Courtesy of Pamala Silas.
Pamala Silas, pictured here in a photo from 1967, is one of almost four hundred Native American children removed from their families and placed into white adoptive and foster care during the 1958-1967 Indian Adoption Project, with often devastating impacts on the children and their native families.
Pamala Silas’s first memory is being driven in an ambulance to the Milwaukee County Children’s Home. It was 1962 and she was just three years old.
Silas, an enrolled member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, is one of almost four hundred Native American children removed from their families and placed into white adoptive and foster care families during the 1958-1967 Indian Adoption Project.
At age five, after spending more than a year in the Milwaukee County Children’s Home, Silas was placed in her first non-native foster family. “It was great,” she recalls. Silas remembers playing football outside with the family’s two sons. She remembers being held in a rocking chair by her foster mother, who she describes as “just really lovely.”
But then things changed. When Silas was eight, her birth mother was released from the Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, after serving time for abandonment. She wanted her children back. She succeeded in petitioning for Silas and her six other children to return to her. But then, after eight months, she was gone again, and the kids were back in foster care.
Silas’s new “home” was nothing like the one she had before. She describes physical abuse and corporal punishment, including instances of the parents tying foster children to beds, forcing them to eat their own vomit, and beating them until they welted. Silas tried to tell her caseworker, who spoke with the foster father. The children were not removed, and the abuse got worse.
“We were being used like slave labor,” Silas says.
When Silas was fourteen and her younger sister, who was in the same home, was eleven, their oldest sister, newly eighteen, saved them. She picked up Silas and her sister from the house, telling the foster parents they were going out for Big Boy burgers. They never came back.
Silas, now fifty-nine, eventually escaped the foster care system, but the abuse she experienced and witnessed as a young girl never left her. “I’m still in a place of healing,” she says. “I probably will be for my whole life.”
According to the National Indian Child Welfare Association, up to 35 percent of Native children in the U.S. were removed during the decade that the Indian Adoption Project was in place, often forcibly or through coercion. Approximately 85 percent of those removed were placed in non-native homes.
Only later did the extensive physical and psychological harm that many of these children experienced come to light. In testimony before Congress and elsewhere, adoptees and foster children told of sexual and physical abuse, as well as emotional isolation from being placing with non-native families who sought to erase their native histories and identities. In response, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA in 1978.
According to former ICWA specialist Shanna Knight, the act requires that Native American families receive “active efforts” to keep the original family together (as opposed to the “reasonable efforts” that federal law mandates for other adoption and foster care cases). “Preferred placement” guidelines increase the likelihood of a child being placed with a relative, members of the child’s own tribe, or Native American families of another tribe.
In October, a Texas judge ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act is racially discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional.
While ICWA does not require that all native children in the foster system be placed in native homes, it does mandate tribal participation in the foster care and adoption process.
“[Children are] not punished because of what happened with their parents or their caregivers by being removed from all the people they love and trust and know,” Knight says. “There’s not jarring police coming to remove a child while the family’s crying. None of that trauma.”
But the future of the Indian Child Welfare Act is uncertain. On October 4, 2018, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas ruled that the act is racially discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional. According to O’Connor, the act grants preferential treatment based on race, which entails a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.
Native leaders and organizations disagree with O’Connor’s ruling, saying the Indian Child Welfare Act provides protections based on Native American tribal sovereignty rather than race. According to Knight, “The crazy thing is that the Indian Child Welfare Act is forty years old, and it’s still one of the least well-understood pieces of federal legislation, even by judges, in the country.”
The Texas ruling stemmed from an October 2017 lawsuit known as Brackeen v. Zinke. A non-native Texas couple, Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, along with the State of Texas, sued for the right to adopt a child born of Navajo and Cherokee parents who they had been fostering for more than a year. Two other states and two additional families joined as plaintiffs.
Judge O’Connor’s ruling allowed the Brackeens to successfully adopt the child, and in turn set a precedent that may make it easier for other non-native couples to adopt native children, especially if ICWA is upheld as unconstitutional.
This isn’t the first time the act has been challenged. According to David Simmons, government affairs and advocacy director with the National Indian Child Welfare Association, fifteen court challenges have been filed since 2015, all “essentially by the same small group of anti-ICWA activists.”
But previous court challenges were mostly based on statutory interpretations of whether or not ICWA was being properly applied, rather than complaints about the constitutionality of the act, and did not involve states as plaintiffs.
The judge’s ruling could affect the thousands of Native American children. In 2017, more than 10,000 native children were in foster care in the United States and a report that year from Simmons’ group found that native children are “overrepresented in foster care at a rate 2.7 times greater than their proportion in the general population.”
Many Native Americans believe that great harm can come from placing native children in non-native homes and institutions—even happy ones.
“You still have a great loss,” says Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota enrolled in South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Tribe who was adopted by white missionaries in 1955, just two years after she was born. “We don’t have access to who we are, where we come from. We have had to develop and mature without our image being reflected back to us in our family and community.”
An effort to overturn Judge O’Connor’s ruling was heard on March 13 in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. A decision is expected within 180 days of the arguments. According to Simmons, regardless of the ruling, “It feels fairly certain that either the defendants or the plaintiffs will probably ask the Supreme Court to review the 5th Circuit decision.”
Besides the cultural and historical implications of legal threats to ICWA, Silas is concerned with the implications for tribal sovereignty, including co-ownership of land and businesses that would be taken away from native children placed with non-native families who have no legal obligation to connect with tribal communities.
Many Native Americans believe that great harm can come from placing native children in non-native homes and institutions—even happy ones.
“If these native children are not connected to their tribal communities, they’re being robbed of their hereditary birthrights,” Silas says. “This is not just about history and language. This is about real solid resources. How can we not keep these children connected to their birthright?”
Tim Fish has seen the negative psychological effects of removing native children from their culture. A member of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma, he worked from 2013 to 2015 as an Indian education coordinator for the school district in Madison, Wisconsin.
“There is a big difference between the native youths that have really been immersed in their own culture and adopted youths who are coming to terms with their cultural identity,” Fish says, citing high incidences of mental health issues and low self-esteem. “I can’t say that enough.”
In a 2017 research study, 28 percent of native respondents reported struggling with alcohol addiction, compared to 7 percent of white respondents. Nearly a third of native respondents reported self-assessed eating disorders, compared to 16 percent of white respondents. In every category the study observed—drug or alcohol addiction, self-injury, eating disorders, attempted suicide, and other mental health issues—native respondents had equal or higher rates than white respondents.
“You can’t deny that there are mental health issues, and if you can’t draw a line from that to the other, then you just don’t want to,” says White Hawk, one of the co-authors of the study. White Hawk runs her own nonprofit, First Nations Repatriation Institute, which helps connect Native American adoptees in Minnesota’s Twin Cities area, and advises other organizations on adoption policy.
“I figured out how to use the lived experience of adoptees, fostered, and birth relatives to help inform policy, help inform those who work with families,” she says.
Escaping from her abusive foster home in Milwaukee under the guise of a trip for Big Boy, Silas never went back into foster care. It was the start of a long journey of healing that eventually led her to also form her own adoption and foster care-focused organization.
Courtesy of Pamala Silas
Silas, top right, with her three brothers after they were reunited with their birth mother upon fleeing an abusive foster home.
She initially lived with her birth mother and siblings in a one bedroom apartment “in the hood” in Chicago. There, Silas’s mother didn’t want her children to re-enroll in school because she was afraid they would be taken from her again. Silas remembers the family rarely having enough money for toilet paper and subsisting mostly off of egg or sugar sandwiches.
“We went from the fire to flames,” she says.
So Silas took matters into her own hands. She began working and enrolled herself back in school at age fourteen. “I told her [my mother] I was going and she could either sign the papers or not.”
At Chicago’s Lake View High School, she befriended two proudly Greek girls. They inspired her to start a Native American club—her first Native American organization, and not her last.
She worked at an organization that paired her with temporary factory jobs throughout high school, and after graduating landed a job as a secretary in the computer industry, with her sights set on climbing the corporate ladder. Eventually, she went back to school at DePaul University. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree there, she turned to nonprofit work.
“I started seeing that policy mattered; history mattered. I didn’t want to go back to the corporate sector, even though I was motivated to drive a Jaguar,” Silas says, laughing.
Along with three other women—Silas’s close friend Debra Valentino of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Roxy Grignon, and Julia Brown Wolf—Silas founded the Native American Foster Parents Association in Chicago in 1997. The group’s main goal was to create more foster homes headed by native parents for native kids. “We were trying to license as many people as we could,” Valentino says.
They did just that, while simultaneously training caseworkers and judges about the complexities of working with the Indian Child Welfare Act.
“I broke the cycle. I raised my own children and they’re raising their children.”
The organization disbanded in the early 2000s, but each of the original founders ended up becoming foster parents themselves.
Valentino fostered five children, including Michael, a boy born of Navajo and Mexican parents who she eventually adopted. She helped Michael enroll in the Navajo Nation, and organized visits for him to see his blood relatives as he was growing up. He was also welcomed into Valentino’s Oneida community wholeheartedly. His first powwow at the age of a year and a half (complete with an honor song to welcome him in) occurred on the first day Valentino started fostering him.
“I always told him he was my son born from my heart, and he always understood what that meant,” Valentino says.
Silas adopted her niece Annie after her brother was unable to take care of her. As the first woman in her family in four generations to raise her own children, Silas loves to talk about how cute Annie, who is now a mother herself, was as a baby.
“If I left the planet today, I broke the cycle,” she says. “I raised my own children and they’re raising their children.”