Donna Ennis: Resilience and emotional healing in Indian Country

Like many Native people I began my career working for my Tribe soon after graduating with my undergraduate social work degree. The Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted in 1978 because of the high removal rate of Indian children from their traditional homes and essentially from Indian culture as a whole. Before enactment, as many as 25 to 35 percent of all Indian children were being removed from their Indian homes and placed in non-Indian homes, with presumably the absence of Indian culture. In some cases, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) paid the states to remove Indian children and to place them with non-Indian families and religious groups.

Testimony in the House Committee for Interior and Insular Affairs showed that in some cases, the per capita rate of Indian children in foster care was nearly 16 times higher than the rate for non-Indians. If Indian children had continued to be removed from Indian homes at this rate, tribal survival would be threatened. Congress recognized this, and stated that the interests of tribal stability were as important as that of the best interests of the child. One of the factors in this judgment was that, because of the differences in culture, what was in the best interest of a non-Indian child were not necessarily what was in the best interest of an Indian child, especially due to extended families and tribal relationships.

In October of 1987 I was hired in the first Indian Child Welfare Position in our Tribe’s urban office in Duluth. I loved this time in my career and loved working with our Native families. I learned so much from them about resiliency and survival. I honed my skills and my ability to walk in two worlds. It was an exciting time in Indian Child Welfare in the 1980s. We were pioneers in implementing the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. I quickly learned that once Native children were removed they were placed in non Native foster homes which were often far away from their biological family and there were no services being offered to the family to aid in returning the children to their families.