#Race Race

   Accessibility links
     * Skip to main content
     * Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

     * NPR logo
     *
     *
     * Shop
     *
     * (BUTTON) Open Navigation Menu

   (BUTTON) Close Navigation Menu
     * Home
     * News (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for News
          + National
          + World
          + Politics
          + Business
          + Health
          + Science
          + Technology
          + Race & Culture
     * Arts & Life (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Arts & Life
          + Books
          + Movies
          + Television
          + Pop Culture
          + Food
          + Art & Design
          + Performing Arts
     * Music (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Music
          + Tiny Desk
          + All Songs Considered
          + Music News
          + Music Features
          + New Music
          + Best Music Of 2018
     * Shows & Podcasts (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Shows &
       Podcasts
       Daily
          + Morning Edition
          + All Things Considered
          + Fresh Air
          + Up First
       Featured
          + How I Built This with Guy Raz
          + Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!
          + Planet Money
          + Hidden Brain
          + More Shows & Podcasts
     * Search
     *
     * Shop

     * NPR Music NPR Music
     * Tiny Desk
     * All Songs Considered
     * Music News
     * Features
     * New Music

     * About NPR
     * (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Overview Overview
          + Overview and History
          + Mission and Vision
          + Stations and Public Media
          + NPR Finances
          + People
          + Ethics
          + Awards
     * (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Connect Connect
          + Visit NPR
          + NPR Presents
          + Studio 1 Events
          + Generation Listen
          + Book a Speaker
          + Request Permissions
          + Ways to Listen
          + NPR Extra Blog
          + Email Newsletters
          + Shop NPR
          + Get Help
          + Contact Us
     * (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Support Support
          + Support Public Radio
          + Corporate Sponsorship
          + Volunteer
     * (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Press Press
          + Releases and Statements
          + Photos and Logos
          + Fact Sheet (PDF)
          + Media Relations Contacts
     * (BUTTON) Expand/collapse submenu for Careers Careers
          + Careers at NPR
          + Search Jobs
          + Culture
          + Applying
          + Interns
          + Fellows
          + Digital

   Native American Adoption Law Challenged As Racially Biased A federal
   judge has ruled the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act unconstitutional
   because it gives Native American families preferential treatment in
   adoptions of American Indian children.

   NPR logo

Native American Adoption Law Challenged As Racially Biased

   Listen · 7:58 7:58
   (BUTTON) Toggle more options
     * Download
     * (BUTTON) Embed
       (BUTTON) Embed <iframe src="https:/ <iframe
       src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/677390031/677511394"
       width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR
       embedded audio player">
     * Transcript

   Native American Adoption Law Challenged As Racially Biased 7:58

Race

Native American Adoption Law Challenged As Racially Biased

Native American Adoption Law Challenged As Racially Biased

   Listen · 7:58 7:58
   (BUTTON) Toggle more options
     * Download
     * (BUTTON) Embed
       (BUTTON) Embed <iframe src="https:/ <iframe
       src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/677390031/677511394"
       width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR
       embedded audio player">
     * Transcript

     * (BUTTON) Facebook
     * (BUTTON) Twitter
     * (BUTTON) Flipboard
     * (BUTTON) Email

   December 17, 20184:27 PM ET
   Heard on All Things Considered
   Wade Goodwyn square

   Wade Goodwyn
   Enlarge this image

   Paul Buckley and his son, Mason, with his wife, Cheryl Becker, and
   daughter, Ariel Becker. The family's desire to adopt Mason was almost
   derailed by the Indian Child Welfare Act. Cheryl Becker/Courtesy of
   Cheryl Becker hide caption
   toggle caption
   Cheryl Becker/Courtesy of Cheryl Becker

   Paul Buckley and his son, Mason, with his wife, Cheryl Becker, and
   daughter, Ariel Becker. The family's desire to adopt Mason was almost
   derailed by the Indian Child Welfare Act.
   Cheryl Becker/Courtesy of Cheryl Becker

   In 2014, Paul Buckley and his wife, Cheryl Becker, fostered a baby boy
   named Mason. They had seen other members of their Phoenix church
   community foster children and were inspired.

   "We both have a heart for helping children," Buckley explains. "And it
   seemed like a way that we could provide something to the community and
   specifically to children."

   After raising Mason for a year and a half, Buckley and Becker moved to
   adopt. It was straightforward until, late in the legal proceedings, the
   Choctaw Nation intervened on behalf of the child's great-uncle. It
   turned out that Mason's birth mother — and therefore Mason — is a
   Choctaw citizen.

   "His mother had never mentioned this. We had never been told that there
   was anything there," Buckley says. "Mason didn't even look Indian in
   the least regards. Most everybody that was involved in the case was
   equally shocked."

   Although the court and the state of Arizona were on the cusp of
   allowing Mason to be adopted, the legal proceedings were terminated and
   the process started all over again. This time the Indian Child Welfare
   Act would hold sway.

   Adoption law history

   The law says Native American children must be placed with and adopted
   by a family member, a member of their tribe or, failing that, a family
   from another tribe. Chrissi Nimmo, deputy attorney general of the
   Cherokee Nation, says that Indian adoptees are handled under different
   law from other children. Knowing the history helps.

   "Assimilation was the goal," Nimmo says, recalling an old argument
   about why indigenous children were removed from their homes. "We have
   these savage uncivilized Indians and we need to make them Americans."

   Since their forced relocation more than 170 years ago at the point of a
   gun, known as the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees have made Tahlequah,
   Okla., the center of the Cherokee Nation — its music, its language, its
   culture and its government. Cherokees constitute the largest tribe in
   the country, 360,000 strong. And it's therefore no surprise the
   Cherokee Nation's deputy attorney general is the lead attorney in the
   legal battle over the Indian Child Welfare Act. Nimmo says the law was
   passed after more than a century of Indian children being taken from
   their tribes by whites.
   Enlarge this image

   A plaque in Tahlequah, Okla., commemorates the forced relocation
   marches of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. Wade
   Goodwyn/NPR hide caption
   toggle caption
   Wade Goodwyn/NPR

   A plaque in Tahlequah, Okla., commemorates the forced relocation
   marches of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears.
   Wade Goodwyn/NPR

   "So we're going to take their children and we're going to train them in
   military boarding school. We're going to teach the girls to sew. We're
   going to teach the boys to work with their hands," says Nimmo. "And
   then they're going to go live in white American society, and they're
   going to fit in with the rest of the country. And Indian tribes as we
   know them will be no longer."

   Once tribal pacification had ended, thousands of Native American
   children were put into government dormitories. At the U.S. Training and
   Industrial School founded in 1879, the motto was "Kill the Indian and
   save the man." By the late 1950s, an effort called the Indian Adoption
   Project began pairing Native American children with white families. At
   the time, it was considered enlightened adoption — white families
   open-minded enough to take Indian children. Nimmo says there were even
   advertisements in newspapers.
   Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families

Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families

Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families

   "Basically you could buy an Indian child for $10. And there literally
   was this ad that Indian children were available for adoption, and for a
   $10 sponsorship fee they would send you one," she says.

   The Bureau of Indian Affairs would sometimes pay to place Native
   American children with white families. The Church of Jesus Christ of
   Latter-day Saints had a robust Indian Placement Program — thousands of
   Indian children were adopted by LDS families.

   Nimmo says tribes began looking around going, "Hey, where are all the
   children?"

   "One-third of all Indian children in the United States had been removed
   from their parents, and between 80 and 90 percent of those had been
   placed in nonfamily, non-Indian homes," she says.

   In 1978, with bipartisan support and led by representatives and
   senators from the Western states, the Indian Child Welfare Act passed
   Congress and was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.

   But this October, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor struck down the act
   as unconstitutional. The same Texas judge struck down the Affordable
   Care Act last week.
   What You Need To Know About The Affordable Care Act After Texas Ruling

Shots - Health News

What You Need To Know About The Affordable Care Act After Texas Ruling

   Law deemed biased against whites

   O'Connor ruled the Indian child law is a racially based preference that
   discriminates against non-Indian families. Timothy Sandefur, vice
   president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, filed a
   brief in the case.

   "The problem was that [the Indian Child Welfare Act] was so poorly
   worded that it now inflicts harm on Indian children that it was
   supposed to protect," Sandefur says. "We're working on a case right now
   in Ohio where there's a 2-year-old Ohio boy born in Ohio, has lived in
   Ohio his entire life — almost his entire life — with an Ohio foster
   family. But because his ancestry is Gila River, the Gila River Indian
   tribe in Arizona obtained an order from its own tribal court forcing
   the child to be sent to live on the reservation near Phoenix. Simply
   because the blood in his veins happens to have the required amount of
   DNA. That's unconstitutional and absurd," says Sandefur.

   I would not be who I am. I feel like I owe everything to having been
   raised in my culture. Our belief, the spirituality of my tribe has been
   ingrained in everything I do.

   Juli Skinner

   Remember Mason, the toddler who was about to be adopted by the Buckley
   family when his great-uncle and the Choctaw Nation intervened? In the
   end, Mason did end up with Paul and Cheryl. Why? Because the Indian
   Child Welfare Act allows the courts wiggle room if it is judged to be
   in the child's best interest.

   In this case, the lateness of the intervention plus Mason's long
   relationship with the only family he'd ever really known led to the
   decision. But this outcome was an exception. Most of the time the law
   means Native American children are adopted by other tribal members or
   other Indians. And for Indians like Juli Skinner, the law made all the
   difference.
   Enlarge this image

   Juli Skinner, a Ponca woman, was in the Oklahoma foster care system
   until her extended cousins used the Indian Child Welfare Act to gain
   custody of her. Wade Goodwyn/NPR hide caption
   toggle caption
   Wade Goodwyn/NPR

   Juli Skinner, a Ponca woman, was in the Oklahoma foster care system
   until her extended cousins used the Indian Child Welfare Act to gain
   custody of her.
   Wade Goodwyn/NPR

   Culture, heritage and history

   "There's a difference between being raised in your culture and having
   to learn about it later," Skinner says.

   She's a Ponca Indian who was taken from her alcoholic parents as an
   infant and then bounced around the Oklahoma foster system for years.
   Finally, her extended family — her father's cousins — used the Indian
   Child Welfare Act to gain custody of her. So she grew up Ponca. Now 41,
   Skinner is emotional as she contemplates how the life she has lived
   most likely never would have happened without that law.

   "I would not be who I am," says Skinner. "I feel like I owe everything
   to having been raised in my culture. Our belief, the spirituality of my
   tribe has been ingrained in everything I do."

   For now, the Indian Child Welfare Act remains in effect. Earlier this
   month, the 5th^ Circuit Court of Appeals stayed O'Connor's ruling while
   it takes up the case.

Clarification Dec. 21, 2018

   This story has been updated to make it clear that Mason and his birth
   mother are Choctaw citizens.

   Correction posted on Dec. 17: A previous version of this story
   incorrectly spelled Reed O'Connor's last name as O'Conner.
     * (BUTTON) Facebook
     * (BUTTON) Twitter
     * (BUTTON) Flipboard
     * (BUTTON) Email

Read & Listen

     * Home
     * News
     * Arts & Life
     * Music
     * Podcasts
     * Programs

Connect

     * Newsletters
     * Facebook
     * Twitter
     * Instagram
     * Contact
     * Help

About NPR

     * Overview
     * Finances
     * People
     * Press
     * Ombudsman
     * Corrections

Get Involved

     * Support Public Radio
     * Sponsor NPR
     * NPR Careers
     * NPR Shop
     * NPR Events
     * Visit NPR

     * Terms of Use
     * Privacy
     * Your Privacy Choices
     * Text Only
     *

   NPR thanks our sponsors

   Become an NPR sponsor

   IFRAME: //20655831p.rfihub.com/ca.html?rb=3035&ca=20501671&ra=gtmcb

   [tr?id=1621557368158968&ev=PageView&noscript=1]