This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 13th, 2020.

I'm Keavib Brown.

The Indian Child Welfare Act is supposed to make it difficult for the government to break up Native American families.

So what happens when the parents and the Native American tribes differ over a child's future?

Cato's Walter Olson comments on a case now before the Fifth Circuit and its

implications for tribal sovereignty and child welfare in general. The

Indian Child Welfare Act is now more than 40 years old. What was the problem that it was supposed to solve?

States had had and used and abused power over the Indian families within their borders.

In particular, they had aggressive child welfare systems that would come in and take children away from Indian families that might be

struggling, might be somewhat functional on the grounds that they were not behaving as the state thought they should behave.

And this is of course not just a problem that Indian families face, but it was certainly

one that was felt badly during the era in which a lot of states pursue a kind of ideology of

kids are better off in other families. They didn't like the way people lived in Indian country.

And so there were a lot of genuine horror stories. So Congress was

reacting against something real. How does the Indian Child Welfare Act deal differently

with parents who are Native American than the law? differently with

the laws of the United States with respect to adoption and that sort of thing.

Well, there are the cases that are not so controversial in which the child is born in an

Indian country and both of his or her parents are Indian and it alters the way

states have to handle those cases, it gives tribes more of a voice

in it.

That's the less controversial side of the Act.

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