A personal reflection by Dawn Knickerbocker (Anishinaabe), Vice President of Communications and External Affairs for Native Americans in Philanthropy.  

 Forty-five years ago, Congress passed a pivotal law. Recognized as the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, this law is connected to Tribal sovereignty, and holds a deeply personal significance for my own family.  

It is unfathomably painful to comprehend the reality endured by so many Native Americans during the time of child removal, and yet it continues to shape our present-day experiences. If you are not familiar—the federal government, through the Child Welfare League of America, allocated funds primarily to churches to remove Native children from their homes, placing them in white households. The scars of this injustice linger, etched upon our collective memory, and serve as a stark reminder of the ongoing struggle for healing and justice.  

Thirty years before the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed, my father and his siblings were swept up in the colonial project and government policy of assimilation designed to make Indians forget who they are, and forget their culture, language, and community. When my dad was about ten years old, he and one of his sisters were taken away—put into the state foster care system. He recounts that time in his life very rarely, and nearly always with sadness. “We were sent to the wolves,” he would say.  

Some of his siblings were “lucky,” and were put into foster homes with caring people and were eventually reunited with our Tribe and relatives. My father and his sister were adopted by a family who were abusive and severed all ties with our Native culture, traditions, and Tribe. It was only after my dad was emancipated at the age of sixteen that he began to try to find his way back. With court records sealed and with no support, it took him years to locate a sibling.  

When my father finally found one sibling, then several others, and eventually his mother, father, grandparents, and aunts and uncles, the land was gone—and the community was fractured and many of our relatives in crisis. To this day, we are on a healing journey. While some of my dad’s siblings did not survive, my dad lives on to tell his story and to work to make us whole. 

Against all odds, all has not been lost. I am proud to come from a very long line of Anishinaabe farmers and caretakers of the land. As young children, my siblings and I were taught how to sow seeds, how to plant and harvest with the seasons. Along with the knowledge of how to care for the land, is the connection to our language and stories that hold the instructions to our way of life. In my estimation, it is a miracle that I have this knowledge today and pass teachings to my own children. In every generation, there has been an attack on the wholeness of my family. Our family continues to heal from the policies of the past. 

After ICWA passed in 1978, we became a foster family. Several of my cousins who were lost to the system found their way into our home. This practice of healing in my family has continues and two of my siblings are now social workers, and our family has now adopted and are raising three children who we would not have known if it had not been for ICWA.  

ICWA came to pass after a big national survey  found that about a third of Native children had been removed from their family and their Tribes. For my own reservation, White Earth Nation, many recall the pain of removal and estimate that over 25 percent of the children and placed into non-Native/ white foster and adoptive houses.  

Native families were told that adoption was the only option if they were to survive, others, like in my family, were a part of church-sponsored programs that facilitated Indian children working in families’ homes –like live-in domestics–while purposefully stripping away their culture and identities in place of a colonized identity. This very racist thinking is hard to fathom today. However, this is the living, breathing reality and present-day experiences of Native Americans. 

At the same time as the removal of our children, there was an effort to remove our land. In my band, White Earth—85 percent of the land is held by non-Native landholders, including the federal, state and county governments. One of the essential elements of Native culture is the profound connection and sense of reciprocity that the people of this continent maintain with their lands and connection to the Mother Earth. As this land’s stewards, we have intimate knowledge of the caretaking and protection of the ecosystem, the biodiversity, and the relationships with the water, air, and animals.  

Read the full article about Indigenous communities and environmental justice by Dawn Knickerbocker at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.