{"id":3155,"date":"2011-11-02T23:24:52","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T04:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=3155"},"modified":"2011-11-02T23:24:52","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T04:24:52","slug":"global-mama-native-families-and-foster-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2011\/11\/02\/global-mama-native-families-and-foster-care\/","title":{"rendered":"GLOBAL MAMA: Native Families and Foster Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of you who haven\u2019t yet listened to NPR\u2019s recent series on Native American families and foster care in South Dakota, click here<\/a>.\u00a0 The first part aired last week when I was running errands. \u00a0I immediately parked my car so that I could stop everything and listen.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t remember the last time I\u2019ve done something like that.\u00a0 I\u2019m a multitasker to the core, but I couldn\u2019t think about groceries with this story on the radio.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t stop listening, partly because I could not wrap my mind around what I was hearing.<\/p>\n

All Things Considered<\/em> reporters Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters dropped several bombshells in their story.\u00a0 Consider the following list of their \u201ckey findings\u201d from the web version<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

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

* 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.<\/p>\n

* A close review of South Dakota’s budget shows that they receive almost $100 million a year to subsidize its foster care program.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is going on here? \u00a0How is it possible that Native families are still being torn apart?<\/p>\n

Native parents and grandparents have fought to keep their children for decades.\u00a0 The United States began taking Native American children away from their families in the 1800s, sending them to boarding and missionary schools<\/a> that would \u201ccivilize\u201d them and cause them to assimilate into Anglo-American culture. \u00a0Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s helped to bring this era to an end\u2014but clearly many Native children remain vulnerable.\u00a0 While some children may need a more stable home than the one their parent(s) are able to provide, it\u2019s hard to understand the numbers in South Dakota: Native children comprise less than 15% of the population but more than half<\/em> of children in foster care; 90%<\/em> of Native children are sent to non-Native families or group care when they are legally<\/em> supposed to be placed in the care of other Native Americans.<\/p>\n

Louise Erdrich writes about a single Native mother, Albertine, who fights unsuccessfully to keep her child in the powerful short story \u201cAmerican Horse<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Albertine\u2019s passionate love for her son remains invisible to the social worker, Vicki Koob, a well-meaning woman with a \u201ctrained and cataloguing gaze\u201d who sees only evidence of poverty and alcoholism as she surveys their small house.\u00a0 She wishes to \u201csalvage\u201d the boy from his surroundings\u2014as if his home is a trash heap or his family an impending shipwreck.<\/p>\n

What if Vicki Koob were able to see what Erdrich sees?\u00a0 What the reader is compelled to see?<\/p>\n

Patricia Hill Collins argues that placing the experiences of mothers of color at the center of our vision enables us to understand motherhood differently.\u00a0 In \u201cShifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n

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. [\u2026] This type of motherwork recognizes that individual survival, empowerment, and identity require group survival, empowerment, and identity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For these mothers, the biggest conflicts aren’t found inside their homes.\u00a0 They lurk outside: the institutions and structures and ideologies that threaten to tear families apart.\u00a0 So for Native American mothers (as for enslaved African-American mothers), \u201cgetting to keep one\u2019s children and raise them accordingly fosters empowerment.\u201d<\/p>\n

So please, check out the story and leave your thoughts below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those of you who haven\u2019t yet listened to NPR\u2019s recent series on Native American families and foster care in South Dakota, click here.\u00a0 The first part aired last week when I was running errands. \u00a0I immediately parked my car so that I could stop everything and listen. I can\u2019t remember the last time I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1916,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21105],"tags":[21141,35,21369,3109,21640,119,21733,21814,21920],"class_list":["post-3155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-mama","tag-all-things-considered","tag-children","tag-foster-care","tag-motherhood","tag-native-american","tag-poverty","tag-racial-equality","tag-south-dakota","tag-women-of-color"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1916"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}