In the past ten years, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has been challenged more often than the Affordable Care Act. In the "movement memo" in this episode, indigenous journalists Kelly Hayes and Rebecca Nagle talk about the right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the child welfare law and why indigenous people’s basic rights The fate of tribal lands and "so-called democracy" are at stake in the United States.

Music by Son Monarcas and Nihoni

Note: This is a rushed transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. The copy may not be the final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to the "Motion Memo", a podcast of the truth about things you should know if you want to change the world. I am your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. This is Native American Tradition Month, and today we are talking about attacks on Native American families and sovereignty, and how these attacks have become a greater effort against right-wing rule. This means that we are talking about the Indian Child Welfare Act — a law designed to protect indigenous children from state-sanctioned kidnapping — and conservative conspiracy to dissolve these protections. As an aboriginal, his father was removed from our reservation as an infant before the ICWA came into effect. This is a difficult topic for me, so I really appreciate Rebecca Nagle, you will soon I will hear from her because it provides many important history and insights for this episode. Rebecca is a Cherokee writer and advocate. She is also the host of an award-winning podcast called This Land. The show did an excellent job of highlighting the labor costs of the ICWA war, while also breaking down why the right wing was determined to destroy one. Child Welfare Law for Indigenous Peoples.

We will discuss the right-wing opposition to the Indian Child Welfare Act and the funding to support it, and why the overall situation here should be scary to everyone. We will not delve into the personal stories of families involved in ICWA-related guardianship cases. But I strongly recommend that you check Rebecca’s podcast This Land to better understand these stories, because what happened to indigenous children is at the core of this story. Today, we will discuss the historical background and political consequences of the legal struggle against ICWA, as well as the appearance of indigenous people in the struggle. We will also discuss some traumatic topics, including boarding school deaths, child abuse and genocide, so as Rebecca said, please take care of yourself while listening.

In recent months, thousands of unmarked graves have been discovered in Canadian boarding schools that once held indigenous children. In the United States, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland responded to the Canadian news, announcing that the U.S. government will eventually work with indigenous communities to determine the location of closed boarding schools and where indigenous children who died in these facilities may be buried. In a column in the Washington Post, Harland, the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States, shared that her maternal grandparents were stolen from their family at the age of eight and her great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Indian school. Harland writes, “The purpose of Indian boarding schools is to culturally assimilate indigenous children, forcibly relocating them from homes and communities to remote residential facilities, where their American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians’ Identity, language, and beliefs will be forcibly suppressed." Harland promised that the Federal Indian Boarding School Program of her department will serve as an "investigation into the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of Indian boarding schools."

Re-examining the history of these kidnappings, imprisonments, and deaths is painful for indigenous peoples and indigenous communities. Among non-locals, we see that the fact that boarding schools are tools of brutality has gained more recognition. But I found it worth noting that for many people, the death of those children is part of a fixed narrative, somewhere behind us—an old story that needs to end. In fact, the deaths of these children are part of an ongoing project that we are still experiencing. Settlers colonialism has changed and reconfigured over time, but it has always been the destroyer of the world, and has now grown into a system with unprecedented apocalyptic potential, so I think this is a question and making connections when.

So I will continue to make some historical rants, because we cannot talk about the Indian Child Welfare Law without talking about cultural genocide and the institutionalization of indigenous genocide. The Indian Criminal Code promulgated by the Ministry of the Interior in 1883 (these laws only apply to Aboriginals) punish Aboriginals with starvation or imprisonment because they engage in Aboriginal cultural customs. Indigenous dances, ceremonies and traditional festivals are criminalized. The code has not been amended for 50 years, and it was not until 1978 that indigenous peoples guaranteed freedom of religion under the law.

When the open war between the aboriginals and the colonists ended and the colonial slaughter was legalized in the United States, anti-indigenous violence became more and more institutionalized. The government was bound by the treaty to provide health care to the indigenous people, and the resulting health care institution India health service was weaponized to sterilize the indigenous people. In the 1970s, 25% to 42% of fertile Native Americans underwent sterilization. In Canada, Aboriginal women recently reported forced sterilization in 2017. But sterilization is only one way to reduce the population of indigenous communities. In the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th century, indigenous children in the United States and Canada were moved out of their homes in large numbers for assimilation purposes. Many people were forced to enter boarding schools, and many were placed in white families.

In the United States, in the 1950s, Congress began to pass laws aimed at ending the sovereign legal status of tribes, placing indigenous peoples and their resources under the power of states to absorb and sell their lands. Some terminated tribes were eventually re-recognized. Some tribes tried to resist termination in court, but termination as the goal was the U.S. policy stance towards the U.S. for decades. The goal of termination was clear: obliterate the sovereign legal status of indigenous peoples and Any shared relations of our land, culture or history, which have not been destroyed by colonialism. This institutionalized genocide has a more social image than complete genocide, and can even be defined as humanitarian.

Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Boarding School in 1892, said: "A great general once said that the only good Indian is the dead. In a sense, I agree with this view, but it is limited to this: All Indians in the race should die. Kill the Indian in his heart and save that person." The Bureau of Indian Affairs will then simulate approximately 366 boarding schools after Carlisle, and Over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of indigenous children will be kidnapped and abused in these facilities. Tens of thousands of children have died. Until recently, the federal government has been reluctant to discuss how many schools exist or verify how many children have died. Even now, we do not have limited answers.

Before the ICWA was promulgated, in 1978, 25% to 35% of Native children were taken from Native American families and placed in boarding schools or predominantly white families. After the passage of ICWA, the law requires courts and private agencies to seek reunion or family placement for indigenous children, and to consult with tribes when making custody decisions for indigenous children in the foster care system. Even with the protection provided on the surface by ICWA, indigenous families still face high rates of family separation due to disproportionate imprisonment rates and social work systems that punish indigenous families for their extreme poverty. However, according to ICWA, indigenous people have a legal basis to challenge the systematic theft of indigenous children.

Now, the right-wing Supreme Court seems to decide whether these protections will continue. Although most people don’t pay attention to the details of federal Indian laws or what will happen to Native Americans, everyone in the United States has a very terrible stake in this struggle. relation. Rebecca Nagle tells the story of overlapping agendas and multimillion-dollar attacks on child welfare laws in her award-winning podcast "This Land," and I have to say, about " Halfway through the second season of "This Land", it became my favorite podcast. The investigative team of the show and Rebecca's narration and reporting are excellent. The story is very important, but to a large extent it has been ignored. Because the American people have become accustomed to ignoring indigenous struggles unless they can refer to it in the past tense—as if to build their moral character by being sad about our history, rather than showing solidarity in a way that might affect our lives. now.

As a fan of this land, I am also an indigenous reporter myself. I am curious about the journey of Rebecca Nagle. As a Cherokee woman, she covered the struggle to save ICWA and followed money ruthlessly. , In order to expose the seizure of greater conservative power. She said that for her, the journey started with a problem.

Rebecca Nagle: I want to report this story because in the past ten years, the Child Welfare Act in India has been challenged more often than the Affordable Care Act. And there is a concerted movement to repeal this law. My big question is why? Why a 40-year-old law was made to prevent the systematic family separation of indigenous communities that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, and really in the previous generations, if you look at our history, How did this law suddenly become? dispute? That investigation took me to many unexpected places. For those who have never heard of the Indian Child Welfare Act or ICWA, this is just a quick start, which was passed in Congress in 1978. This is after a large national survey, 25% to 35% of all indigenous children were removed from their families and tribes.

This is just a shocking statistic. You talk to the elders in that area, and people talk about the community there, the aboriginal community, there are literally no children, the relocation rate is so high, and some things are happening. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a government agency that is running this program called the Federal Indian Adoption Project, where they actually work with the Child Welfare Alliance to place indigenous children in white families. This extremely racist idea considers indigenous Children are only inherently and automatically better. Then something else happened. The child welfare agencies and social workers at the time had a lot of prejudice against indigenous families, so they would see a child raised by an aunt or grandma and said, "Well, since this child is not Raising by biological parents is to abandon the child," and then take the child away.

ICWA, this is a complicated law. It does a lot of different things. It does not just do one thing, but I think it is a set of guardrails, when a local child and that child... Local means that the child is either registered by a federally recognized tribe or is eligible to be registered by a federally recognized tribe tribe. If that child is going through the child welfare system or private adoption process, it is like a set of guardrails to ensure that the child stays in touch with their family first, with their tribe second, and with their indigenous identity a third.

KH: It is important to understand that describing an entire race, community, or group as unable to take care of their children is a political strategy that provides a cover for oppression and at the same time exempts it from its role in conditions that affect society. The child’s quality of life. Because how can people who cannot be trusted to make decisions for their children be trusted to make decisions for themselves? If parents are dysfunctional, how can we blame the country for children’s difficulties? In Killing Blackbody, Dorothy Roberts wrote that blaming black mothers "is a way to conquer the entire black race." In her 2002 book "Broken Bonds: The Colors of Child Welfare," Roberts pointed out "After controlling for all other factors, non-white children [in the Tennessee foster care system] are 42% less likely to leave state custody within three years, including behavioral problems, family characteristics, and services." Black parents and The child’s experience clearly shows that the family supervision system is part of the prison state’s surveillance and social control. As in all areas of criminal conviction, the wealthy also have a different set of standards. As Roberts wrote, “The main reason why child protection services are mainly targeted at poor families is the way in which child abuse is defined. The child welfare system aims to detect and punish the negligence of poor parents and ignore the failures of most middle-class and wealthy parents.” Therefore , It is important for us to understand that this system is not a system that focuses on children at all, but a weaponized system for indigenous families. The family regulation system is fundamentally violent, and it has always been.

I know and understand all of this, but I still feel suffocated when I think about the level of horror imposed on indigenous families in the pre-ICWA era of child relocation. Indigenous people cannot leave their children unattended in their yard without worrying that social workers might show up and kidnap them. When social workers showed up, those who did not hide their children fast enough were forced to watch their children be taken away. Opposing parents face imprisonment and further threats that they will never see their children again. When discussing these histories, many people ignore the social control embedded in these dynamics.

Aboriginal people have long opposed settler colonialism. Some parents whose children were taken camped near the school to get close to the children and demanded that they return, but many families did their best to cooperate with the federal government because the government held their children hostage. Just like Trump's family at the border Like separation, the separation of indigenous children from their parents sometimes involves the use of tiny shackles designed to have a chilling effect on the parents and the community. The U.S. government has taken a whole generation of indigenous children hostage, and as the recent incidents have intensified, the U.S. government has no guilt about killing them.

RN: I think in the boarding school era, this general in the army thought of the boarding school idea. He wrote in his book that he talked about the hostages of indigenous children who were said to be educated in these terrible institutions. It's basically a bargaining chip for what he calls the good behavior of the people. I think this is something we have seen over and over again throughout American history: Native children are used as the tip of the spear for colonization and genocide projects. So it happened in the age of boarding school. It happened in the era of the adoption project in India. I think this is happening now. Some players are actually using indigenous children and using the battle for custody of indigenous children and using ICWA’s broader battlefield to fight against federal India. Other major issues in the law, as well as major issues of tribal sovereignty and indigenous rights. Therefore, when you look at the history of the use of Native children, we do not go beyond this point. I think it’s hard to talk about in indigenous communities how our families are still treated in the foster care system.

Therefore, there are huge racial differences in foster care, especially for indigenous and black families. So look at a place in Minnesota. Aboriginal children have a one-third chance of entering a foster care institution before the age of 18. Indigenous babies have a one in ten chance of entering a foster care institution before their first birthday. Nationally, the average level of white babies is 1 in 100. You will see racial differences at various levels, from who has been reported to CPS [Child Protection Service] and who is under investigation by CPS. Once the investigation begins, which children are taken away, one can say, “Oh, well, they must be more dysfunctional or more abused in the indigenous communities.” But I think another important statistic is that white children actually It’s more likely that when you look at the reasons for deportation, white children are more likely to be deported for physical and sexual abuse, while indigenous children are more likely to be deported for this all-encompassing category called neglect.

Poverty, especially extreme poverty, may seem neglected to many people. I talked to a parent advocate who works in an indigenous family in Minneapolis, and she said that most of the children in the family she works with are in the system, but they are already in the system. They are punished for things like children’s inability to go to school, so this is called educational neglect. Of course, we want every parent to ensure that their children go to school, but when you are homeless, there are other issues at work. One of the children we are talking about in the series was raised by her grandmother. Her biological parents suffer from substance abuse disorder, but she and her grandmother have a stable caregiver. Then her family fell into this crisis when they were homeless. It was then that she was kind of in foster care, and then actually spent three years in foster care, while her grandmother was trying to get her back.

If all these supports are in place, this will not happen to the child. So I think there are still continuous relocations in today's foster care system. It is confirmed in the statistics, and then when you go to talk to these indigenous families, it is also confirmed, just talking about the way they are treated. A mother I interviewed for this series, she did everything in accordance with her case plan. She marked each box, completed everything, became sober, completed the consultation, and completed everything. Her social worker told her bluntly, “You can never bring your children back. I will not help you bring them back.” These are the experiences of indigenous families in the current system. This is not what happened in the 1960s and 1950s, but what happened in 2021.

KH: The lawsuit filed by whites who challenged ICWA because they wanted to adopt indigenous children cited many historical themes that have promoted the migration of children in the United States. These themes have been imposed on indigenous people by settler colonialism as evidence that indigenous parents Not suitable for raising their children. When wealthy white people portray themselves as saviors and save indigenous children from unhealthy and backward lives, they will invoke classism and even obesity phobia.

RN: The type of reason given by adoptive parents for why they have a better house is that their house is bigger, and they will argue that they have more money and more financial stability, and they can provide more opportunities. In one of the cases, Cliffords tried to argue that they did a better job in management. I think she was 7 years old, and the weight, diet and exercise of the child were better than her grandmother. So all those subtexts that favor white families and middle-class families, in these cases, when you get deep into potential custody disputes, upper-middle-class families are there.

KH: I think one of the reasons this land is so important is that Rebecca's podcast does outline the overlapping interests that were allied to overthrow ICWA, and why they are uniting to break the law. The first and most obvious participants are white adoptive parents, who believe that ICWA unfairly limits their ability to adopt indigenous children and wants to provide them with a multi-billion dollar industry for these children-at a cost.

RN: The opposition to ICWA is divided into three main areas. There is a private adoption industry, which is actually led by a pair of private adoption lawyers. There are corporate lawyers, and the last one is right-wing funders and organizations. So starting from the private adoption industry, some large national organizations representing the private adoption industry, including the National Adoption Council and the American Adoption Lawyers Association, have very openly and strongly opposed ICWA, and in fact have become part of the cases that attempt to combat ICWA. If you look at the private adoption industry, I mean, in general, they don’t like regulation, and they tend to oppose regulation that limits the number of children that can be adopted. So this is a very difficult conversation about adoption, because we think that adoption is because there are children in need, and adoption is a kind of selfless thing that can help children in need, as well as the needs, the scale of needs, and the balance of needs. The United States today is actually the opposite.

There are more people who want to adopt children, especially when you talk about babies. There are more children to adopt than children to adopt. There are several reasons for this. One is the opportunity to obtain abortion, reproductive freedom and birth control, or even just for For unmarried women, having children is more acceptable in society, which indeed reduces the number of babies available for adoption. So what the adoption industry does is they actually go international, so they go to other countries one by one, those countries, because of coercive and abusive behavior, because of bribery, and then some people actually like to murder adopted children in high profile, Guatemala , Ethiopia, South Korea and other countries have actually closed their borders to American families. You will see that in the 2000s, the number of children available to American families just fell off the cliff.

People call it, I mean, some large adoption agencies and lobbying organizations in the adoption industry actually had to close their doors because they didn’t have enough business. What started happening was a trend that I think... It is about ten years old, and you really see these numbers rising in the mid-2010s, but they have been trending like this for a while, and these are the same The institution is now turning to foster care. Therefore, there are some private adoption agencies whose goal is to find adoptable children for customers of paid services. They allow their customers to become adoptive parents and tell them that fostering is a way to adopt. Therefore, every plaintiff in this case, all these non-local foster families are using so-called "foster care." So they use the foster care system to not have children within six months, then regenerate a child for a year, and then regenerate a child for three months, and they know that the stop gap, the kind of support, and the kind of resources are for the children in the family in crisis. Say-they are definitely fostering adoption. So I think this is a huge trend and a huge problem. And I think the other thing that is really uncomfortable when we talk about adoption is race and class dynamics. Therefore, most of the children adopted in the United States are children of color. The vast majority of adopters, about 75%, are white. Then there are huge class differences. So we really have a system in which families of color and poorer families have their children adopted by families with more wealth and mainly white people. This is the dynamics of domestic adoption. Another thing is that adoption from a foster care institution is a different system, but private adoption through an agency costs approximately US$50,000 to 60,000.

Therefore, it is very expensive and does not include who can do it, but it is also a way for private adoption lawyers to make money. So what we found, I think there is... I talked to an adoption lawyer. I have talked with people who run adoption agencies. I have talked to people who run adoption agencies, and they think these dynamics are good. I’ve talked to people who are very serious about these developments, and I’ve heard a term over and over again. I think it really helps explain the adoption industry in the United States. This term is called the “gray market.” It’s not like Children are sold on the black market, but if there are loopholes in the law, because adoption laws are state-by-state, adoption lawyers will use these loopholes to help their clients get what they want a baby, which is an adoptable child.

So, yes, we found a specific case of a lawyer who proposed this very complicated legal reasoning. There is no court decision to support it, but there is no need to privately notify the tribe to adopt it. So he adopted all of this, or we found a case where he adopted an indigenous child from Arizona without notifying the tribe. So I think there is... So this is one aspect of what is happening in the private adoption industry. I just want to say that I think we need to have a national conversation about the dynamics of adoption and the shift to "cultivating adoption." In international adoption, the differences in the money and power that American families have when they enter developing countries have created a huge abuse system, which makes us think that this dynamic will not happen in the family system of child welfare is disproportionate poverty , A disproportionate number of colored families, and families here have more resources.

For us, we don’t think that some of the same abuses will not happen. I think it’s naive based on what we’ve seen in the adoption industry internationally. So I think it raises some major ethical issues. Yes, I don’t know. I will stop there. I don't know if I said too much. I can talk about it forever. Yes, absolutely.

KH: For indigenous people, the lives and welfare of indigenous children are at the core of this struggle. However, in the fight to dismantle ICWA, it is more important than a single law or even the fate of indigenous children and families currently trapped in the system. Because the legal arguments made by white adoptive parents for the dissolution of ICWA may eventually dissolve the Indian law we know in the United States, putting the rights of all indigenous peoples and our tribal nations at risk.

RN: So the plaintiff in this large federal lawsuit, Brakeen v. Haaland, is presenting a very, very, very specific legal argument. They say that ICWA’s Indian Child Welfare Act is racially discriminatory because it treats non-native foster parents differently from native families, and it treats native children differently from non-native children. This is racial discrimination. And we have a constitutional amendment that stipulates that you cannot treat people differently because of race, so the whole thing is unconstitutional. The problem is that the foundation of Indian federal law is the unique political status of the tribe.

Our tribe has signed more than 300 treaties with the U.S. federal government through the same constitutional procedures as the United States, Japan and Germany, and our tribe has rights from these treaties. So this is not about race, but about the political status of tribes and tribal citizens. So, just like I have certain rights, because I am a US citizen, or because I am a resident of Oklahoma, or because I live in Cherokee County, I also have certain rights because I am Cherokee County. Citizens of the base nation. Although indigenous people have experienced racism, we are racialized under the law, but...in this case, this is an outdated language, but the law uses the language of "Indian children", a Indian children, as defined by ICWA, are children who are eligible to join the tribe or have been registered.

So that's about the tribe... It's not about the child's race, but about the child's political relationship with a sovereign country, and the sovereign country's right to protect the safety of its children. So the broader impact is that if ICWA is unconstitutional because of racial discrimination, what about all other areas of federal Indian law? When I go to the local IHS hospital, I can go to that hospital, but if you are not a tribal citizen, they will reject you. If we are just a racial category, what about the constitution that Hastings can serve me but not others? What about our right to manage clean air and clean water on our land? What about our right to reserve? No other ethnic group in the United States owns land bases, governments, tribal police forces, or its own court system. right? So our thinking is... these ICWA cases are a bit like Trojan horses that can attack other areas of Indian federal law.

It's almost like pulling a string on a sweater. If the Supreme Court insists that ICWA is racial discrimination, then you can translate it into other areas of Indian federal law. This is not the kind of conspiracy like wearing a tin foil hat. This is actually very obvious to prove, because the company lawyers who filed these anti-ICWA cases also made the same arguments in the battle against tribal casinos and tribal games. Therefore, Paul Clement is one of the barristers behind these anti-ICWA cases. He argued that a tribe has the right to build casinos if its clients do not constitute racial discrimination, and use almost some of the exact same language, and then He turned around and made it in the ICWA case. Matthew McGill, who represented the plaintiff in the latest case, filed the state's claim, which is the second part of the Brakeen case to prevent tribal casinos from opening in Arizona.

Therefore, these lawyers have brought these legal theories and legal arguments from the game to ICWA. If they win on the ICWA field, they can bring them back to the game, which is not a logical leap. If you can question the legitimacy of the Indian gambling industry, then all casino revenues in the United States can make a lot of money, and tribes account for half, about 30 billion US dollars a year. Then another area with a lot of financial interest is oil and gas. Therefore, although the tribe has jurisdiction over less than 2% of the land in the United States, it accounts for approximately half of all fossil fuel resources west of Mississippi. There are huge reserves of oil and gas, and huge reserves of coal. Now, these resources cannot be extracted without the consent of the tribe.

Then there are all the other dimensions we see in these pipeline disputes, where the pipeline violates the hunting rights, treaty rights, fishing rights, or clean water rights of indigenous peoples, and may even go beyond certain reserved boundaries, because many treaties include hunting And fishing rights, but these rights are not clearly stipulated in the reservation, and the tribes have also begun to advocate this. Therefore, there are many open dialogues in the oil and gas industry about how indigenous sovereignty and tribal sovereignty pose risks and threaten their bottom line. Therefore, the law firm Gibson Dunn that represented the plaintiff free of charge in this case is the same law firm that represented Dakota Access Pipeline Company. They have lobby groups and they speak on behalf of their clients about indigenous resistance and these pipeline protests that really need to stop because it hurts their business.

So you can see the financial connection. I think this is what makes this case so terrible, because at the grassroots level of the federal court, there was a conservative judge who basically agreed with the plaintiff and said, "Did you know? ICWA is racial discrimination." Then it went. A very conservative court of appeal for the Fifth Circuit, they are basically divided on this issue. They issued this very complicated division decision, and did not cancel ICWA, nor ruled that it was unconstitutional, but you can say that according to these very, very, very basic principles of federal Indian law, you have eight judges in the Court of Appeal. It was ruled that the federal Indian law was basically unconstitutional. The case is now awaiting trial by the Supreme Court. And the stakes are very, very high, because it may have this kind of chain reaction, threatening everything from games to hunting and fishing rights, to health, tribal autonomy, tribal police, almost everything you can think of, because if Native Americans can’t Being treated differently because of race, well, that's what the federal law of India is all about.

KH: Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the world's population, but manage more than 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. The struggle for indigenous sovereignty in the United States is inseparable from the struggle for life on earth. When most people think of the role of indigenous people in the environmental struggle, they think of protest movements like Tateishi, or water protectors who fought against Line 3, but in the ICWA battle, we saw the right-wing forces using indigenous peoples As the tip of the spear, children are designed to enable us to manage the local land and waters that have not yet been destroyed by companies like Enbridge. In the world, there are many ways to make indigenous people the goal of defending the earth. Assassinations are becoming more common in places like Colombia and the Philippines. In the United States, Native American activists are facing escalating national violence and criminal convictions, but we are also facing legal shocks, which may undermine our basic rights as natives in accordance with the law, and allow us to completely steal our children and land. And land re-legalization. And water.

As if all this was not bad enough, Rebecca and her team discovered another aspect of the conspiracy to destroy ICWA, and all of this went back to the original question that led Rebecca to pursue the story: Why? Of course, there are wealthy players and people who want to absorb a lot of precious resources, but ICWA has been challenged more than the "Affordable Care Act". Considering the significance of killing ACA to conservatives, this is quite large. So who is willing to invest seemingly unlimited money to break this law, and why?

RN: So there was a high-profile case in the Supreme Court in 2013. Since then, ICWA has not been declared unconstitutional, but it has achieved partial victory. And you can see that the judges don’t really understand the law, don’t really understand tribal sovereignty, and are very sympathetic to the plaintiff in this case. So it’s a bit like a natural moment when people can see, “Well, I think this is an area where we get sympathy from the Supreme Court, maybe we can win.” So in the first few years, it’s a bit like 2015, In 2016, the first organization to initiate these anti-ICWA cases was this right-wing think tank in Arizona, called the Goldwater Institute. It's very random to think so, well, why did this organization choose ICWA?

We were able to find through FOIA requests that they have been coordinating with the state attorney general since 2015. They brought a string of cases, and they really helped stop the attack. As a reporter, what I want to know is: who pays and why? We discovered that this is the conservative family foundation called the Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin. This is interesting because I think people are used to hearing about things like the Koch network and all these things. For many years, the Bradley Foundation’s expenditures have actually exceeded the sum of the entire Koch network, but it has not received almost so much media attention and media coverage. But the Bradley Foundation received a lot of cash in the mid-2010s. They are studying how to use it to build what they call "conservative national infrastructure."

They decided that they kind of saw the writing on the wall. Republicans might not always control Washington due to changes in the US demographic structure, but if conservatives can control the state and the courts, who is in the White House and who controls the importance of Congress Getting smaller and smaller. So they made this plan to build conservative national infrastructure. They actually asked Goldwater to submit a proposal, and Goldwater's proposal was to establish a state-based litigation coalition. So, when you hear something like, oh, five states passed voter ID laws, or these anti-transgender bills are happening at the same time, people will realize this, and there are several organizations that help coordinate the state [legislation] in conservative State. So basically Goldwater's proposal is to establish a litigation department. So there will not be only coordinated conservative laws. There will be coordinated conservative litigation, and this is the source of ICWA's funding.

As a reporter, this shocks me because it is not really about the tribe. Judging from the documents we have read, this does not seem to be specifically aimed at tribal sovereignty. This is a larger agenda for building conservative power, and ICWA is just a tool that is absorbed by it. I mean, what you have seen, the Center for Media and Democracy and other people have done some great in-depth reports on the Bradley Foundation, but it’s a bit like the place I mentioned where they hired this consultant. They are kind of like the whole process of reflection before they issue a large RFP, but their idea is that if we can control the states, if we can control the courts, then basically they are running around DC. Therefore, I think their goal is to establish conservative power and maintain conservative control over politics. Incredibly, they are still a family foundation because of internal memos-I should say they were hacked. This is why we know all these things. They were hacked in the summer of 2016.

Therefore, international hackers leaked a large number of files. This is how we understand the inner thinking of the Bradley Foundation. It's a little weird to me. I mean they donate money for things like art museums and symphonies, which are very typical. They did a lot of these things in their state. But if you look at their national donations, its goal is to build conservative power. In this RFP, it is not based on a problem. This is not to say, "Well, we want to get rid of abortion." This is actually about building infrastructure and networks across states to build what they call conservative state infrastructure. So, I mean, this is a very strategic way to build and maintain conservative power.

I think we are now having a lot of dialogue about the courts and the Supreme Court, and abortions are being performed before the Supreme Court. People are asking about the role of the court in our democracy and politics.

I want to say that anyone who cares about this should pay attention to this case, and should pay attention to the Brakeen v. Haaland case, because it tells the story in an enlarged way and then on a larger level. Texas has been trying to get the judges for a long time... They have this very unique system of appointing federal judges. The state actually has a team of conservative lawyers who appoint senators and then let them go through the confirmation process. You can see all the tiny relationships, the relationships of this small network. The person leading Gibson Dunn, I believe it is the Dallas office. That is the office in Dallas or Houston. I'm pretty sure it was the Dallas office. When they took over this case, they took over the Brakeen case. He helped to appoint... He was a member of the committee that nominated the judges who took the case.

So that very conservative district judge, he basically accepted a 40-year-old law and wrote this radical decision. He threw it out the window and was put in place by this system. Then we saw the Fifth Circuit, the man who led Gibson Dunn's office is actually on the Fifth Circuit now. He was appointed by Trump, but the Fifth Circuit is a very conservative circuit. They proposed this extremely confusing but also very radical ruling, which runs counter to the Indian federal law for centuries. The case will now be submitted to the Supreme Court. And I think a lot of people are paying attention to abortion to test the degree to which the Supreme Court follows precedent and things like that. I will say in Brakeen v. Haaland that we have a case, what is on the table, I mean, it depends on how the Supreme Court grants the certificate and how they accept it. If they broadly speaking, what actually puts on the table is the constitutionality of the entire US law. Title 25. If you go back to that era, it's like those things are on the book, just like the entire US Code book is on the table. So I think this is one of the cases that needs attention for those who are interested in how the courts shape our democracy and what is happening in the courts.

KH: So what is at stake in the fight over ICWA? The fate of native children and families, the land and waters managed by natives, and the underlying form of American democracy. Therefore, I sincerely hope that our listeners will be moved to learn more about this issue, and you will all subscribe to the podcast This Land, because it is indeed an important news report. This society rarely admits harm to indigenous people, and they are unfolding. Even in a progressive circle, the acceptable attitude of society towards us is one of the typical regrets. But we are still here. Many indigenous people are fighting, not only for the future of indigenous children, but also for the survival of all life on earth. Just last month, 55 water conservationists and indigenous leaders were arrested while occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is the first time that indigenous activists have occupied this space since the 1970s, but I guess most of you have not heard of it. According to reports, allegations of water protectors trying to prevent the construction of Line 3 are straining the legal system in the counties of northern Minnesota, but I don’t see the massive support these activists need to continue to fight the shameless allegations. Including allegations that two protectors who climbed into the pipeline attempted suicide. I hope that people mourn the indigenous children who were stolen and killed by the state, and mourn the massacres and migrations in the past, but I also hope that people realize that we are here now, our liberation and survival are the same as others. These may seem like our battles, and we are fighting alone, but in reality, this is more like a question of who has arisen. Because preventing the violence of colonialism is always closely related to everyone, because the end of capitalism and colonialism is the end of the damn world.

All of us have a stake in the future battle, opposing right-wing power grabbing and companies that want to exploit resources in the world until they have nothing. Stopping them is good for us. So let us remember our connectedness, let us remember that the injuries we suffer are closely connected. Let us try not to disappoint each other.

I want to thank Rebecca Nagle for talking to me about ICWA and her podcast This Land, you can find it at Crooked Media or wherever you get the podcast. Rebecca’s team provides links to resources for child relocation survivors and investigative reporters who wish to learn more in the program description of the "This Land" episode. We will also link to this content in the program description of this episode.

I want to show some love to all boarding school survivors, adopted persons and displaced persons. May we all find each other on the front lines and fight to protect our children, our land and the world.

I also want to thank the audience who joined us today, and remember that our best defense against cynicism is to do good things, and remember that the good things we do are important. Until next time, I will see you on the street.

Kelly Hayes is the host of the Truthout podcast "Movement Memos" and a writer for Truthout. Kelly's work can also be found on Teen Vogue, Bustle, Yes!. Magazines, Pacific Standards, NBC Think, her blog Transformative Spaces, appeals, electoral struggles: How do people of color succeed and fail in the struggle for freedom Who do you serve and whom do you protect? Kelly is also a direct action trainer and co-founder of the direct action collective Lifted Voices. Kelly received the Women's Celebration Award for his organizational and educational work in 2014, and the Defender of Justice Award from Chicago Free School in 2018. Kelly's sports photography was exhibited in the "Freedom and Resistance" exhibition at the DuSable Museum of African American History. To learn about Kelly's organization, you can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.  

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