Custody battles erupt when judges, adoption agencies and attorneys don’t follow the guidelines, Chrissi Nimmo, a Cherokee Nation assistant attorney general said.
TULSA, Okla. (AP) – After 18 happy months in his Owasso home, Ross Harp’s foster son was taken away for just one reason, Harp said.
“We’re white, and the baby wasn’t,” he said. “How is that not racist?”
Hoping to change the Indian Child Welfare Act, Harp and several other advocates delivered a petition on April 17 to U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine’s office in Tulsa.
Passed in 1978, the federal law gives a tribe the right to intervene when an Indian child is placed in the custody of a non-Indian family.
“If there was an African-American Child Welfare Act,” Harp said, “or an Asian Child Welfare Act, everybody would be making a fuss. But because it’s happening to Indian children, nobody cares.”
With 23,000 names from across the country, including more than 1,000 from Oklahoma, the petition was inspired by the Baby Veronica case, which was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court a day earlier.
Veronica spent the first two years of her life in South Carolina with a non-Native American couple who was trying to adopt her.
But the Cherokee Nation intervened on behalf of her biological father, Dusten Brown, who’s a tribal citizen.
Now 3, the girl lives with Brown in Nowata. But her adoptive parents in South Carolina still hope to win her back.
“It’s not just Baby Veronica,” Dawn Ferrill, a foster parent who circulated the petition in Oklahoma, said. “It’s happening over and over again.”
The Supreme Court will decide Veronica’s case this summer. But either way, Ferrill hopes to see Congress change the ICWA.
First, the “best interests of the child” should be considered before deciding custody, she said. And a birth mother or father should be allowed to choose an adoptive family regardless of their descent, she said.
Cherokee Nation officials consider both proposed changes unnecessary.
The law already takes into consideration the “best interests” of the child and even the wishes of the birth parents, said Chrissi Nimmo, a CN assistant attorney general.
But the law also protects tribal sovereignty, giving the CN jurisdiction over its own children, she said.
Custody battles erupt when judges, adoption agencies and attorneys don’t follow the guidelines, Nimmo said.
“The way to avoid this situation,” she said, “is to fully comply” the ICWA “from the beginning of the case.”
But Ken Navarro, who signed and helped deliver the petition, said that as now interpreted, the act puts the interests of the tribe ahead of what’s best for the child.
Navarro ultimately won the right to adopt a 2-year-old boy but only after he briefly lost custody and fought a lengthy court battle with the CN, he said.
“It’s all very traumatic, especially for the child,” he said. “And for what?”
Baby Veronica spent the first two years of her life in South Carolina with a non-Native American couple who was trying to adopt her.