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Tribes and non-profit groups across Alaska have a nervous eye on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rhonda McBride from our flagship station KNBA tells us more.
A decision on Haaland vs. Brackeen, a case that could potentially overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act, is expected this month.
The states of Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana, along with individuals, have been fighting to overturn ICWA, claiming it’s unconstitutional.
Alex Cleghorn, a senior legal policy director for the Alaska Native Justice Center, says ICWA has, for more than forty years, been a tool that tribes have used to protect Native children and to make sure they are placed in extended families where possible.
Cleghorn says ICWA was created to prevent the widespread removal of Indian children from their tribes.
He says the arguments made by the lawsuit that ICWA is race-based are deeply flawed.
“It is clearly recognized and has been recognized for many years that that relationship is political. What some of the arguments are attempting to do is to reduce it to a racial recognition and therefore under some sort of equal protection analysis.”
Cleghorn says ICWA provides guidance for how states should interact with tribes – and guarantees their involvement in protecting the best interest of Indian children.
Jim Labelle, an Alaska Native boarding school survivor and president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, says he and his brother were sent to boarding schools, where they suffered abuse.
Two other brothers and a sister were adopted out to non-Indian families — and LaBelle did not find out about what happened to them until well into adulthood.
He says, had ICWA been the law of the land, his brothers and sisters might have been able to have at least maintained contact.
“They would have been placed in either relative’s homes or at least in the tribal community, that my mother came from.”
LaBelle feels that if the U.S. Supreme Court does not uphold tribal authority to intervene in adoption cases, the abuses of the past will return.
He says it will also open the door to weakening tribal sovereignty.
A trial over new North Dakota legislative districts began this week in federal court in Fargo.
The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Spirit Lake Tribe, and three Native voters are challenging the map’s compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The plaintiffs allege the state legislature drew legislative districts, which dilute the Native vote.
The Native American Rights Fund is representing the tribes and voters.
A First Nation’s chief in Ontario is appealing to three Canadian hockey stars to stop appearing in online gambling ads.
As Dan Karpenchuk reports, she says she’s concerned about the message that they’re sending to young Indigenous children.
Hockey stars Wayne Gretzky, Connor McDavid, and Auston Matthews to heroes to thousands of young Canadians.
But recently they’ve been appearing in ads for online gambling and those ads are, to some experts, getting out of control in Canada.
It’s difficult to watch any sports event without seeing some of those ads.
Now in an open letter, Kelly LaRocca, the chief of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation northeast of Toronto, wants those hockey stars to stop because of the influence they have on Indigenous youth.
“I think that they’re being told that it’s okay to just pick up and gamble whenever you feel like it. I hope that they stand down from advertising i-gaming, because they have an immense amount of influence because our youth look up to them. As adults we look up to them. We remember the good feeling of watching them play hockey and the delight of the sport and I just think it’s just disappointing that they’re taking part in this activity.”
A year ago, Ontario allowed the first regulated internet gambling market in Canada.
It means that anyone, any age, can place a bet.
The Gaming Association has argued that regulated gambling is safer than illegal sites.
But Ontario’s Alcohol and Gaming Commission is now considering a ban on the use of athletes and celebrities in internet gambling ads and marketing.
That decision as not yet been made.
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