RACE GOALS  

How do Native American foster children have the rare privilege of remaining within their culture?

Ellen Fox

June 22, 2000

All things being equal, the law says that when it comes to adoption or foster care, race can't be an issue.

Child welfare agencies can't put off placing a black child into a white home so they can recruit a black foster family instead. Black families can't be prevented from adopting Asian children. Latino children can't be denied residence with a black family. It's all right there in 1994's Multi-Ethnic Placement Act and 1996's Inter-Ethnic Placement Act, which were written up to bar the practice of making race, color or national origin the sole factor in child placement.

But when Roxy Grignon found herself caring for the week-old child of a Native American drug-user in 1994, she knew little about the priority given to tribal members when it comes to the placement of Native American children.

"I was aware of the Indian Child Welfare Act," she says of the law that gives preference to Native Americans like her in cases of adoption or foster care, "but I knew nothing about it."

After getting her hands on a copy of the law, passed in 1978 to reduce the alarming number of Native American children being relocated to non-Native families, she determined that if she could prove the child's tribal affiliation, he would be permitted to stay with her. Today, Grignon is executive director of Ravenswood's burgeoning Native American Foster Parents Association, and the child is her adopted son, named Na Ne Ko Sew, which is Menominee and Potawatomi for "He is happy."

Though child placement agencies are mandated to be colorblind -- as dictated by the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, and often a touchy issue for those who oppose transracial adoption -- Native American children are the exception: Their placement can be determined on the basis of race. First in line to care for them are members of the child's family -- Indian or non-Indian -- then other members of the child's tribe and, lastly, other Indian families.

Since 1997, when the Native American Foster Parents Association was incorporated, their roster of licensed foster parents has grown to twenty-two families, with thirty-five more Native American families slated to be licensed in the near future. That's a far cry from just the "three or four" Grignon says were available to care for the nearly fifty Native American wards in the Illinois child welfare system when NAFPA began. Within the year, the group hopes to be approved to place Indian children with families as a licensed child welfare agency -- making it the first agency of its kind in a state that doesn't have a single Indian reservation, but which boasts 15,000 Native Americans (1990 census) in the Chicago Metro Area.

  To Grignon, NAFPA's avowed mission to "bring our children home" is long overdue. Though America's widespread policy of "civilizing" Indian children by placing them in mission boarding schools or with white families dates back to the early nineteenth century, a 1976 study found that 25 to 35 percent of all Native American children were being placed in out-of-home care, most of them in non-Indian homes or institutions.

"It was fairly easy for state agencies to go inside these homes and small communities and remove Native American children and adopt them out," explains Dale Francisco, the NAFPA staffer who enrolls state wards for tribal membership.

Deferring to the sovereign nation status of Native American tribes, the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 gave preference to Native Americans when it came to placing children in foster care or adoption. But enforcement was slow-going, owing to the scarcity of Native American foster families, the fact that many children were of mixed race or were misidentified, and the unfamiliarity of case workers with the law.

As a teenager, well after the passage of the law, Clarissa St. Germaine, NAFPA's former program assistant, was placed with a white family that barred her from attending powwows and forced her to return the crown she had won at Chicago's American Indian Center. Others in NAFPA's Four Winds Survivors Group -- so named for the vast scope of Indian displacement -- also relate stories of lost identity in the child welfare system.

"Everybody has the same story, the situations are different, but the hurt is the same when you grow up outside your people," says Martin Gamon, who hit the system around age 12, in 1963, when his stepfather died. When he was sent to Illinois State Training School for Boys in St. Charles, he was assumed to be Mexican, like his stepfather. Not that it would have made much difference.

"Those days, in the sixties, you didn't have anybody to speak for you. That's why it's a blessing to have an organization like this to help kids today," he says firmly.

Four Winds member Barbara Drake, who hails from the Ojibway tribe's Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in Wisconsin, struggled with her mother's alcoholism and bounced from home to home in her teen years, before the passage of ICWA.

"When I first went into a foster home it was like a culture shock to me, I'd go to sleep just to dream about being back home. I didn't think that being Native American was different, but the kids [at school] began to laugh and throw things at me."

She moved to Chicago in the hopes of losing her identity, married a Sioux man -- who had grown up in a boarding school -- and raised their children with very little mention of their heritage. They divorced because "neither one of us had any concept of what it was like to have a family or raise a family," she says.

Roughly once a month, says Department of Child and Family Services senior administrator Bob Mindell, "I get a call from a ward that has not previously been identified [as Native American]. Sometimes cases don't get identified until they've been a year or two in our system, oftentimes because the parents don't identify the children as being Indian." Of the 33,527 Illinois children currently in substitute care, 137 are identified as Native American.

But the new identification of Native American wards already in care and the burgeoning strength of NAFPA raise the obvious question: Can children who have been freshly identified as Native American be taken out of their non-Native American families and relocated?

Yes, if the tribes choose to intervene, and it's already happened in Illinois twice, Mindell says. One of the more famous disputes over ICWA in recent years involved the Rosts, an Ohio couple who adopted two girls but were later forced into a custody battle with the girls' Native American grandmother. The girls wound up staying with their adoptive family.

"The kind of case you're talking about has been problem for us," Mindell concedes. "It's been a problem because the child has often bonded with the foster family that they're with. Oftentimes that's a very viable placement." But sometimes when tribes are notified, Mindell adds, they don't necessarily object to the child's non-Indian placement.

"People think that we're going to come in and rip children away because they're becoming aware of the law," warns Grignon. "They think we're going to come in and take children back to their reservations. Which is not true at all." Grignon says that if a child has already been placed in a non-Native American family, she encourages the family to come in for education and lead the child in pursuing cultural activities. Most of the responses have been positive, she says.

But what if they're not?

"If they're not, then I don't think that's in the best interest of child," she says. "I would do everything I could to have that child removed." Even if the child's tribe -- once notified -- didn't mind the placement? "I think the tribe would. As long as there are people who are licensed, they would want the child in Native American homes," she says. "It's still a birthright of the child. And it's a right of a nation of people to have their children."

 (2000-06-22)