Forty-five years ago, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act to address a crisis. Native American children were being removed from their homes at alarming rates.
Studies found that more than a quarter of all American Indian children were taken from their families, placed in foster care or put up for adoption — typically in non-Native households.
ICWA was designed to counteract decades of policies and systems that uprooted Native American children from their families and culture — from boarding schools, to the Indian Adoption Project, to the disproportionate removal of Native American children by child welfare agencies.
Minnesota even has its own version of the law, called the Minnesota Indian Family Protection Act, or MIFPA, that lawmakers strengthened this year in case ICWA is struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case scheduled to be decided later this month.
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But while experts insist ICWA has helped, Native American children living in Minnesota remain 16 times more likely than white children to be removed from their homes and placed in foster care.
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