Native Families’ Disenfranchised Grief Is Increased In Child Protection
We all know what to do when a family member, friend, or colleague suffers a crisis or loss. We support, listen, and understand. We expect less, we tolerate more. We support the other person as long as they need support. We show up with compassion.
Unfortunately, the child protection system, established to help children and families in times of crisis and loss, frequently lacks this very kind of compassionate response. The parents I represent as executive director of the Indian Child Welfare Law Center often find their losses minimized and their grief discounted. They are blamed for their challenges and treated as deserving of the consequences. And thus, even in moments of crisis and loss, they are expected to give more, not less.
In 2020, the pandemic made this systemic bias even more obvious. Across our community, many people stayed home to shelter in place as offices and businesses closed. Meanwhile, families we represent were asked to leave the places they were staying—where social distancing was often impossible in the first place—and travel, typically via public transit, to the Hennepin County Medical Center to submit urinalysis samples. Alternative methods of documenting sobriety were scarce, so families had to choose to venture out or miss a test (treated as a positive result) which would bring the children nearer to permanent removal.
In contrast, the foster homes where our families’ children were placed had wide discretion early in the pandemic, based on the foster parents’ COVID-19 safety concerns, to restrict our families’ in-person visits with their children. When foster parent felt unsafe, our families did not see their children in person. Eventually the county offered video visits—no substitute for a parent’s time to hold and smell their newborns.
In both situations, the pandemic’s unanticipated burden shifted onto our families; in their grief, they were required to give more. This pernicious sentiment underlies an overly rigid systematic response to exhaustion, fear, and trauma that ignores family connections and the profound loss sustained when those connections are severed. Parents are expected to accept and rationally respond to the removal of children from their care, simply because the government knows better. This paternalistic attitude has devastating consequences for Native children in Minnesota, who as of 2019 are 16.8 times more likely than white children to be in out of home placement (MN Department of Human Services, 2020).
Our families are not permitted to grieve. Their disenfranchised grief is minimized, ignored, and not acknowledged as legitimate. When someone cannot grieve, they often become depressed or angry, beyond a typical grief response.
I have seen many examples of this grief response over the years. In one instance, a child died in foster care. My client, the deceased child’s mother, was in treatment for substance use disorder. We learned of her child’s death via the county’s notification to the court, before the mother was notified. Then, to accommodate the mother’s grief, the county suspended the mother’s treatment—when she needed treatment more than ever.
Lack of access to timely treatment also causes avoidable heartbreak. When a parent is willing to enter treatment, the appropriate, caring response—what one would do for family or friends—is to get that parent into treatment immediately. Yet the systemic response lacks urgency. While awaiting a bed at a treatment center, too many parents change their minds, with terrible consequences. It is such an unnecessary, devastating loss whenever a child loses a mother who wanted treatment but overdosed while on the waitlist.
For hundreds of years, Native families were openly targeted by government policies predicated on disregard of Native families’ grief. Native nations lost ancestral lands and were removed to reservations promptly broken apart by the government’s allotment policies. Next, generations of Native children were enrolled, often under extreme duress, in faraway boarding schools established with an avowed assimilationist mission to sever traditional Native cultural ties.
As boarding schools waned, the government’s Indian Adoption Project was so successful in removing Native children for adoptive placement with white families that by the early 1970s, 25% of Native children under 1-year-old were in white adoptive homes (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, 1989).
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 responded to blatant abuses, such as counties removing children and placing them for adoption because of poverty. Yet much work remains in a system that fails to recognize how the profound human experience of loss and grief creates devastating intergenerational trauma – failing to protect the very children and families it purports to help.
Since 1993, the ICWA Law Center has advocated for Native families. Sometimes that means going to court or filing a brief. However, our most meaningful advocacy is our compassionate response to a family’s basic human right in time of crises to grieve losses. The child protection system all too often tolerates a family’s loss without allowing a chance to grieve while minimizing the devastating individual and systemic impacts.
The text above was initially published in CW360⁰, a publication of the University of Minnesota School of Social Work, Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare, in Summer 2021 as “Generations of grief unprotected in child welfare systems” by Shannon Smith, JD with Karl Nastrom, JD. https://cascw.umn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/360WEB_2021_508rev.pdf