The ongoing effort to save the Indian Child Welfare Act from legal challenges and colonial messaging

Efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) have been going on almost since it was passed.

Researchers have reviewed editorials and commentaries over 40 years to show how writers have tried to sway public opinion against ICWA. The findings were recently published in The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance at UCLA, under the headline “Editorializing ICWA: 40 Years of Colonial Commentary.”

“There is a clear agenda and public relations campaign presented in our research of anti-ICWA columns, particularly those from the 21st century,” the article says. These columns “use a settler colonial ethic in an attempt to ‘destroy’ ICWA and ‘replace’ Native parents with white couples.”

Star Tribune steps up to the plate on treaty rights, swings, and misses

I was excited when I read the Nov. 13 Star Tribune headline: Minnesota officials work to mend historically fraught relationship with tribes. I was hoping for a thoughtful analysis.

Reading it, I was reminded of what my friend Bob Klanderud called a “wish sandwich”: Two pieces of white bread with nothing in between other than a wish for some peanut butter.

The story lacked peanut butter, I wish it were there.

The story didn’t mention Enbridge Line 3 once. It’s an open wound and central to Minnesota’s current “fraught relationship” with Native nations in northern Minnesota.

For years, the Red Lake and White Earth nations have argued that the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline violates treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather on lands they ceded to the U.S. government. They have received zero support from the Governor’s Office or his agency heads.

The Star Tribune was willfully ignorant of how important Line 3 is in Indian Country and/or it didn’t want to ask tough questions.