Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Cherokee Nation powerless in ICWA battle

Baby Veronica’s adoption case reminds us that our fate as Indian people is still too often in the hands of colonizers and the systems they created—especially the legislative and the judicial branches of America’s government. History and the arrogance of the Europeans who came to these and other shores have woven a complicated philosophical web that has us psychologically and legally entrapped in processes not our own. Those processes and systems are based on worldviews that are to this day foreign to us.

We are, after all, still distinct peoples with languages, governing practices, lands and instructions on the right way to live on those lands, handed down to us by our Creator(s). Even those of us who are struggling to regain lost languages and traditions are rooted in fundamentally different experiences and ways of seeing the world which are etched into our collective souls, compared to non-indigenous Americans. Federally recognized or not, full-blood or not, we are of this land; we are nations more than we are tribes, and even Justice John Marshall affirmed that while he was inventing the legal myth of the domestic dependent nation.

In broad strokes, it is the conceptual trap of the doctrine of domestic dependent nationhood that makes it possible for Veronica to be ripped away from her father and her Cherokee culture. The trust doctrine, bolstered by the plenary power doctrine as they are currently interpreted in America’s law, reinforce the domestic dependent nationhood doctrine, resulting in the concept of limited tribal sovereignty. This is what renders the Cherokee Nation essentially powerless to prevent the forced removal of Veronica from her family.