I’ve been meaning to write about some of the books on my bookshelf for quite a while.  (As in, all semester!)  So here’s a quick roundup of a handful of 2011 titles relevant to motherhood globally:

Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, by Lamia Karim (University of Minnesota Press).  If you’ve been following microfinance, often touted as a cure-all for global poverty, anthropologist Karim offers a more sobering look.  You can read the great review in the current issue of the Women’s Review of Books (WRB) here.

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs).  Hvistendahl is a correspondent for Science magazine, and her thoroughly researched (and deeply disturbing) book examines the gender imbalance globally. Amy Agigian does a fabulous job reviewing it in the same issue of WRB, although her essay (alas) isn’t available online.

The 21^st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How To Do It, edited by Andrea O’Reilly (Demeter Press).  If you need to feel uplifted about all the social change brought about by mothers, look no further.  This comprehensive anthology includes articles about maternal activism from all parts of the world, including Australia, Ireland, Germany, Argentina, Iran, Russia, Canada, and the U.S.

Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, by Rebecca Asher (Harvill Secker).  Journalist Asher examines the current state of motherhood in the U.K. and discovers that women are still left cooking the bacon and, um, pushing the pram.

Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering, by Cameron Lynn Macdonald (University of California Press).  Macdonald, a sociologist, provides a fascinating look at the relationships of professional women with their nannies/au pairs.  Rosanna Hertz reviews both this book and Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Communities, by Tamara Mose Brown (NYU Press) in that same issue of WRB (enough already, I know.  But have you subscribed yet?).  Brown has also reflected on her own experiences as a mother studying nannies, which I wrote about here.

I write to share a quick update on a researcher and writer previously featured on Girl w/ Pen: Chloe Bird, Ph.D., a Senior Social Scientist at RAND in Santa Monica, was interviewed about her research on gender and household labor for the episode of Dr. Phil which is scheduled to air this Friday, December 2nd.

The “Chore Wars” episode focuses on three couples, married 4 years, 16 years and 39 years, respectively.  The three wives were in conflict over their husbands’ refusal to do more chores around the house. Dr. Phil counseled the couples, and then turned to Bird, who was sitting in the studio audience, to ask her about her research. She discussed some of the sociological issues as to why the division of household labor is such a challenge and how inequity can impact both spouses.

Bird noted,

In the case of inequity in household labor, the intended audience is individuals and couples seeking to find an equitable way to accomplish all the tasks it takes to keep a household going. So, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to communicate research to such a large and diverse audience.

For more on Bird’s medical sociological research, see my prior Girl w/Pen interview with her and her co-author Pat Rieker about their book Gender and Health: Constrained Choices and Social Policies.

2011 brought us two top-selling autobiographical takes on female aging. Jane Fonda’s Prime Time asks readers to explore everything from friendship to fitness to sex, with a goal of having us accept that “people in their 70s can be sexually attractive and sexually active.”  Betty White’s If you Ask Me (And Of Course You Won’t) offers readers a candid and often humorous take on the last 15 years of her life. White warns of the pitfall of our youth-centric culture: “So many of us start dreading age when we’re in high school. And I think that’s really a waste of a lovely life.”  While these celebrity authors paint provocative personal portraits of aging, I’m drawn to the new book by Colgate sociologist Meika Loe, Ph.D.: Aging Our Way: Lessons for Living from 85 and Beyond (Oxford University Press) charts her three-year journey following the lives of 30 diverse “elders” (women and men ages 85 to 102 years old), most of whom were aging at home and making it work.

Adina Nack: How did your last book on the Viagra phenomenon lead you to your new book on the ‘oldest old’?

Meika Loe: For The Rise of Viagra I interviewed elder men and elder women partners of Viagra users. It became clear that ageism impacted their lives and was a key ideology that propelled the Viagra phenomenon forward. Afterwards, I missed those interactions with elders and wanted to know more about their experiences aging at home. Aging Our Way ended up being a book that focuses more on elder women’s experiences, voices that had been marginalized, if not completely absent, from the media coverage of the Viagra phenomenon.  In the 85+ age group, women outnumber men by almost 3 to 1, and close to 80% of elders living at home alone are women. Too many people assume that research on elders is sad and depressing, in comparison to research on Viagra. To the contrary! I find elders’ stories inspirational. Aging Our Way features the lessons I learned from them – lessons for all ages.

AN: Aside from the Viagra interviews, what inspired you to focus on this group of people who are all more than twice your age?

ML: I was extremely close with my grandparents and great-grandparents growing up. More recently, I rent a room from a village elder in the small town where I work. Living with her, an invisible world opened up to me – a world of widows caring for one another and collectively attending to quality of life, mostly in the absence of biological kin.  Like, Carol, my seventy-something landlady, who gets a check-in call from octogenarian Joanne every morning at 8 a.m. Then Carol calls 98-year-old Ruth. All of these widows have lived alone in their homes within 10 square blocks of each other for decades, and now they constitute a social family. Once in a great while, when Carol cannot reach Ruth, she’ll grab the extra key and head to her home to make sure everything is okay. One time she found Ruth on the floor.

AN: That must have been scary – so, even with this type of ‘morning phone tree’, isn’t isolation a problem for these women and men aging alone?

ML: Yes, like most of us, elders attempt that delicate balancing act between dependence and independence every day. So, while many of these elders value independent-living, they’re also adept at building social networks. Ruth H. is committed to making a new friend every year of her life: she reaches out to my campus’s Adopt-a-Grandparent group and has five student walking partners this year, all new friends. That said, aging alone comes with its share of isolation and risk, and I’m reminded of Elizabeth, a Navy veteran and high school English teacher who insisted on living alone in her home, amidst her longtime friends and neighbors, despite her children’s pleas for her to move to Georgia. Elizabeth recently passed away during Hurricane Irene. She was inspecting her basement for flooding and must have fallen. This is such a sad story, but Elizabeth would not have wanted it any other way: she said she wanted to die with her boots on.

AN: Do women have an advantage over men when it comes to longevity and aging?

ML: Social epidemiologists Lorber and Moore have shown that women live longer but not necessarily healthier lives. Traditional gender roles take their toll: often, women prioritize caring for others for so long that their own health suffers.  Perhaps as a result, women have higher rates of chronic illness and depression. At the same time, many of the women I followed are enjoying a chapter in their lives where they can focus on themselves, their communities, their gardens, and their own health. Shana, 95, says things like “Now I am finally living for myself. Now I can focus on me.” Most women have lifelong gendered skill-sets for self-care: systems for food preparation, cleaning, bathing, budgeting, and reaching out to others. The men I followed are less adept at those skills: they had never been expected to cook and clean. So men, like Glenn, told me about having to learn these skills after the loss of their spouses.

AN: Does caretaking of others really end at age 85?

ML: Caretaking continues, often in new and familiar ways.  I think of Olga, age 97, caring for her grandson every weekend and putting aside a few dollars every day for her daughter who is battling cancer.  In her subsidized senior housing community, she delivers hot meals, hems pants, and runs errands. By caretaking, Olga feels a sense of community, a web of support. When she needs assistance, she has options and knows where to turn. So contrary to expecting nonagenarians to be sickly and dependent, many not only receive but also give care.

AN: Talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare has been in the news – how did you see these programs impacting elders’ lives?

ML: I have to admit – in my 30s, I see money going out of my paycheck—and I remind myself that that money is put aside for when I need it – I just hope it will be there! Through this research I saw how and why programs like Medicare and Social Security matter. For example, Juana worked in factories her whole adult life, and her small Social Security check keeps her hovering above the poverty line, able to afford rice and beans for the family and to pay for cable TV so she can watch her beloved Yankees.  Medicare covers annual doctor’s visits that likely keep her from spending time in the emergency room, a more expensive cost for society. Like most elders, she depends on Social Security for a significant portion of her income.

AN: Why should we all – not just the elders in the U.S. – read your book?

ML: Undergrads come to my Sociology of Aging course with all sorts of preconceived notions. They dread aging, seeing it as synonymous with depression, disease, and death. Our ageist society has taught them that aging equals loss, and they’re surprised to learn about elders who are aging on their own terms: coordinating self-care, combating isolation and loneliness, and exercising autonomy and control – sometimes in the face of disabilities and chronic illnesses. We all benefit from learning creativity, connectivity and resiliency from our elders. They teach us crucial lessons about all stages in life: living in moderation, designing comfortable spaces, constructing social families, appreciating humor and touch, and building social capital.  And, let’s face it, if we’re lucky, then we will all be elders soon enough.

“Mom, I think I’d like to be a photographer,” my 10-year-old daughter, Maya, said recently.

“That would be very cool.”  Inside, I found myself thinking: I hope you can earn a living doing that.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a believer in the arts.  I sang in a high school show choir before Glee made that seem cool.  I worked backstage on all of my high school’s plays and minored in theatre at Muskingum College just because I loved it.

In fact, maybe because I know I have a bias toward the arts and humanities, I worry about how to correct for that.  I also know very well the barriers women face in entering the male-dominated—and lucrative—STEM fields.  I love sharing blog space with Science Grrl, Veronica Arreola, and I definitely gain insights from her posts.  I want to try to expose Maya to those potential career paths, too.

But the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia last week gave me a new way to think about the transformative potential of the arts.

I listed to Lisa Yun Lee, the director of the Jane Addams Hull House museum, talk about why she makes efforts to support the arts with her programs.  She explained that her immigrant mother—who she knew as an accountant—had wanted to be a poet, a calling she gave up when she came to the United States.

I attended Ashley Lucas’s moving one-woman show, Doin’ Time Through the Visiting Glass, which examines the impact of incarceration on families.  Before the performance I admit I had given little thought to how prison shapes and binds those on the outside.

Lee’s remarks about her mother and Lucas’s performance reminded me that I want Maya to pursue her passions, wherever they take her.  I want her to be the photographer—or the poet—who can realize her vision and possibly make art that makes change.

Just off the plane from a fabulous trip to Atlanta for the National Women’s Studies Association Conference.  Thought I’d share my opening remarks from Girl w/Pen’s session, “Gone Virtual: Opportunities and Challenges for Feminist Scholar-Bloggers.”  Thanks to everyone who came and participated in the Roundtable, and to those who weren’t able to be there, I hope these postings help!

It’s an honor to be here in real space with these women with whom I share a platform virtually.  A bit about the history of Girl w/Pen: In 2007, when my first book (Only Child) came out, and then my second (Sisterhood, Interrupted), I started a blog.  It’s mission morphed as I did, becoming eventually a group platform designed to “bridge feminist research and popular reality.”  Today, we are a collaborative blog of 10 scholar-bloggers across disciplines–all of them what I would call “engaged scholars,” women who are not only modeling something important for their students (namely, engagement in a more public form of dialogue) but reinventing what it means to be a feminist scholar along the way.  They’re going to share with you how blogging for a larger audience impacts their research, their writing, and their teaching, and how collaborative blogging can serve broader feminist goals.

But first, a quick comment about why it’s particularly interesting and important to be blogging NOW.  The blogosphere is remaking the media.  It’s part of media, sure, but it’s also proactively shaping, often, what becomes news.  I’ve recently teamed up with The OpEd Project and have been teaching seminars with them.  A big part of what we talk about there is women’s imperative to contribute to public forums and public debate given our woeful underrepresentation in the nation–indeed, the world’s–most public and prominent thought leadership forums.

How many of you blog?  How many of the rest of you would like to blog but feel you have no time to?

My hope, by the end of our session this morning, after hearing what these scholar-bloggers next to me have to say about it all, is that the question becomes not how can I possibly add blogging to my already packed life but how can I not.

Panelist introductions:

Heather Hewett is an Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies.  Her work has been published in a range of academic and popular venues, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women’s Review of Books, Brain, Child, and in several edited collections, including Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. She writes and edits the “Global Mama” column for GWP.

Veronica I. Arreola is the assistant director of the Center for Research on Women and Gender and the director of the Women in Science and Engineering program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A veteran blogger, her own blog, Viva la Feminista, is where she discusses the intersection between feminism and motherhood. She holds a bachelors degree in Biological Sciences and a masters in Public Administration, both with concentrations in Gender and Women’s Studies. She began work on her Ph.D. in Public Administration last year.  She writes the Science Grrl column at GWP.

Alison Piepmeier directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, where she’s an associate professor of English.  Her most recent book is Girl Zines:  Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009).  She’s a member of the NWSA Governing Council.  She writes the Body Language column at GWP.

Allison Kimmich has led the National Women’s Studies Association since 2004.  Most recently she has guided the Association’s Teagle-grant funded research on women’s studies and civic engagement.  She holds a PhD in women’s studies from Emory University.  She writes the Girl Talk column for Girl w/Pen.

Kyla Bender-Baird is a Doctoral Student at the CUNY Graduate Center where she focuses on sociology of gender, embodiment, and the law.  Her book, Transgender Employment Experiences, was released this fall by SUNY Press.  Prior to returning to graduate school, Kyla worked at the National Council for Research on Women where she served as the managing editor of their blog (among other things).

And I’m Deborah Siegel. (Bio and all that stuff at www.deborahsiegel.net)

A quick note about how the blog itself works: We’re each “editors” and welcome guest posts that fall under the broad rubic of our particular columns.  We also welcome guest posts on other topics as well.  (See the guidelines, and use our contact form to get in touch with our fellow blogger and webmaster Avory Faucette!)

FROM THE HANDOUT…

CHECK OUT PANELISTS’ COLUMNS AND SAMPLE POSTS
SCIENCE GRRL / Veronica Arreola Can We Whistle Stereotypes Away?
BODY POLITIC  / Kyla Bender-Baird Love Your (NonNormative) Body – a dialogue with Kyla and Avory
GLOBAL MAMA / Heather Hewett Maternal Health, One Year Later
GIRL TALK  / Allison Kimmich The Other Sex Talk
BODY LANGUAGE / Alison Piepmeier High Expectations
MAMA W/PEN  / Deborah Siegel Midlife Mama Asks Whether We’re All Too Isolated to Fight the Pink-v.-Blue Battle Outside Our Homes

OTHER VENUES WHERE GIRL W/PENNERS BLOG
Baxter Sez
Ms. Magazine Blog
The Pink & Blue Diaries
Viva la Feminista
The Real Deal

As I prepare to head down to Atlanta for the National Women’s Studies Conference and the Girlw/Pen panel, I have to share with you one of my new favorite sites: Gendered Innovations.

What is Gendered Innovations?

Gendered Innovations employ sex and gender analysis as a resource to create new knowledge and technology.
The Gendered Innovations project:

1) develops methods of sex and gender analysis for scientists and engineers;
2) provides case studies as concrete illustrations of how sex and gender analysis leads to innovation.

There is a wonderful video of Londa Schiebinger explaining the project too.

What I love and greatly appreciate about this project is that it nicely explains why gender is important in science and engineering. From seat belts that project pregnant women and their fetus to heart disease researchers working with women in mind, gender plays an important part of science and engineering innovation.

This chart outlines all the points along the innovation path where sex and gender must be acknowledged in order for the outcome to be relevant and appropriate for all.

Setting Research Priorities and Making Funding Decisions? Who is valued? Is the National Institutes of Health funding research in women’s health at an appropriate level? And just becuase there is an Office of Women’s Health does not mean the funding matches the need.

Once funding is approved by Congress, does NIH set objectives that will positively impact women’s lives? For years heart disease was seen as a men’s disease and that women also had it. But women exhibit symptoms differently. We are still trying to educate women and the medical community to these differences.

There’s a laundry list of things to consider when deciding on methodologies, gather and analyzing data and evaluating the results with consideration to sex and gender. Most importantly is that fine line of setting up a research project to look for gendered differences and being able to identify those differences afterward.

And off to market we go! Will our voice activated gadgets recognize the higher pitch of women’s voices? Will the hot new drug work just as well in women as in men?

It’s not just about women either. Men are left out of research on so-called women’s diseases like osteoporosis.

For a researcher who is still learning like me, I really enjoy the terminology page. Because even the most seasoned feminist needs a quick reminder of when to use sex or gender appropriately.

Obviously I give this site a huge thumbs up. It is great for those who just want to understand what the big deal about gender in medicine/science/engineering is or for those of us who are doing or planning to do our own research into how gender impacts innovations.

Though two new shows in the fall line-up – Once Upon a Time and Grimm – both use fairy tales as the basis for their narratives, blending the ‘real world’ with the ‘fairy tale’ world, the similarities pretty much stop there. The two shows are radically different – and especially so in their representation of gender. Grimm has far less of a female focus and frames women as victims, functioning like CSI: The Fairy Tale Version while Once Upon a Time is centered around strong female characters, functioning as a sort of Snow White: Disney Princess Slayer.

Much like Hoodwinked, Grimm functions as a fairy-tale crime scene retake. However, while Hoodwinked gave us a wise-talking Red and a go-to Granny, Grimm focuses on a male detective and thus far has put females on the sidelines – and, in accordance with rape culture – represents them as potential victims who had better “stay out of the forest” it they want to stay safe.

The season premiere opened with a young woman jogging in a red-sweatshirt listening to the Eurhythmics song Sweet Dreams, a song that will later be hummed by her wolfy attacker as he ominously adds another red sweatshirt to his basement wardrobe collection, indicating he has kidnapped and killed quite a few ‘litte Reds.’ As the use of the Eurhythmics song suggests “some of them want to abuse you.” Never fear though, as the intrepid male detective duo of Nick Burckhardt (David Guintoli) and Hank Griffin (Russell Hornsby) are on the wolf’s track, serving as would-be woodsmen to save red damsels in distress.

Earlier, these same two detectives watch women walking down a street. Hank asks David “What you looking at?,” to which David notes that something seems remiss about one of the women, noting her low salary does not match her Armani outfit. Hank scoffs in reply “Why can’t you just watch her ass like the rest of us?” This may be the most obvious moment of a sexualized male gaze in the premiere, but other aspects of the show indicate it will be more akin to Supernatural (where two male leads are the key demon hunters) than to Alias (where a strong woman was front and center).

Granted the premiere introduces us to Mary – Nick’s guardian since he was 12. She is the one strong woman thus far, telling Nick about his true “fairy tale hunter” identity and then battling a monstrous baddie. This fight lands her in hospital (and if male-hero Nick hadn’t shot the monster, would have likely resulted in her death). This, and the fact she earlier told Nick she’s been given only weeks to live, suggests Mary won’t be around for long – too bad, as putting  (good) strong women at the helm of fairy tales is a rare occurrence – there are plenty of evil female villains, but not many heroines, unless you consider talking to animals or finding a prince a particularly heroic trait.

The most intriguing plot point of the premiere comes when Nick targets the wrong creature, a reformed wolf. The wolf/human insists on his innocence, angrily telling Nick “you people started profiling us over 200 years ago.” It will be interesting to see if the show builds on ideas of racial profiling or if (please!) it includes some strong women and non-prince charming detectives, until it does, I will get my strong-women-in-fairy-tales fix watching Once Upon a Time.

Once features not only a re-vamped Snow White, but her kick-butt daughter, Emma Swan.

While in Grimm, the setting is modern-day Oregon, in Once, the characters are trapped between two worlds – the fairy-tale past and the modern world, including the town of Storybrooke, where an evil spell cast by the Queen has frozen all the fairy-tale characters in time and taken away their awareness of who they are. In the modern world, The Queen is Storybrooke’s dictatorial mayor, and her adoptive son Henry is on a quest to save the day. He seeks out Emma Swan, the daughter of Snow White, who lives in Boston and works as a bail bondsperson that reveals the “evil” of philandering men. Not knowing her “true identity,” Emma goes with Henry to Storybroooke, staying there when he convinces her only she can undo the curse.

Thus far, it is not clear who knows they are stuck in a fairy tale and who doesn’t, but the lavish costumes, special effects, and attention to fairy-tale detail makes for a show that is far more enchanting than the film Enchantment – Disney’s attempt at a fairy tale redux that, in spite of excellent turns by Amy Adams as princess and Susan Sarandon as Evil Queen, ultimately gave us the same old message – someday your prince will come, he will “save” you, and your “happy ending” equals being  a happy wife/mother.

Where Enchantment failed in a typical Disney way – by trying to “modernize” a sexy message and make it palatable via the inclusion of catchy tunes and cute talking animals, Once succeeds by NOT being cute – instead we have the nasty Rumpelstilskin morphed into the modern evil capitalist Mr. Gold, the newfangled Snow as an excellent, caring elementary school teacher, little Red and the Fairy Godmother as hotel proprietors, and Jiminy Cricket as child therapist. Further, though the show accords with the “evil stepmother” meme of fairy tales – it complicates it as well, suggesting that “evil” women might just  be the result of a society that does not value single mothers and questions powerful women in the workforce.

But, the biggest difference is the fact Emma Swan is framed as the heroine – that her “happy ending” is NOT about finding a man or going to a ball all gussied up, but about detective work, about building a relationship with her son Henry, and about seeking the “truth” as to why time stands still in the corrupt Storybrooke world. For once a female is poised to be the hero – and with no prince charming by her side. Woot!

The themes and content of the show thus far circulate around issues of gender, class, education, mothering/parenting, beauty, aging, and power – yes, these are common fairy tale concerns, but the difference is Once – at least so far – takes fairy tale tropes and give them a feminist/social justice twist.

The queen/mayor is not just an evil witch of the all powerful women are bad, but a woman stuck within capitalist patriarchy – where Mr. Gold (Rumplestilskin) calls the shots. Even more intriguingly, Maleficent (played by True Blood’s Kristin Bauer van Straten) is portrayed as recognizing the bind inherent in the good/evil binary and the way it too simplistically frames some women as witches, and others as princesses. In one humorous scene, The Queen and Maleficent complain about Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, noting how those prissies ruined their lives. Underneath this banter lies the suggestion that what really turned them evil was neither Snow or Sleeping, but patriarchy and the marriage imperative imposed by fathers.

The show also interestingly puts a new twist on “true love” – the focus of so many fairy tales. When the Queen wants to release her dark curse, Rumplestilskin tells her she must sacrifice “the heart of the thing you love most,” which we soon discover is not some Prince Charming character, but her father.  Just before she kills him, her father tells her “Power is seductive, but so is love, you can have that again…I believe given a chance we can find happiness again, but the choice is yours.”  Alas, she chooses power over love and kills him, using his heart for the curse that transports the fairy tale inhabitants to Storybrooke and freezes them forever in time.

Henry, who bears the namesake of the slain father of the Queen, seeks Emma out to release the curse, telling her she is the only one who has the power to do so. Embedded within this quest is Henry’s own search for true motherly love. However, the show is careful not to suggest that Emma’s love is “better” or “natural” because she is his biological mother – rather, it suggests that, as a good person, she cannot help but help Henry, and in doing so, she disproves her claim that she is “not fit to be a mother.” The show also is careful not to demonize her for putting Henry up for adoption and notes the age/class factors that contributed to her decision. Moreover, it opens out what “mothering” means – it is not about having money and power (like the Queen/Mayor), but about the type of nurturing both Emma and the newfangled Snow White (Henry’s elementary school teacher) offer Henry.

Emma of course doesn’t believe she can save Henry nor Storybrooke, but, as Henry points out,  “the hero never believes at first, if they did, it wouldn’t be a very good story.”

As for me, I believe this is going to be one heck of a good story, and I hope against hope that it will lead to the “happy ending” of finally FINALLY! having a mainstream fairy-tale that doesn’t sideline females or suggest they are only good for cleaning up after dwarves, marrying princes, or beautifully sleeping.  As for me, I am not awaiting “true love’s kiss” – nope, I am counting the days until episode two of Once Upon a Time.

For those of you who haven’t yet listened to NPR’s recent series on Native American families and foster care in South Dakota, click here.  The first part aired last week when I was running errands.  I immediately parked my car so that I could stop everything and listen.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve done something like that.  I’m a multitasker to the core, but I couldn’t think about groceries with this story on the radio.  I couldn’t stop listening, partly because I could not wrap my mind around what I was hearing.

All Things Considered reporters Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters dropped several bombshells in their story.  Consider the following list of their “key findings” from the web version:

* Each year, South Dakota removes an average of 700 Native American children from their homes. Indian children are less than 15 percent of the state’s child population, but make up more than half the children in foster care.

* 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.

What is going on here?  How is it possible that Native families are still being torn apart?

Native parents and grandparents have fought to keep their children for decades.  The United States began taking Native American children away from their families in the 1800s, sending them to boarding and missionary schools that would “civilize” them and cause them to assimilate into Anglo-American culture.  Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s helped to bring this era to an end—but clearly many Native children remain vulnerable.  While some children may need a more stable home than the one their parent(s) are able to provide, it’s hard to understand the numbers in South Dakota: Native children comprise less than 15% of the population but more than half of children in foster care; 90% of Native children are sent to non-Native families or group care when they are legally supposed to be placed in the care of other Native Americans.

Louise Erdrich writes about a single Native mother, Albertine, who fights unsuccessfully to keep her child in the powerful short story “American Horse.”  Albertine’s passionate love for her son remains invisible to the social worker, Vicki Koob, a well-meaning woman with a “trained and cataloguing gaze” who sees only evidence of poverty and alcoholism as she surveys their small house.  She wishes to “salvage” the boy from his surroundings—as if his home is a trash heap or his family an impending shipwreck.

What if Vicki Koob were able to see what Erdrich sees?  What the reader is compelled to see?

Patricia Hill Collins argues that placing the experiences of mothers of color at the center of our vision enables us to understand motherhood differently.  In “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” she writes:

Whether because of the labor exploitation of African-American women under slavery and its ensuing tenant farm system, the political conquest of Native American women during European acquisition of land, or exclusionary immigration policies applies to Asian-Americans and Hispanics, women of color have performed motherwork that challenges social constructions of work and family as separate spheres, of male and female gender roles as similarly dichotomized, and of the search for autonomy as the guiding human quest. […] This type of motherwork recognizes that individual survival, empowerment, and identity require group survival, empowerment, and identity.

For these mothers, the biggest conflicts aren’t found inside their homes.  They lurk outside: the institutions and structures and ideologies that threaten to tear families apart.  So for Native American mothers (as for enslaved African-American mothers), “getting to keep one’s children and raise them accordingly fosters empowerment.”

So please, check out the story and leave your thoughts below.