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Anchor: Antonia Gonzales
Advocates are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act.
The court will consider the constitutionality of the decades old law, which is intended to keep Native children with Native families.
Mark Richardson has more.
Dozens of tribes and ACLU chapters in at least a dozen states have filed briefs urging the court to uphold ICWA.
Tedde Simon (Navajo) with the Northern California branch of the ACLU says many tribes still consider the separation practices cultural genocide.
“Anything that was Indigenous about them was scrubbed away and removed.”
The case was supported on appeal by conservative groups, who claim ICWA gives tribal nations rights not provided to other racial minorities.
Native advocates fear a reversal could change how the federal government interacts with tribal nations on major issues.
Simon, who serves as an advocate for racial justice and is a member of the Navajo Nation, says many Native Americans believe that when possible, keeping a native child in their Indigenous culture is in everyone’s best interest.
“All kinds of studies have been done showing that Native children have much better life outcomes across all of these indicators when they have the ability to be connected to their culture and their language and their heritage. ”
Simon adds that many Native Americans believe the case isn’t just about children’s rights but is also an attack on the power and authority of tribal nations to defend their gaming rights, restore tribal lands to reservations, and manage their water rights in the Colorado and other river basins.
“This has the potential to be the most important Supreme Court case relating to Native American people in our lifetime. If the Supreme Court is to rule ICWA unconstitutional, it would have potentially devastating impacts on tribal sovereignty and the existence of Native nations.”
A warning: the following story deals with sexual assault
Indigenous singer and songwriter Kelly Jackson, of Wisconsin’s Lac du Flambeau band, is using her music to raise awareness about violence against women.
WXPR’s Erin Gottsacker reports.
Kelly Jackson wrote this song, “Don’t Speak”, about a decade ago in response to a personal encounter with sexual violence.
“I wrote ‘Don’t Speak’ because I’m a survivor. It was my way of putting into music what my own emotional recovery was.”
She started performing the song for audiences, and quickly realized it resonated with a lot of people.
“People would come up to me and say, ‘oh my gosh, I’m a victim of sexual violence when I was in college’ or ‘this happened to me.’”
In hopes of opening up this conversation, Jackson recorded a music video for the song. It features a cast of real-life indigenous survivors – from a military veteran to a college student to a wife and children.
In the video, each woman stands alone as her world literally turns upside down.
“We had this beautiful set and the whole room itself literally tipped backwards 90 degrees,” Jackson described. “Everything falls. It’s like that point where you find yourself lost in the chaos following a traumatic event. I think watching everything come back up and the women dusting themselves off and the powerwalk forward was very moving for me.”
They walk off stage alone, then reemerge together.
The video is the centerpiece of a fundraising and awareness campaign to raise attention to violence against women.
Jackson is calling the effort “Impact Change.”
Proceeds will help her nonprofit assemble emergency care packages for victims of violence. She encourages people who want to support the cause to simply start a conversation.
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