Advocate Frank LaMere Talks About Battles Shaping Indian Child Welfare

By Stephanie Woodard

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has been in the news lately. A National Public Radio (NPR) series exposed horrific child-welfare injustices in South Dakota, while two CNN stories—one on the return of an infant boy to the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and another on the return of a baby girl to her Cherokee father—criticized the law, and then-CNN anchor Campbell Brown added some scathing commentary. We went to Frank LaMere, member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and executive director of the Four Directions Community Center, in Sioux City, Iowa, for a reading on how perceptions of ICWA are changing and what still needs to happen to ensure state social-services departments and courts nationwide understand and fulfill its requirements. LaMere is a longtime advocate for Indian child welfare who works on a daily basis with Native families.

Has recent coverage of ICWA adversely affected the attitude toward Indian child welfare?

LaMere: The exposure brought attention to the plight of our children, and I am glad of that. As a result of the NPR coverage, members of Congress were inspired to ask for an investigation of South Dakota. I wrote to the legislators involved and told them, “Don’t stop there.” South Dakota has problems, but so does the rest of the country. They should investigate every jurisdiction in every state. Here in Iowa, the social services department of Woodbury County [surrounding Sioux City] has made progress, but it’s just one of our 99 counties. Many in Iowa would still do an end run around ICWA.

What did you think of CNN’s take on ICWA?

CNN and Campbell Brown need a reality check! Brown, as a mother, said she could not imagine the hurt a white family felt when their Indian child was returned to his people. Why could she not also imagine the hurt thousands of Native families feel right now, knowing their children will cry themselves to sleep tonight because someone did an end run of ICWA and stole their children under the “color of law”? Over the generations, hundreds of thousands of Indian families have endured this pain. That’s the grim reality. We must engage and educate ICWA detractors, and we must remind them that the Indian Child Welfare Act is the law of the land—whether they like it or not. And we must applaud the tribes and parents in these recent cases for persevering and those in the courts for reuniting them with the children.

Why do even states that seem to comply with ICWA—or at least seem to try—still have relatively high numbers of Native children in foster care?

We in Iowa are trying to better understand those numbers. Native families were not identified as such in the past, and perhaps now that we’ve drawn attention to them and are identifying them as such, the numbers are rising for that reason. Additional data I want is tracking of individual social workers’ records of pulling our families apart—or keeping them together. Once we have these numbers, we need to ask what their agencies are going to do about it. This needs to happen everywhere, and it needs to happen now.

How does a Native parent fare in child-custody matters when facing a non-Native parent?

Generally, not well. Right now, I’m dealing with the worst case I’ve ever seen and the best example of how the system can fail our families. Two severely disabled Native children were taken from their white father, a founded—that is, proven­—child-abuser. After a crisis, during which one child ended up in the hospital, the court gave the youngsters temporarily to their Native mother. Now the state of Iowa has decided to reunite the children with the father, and the mother fears for her children’s lives. This is about old attitudes that make it tough for our Native families to get justice and to convince courts that ICWA, a federal statute, must be heeded.

Can you give some examples of what Native parents face?

I sit in on many meetings to determine the fate of Native families—along with the judges, lawyers, social workers and others involved—and I observe that they do not apply objective standards. If one standard were applied to all, Native children would go home more often than not. Time after time in these meetings, the Native parent has solved the issue—typically alcohol or drugs—that caused the children to be taken away. The parent proudly announces, “I’ve been sober for 22 months,” or what have you. We all congratulate them on their new wellness, then when that conversation dies down, a social worker inevitably says, “Well, yes, but… ” and raises a new issue. He or she may bring up a long-resolved problem from 20 years before, or something new. At a recent meeting, a social worker announced she’d found dirty dishes in the sink during her last visit to the mother’s home, so the mother shouldn’t get her kids back. I became unglued. I stressed that the mother didn’t lose her children over dirty dishes, and they couldn’t be kept from her for this reason. I deal with this kind of thing every week.

Do states have a financial incentive to ignore ICWA?

It’s a conspiracy of silence. Everyone knows our children feed the child-welfare system. They have for a long time and will continue to do so, because the funding is set up that way [with more children generating greater funding]. But those who work for the system won’t speak up. Beyond that, many social workers and courts nationwide feel they know better than we do about what’s good for our children. It remains for Native people to speak up. We must keep blowing the whistle on the child-welfare system, to local, state and national lawmakers. Only then will we have a chance to keep our families intact.

Is this what Four Directions does?

We at Four Directions Community Center routinely make people in the child-welfare system uncomfortable. Nothing changes until someone feels uncomfortable. That includes us. It is hard to confront those who control the systems that control our lives, but we must. Our children and their futures are in jeopardy. We have a long way to go, but we will prevail.

Click here to read our Q&A with Diane Garreau, ICWA director for South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

Funding for this story was provided by the George Polk Program for Investigative Reporting.

Source http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/14/advocate-frank-lamere-talks-about-battles-shaping-indican-child-welfare-95537

Gov.: No useful data in NPR report on Indian children

By: Tom Lawrence

Gov. Dennis Daugaard said he didn’t gain any useful information from a controversial 2011 public radio series on American Indian foster children in South Dakota.

“I can’t identify any legitimate criticisms that identified an area where we could take action,” Daugaard said. “It raised my level of knowledge, but I think that’s a poor way to cause me to raise my level of knowledge, through a sensational story that was unfounded.”

Laura Sullivan, a National Public Radio investigative correspondent, produced a three-part series titled “Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families” that was heard on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” in October.

The series said South Dakota was one of 32 states that did not comply with the federal Indian Child Welfare Act and other laws. It said state social workers had entered Indian reservations with which the state has no agreement and removed tribal children from their homes.

Daugaard, who has said little publicly about the issue since the reports aired, said Monday the series was based on “unfounded” information.

“I think it’s very unfortunate that NPR decided that they were going to create a very sensationalistic story,” he said. “And it’s also unfortunate because it’s such a complex area.”

Daugaard made his comments during a discussion with The Daily Republic’s editorial board Monday morning at the newspaper’s office in Mitchell, following a public appearance the governor made earlier Monday morning in the city.

Sullivan had her mind made up when she arrived in South Dakota, the governor said, and didn’t want to hear anything that differed from what she believed. He said numerous state employees who spoke with her felt that way.

“It’s really a lot of misinformation and poorly researched information,” Daugaard said. “I think we did our best to refute much of it.”

According to a discussion of the series on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” the series raised valid points.

“An average of 700 Native American children in South Dakota are removed from their homes and placed in foster care each year, often in violation of federal law, an NPR investigation found,” the “Talk of the Nation” report states. “Native American children make up less than 15 percent of the state’s child population, but represent more than half of the kids in foster care.”

“Some Native Americans believe the problem is that Native children who are placed in foster care with non-Native families, as most are in South Dakota, lose connection to their culture, traditions and tribes,” the NPR report stated.

The series also spotlighted Daugaard’s role as CEO of the Children’s Home Society, which deals with many foster children and received several contracts with the state that totaled more than $50 million. He was the state’s part-time lieutenant governor for eight years while also leading CHS.

Daugaard “pre-responded” to the NPR stories before they aired, sending e-mails to South Dakota media outlets that claimed Sullivan, whom he declined to speak with, was biased and unwilling to listen to all sides of the story.

He repeated those assertions Monday.

Daugaard pointed out that the South Dakota Department of Social Services had contracts with the Children’s Home Society since 1978, long before he worked for it.

Daugaard and his director of policy and communications and chief spokesman, Tony Venhuizen, said they have been in contact with NPR’s ombudsman for six weeks and have expressed their unhappiness with the series.

An ombudsman is an intermediary between parties with a differing point of view. Many large media organizations have employed ombudsmen since the 1970s.

Edward Schumacher-Matos is NPR’s ombudsman.

He is a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and a former reporter, editor and columnist for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

In his final online post of 2011, Schumacher-Matos said he would look into the story.

“Coming soon is a look back at an investigation of Native American foster care in South Dakota,” Schumacher-Matos wrote on Dec. 23.

He did not respond to an e-mail Monday from The Daily Republic asking for additional comment.

Daugaard said he’s glad NPR has someone who is “portrayed as being independent” taking a look at how Sullivan dealt with the story.

Source http://www.mitchellrepublic.com/event/article/id/61208/

US officials plan South Dakota summit on Indian foster care

CHET BROKAW Associated Press

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — Federal officials are planning a summit in South Dakota in the wake of allegations that the state has violated federal law by removing too many American Indian children from their homes and placing them in foster care with non-Indian families.

Nedra Darling, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department's Office of Indian Affairs, told The Associated Press that the agency has created a committee to plan the summit, the date of which has not yet been set.

"We hope it will open up a dialogue between tribes and federal and state agencies," Darling said.

The summit is in response to a National Public Radio series in October that said the state routinely broke the Indian Child Welfare Act and disrupted the lives of hundreds of Native American families each year. Federal law requires that Native American children removed from homes be placed with relatives or put in foster care with other Native American families except in unusual circumstances.

The three-part NPR report said 90 percent of the Native American children removed from their homes in South Dakota each year are sent to foster care in non-Indian homes or group homes. It reported that Native American children are placed in South Dakota's foster care system at a disproportionate rate because only 15 percent of the state's child population is Native American, but half of the children in foster care are Native American.

State officials have criticized the NPR report as inaccurate, unfair and biased.

Kim Malsam-Rysdon, secretary of the state Department of Social Services, said the Interior Department has not notified state officials about the planned summit, but that the state has nothing to hide.

"We are very confident that South Dakota is in compliance with federal law in this area, and we really do welcome the opportunity for the federal government and others to understand just how that federal law is being implemented in our state," Malsam-Rysdon said.

The summit suggestion surfaced in a letter to members of Congress who had called for an investigation. The meeting is meant to give state, federal and tribal officials a way to work together so that all involved agencies comply with the law and make sure American Indian children and their families are protected, wrote Larry Echo Hawk, the Interior Department's assistant secretary for Indian Affairs.

The Interior Department also is considering sending lawyers to South Dakota to help tribes enforce the Indian Child Welfare Act, Echo Hawk wrote.

Malsam-Rysdon, whose agency oversees South Dakota's child welfare system, said people need to understand that the system involves her department, tribes, courts, law-enforcement officers and others. Federal officials should not take any action based on the NPR report, but instead should get the facts about what is happening in South Dakota, she said.

"We're glad the Department of Interior is taking it seriously, that they're evidently interested into looking into and ensuring the federal law is being implemented," she said.

Malsam-Rysdon said it's true that a disproportionate number of Native American children are involved in the child welfare system. The state receives more referrals for alleged abuse and neglect involving Native American children, and that leads to more investigations and removals from homes for those children, she said.

"What really permeates our involvement with the child welfare system is safety of the child," Malsam-Rysdon said. "We're involved in homes where there are proven or foreseeable safety concerns regarding a child."

In a written response to the NPR series, the state has said it uses all available Native American foster placement homes.

The series said the state's motive for removing Native American children from their homes might be financial because the state gets federal financial assistance for each child removed from his or her home. The report said the state gets almost $100 million a year to subsidize foster care programs, but state officials said the budget for the entire Division of Child Protection Services last year was only $59 million, and spending specifically on foster care and foster-care support was just $8 million.

The series also said there was a conflict of interest in Gov. Dennis Daugaard's work for Children's Home Society of South Dakota when he was lieutenant governor. That organization received millions of dollars for housing Native American children under contracts the state awarded without competitive bids.

The governor's office responded that Children's Home Society has had contracts with the state since 1978, long before Daugaard became its chief operating officer in 2002.

State officials also have said the Department of Social Services cannot remove children from homes and place them in protective custody. Only law officers and judges have the legal authority to do so, the state officials said.

Source http://m.siouxcityjournal.com/mobile/article_e1ed29d6-1b91-59ab-bfe6-26801493047a.html

NPR Story Follow Up

Click here to read the follow up story.

Report: S.D. skirts law protecting Native American children

By Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY

Thirty-two states are failing to abide by the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law passed by Congress in 1978 to stop thousands of Native American children from being forcibly removed from their families and being sent to boarding schools, where they were abused, or into other abusive conditions, a National Public Radio investigation has found.

The problem is most pronounced in South Dakota, NPR reports.

"Cousins are disappearing, family members are disappearing," Peter Lengkeek, a Crow Creek Tribal Council member, tells NPR. "It's kidnapping. That's how we see it."

About 700 Native American children in South Dakota are removed from their homes, some of them under questionable circumstances, NPR finds. The majority of those placed in foster care are sent to non-native homes or group homes, although the Child Welfare Act requires that Native American children must be placed with their relatives or tribes, except in rare circumstances.

South Dakota state officials say they have to do what's in the best interest of the child.

"We come from a stance of safety," Virgena Wieseler of South Dakota's Department of Social Services tells NPR. "That's our overarching goal with all children. If they can be returned to their parent or returned to a relative and be safe and that safety can be managed, then that's our goal."

Critics say the situation appears to be financially lucrative for foster care providers, one of whom has ties with state officials, NPR reports.

Source http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/10/report-south-dakota-skirts-law-protecting-native-american-children/1