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Choctaws fight to preserve authority over Native American adoptions

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Choctaws fight to preserve authority over Native American adoptions

A challenge to a decades-old federal law that aims to keep Native American children and their families together is before the U.S. Supreme Court, and it has the potential to impact tribes around the country, including thosein Mississippi.

The Indian Child Welfare Act governs child custody of Native children. If a child is removed from their parents, the act sets preferences to place the child with another family member, another member of the tribe or a different tribe.

The case Brackeen v. Halaand before the Supreme Court challenges these preferences. Three pairs of non-Native foster parents and three states are suing the federal government and five tribes, arguing the act discriminates against non-Native people based on race.

Tribes including the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians are watching the case and see more at stake than adoption.

“As the only federally recognized tribe in the State of Mississippi, our 11,000 plus members are descendants of those members who chose to remain here in Mississippi to preserve our cultural heritage on our ancestral homelands,” the tribe said in a statement. “Today, just as in the past, the preservation and security of our tribe, and our tribal children and families are of utmost importance.”

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in November and is expected to make a ruling next year.

ICWA was created in response to the mistreatment of generations of Native American people by the government, including the enrollment of children in boarding schools where they were forced to abandon their religion and culture and the adoption of children out of tribes.

When the act passed in 1978, between 25% and 35% of all Native children were taken from their families and put in foster homes, up for adoption or into institutions, according to surveys by the Association on American Indian Affairs. They were often placed with non-Native and white families.

ICWA gives tribes the opportunity to be notified about cases involving Native American children and to intervene. It established a process for transferring child custody cases to tribal court.

The act recognizes that tribes have sovereignty and exclusive jurisdiction over their members who live on tribal land or are domiciled there. The act’s standards also apply to Native child custody proceedings in state court for those who don’t live on tribal lands.

During Senate committee hearings about Indian child welfare in the late 1970s, then Choctaw Chief Calvin Isaac testified that raising Native children in non-Native homes reduces tribes’ chances of survival.

The tribe still holds a similar view and says ICWA helps tribes maintain sovereignty by ensuring they have the opportunity to protect and preserve the wellbeing of their children.

“Children are tribal communities’ most valuable resource since the language, culture, and traditions that make those communities unique are passed down from generation to generation,” the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians said in a statement.

The Mississippi Department of Child Protective Services, which oversees foster care and adoption in the state, recognizes ICWA and has developed policies and procedures for how to handle cases with Native children and follow the act.

This includes giving the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians or any tribe that a child belongs to the right to assume jurisdiction of the child. The department also signed a memorandum of understanding with the tribe in 2020.

In the Supreme Court case, two couples from Texas and Nevada were successfully able to adopt Native American children, even after challenges from the tribes where the children were eligible for membership.

Another plaintiff, a Minnesota couple, tried to adopt a child who was placed with her grandmother, who is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. The grandmother eventually adopted the girl.

During oral arguments in November, attorneys representing the plaintiffs challenging ICWA argued a number of issues with the act, including that it violates equal protection through racial discrimination and goes beyond the powers given to Congress to regulate Native American affairs.

Another issue challengers brought up is whether Native Americans should be classified politically through tribes or racially through their ancestry.

Ian Gershengorn, the attorney representing the five tribes in the Brackeen case, told the justices during oral arguments that tribal self-government is at the core of ICWA. All federally recognized tribes and members of those tribes have a common political relationship with the United States, which he said is why a political classification is more appropriate than a racial one.

In court documents, defendants have expressed concerns that a challenge to the act could reduce the legal rights of tribes in issues including environmental regulations, land and gaming.

Ashley Landers is a professor in the human development and family science program at Ohio State University who studies child welfare of Native children. She wonders what protections for Native children will remain if ICWA is overturned or drastically changed. 

“What are the protections in place to try and right this historic wrong?” Landers said. “We need to have ownership of what we’ve done to Native families.”

Some researchers and advocates want to shift the focus from adoptive parents to adoptees by having the Supreme Court consider the impact on Native American children in foster care and adoption.

Sandy White Hawk, an adoptee from the Sicangu Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, is founder of the First Nations Repatriation Institute in Minnesota. She is also research partners with Landers.

The institute serves as a resource for Native people impacted by foster care or adoption, and it supports family and cultural reunification and community healing and offers technical assistance, research, education and advocacy.

“It’s still happening,” White Hawk said about the adoption of Native American children out of their tribal communities. “Children are still being taken.”

She was placed with a white missionary couple who she said saw her adoption as a way of saving her. In that family, White Hawk endured physical and sexual abuse and grew up hearing her Native American heritage spoken about negatively.

White Hawk and Landers have researched the experiences of Native Americans, including mental health outcomes of Native adoptees and the kind of abuse they experience in foster care and adoptive homes.

In one of their papers submitted to the Supreme Court in Brackeen v. Haaland, they found that Native American adoptees are more likely to report self harm and suicidal ideation compared to white adoptees. Their research found Native adoptees have the unique context of historical trauma, assimilation and systemic child removal that suggests their mental health outcomes would differ from adoptees of other races.

“Adoption is complex and has grief and loss and it impacts everyone, but the person who gets the least support and resources is the adoptee,” White Hawk said, adding that adoptees are often expected to feel grateful about their adoptions.

Landers said it’s a false narrative that taking Native children from their homes will result in them living a better life. Instead, resources should be allocated to help families stay together and prevent removal, Landers said.

This isn’t the Mississippi Choctaws’ first Supreme Court case. Over 30 years ago, the tribe brought a case that helped interpret ICWA and define tribes’ role in the custody of Native American children.

In Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, the court ruled that through the ICWA, tribal courts have the power to hear adoption proceedings for Native children.

The case started when the tribe appealed the adoption of twins born to Choctaw tribe members who lived on reservation land in Neshoba County. The children were born hundreds of miles away in Harrison County, and the children’s parents agreed to their adoption by a non-native couple, the Holyfields.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that tribes have jurisdiction over children domiciled on a reservation based on tribe membership or eligible membership, even if they aren’t physically present there. As a result, the Harrison County Chancery Court didn’t have the jurisdiction to approve the adoption for the twins.

“MBCI was party to the first U.S. Supreme Court case to uphold ICWA and has continued to support Congress’s constitutional duty to uphold the sovereignty of Indian tribes by joining a brief supporting the tribes involved in the latest U.S. Supreme Court case challenging ICWA,” the tribe said in a statement.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” 

He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914. 

In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” 

In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.” 

In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness. 

Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.

Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.

Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.

Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.

The fight centers around multiple factors, including:

  • Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
  • Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
  • Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
  • Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.

It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.

But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.

It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.

An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.

According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.

The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.

As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.

But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.

In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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