![]() ![]() “It matters a tremendous amount that tribes are seen as nations and not races,” Reese said.Īccording to her, it’s unlikely ICWA will come out of this challenge unscathed, and there are a number of ways the court could weaken the law or strike it down. That distinction has been upheld by more than a century of Supreme Court precedent and serves as the basis for a body of federal law and policy that protects tribes’ authority to govern themselves. We’re talking about the people who make up the citizenry of a domestic dependent nation.” “When folks are enrolled in an Indian tribe, we’re not talking about the descendants of a racial group. “It puts tribal governments in the position of doing some basic education,” Reese said. Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, a professor at Stanford Law School and a citizen of Nambé Pueblo, called this argument “unmoored” from the history of tribal nations in this country. ICWA’s challengers are non-Native couples who say that the law puts them “last in line” to adopt Native children and discriminates unfairly on the basis of race. But ICWA - the law that helped facilitate those placements - is in peril. And to this day, that’s the way I am.”Īnd the way she and her husband, Pat - who’s Northern Arapaho - have since raised their three biological daughters and dozens of Native foster children on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. “It was different, but it wasn’t strange. She stopped going to church and started going to ceremony. City life didn’t suit her, so Clarisse found her way back to Big Pine and reconnected with her biological family. (Courtesy Harris)īy the time ICWA passed, Clarisse had long since aged out of foster care and into a government relocation program for Native people, which took her to San Jose, California. The federal law gives tribal nations a voice in custody proceedings involving Native children and prioritizes those children’s families and communities for foster and adoptive placements.Ĭlarisse Harris as a child. In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act sought to address that history of cultural dispossession. And my younger brother said, ‘Johnny! You know we’re Apaches!’”Ĭlarisse laughs as she told this story - she thinks her brother must have been watching too much “Bonanza.” But what she and her siblings experienced was part of what Congress once called “the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today”: the systematic removal of Indigenous children to assimilationist boarding schools and non-Native foster and adoptive homes. The butcher asked my older brother, ‘Well, what kind of Indian are you?’ And he didn’t know. “They had a little corner grocery store, and my brothers were in there. Clarisse remembers a time when their foster parents took them to visit Bakersfield, California. The siblings never lived more than about 60 miles from Big Pine, but their identity never came up in the white homes where they were raised. “We didn’t know we were members of a tribe.” “We knew we were Indians,” she said, because that was how people in town and at church talked about them. Growing up, she and her five siblings didn’t know that. “What kind of Indian are you?”Ĭlarisse is Northern Paiute from the Big Pine Reservation in California. She’s been a foster parent for 40 years and was brought up in foster care herself. This chaos is comfortable and familiar, she said. We’ll have to go to Lander tomorrow.”īefore the night is over, Clarisse will mediate an argument over which pumpkin belongs to which boy, talk all seven kids into having salad with their dinner and give one of her sons a haircut. “How is his arm?” Ty asks Clarisse, who shakes her head. He’s worried about the other 14-year-old who fell and hurt himself at school. Ty, who’s 18 and home from a day of community college classes, helps track down the costume online. “Ghostbuster costume,” he says, but Clarisse has her hands full making dinner. “Mhm,” she says. ![]() Some of the younger boys are outside shooting hoops and riding bikes around the dusty driveway.Ĭlarisse’s 14-year-old, who has autism, comes into the kitchen with a request. The 5-year-old has drawn triangle eyes and a toothy smile on hers, but she’s waiting on carving help from the teenagers, who are huddled around a smartphone watching YouTube videos. “OK, did everybody get their pumpkins done? Get those seeds picked up and put in the pan?” she shouts from the kitchen. Inside, on a school night before Halloween, Clarisse is frying up hamburger meat and potatoes for dinner while the kids carve jack-o’-lanterns at a long table in the family room. In the yard, there’s a chicken coop, a sweat lodge and a view of two snow-capped mountain ranges: the Wind River to the west and the Owl Creek to the north. They live in a white house on a hill in Ethete, Wyoming, with the seven children they’re raising. Clarisse and Pat Harris are in their mid-70s. ![]()
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