Elisia Manuel remembers when she and her husband Tecumseh received their first foster child. “We had to go buy the boy some clothes,” she told me. “We had to get him everything, because he came with nothing. The agency even had to lend us a car seat to bring him home.” Elisia, who comes from the Mescalero Apache and Yaqui tribes, and Tecumseh, an Akimel O’odham from the Gila River Indian Community located just south of Phoenix, were thrilled to get a Native child to care for—even if it meant completely outfitting the little boy, purchasing a heavy-duty washer, and finding other supplies.
But state and tribal child welfare agencies say that Native foster families like the Manuels are hard to find. And that shortage can cause havoc when non-Native foster families wishing to adopt a Native child try to circumvent a law designed to keep tribal kids in their communities. Nationwide, American Indian and Alaska Native children are placed into foster care at a rate 2.7 times greater than their proportion in the general population, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA). With a disproportionate number of Native kids removed from their homes each year, the need for Native foster homes is huge—and there aren’t enough to meet the need. That shortage leads to non-Native foster parents taking in kids from tribal communities. Sometimes, those foster parents decide they want to adopt the foster child even though the law is supposed to prevent virtually all such non-Native adoptions.
This has led to nasty fights over custody; one highly publicized dispute was over Lexi, a young Choctaw girl whose foster parents sued to prevent her being given to the girl’s paternal family. The case stretched over four years and attracted international media attention until 2016, when the case was resolved in favor of her father’s family. In 2013, a little girl known as Baby Veronica was at the center of yet another maelstrom, this time after her non-Native mother turned her over for adoption leaving her Native father to fight for her return. This time, the outcome was different: The non-Indian adoptive family got to keep the girl.
[For more on this story by Debra Utacia Krol, go to https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...aring-families-apart]
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