Hello my relatives this is Shunmani two from the Bans of Turtle Island

podcast in the Yodid series this is a brief history of the Native American

Rights Fund that I did with Dan Lorenz. We were supposed to be joined by Aaron Lynch, however she couldn't make it.

So this is only about half the interview. With that said, I want to remind everybody that for only one dollar you can

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Hope you enjoy. Yeah, okay, so there's a couple of different things. Well, one you mentioned, you know, determining based on blood quantum, right? Right. And that's controversial in a lot of ways. One, for one, like the affidavit system is very common on reservation well you know amongst our

nations to bring in you know new members of the new members of the tribe but to like get registered as a member of the tribe, right?

And so like with ICWA, how much does it protect like children who say parents are enrolled but they never were technically enrolled? Do you know?

Yeah, so this is something that Congress actively debated in the several years that it spent putting together the Indian Child Welfare Act.

One early suggestion would have been to limit the Indian Child Welfare Act

only to tribal members, but there was concern that because most tribes have this kind of mechanical process,

you have to put in an application and sometimes applications are only considered once or twice a year and children need to be protected from the minute they're born.

That wouldn't work.

There was another proposal that would have extended the

Indian Child Welfare Act's provisions to cover any child of Indian ancestry, but

the thinking was that that was too broad because it didn't

take into consideration whether, for example, the child's parents maybe had actively severed their tribal ties,

no longer wanted to be tribal members, and it wanted to respect the ability of people not only to affiliate with the tribes that they may

affiliate with, but also to separate themselves from those tribes.

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