice provides validation and recognizes the disenfranchised grief of those who have been harmed. It is cathartic and promotes healing. Professional organizations’ acknowledgment of wrongdoing will help build trust and help build stronger, more effective helping relationships between Indigenous and Tribal people and social workers. It is the first step in reconciliation. Acknowledgment is powerful, transformative, and a prerequisite to accountability. True recognition of how we have contributed to oppression can minimize the risk of ongoing wrongs.

(Weaver et al. 2021, p. 5)

The Accountability Statement was written by ITSWEA members, supported by historical research conducted by social work students, and drew from the expertise of additional Indigenous social workers for content in areas that went beyond the authors’ expertise. ITSWEA presented the completed statement to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Board of Directors who unanimously endorsed it in 2021. The Accountability Statement offers an overview of Indigenous Peoples within areas colonized by the United States, including the Caribbean and Pacific, followed by sections describing historical and contemporary interactions between social workers and Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, with much of the content highlighting child welfare practices. The Accountability Statement includes a call to action and specific commitments made by CSWE on behalf of the organization and its thousands of members, noting, “As social work educators we must engage across education, practice, and policy to repair past harms, eliminate current ones, and prevent future ones” (Weaver et al. 2021, p. 3). The Accountability Statement emphasizes that Indigenous people have never been passive victims, and this acknowledgement of harm should not be seen in that light.

Truth and reconciliation opportunities are also offered as part of healing at the family and community levels. The First Nations Repatriation Institute (FNRI) is a Native hub in the Minneapolis area. Its activities that support healing and belonging for Indigenous formerly fostered individuals and adoptees include a monthly talking circle for them and a Truth and Reconciliation Forum that includes them, birth families, foster/adoptive families, and community members (de Bourbon 2013).

4.2. Homecoming Ceremonies

Welcoming home those who were disconnected from their families, communities, cultures, and homelands through the child welfare system is another means of repairing harm as it can promote belonging for both those who are reconnecting and their descendants. Tribal Nations and urban Indigenous organizations are taking intentional steps in this direction. For example, the White Earth Nation in Minnesota and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota have held or supported homecoming ceremonies for relatives who were disconnected via child welfare system involvement (Ecoffey 2015; Gunderson 2007; Landers et al. 2015). Another of FNRI’s activities is the annual Gathering for Our Children powwow intended to enfold formerly fostered individuals and adoptees back into the circle with honor and welcome songs (de Bourbon 2013). Both reconnecting adoptees and their children have benefitted from participating, describing it as “healing” (White Hawk Strong n.d., para. 10) and “life changing” (Pretends Eagle Weber n.d., para. 2).

4.3. Child-Environment Reconnection and Protection

The relationships critical to repairing past harms and preventing future ones for Indigenous children and families extend to more-than-human relations. Land-based healing initiatives, for example, take an expansive, integrated approach to reconnection and relational restoration (Redvers 2020). Like boarding school survivors and other Indigenous people who have been disconnected from their families, communities, and homelands (Fast et al. 2021; Johnson-Jennings et al. 2020), formerly fostered individuals and adoptees can find land-based practices and interventions to be meaningful paths to healing and cultural reclamation (Boldo et al. 2021; Spears 2023b). These initiatives take various forms (Ahmed et al. 2021), including participant involvement in the restoration of traditional food practices or food sovereignty (Burnette et al. 2018).

One exemplary land-based relational restoration initiative is the Culturally Relevant Urban Wellness (CRUW) program at xʷc̓ic̓əsəm Garden (the Indigenous Health Research and Education Garden) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Farm on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam First Nation) territory in Vancouver. CRUW incorporates xʷməθkʷəy̓əm land-based methodologies as reconnecting and relationally and culturally restorative practices for urban Indigenous youth transitioning from the provincial foster care system to independent living (Grant et al. 2021). The program was founded with the aim of taking a decolonial approach to the Canadian child welfare system (Grant et al. 2021). It operates as a collaboration among the Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services Society, the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm, the Indigenous Research Partnerships in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, xʷc̓ic̓əsəm Garden, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm band members, and the Pacific Community Resources Society (Grant et al. 2021; University of British Columbia [UBC] n.d.). Understandings of food as medicine and the way individual and community wellness are derived from relationships with land and territory are woven into program components (Grant et al. 2021; University of British Columbia [UBC] n.d.). The components were developed by an Elders Advisory Circle and teach youth to participate in Indigenous food sovereignty and additional decolonization and self-determination movements toward improved lives for themselves, their families, and their communities (Grant et al. 2021). The land-based practices at CRUW facilitate understandings of the interconnectedness and interdependencies in participants’ environment and the universe, helping to heal disrupted kinships and promoting maintenance of good relations with everything, including self (Grant et al. 2021). More than 100 participants have graduated from CRUW, and some have gone on to participate in leadership and advocacy for Indigenous Peoples (Grant et al. 2021). While CRUW is based within Canadian borders, its success suggests that developing similar initiatives within the United States could help address the harms of child welfare involvement.

The ability of Indigenous Peoples to protect their natural environment and maintain cultural land-based practices is seldom part of child protection discussions among child welfare professionals, yet, because it is vital to Native child and family wellbeing (Spears 2023b), the siloing of children, families, culture, and the natural environment must end (Patterson 2023). As an illustration, the longstanding environmental racism that led to lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation for many Native communities was associated with their disproportionate experiences of COVID-19 impacts, including COVID-related deaths (Deschine Parkhurst et al. 2020; Mitchell 2020). Native children experienced the highest rate of COVID-related caregiver loss, which was 4.5 times that of White children (Hillis et al. 2021), with associated disparate increases in foster care entry as well as adverse exits (Thakral et al. 2024). For example, Diné children exiting foster care generally returned to the environmental contamination that contributed to the conditions used to justify their removal (Patterson 2023). On the other hand, healthy environmental conditions enable Indigenous children and their families to engage in traditional subsistence activities promoting intergenerational teaching/learning of food harvesting and processing, mentoring, shared memories, a nutritious diet, food sharing/gifting, and transmission of associated worldviews and values such as responsibility, relational accountability, and reciprocity (Gordon 2023a; Patterson 2023). In addition to promoting physical health, these activities forge social connectedness among family and community members, and maintain spirituality and ceremony participation, which are protective against mental health issues and substance use (Gordon 2023a).

Complicating the intertwined protections of Indigenous children and the land is the fact that most all the lands and waters in the United States, previously cared for by Indigenous Peoples for millennia, are now under ownership and management of the settler government (Gordon 2023a, 2023b). The forced transfer of land stewardship and exclusion of Indigenous Peoples from decision-making processes for land use have had devastating impacts (Spears 2023b). The federal government has ignored its treaty obligations to Indigenous Peoples, including for access to water (Patterson 2023), and allowed commercial hunting and fishing to contaminate the lands and waters, severely inhibiting subsistence practices and the protections of cultural continuity and contributing to widespread poverty (Gordon 2023b). Even as the loss of environmental stewardship has created conditions contributing to Indigenous child removal, ICWA is threatened by the very same forces responsible for environmental degradation. Specifically, the protection of ICWA has been tied to the way settler legal systems and contaminating settler industries have joined forces in sustained efforts to further their access to and control of the resources on Tribal lands (Linjean and Weaver 2022; Patterson 2023).

To protect the wellbeing of Indigenous children and ensure they are raised in safe, healthy, culturally congruent ways, Tribal self-determination is needed in matters of stewarding the lands and waters (Gordon 2023b; Patterson 2023). This is aligned with a broadened, “kincentric” understanding of child wellbeing grounded in a worldview that recognizes the essentiality of children’s connectedness to the natural world, culture, spirituality, and ancestors, in addition to family and community (Gordon 2023b, IV, para. 8). In the interim of fully restored decision-making power, steps toward self-determination could include increased funding, expanded Indigenous representation on state fish and wildlife boards, and incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge into settler policies (Gordon 2023b; Spears 2023b).

4.4. Legal Systems

State-Tribal partnerships that codify federal ICWA protections within state laws are another important safeguard. Seventeen states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) have collaborated with Tribes in their regions to achieve such legislation, and in certain cases augment safeguards (Ditzenberger 2023). For example, some laws require state courts notify Tribes of voluntary (e.g., private adoptions), in addition to involuntary, proceedings; promote kinship placements by assisting children’s extended family members with housing, finances, or transportation; mandate compacts that detail how children in placements that do not include a member of their Tribe as a caregiver will learn their culture and actively participate in cultural activities; sanction Tribal customary adoptions, which do not terminate parental rights; and/or extend ICWA protections to non-federally recognized Tribes (Spears et al. 2022).

Overall, these augmented protections in state laws align with the intent of Tribal child welfare codes and courts that emphasize self-determination and cultural values (Kunesh 2022). A study of 107 Tribal codes found that most did not assert their own cultures to resist settler child welfare norms, however, indicating space to enhance transformation of child wellbeing and protection efforts according to Indigenous cultural ways (Starks et al. 2016). Suggestions included incorporating preservation of Tribal community, values, and cultural practices into understandings of child protection; infusing cultural understandings into the definition of family, active efforts to keep families together, and considerations of children’s best interests; and assigning responsibility for reporting maltreatment to the community as a whole. Tribal courts also partner with Tribal families, social services, and child welfare departments to implement these cultural strength-based strategies (Child Welfare Information Gateway 2019). In conjunction with significantly reduced substance abuse offense recidivism, healing to wellness courts are associated with the reunification of child welfare-involved families (Tribal Law and Policy Institute 2014).

4.5. Social Work Education Initiatives

Some schools of social work have developed and implemented curricula centering culturally relevant and respectful child welfare practices with Native Americans. A notable example is the Center for Regional and Tribal Child Welfare Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, School of Social Work (Haight et al. 2019). This center educates social workers for practice in Tribal communities using a strengths-based model that integrates Indigenous worldviews with social work practice, drawing extensively on experiential learning. The curriculum covers the impact of genocide and historical trauma on Indigenous families and describes contemporary laws and policies including ICWA (Haight et al. 2019).

Additionally, following the previously described Accountability Statement, CSWE requested that ITSWEA develop a companion teaching guide with specific activities that educators can use to help future generations of social workers understand the history of the profession and work with Indigenous clients in respectful and culturally safe ways (Linjean et al. 2022). Most recently, the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute published a Curriculum Guide intended to help social work education programs initiate and/or expand American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) curriculum content to equip students to work competently with Indigenous populations involved in child welfare systems (Drywater-Whitekiller 2024). The Guide, which categorizes suggested curricular content by the CSWE Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards competencies and associated learning outcomes, aims to “be respectful and attentive to diverse AIAN foundational core policies, cultural pathways, families, and communities”; “decolonize western practices that have led and governed social work practice and incorporate different ways of knowing”; and “employ historical and contemporary Indigenous practices that have sustained and contributed to the resilience of AIAN populations since time immemorial” (p. 4).

5. Child Welfare System Transformation

There are multiple examples of transforming child welfare policy and practices in ways that honor Indigenous values, affirm Indigenous strengths, and enable Native American children to be raised within our families, cultures, and communities. Tribal Nations have worked to decolonize services, so they reflect Indigenous kinship structures, customs, traditions, and beliefs (National Indian Child Welfare Association [NICWA] 2021; Waubanascum and Sarche 2023). This section describes three examples of Tribal child and family programs that “emphasize relationships and connections and expand responsibility for children and family wellbeing to the whole community” (Kunesh 2022, para. 13). Further, they understand family preservation as critical to community healing and restoration following from repercussions of historical trauma (Kunesh 2022).

5.1. Relational Worldview

Chase and Ullrich (2022) noted the general lack of Indigenous ontology, epistemology, and axiology in child welfare policy and practice. Native American cultures are deeply relational, thus protecting and strengthening rather than severing family ties is essential in transforming child welfare systems and making them culturally safe (Chase and Ullrich 2022; Early 2022). Keeping a child safe includes maintaining relationships with family, community, and the child’s environment; recognizing that relationships are crucial to everyone’s wellbeing.

Children that have healthy relationships learn who they are and where they come from beyond colonial social constructs. Children that know who they are and where they come from do not need to adopt a trauma identity that keeps them protected in some ways, but locked in survival mode in other ways. Children that are raised with a relational identity become healthy adults, family members, and community members that help the next generation of children develop in a relational way.

(Chase and Ullrich 2022, p. 188)

5.2. Indigenous Connectedness Framework

In Alaska, Native people represent 20% of the population but roughly 2/3 of the children in out-of-home care (Early 2022). Current state policies emphasize removal but finding enough foster families is difficult. Child removal is painful to children, families, and communities, often leaving children feeling insecure and unstable. “Children need to know that people that care about them do not just disappear from their life or have contact 1–2 times per week, or once every four months if the child was moved to a different community that would require a plane ticket for contact to occur” (Chase and Ullrich 2022, p. 188).

Preventive efforts to preserve and support Native families are an alternative. A study incorporated feedback from Alaska Native knowledge holders to inform an Indigenous Connectedness Framework (ICF) and re-imagine child welfare practices in ways that limit family separation (Chase and Ullrich 2022). The ICF informs system change as well as practice (Chase and Ullrich 2022). Using this lens, keeping children safe is a responsibility shared by community members and agencies (Chase and Ullrich 2022). Furthermore, effectively transforming child welfare services cannot be done in isolation but requires recognizing the fundamental reasons why many families become involved with child welfare systems and adequately funding programs that support wellbeing including those that address poverty, substance misuse, inadequate housing, and food insecurity (Early 2022).

The Yup’ik village of Kwigillingok created a child protection team that incorporates Indigenous knowledge and guidance from Elders and reflects the ICF (Chase and Ullrich 2022). Out-of-home removals dropped quickly from more than 20 households to zero. Services now center relationships with community members, and helping professionals check in to inquire, “How are you? How can I support you? What’s going on?” (Early 2022, para. 13). Such a child welfare system built on a framework of connectedness can support family relationships in ways that prevent additional trauma, like that often generated by placing a child in foster care with strangers (Chase and Ullrich 2022).

5.3. My Two Aunties

The My Two Aunties (M2A) program is an exemplary program devoted to family preservation. It is funded by California’s Office of Child Abuse Prevention and Department of Social Services and partners with San Diego County and the Indian Health Council, a healthcare consortium of nine federally recognized Tribes, to serve Tribal families in three counties from its home base on the traditional homeland of the Payómkawichum (Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians) in San Diego County (Spears 2023a). Its goals are to prevent and intervene in child maltreatment and reduce family separation by decolonizing social services and revitalizing cultural family lifeways and childrearing practices through positioning social workers in the traditional role of Native aunties (Center for Native Child and Family Resilience [CNCFR] 2022). As aunties, the social workers support families with mentoring and coaching to build cultural family skills and values and encourage associated cultural norms (Center for Native Child and Family Resilience CNCFR 2022). Cultural lifeways, including healthy diet and safe parenting, are conveyed via traditional storytelling, and taught alongside lessons such as gathering and using traditional plant medicines from the family’s backyard and using the Native language, which parents may not have received due to their own displacement in foster or adoptive homes (Spears 2023a). In this way, M2A also recognizes and works to address repercussions of historical and intergenerational trauma stemming from colonialism, which are associated with contemporary family struggles that create unsafe environments for children, such as substance abuse and domestic violence (Center for Native Child and Family Resilience CNCFR 2022; Spears 2023a).

While the M2A aunties are mandated reporters and perform typical social work tasks such as home visits, safety planning, and case management, the program is culturally grounded. Its concepts and values include children as gifts of responsibility; family resilience; family as a part of community; honor; and respect for Elders; and the program pursues cultural strengths-based outcomes such as connections with family, friends, community, and cultural supports; cultural family life skills; cultural identity; ethnic pride; sense of belonging; and cultural resilience (Center for Native Child and Family Resilience CNCFR 2022). This culturally relevant and respectful approach, which, in contrast to settler systems, does not feel like surveillance or shaming, helps to build parents’ trust (Spears 2023a), and promotes increased access to social services among those at risk of maltreatment (Center for Native Child and Family Resilience CNCFR 2022). In fact, in addition to those who are referred, M2A has grown to serve Tribal parents who voluntarily seek its supports and services and contributes to the small number of Tribal children in out-of-home care in its service area (Spears 2023a).

5.4. Ombimindwaa Gidinawemaaganinaadog

The Red Lake Nation in Minnesota has also incorporated a relational approach, grounded in Anishinaabe culture and values, in their child welfare services. Indeed, they have renamed the department that provides these services Ombimindwaa Gidinawemaaganinaadog (Uplifting All of Our Relatives), foster parents are now called relative care community service providers, service recipients are referred to as relatives, and services are no longer known as child protection case management, but are now called reunification services (Steiner 2022). This shift in language reflects a focus on intergenerational family wellness within a framework that recognizes both trauma and resilience, grounded in an Anishinaabe worldview.

The department has been honored with an award from the Minnesota Department of Human Services for their efforts to adapt services to meet community members’ needs. Rather than replicating older practices like placing children with off-reservation foster families, the program works to keep families together, approaching them in culturally grounded ways to find out what they need, offering supportive services like help getting food or paying bills, and when removal is necessary finding temporary placements with extended family members. Amy RedCloud, the Mental Health Treatment Director explained, “We talk about being able to step into relationships with humility and accountability and in a space we can all learn. We, as service providers, consider the families to be the experts. We’re not the experts. The families are” (Steiner 2022, para. 24). This approach has led to a 68% decrease in children in out-of-home placement between 2017 and 2021 (Steiner 2022).

6. Conclusions

Native Americans have resisted and persisted throughout the historical and ongoing targeting of children and undermining of family practices wrought by the colonizing forces of settler child welfare systems. From ICWA enactment to reparations of past child welfare system harms and prevention of future ones, to exploration of future pathways for transforming child welfare systems and ensuring that associated policies and practices are culturally congruent, Native Americans have demonstrated cultural strengths. A principal strength is the grounding of child protection and wellbeing efforts in cultural relational understandings. These understandings are evident in Tribal family services and legal systems that integrate broad aspects of family preservation and wellbeing and engage the entire community in child protection, as well as initiatives that expand to more-than-human relations and connections between children and their natural environment. Our children are our future. Thus, to draw again from the wisdom of Terry Cross (2014, p. 24), there is “too much at stake to do anything less” than to continue advocating for their protection and holding accountable any entity that threatens our rights to raise them safely within our families, cultures, and communities. We have always fought for our children, and we will continue to do so.