Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families UPDATED

NPR has done an in-depth investigation on foster care practices in South Dakota. In South Dakota, Native Americans children make up only 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half the children in foster care.

“There are children in South Dakota who need to be removed from their families. But according to state figures, less than 12 percent of the children in foster care in South Dakota have been actually physically or sexually abused in their homes. That’s less than the national average.

And yet South Dakota is removing children at almost three times the rate of other states, according to data from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.”

See the disproportionality of Native children as a percentage of children placed by state in this graphic.

“Nearly 700 Native American children in South Dakota are being removed from their homes every year…with the vast majority of native kids in foster care in South Dakota are in non-native homes or group homes, according to an NPR analysis of state records.”

“Key Findings Of This Investigation

* Despite the Indian Child Welfare Act, which says Native American children must be placed with their family members, relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans, native children are more than twice as likely to be sent to foster care as children of other races, even in similar circumstances.

* Nearly 90 percent of Native American children sent to foster care in South Dakota are placed in non-native homes or group care.

* Less than 12 percent of Native American children in South Dakota foster care had been physically or sexually abused in their homes, below the national average. The state says parents have “neglected” their children, a subjective term. But tribe leaders tell NPR what social workers call neglect is often poverty; and sometimes native tradition.

* A close review of South Dakota’s budget shows that they receive almost $100 million a year to subsidize its foster care program.”

“CWA Timeline

Jan. 2, 1975: Congress establishes American Indian Policy Review Commission, which is charged with reviewing U.S. Indian policy. In 1977, the commission issues a report with more than 200 recommendations. (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2)

April 1, 1977: Sen. James Abourezk (D-SD) introduces Senate Bill 1214, the Indian Child Welfare Act. After passing in the Senate, the House passes its version of the bill, H.R. 12533, on October 14, 1978.

Nov. 8, 1978: President Jimmy Carter signs the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) into law. It establishes federal standards for removing Native American children from their families and outlines proper procedure in regards to Native American children in foster care.

April 9, 1980: After a number of challenges to the new law, the Supreme Court of South Dakota determines ICWA is constitutional, saying interference in custody matters of tribal members threatens a tribe’s right to self-governance.

April 18, 1988: The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families issues a report to assess ICWA implementation. It finds that ICWA has failed to reduce the flow of Native American children into substitute care. The report also finds the lack of funding fosters a negative climate of competition among tribes.

April 3, 1989: In Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms the idea of tribal jurisdiction.

April 4, 1990: The Supreme Court of South Dakota finds a state court may deny transferring a child custody case involving Native American children to a tribal court if there is “good cause” to deny the transfer.

March 3, 2004: South Dakota passes Senate Bill 211, which establishes a commission is charged with examining South Dakota’s compliance with the ICWA.

Dec. 30, 2004: The Governor’s Commission on the Indian Child Welfare Act releases a report (pdf) that cites an overall lack of funding. They find tribal courts do not have the funds to assume jurisdiction in a case that would provide foster care and other services for children. They also find the Department of Social Services is not always following ICWA procedure when dealing with a Native American child. The report recommends passing a state ICWA bill to enhance compliance.

November, 2005: A second report (pdf) by the South Dakota Governor’s ICWA Commission outlines how to implement the 30 recommendations cited in its initial report. The report emphasizes the state’s need for more funding and establishes the “Collaborative Circle,” a formal group which increases dialogue and partnership between Native American tribes and the Department of Social Services.

Sept. 27, 2011: The Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act passes both houses of Congress and is presented to President Obama. The legislation ensures that states successful in reducing their foster care caseloads do not lose federal funding. This legislation aims to create an incentive for states like South Dakota to reduce the number of children in foster care.”

Native Foster Homes Sit Empty While Native Children are Placed in White Homes

“Marcella Dion lives on the Crow Creek reservation and has been licensed as a foster care provider since 2005, but the state has never sent her any children. Recently she took in her brother’s granddaughter, Isabella.

With Valandra a dead end, Janice Howe asked the social worker to move the children to a native home where they could participate in cultural activities such as going to sweats and sundance. But nothing changed.

Social Service’s Wieseler said they would like all native children to be in native homes. But she says they’ve only got a few and they don’t have room.

“We are constantly recruiting,” she says, “constantly recruiting in all of our offices for all kinds of foster families and we are always trying to recruit them because we need more.”

That comes as a surprise to Marcella Dion. She’s a native foster home provider on the Crow Creek reservation and has lots of room.

Her home’s been empty for six years.

“I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on,'” she says. “I got my [Indian Child Welfare license]. No kids.”

Then there’s Suzanne Crow, also from Crow Creek.

“I’ve been a foster parent here for over a year,” she said. “They’ve never called me for any Indian kids.”

In that year, hundreds of native children in South Dakota were placed in white foster homes. Officials on the Pine Ridge reservation, several hours away, also say they have 20 empty homes.”

Read the series: Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families
[NPR 10/24/11 by Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters]

Incentives And Cultural Bias Fuel Foster System
[NPR 10/25/11 by Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters]

Update: The third part of the story was posted on October 27 Native Survivors Of Foster Care Return Home [NPR by Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters].

It tells the story of Dwayne Stenstrom , a professor of American history at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

“He grew up in a white foster care home, married his wife 31 years ago and raised six children. He’s as passionate about history as he is his community.”

“He grew up on the Nebraska plains, on the Winnebago Reservation. He and his brother spent the summers outside on the prairie with their grandfather.

But when he was 8 years old, in the spring of 1968, a van pulled up outside his house. The driver, a woman, told him he and his brother were going away for the summer. Stenstrom recalls his grandfather looking worried.

“He told me never to forget where I come from and to embrace it,” Stenstrom remembers.

That was the last time he saw him.

Stenstrom spent the summer in several foster homes. One day the van took him to Ainsworth, Neb., to a house where an older couple lived. Their own children were grown and no longer living at home. There, he and his brother waited for fall so they could go home.

“I’m thinking when the summer’s over, the little van [is] going to come and get me,” Stenstrom says. “It still hasn’t come and got me. I’m still sitting there emotionally waiting for the little van to come. And I don’t expect it’s coming.”

Years later, he was told by a state worker that his mother drank too much. But he doesn’t recall any bad memories. He knows she loved him. When he closed his eyes, he could see it in her face.

He says he doesn’t understand why he wasn’t sent to live with one of his relatives. He had hundreds of them. Instead he was sent to a white foster home.

“I grew up in a teepee, for Pete’s sake,” he says. “This isn’t a cliche. Go to bed in a circular teepee tonight and wake up tomorrow morning with four walls. And when you open your eyes, you don’t recognize anybody in the room. And sit there for 12 years. Because that’s what I did.”

“Stenstrom liked his foster parents. He says they treated him well, but he does not refer to them as his own mother or father.

“I learned to appreciate that family,” he says. “I stayed with them until both of them passed away. When the mother passed, I went back to her funeral and one of her kids asked, ‘Why’s he here?’ ”

After that, something snapped. And like more than half of children who leave foster care, he got in trouble with the law and drank too much.

“The only thing I had going for me was my memory,” he says. “I looked in four directions and there was nobody.”

That’s when he returned to the reservation, he says, to see what he had missed and find his identity. He says it saved him.”

After Stenstrom found his way home, he says he connected with the spirit of his grandfather and made peace with the years he spent in foster care. Eventually he even found his mother. She told him she had searched for him for years. He spent six months with her before she died of cancer.

“That was my mom,” he says. “That meant the world to me.”

Native Foster Children Run Back to their Reservation Often

“On the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, former foster care children walk into Juanita Sherick’s office every week. They want to be saved too. Sherick knows the feeling. She was taken from her parents when she was 9.

Sherick says like those who visit her, she lost her language and her sense of tiospaye — tribal family.

“A lot of times it’s real painful for me to think about it because my brother and I went through a lot,” she says. “I have never forgotten it. I think that’s why I work so hard in this job.”

Sherick is now the tribe’s social worker. The most difficult mornings are when young children are waiting at her door. They’re runaways from foster care.

Asked what she does with them, she says: “I don’t give them back to the state of South Dakota, that’s for damn sure.”

That feeling is common on South Dakota’s reservations. Officials from three separate tribes said they are actively hiding children from state caseworkers.

Sherick says she finds a relative to take them in — something she says the state should have done in the first place.

“They are so happy to see Grandma,” she says. “They just cry. It makes you cry. Those are the times it’s all worth it.”

“‘They’ll Always Come Home’

Not too long ago a boy, about 6 years old, found his way to the pay phone at the minimart on the Cheyenne River reservation.

“He ran away from a foster home in Lemmon,” says Diane Garreau, the tribe’s social worker. “He was looking through the phone book because he had remembered names of his family.

“They try to come home,” she says. “They’ll always come home.They should have never left here.”Garreau and dozens of other tribal officials say the only difference between running away and running home is whether or not you’re running in the direction you belong.”

Update 2: “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.”

U.S. officials plan South Dakota summit on Indian foster care
[Rapid City Journal 12/16/11 by The Associated Press]

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