Indian Child Welfare Awareness day drew crowds of concerned Native Americans to Olympia Jan. 26.
The fourth annual Indian Child Welfare Awareness Day is an event hosted by advocates of Native American children. It allows people to have an opportunity to meet lawmakers and to educate them about the importance of enacting laws that help to ensure that Native American foster children live in environments that support their Native American identities.
Many showed up to rally their support for a bill that is currently in the legislature – it would give more rights to immediate family members and grandparents in custody placement, re-enforcing the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Some, like local tribal member Eladio Curley, a third-grader at Wahelut Indian School, shared his story of being placed with his grandmother Marlene Davis when he was 1 year old, instead of in foster care.
“She has cared for me and raised me with love,” he told the audience Jan. 26. “I am happy to be with my grandmother and relatives. My heart is the most happy when I am able to spend time with my father. I love my father very much and I am happy that I am able to have him in my life.”
Marlene Davis is active in the local tribal community, and encouraged fellow grandmother and Puyallup Tribal member Martina Campbell to attend the Indian Child Welfare day to rally support for an issue that hits close to home for her, as well.
Martina Campbell has four of her own grandchildren in foster care, and she and great-grandmother Verna Bartlett have had difficulties getting the courts to side with the family in the ongoing custody hearings.
“We want to get grandparents to be able to get children (out of) foster care. We have four children in foster care, and they say we don’t have parental rights.”
“We went to the capital, there were speakers, we got to meet the bill sponsor, Senator Claudia Kaufman and talked about the bill trying to be passed, to where grandparents have parental rights.”
SB 6470 addresses the burdens of proof required in dependency matters affecting Indian children, and establishes state guidelines mirroring the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which stresses keeping Indian children with their family, or members of the tribe, as a way to continue the cultures and traditions unique to Indian families.
“The Indian Child Welfare Act was specifically created because so many Indian children were being adopted and being put in foster care, and families were not contacted…we were losing children,” said Verna Bartlett, who has helped raise several of her 22 grandchildren and nine great grandchildren, and spent more than two decades working at the Puyallup Tribe’s Children’s Services office. “In last few years, more and more children are being placed in non-native homes, and non-relative homes.”
“Right now have no rights- I cannot intervene in my great-grandchildren’s cases.”
As of Feb. 28, the bill had passed its second reading in the House of Representatives for the 2009-10 legislative session.
“If the bill passes would make it 100 percent easier to get grand children out of foster care,” Martina Campbell said. “I was so excited, and happy to know that lawmakers could hear how the children were feeling. The children that spoke wanting grandparents to have rights too. Even though they are small they still know what’s going on.”
