ICWA Special Edition

Sorry for the extra email, but I wanted to make a special post about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was debated in the Supreme Court on Wednesday. As many of you know, I write about adoption quite a bit. Or at least, I have written a series of academic articles about adoption and Indigeneity over the past few years. I detail those articles in a post called Queer Kinship, here.

I’m going to try this in two parts. One is this Twitter thread on how I relate to ICWA. I wrote the thread before the case was heard and I’m just reposting it here. Part two is a little reflection on what it was like to listen to those arguments on Wednesday.

Before that two links to Native writers covering #ICWA:

Rebecca Nagle in The Nation

Jen Deerinwater in Truthout

NDN Collective on the ground

How I relate to ICWA

The Supreme Court will be hearing arguments about #ICWA tomorrow. This is a thread about trans-racial adoption, Indigenous futures, and the intergenerational effects of US assimilation policies.

My father was adopted by a white family as a newborn in 1952. We knew nothing about his biological kin. He never wanted to know about them. He never asked. He never wanted to open that wound.

I am the biological son of my father. And even though I was not the one adopted out, every time someone asked me, where are you from? What is your ethnicity? What are you? I had no answers. I had no way of knowing how to approach those questions.

I remember people asking my white mother, "who is this boy?" As if there were no way we could be related. Such encounters have an impact on a young person. I had so many questions. So many unresolved "issues".

Adoption is not just about the person who was adopted. It creates intergenerational ripples, wounds that grow and fester. Adoption is a technique of settler colonial dispossession, like the theft of land and the theft of knowledge. Adoption is the theft of Indigenous futures.

In 2005 we went through the process of opening my father's sealed adoption records. We had to convince him. He did not want to do it. He had to see a judge. He had to complete a psychological evaluation. He had to open those wounds. We all did.

And when the records finally came back, we realized that his mother, my grandmother, was Native American. What does one do with that knowledge, that change in identity? How does one deal with that?

And then we managed to find out that she was still alive, my grandmother, Ada. We found her. And we called. And she answered. And we all cried.

We found her and we were able to meet in person in 2006. And my father, brother, and I were able to enroll in the Cherokee Nation (Ada was Cherokee). What does one do with this knowledge? This feeling of evisceration that is at the same time, hope?

I remember feeling like an impostor, for years. For a decade. I still do. I remember feeling like adoption was meant to destroy my father, to destroy me, to take him from himself. To take us from our own futures.

So, the next time you hear someone say that adoption is about love, is about the best interests of the child. Especially in the case of Indigenous children. Tell them it is bullshit. Tell them to read the Senate testimony calling for the passage of ICWA in the 1970s.

Tell them that in some states in the 60s and 70s up to a third of all Indigenous children were removed from their families. Tell them the United States did this intentionally, specifically, so that Indigenous children would not grow up to be Indigenous adults.

Tell them that if ICWA is overturned, white Americans will hoard Indigenous children like dolls. Like bread. Tell them white Americans want to feel good about stealing our land, so they steal our children. Tell them settler love is not enough. 13/

Tell them that Indigenous people are a political class, not a racial one. And that we have rights that are based on our sovereignty as Peoples. Not on what the United States classifies as "race". And that those fundamental rights depend on our being able to keep our children.

Tell them, if you want, that they can reach out to me, and I'll tell them, too. Tell them the United States wants to eliminate Indigenous people and that ICWA is one of the few ways we have of preventing the theft of our own children, our futures, our communities.

Tell them that it is not about the welfare of Indigenous children, but about white millionaires who want to dismantle Indian law. And that ICWA is just the vehicle. Tell them all this. Tell them. Tell them again.

All I wanted to hear was someone say, “I love you.”

I have read the testimonies leading up to the passage of ICWA. They are harrowing. NDN mothers sit in the Senate chamber and tell a panel of white men that someone stole their children. They say it over and over again. And they ask why? Why are you doing this to us?

This time we heard lawyers argue over “the best interests of the child” or children “bonding”. But we did not hear settler colonialism uttered, we did not hear the reason why Indigenous children are stolen.

We heard lawyers arguing over us like pets. Like a basket of rolls at dinner.

And we heard Samuel Alito say this: “Before the arrival of Europeans, the tribes were at war with each other often, and they were separated by an entire continent.”

I was stunned. I could not believe that this was presented as a statement of fact, not part of a question. Not part of an inquiry into the validity of the claims as to why ICWA should or should not be upheld. To be fair, Alito was asking about whether placing an Indian child outside of their own tribe, but within another tribe, rather than with a non-Indian family, can be considered “rational”. He seems to be trying to figure out if Indian tribes have anything in common that would lead to a reasonable justification for placing a child in a different tribe. But I still cannot get over the fact that this discourse of war—this line of thinking that imagines that there was a previous moment in which Native American nations were constantly at war—is somehow broken by “the arrival of Europeans”. The temporality of that sentence is so jarring, so fundamentally ahistorical and ill-informed, as to constitute, for me, a right wing conspiracy theory.

Perhaps that is too strong a term. I don’t really care. The fact is that Alito has zero understanding of what “warfare” meant in Indigenous communities, then or now, and has zero inclination to contextualize the different forms of conflict (and conflict resolution) that existed for millennia before Europeans came and decided to murder us all.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t fucking deal with this guy. Jesus.

All I wanted to hear was someone say, “I love you.” And what I got was: “savage”.