Articles Tagged with reservation

Today, we are taking a look at the Indian[1] Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law managed by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. The ICWA was passed in 1978 to counteract the unfair treatment of Indigenous children in state and foster care. The US has a nasty history of forced assimilation programs where Indigenous children were stolen from their families and moved to boarding schools, where they were forced to abandon their Indigenous culture and heritage. Even though these programs have ended, Indigenous families still face cultural ignorance and bias in the foster care system. In a 2013 study, the percentage of children in foster care who were Indigenous was 2.5 times their percentage in the overall population. In some states, that number was up to 14.8 times. The ICWA helps to protect these children, their families, and the Indigenous Tribes in the United States. Continue reading →