- I'm Maribel Lopez from Twin Cities PBS.

I'm pleased to be welcoming all of you here into this virtual space tonight.

Thank you for being here.

As a registrant's of tonight's event, via Eventbrite, you would have received a link to screen the film in its entirety on your own prior to the discussion tonight.

So, just know we're not going to be watching the whole film tonight, but we will be having a discussion, taking your questions in response to the film, and the subject matter with folks today.

And, I will say, if you didn't have a chance to watch the film or you want to watch it again, you can stream it on TPT's passport.

So just visit tpt.org and search for "Blood Memory" and you'll be able to find it there.

A little bit of housekeeping and a few more remarks before I introduce our panelists for tonight.

Please feel free to drop in a hello.

Let us know where you're watching from, what brought you here tonight.

We'd love to hear from you and feel free to type it in the chat or, if you're watching us on Facebook, in the comments and, if you experience any technical issues, please direct message us in Zoom or leave a comment in the chat and we'll do our best to address it.

And tonight's event is being recorded.

You should see that.

And we plan to make this recording available on our website at a later date.

So, stay tuned for that.

We'll send out an email with that information once it's up on our website.

Tonight's virtual event is co-presented by the First Nations Repatriation Institute and TPT's Racism Unveiled Storytelling Initiative, which aims to call out racism and highlight solutions from our communities to end systemic racism.

And, tonight's event is graciously sponsored by Highway Credit Union, as well as the Minnesota Humanities Center, the Minnesota Judicial Branch's Second Judicial District Equal Justice Committee, the Ramsey County Bar Foundation, and Racism Unveiled, which is funded generously by Otto Bremmer Trust, Health Partners, and the St. Paul and Minnesota Foundations, and, of course, TPT's members and donors.

Thank you so much.

Our discussion tonight will be moderated by Sandy White Hawk and panelists Dr. Priscilla Day and Judge William Thorne will be joining her.

I want to thank them all for being here tonight.

I also would like to give a special thanks to former Twin Cities PBS staffer, now Minnesota Humanities Center director of strategic communications, Pamela McClanahan, who helped organize this event, as well as TPT Community Advisory Council member, the honorable Judge Steven Smith, and a huge thanks to Sadie Hart for helping organize tonight's event, bringing us all together.

There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes.

Thank you, Sadie.

And now I have the honor of introducing our facilitator for tonight's discussion, Sandy White Hawk.

Sandy is the founder and director of the First Nations Repatriation Institute or FNRI and was removed from her Sicangu Lakota relatives, and was taken to live with a Christian missionary couple 400 miles away, where her skin color and cultural heritage were rejected.

And, if you watch the film, "Blood Memory" explores Sandy's adoption and reconnection with her Lakota community and identity.

Thank you so much for being here and I will hand it over to you.

- Greetings everyone.

(Sandy speaks foreign language) My name is Sandy White Hawk.

(Sandy speaks foreign language) Greetings, relatives.

It is so exciting to be here tonight.

I am really thrilled to be able to share this time, not just with you, but with my good friends, Dr. Priscilla Day and Judge Bill Thorne, who will offer you great insights into this topic.

It isn't just a story about me.

While my voice is there, it's all our story and how we can come to healing.

I would like to begin the evening with a land acknowledgement.

Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment.

Some were brought here against their will.

Some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted.

Truth and acknowledgement are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference.

We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth.

We are standing on the ancestral lands of both Dakota and Ojibwe people.

Minnesota comes from the Dakota name for this region, (Sandy speaks foreign language), the Land Where the Waters Reflect the Skies.

We pay respects to their elders past and present.

Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together here today and please join us in uncovering such truths at any and all public events.

As we do in all our gatherings within our communities, we take time to acknowledge the one who gave us life, the one who puts the air in our lungs, the one who unfolds our life's purpose.

So, if you would just everyone that is with us, however it is that you express your heart to your creator, if you would just take a moment with me as we focus so that our discussion will be healing, productive, and maybe we'll even have some good laughs.

(Sandy sings in foreign language) We say a heartfelt thank you for the gift of being together in this way.

We ask grandfather to have pity on us as, in our humanness, our desire to connect, that we be able to do that through our heart and not through our mind, that we see solutions that we can do to help our families, which is ultimately, grandfather, we know, the purpose of this discussion tonight.

Help us focus on healing, grandfather.

For our brothers and sisters who are unsheltered, we ask for them to be comforted and receive their needs.

For our brothers and sisters behind bars, grandfather, we pray for justice and healing and for their families who wait for them.

For those who are mourning right now, grandfather, from all the hardships that this virus has brought us and any other way, their relatives have left, we asked for a blessing of peace and comfort for them.

As we gather, help us remember our blessings that bring us here to be able to focus on this topic in our time together.

(Sandy speaks foreign language) The song I sang is a very simple prayer song.

Our people say that we don't even know how old it is.

We just know that it's always been here and it's a very, very simple prayer song that can be loosely translated to "I want to live.

So, I will pray first.

I want to live with my relatives.

So, I will pray first" or acknowledging that everything comes from our creator.

Thank you.

I think, Priscilla?

Well, I'm not sure what happened.

- Okay, can we go to the next slide please?

Good evening, everyone.

We're really happy to be able to join you today and talk about this very important issue, Indian child welfare.

And, as Sandy mentioned, there is a legacy of systemic racism and oppression that was designed to separate our families and children and there's a long history of that in Minnesota and across this nation and beyond.

But, here's some data that's specific to Minnesota and this data causes me a great deal of alarm and I get quite passionate about talking about this.

I had a little heated discussion earlier with a county attorney and the reality is that it's almost normal for Native families to be the subject of a child welfare investigation in Minnesota, about half of all Native families come to the attention of the child welfare system and so that's true across the different levels of investigation and we have to do better than that.

So, Native kids are three times more likely to be investigated than White children, four times more likely to have those investigations substantiated.

20% of all Native children in Minnesota will be in out of home care by the time they're 18, 30% will be placed into foster care and 25% of those families will have their parental rights terminated permanently.

10% of all of our infants under the age of one will be placed in foster care in Minnesota, the highest in the nation, and, in most of these statistics, Minnesota leads the country in disproportionality for American Indian/Alaskan Native children and many of those infants go into care and never come out.

And, if you look at "Blood Memory," there's some great discussion about the adoption industry that continues to target Native kids.

Next slide, please?

This is just a visual.

I'm not going to say a whole lot about it.

But, it shows you the disproportionality across the system for American Indian kids and you'll see that Minnesota at all levels is right up towards the top and we have to and we need to do better because that disruption is permanent and the trauma that we're causing really needs to, and we need to learn how to take care of our families and not remove our children.

- The removal rate for Minnesota is 20 times the rate for other citizens within the state.

South Dakota gets all the bad press for removal.

I hate to say it this way, but they're only six times more often.

Minnesota is over 20 times more often.

- Yeah and we have been for a long time.

- Can we see Judge Thorn's face, too?

What happened?

Is there a way to put him out upon the screen where we are, whoever is doing that, but go ahead, Priscilla.

- No, I, there he is.

- There he is.

That's our colleague joining us from Utah.

I'm joining you from Northern Minnesota from the Leech Lake Reservation where I'm a tribal member.

But, yes, absolutely.

There's a lot of policies.

Most recent, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which really pushed people towards the permanency of adoption and ignore other options of permanency and I just found out the other day, Minnesota is one of three states in the country where that's actually written into law that adoption is preferred over other kinds of permanency and so there are some lawyers that are looking at changing that legislation.

But, it's embedded in our systems and we all need to take some responsibility and change that.

- So, when I started the work around adoptees and fostered individuals and our birth relatives, I could hear a repeating story of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and racism within the family, emotional abuse, and there wasn't really a comprehensive study done on adoption outcomes.

So, we were able to look at 95 in this survey, asking them questions about different aspects of their life.

And so, of 95 who took our survey who have been adopted and/or spent at least minimally six months in foster care, these are pretty significant numbers of abuse.

24% experienced sexual abuse, 46% experienced physical abuse, and 49 experienced emotional abuse.

This implication, when we were first showing it, the numbers here, people were a little bit shocked.

But, what really has frustrated me is that people that work within adoption and foster care and child welfare are not moved to change things, which I don't understand and I don't know if they're afraid to lose their job or it's too overwhelming to think about, thinking that we can't change things.

But, why are we willing to take this risk with children is what I want to know.

Judge Thorne always says, all day long today he kept reiterating, "Is this how you would treat your own grandchildren?

Is this the outcome you would want for your own grandchild?"

So, I don't get it.

We just really have to do something because, as you saw in the film, I didn't go out and ask only people who've had a hard time in their adoptive families can come and speak at our talking circle.

That did not happen that way, but that is typically is what we hear and I want to add, as well, that, in the event that an adoption adoptive family is stable and loving and just loves in that most healthy unconditional way, it does not mean that that adoptee could not experience deep grief, extreme grief, because of not knowing who they are.

Loving someone does not replace your sense of who you are.

It does not replace genetics.

It does not.

It just doesn't and so it's sometimes even harder for someone who knows that they're loved to say, "I still am not happy.

I still need to know who I am."

In fact, it's almost harder for them to tell the parents who love them, who they know they're loved, can feel that love reciprocated and gave, it's exceptionally difficult, so- - I term it the equivalent of the potted plant theory of childbearing that you can move a plant from one window to another and, as long as you water it and give it sunlight, it thrives.

That doesn't work for children.

Children need to belong.

And if you rip them away and put them someplace else, they may survive, but they miss where they were and they miss what they don't have and it ends up creating a need within them that starts to become the equivalent of a hole that just gets bigger and bigger.

- Yup, and I know that there may be some judges on this, on our participants, in our audience here who have done adoptions and adoptions have become a big day in court and everyone feels happy and good about it and it has to be hard for judges to hear what the outcome could have been in the long run.

But, this is the reality and this is the truth that we need to look at and I know that people, judges, can only make decisions based on the information that's put in front of them.

So, we are putting this in front of you to show you and tell you that adoption is not the best option, bottom line.

- And adoption of adoption by itself is never enough.

Even if you have a situation where you have to adopt, it doesn't mean you abandon the family they came from, because they will go back.

They will find their way back.

The best that you can do in that situation is try and blend the two.

But, you don't abandon part of who that child is because somebody has screwed up and made a bad choice.

- Yep, yep!

That's not me, Bill or?

- The Indian Child Welfare Act was designed specifically to counteract the fact that Indian kids were removed way too often and used as an excuse for then creating an intergenerational pattern and, if you look at the removal practices that started 150, 200 hundred years ago, the child welfare system is simply a continuation where the intentional policy was to break up families and remove kids from their tribal influences and that's resulted now in intergenerational dysfunctional families.

So, ICWA was designed to try and use active efforts, use engagement of the community, giving kin the first option for placement.

These are really things we ought to be doing for all families.

ICWA was just the first step that I hope will be a revision of child welfare in this country.

- Yeah, and I just wanted to point out, tribes retained some rights through treaty rights and one of those is the right to govern their own citizens and so that's why ICWA was passed.

ICWA is a political law based on tribal sovereignty and it's not special treatment for a minority group and that is often used to attack the law.

So, yeah, Dale put in, I think, that November 8th is the 44th first birthday of ICWA.

ICWA has never been fully realized.

It's never been fully funded.

People confuse, even though it's a federal law, they confuse it with other federal laws that say something different and so now the movement is really trying to have ICWA as a gold standard for all family preservation, because it's primarily a family preservation act and people think it's a placement act and it's that, too.

But, it was first to keep our families together.

- And the engagement of tribes is not that unusual.

If you think about the fact that, if you have a child who's in trouble in Italy, United States government, the embassies, all get involved to try and make sure that child gets home.

This is allowing tribes to do the same kind of thing to protect their citizens, be able to speak up and say, "We have an option that's safe and back where they belong."

- Next slide.

So, this is a new graphic that was developed at the Capacity Building Center for Tribes and it really, I think, further explains what Bill was talking about is that there are built in safety nets in tribal communities and it's not just that child and family that are traumatized by removal, but it's the rest of the community as well.

And so, on the flip side, there's a lot of built-in resiliency in our communities and that's why ICWA talks about active efforts, engagement of the tribes, using culturally based resources, and those continue to exist in our tribal nations and in urban sites that have programming that addresses the whole family.

- Virtually every tribe has long traditions of taking care of children, whether they're your relatives or not.

Clearly, if they are your relatives, you step up.

But, even if they're not, they're still your relatives.

They're still members of the community.

You still have ties to them and what ICWA was designed to do was to give those tribal communities an opportunity to step forward and say, "We are here for you," so that we no longer have children who are lost between those two cultures.

- There's a question for you, Sandy?

- Yes.

I see that.

If people have brought their young adoptees to us, let us know that they're there, because if they're minors, then their parents need to let us know they're there.

But, we would love to know who they are and where they are and work with them and provide them that connection.

- And one of the things those kids need to know is that somebody has been looking for them.

They were not abandoned.

They were not left on the side of the road.

There are people who are looking for them and actively want to be a part of their lives.

- Yes, we did take a couple of years ago, the White Earth Tribe asked FNRI and our team to bring several youth who are in foster care here in the cities up to White Earth and we did that and took them on a three day adventure and taught them everything White Earth, everything Anishinaabe.

It was a wonderful, wonderful experience and, man, it would have been so awesome as a young person for me to have that because I didn't see another Indian person 'til I was 35, 35 years old.

Finally started to relax in my body when I started seeing others that looked like me.

But, back to our talk here, and I can talk about that stuff later.

- Well, it is so common in the Native community.

It's hard to be in any group of Native people without having someone with lived experience and I've been in settings with Sandy where someone will listen to her talk and then come up and say, "Can you help me find my family?"

And that's part of the work that she does.

- Somebody is asking, Tammy Skinaway: "What will we do now?

What can we do?"

Healthy foster homes, tribal involvement, accountability of counties, family preservation.

There's still a lot of bias, I would say, in looking at where families are at and children, I think, and Bill can speak to that, so can Priscilla.

The needless removal of children right now is, it's back to where it was in the seventies and sixties where there was such a bias toward us.

- Yeah, we need to stop the unnecessary removals.

Where removal is necessary, it's a fraction of the cases.

Well, we need to then make sure that the family is involved in making decisions about who's going to care for that child and, on those very rare cases, when there is no family available, then we need to take steps to connect that child to their roots so that they have some sort of an anchor as they grow up.

The worst thing we can do is cast a child adrift.

- Exactly and someone on the post, on the chat, said that, "Follow the money."

Exactly, there's money in foster care.

There is not money in family preservation.

I don't know how to make money, go to the family preservation.

So, whoever works within policies and those kinds of jobs there, we need you to be able to be able to write that and change that so that unnecessary removals happened.

I do want to say something, that I know that a lot of the reasons children are removed is parents may be addicted and you have tried and tried to get them to participate in different resources that you thought would be helpful and you see resistance.

I want you to remember that resistance does not mean that the person doesn't want to get well.

It means they feel unworthy of being well.

Unless you've been in that cycle of addiction, I think it's hard to understand when you watch repeated behavior, even though when you've been told and assured that we can help that doesn't register.

It takes a long, not a long time, but it takes patience and empathy for that to penetrate into the person.

That person may have never been able to trust anybody in their life and then we ask them to trust a social worker who they don't know, who is- - And, who's taken their kids.

- Yeah.

I think taking children, I think if I would have had my daughter removed and, in many cases, I look back and think, had she been in school it probably would have happened.

My addiction was that bad.

In a way it takes away the incentive for the parent to get well because the one thing I do know about addictive parents is we do want our children to be safe.

We feel like shit when we repeat horrible things over and over.

It does not feel good.

Having them in a safe place gives us that opportunity to go, "Oh, okay, well, at least they're there and they're safe.

I'll figure out a way to get them back," but then you just go right back into your using and then that's forgotten.

So, I don't think that's a helpful thing for anyone.

Aside from the child, it takes that incentive from the mom and dad.

- Yeah, the research is pretty clear that the more contact the child has with their family, the better the chance of recovery for that adult or that parent 'cause it keeps them motivated, keeps them connected.

What we don't want to have happen is them to give up and say, "There's no way I can succeed."

So, we need to provide real hope to people by knowing there are people who will walk alongside them that believe in them, and that will help, just like, again, we would help our relatives.

We wouldn't walk away from our brother or our sister simply because they were messed up.

We would never give up.

We might get frustrated.

We might say some things, but, push come to shove, we would be there to help if they were in a position to get their kids back, or at least stay connected, 'cause, even if you can't take care of them on a day to day basis, it's still important for those young people to know somebody loves them and wants them, even if they acknowledge they're incapable of taking care of them today.

- Yeah, I think Bill's point about, most tribes don't do termination of parental rights.

They do other kind of permanency solutions, like customary adoption, where you actually expand the family.

And, Bill talks about this, I think, a lot and I really think sometime in the future, people are gonna look back and went, "What?

She took kids away from their families?"

It's part of that ingrained legacy of not valuing indigenous people and then that trauma gets embedded in families and communities and that's why we see, I think, a lot of addiction issues, a lot of behavioral health issues, and then, poverty.

Poverty is a huge driver of why families come to the attention of the child welfare system and then, yeah, the prenatal substance exposure.

You shouldn't be removing kids.

You should be supporting that family.

- Again, the research is pretty clear.

Even for prenatal exposure, the infant is better and healthier faster, and the parents get better faster if you keep them together.

When you separate them, you drag out the process of their own bodies recovering to where they need to be.

I mean, it's as if we have ignored everything that tribal traditions have taught and then, when Western science gets to the point of saying, "Yes, we agree," we ignore that as well.

Western science and tribal traditions have finally gotten to the point where they acknowledge the best thing for kids is to be with the families and whatever we can do to support that, they don't have to be perfect families.

They don't have to be great families.

They have to be families that can provide safety and a place to grow up where you're loved.

Everything else is extra.

- Yeah, your average family has issues to be resolved.

- Every family has issues.

- Every single family.

Yeah, I recall when I was a QEW in this one case, the mother was just torn apart for how she kept house and everything.

And I'm like, I just couldn't, I was trying to put it in my brain that somehow that's an indicator that somebody is not a good mom because dishes were stacked.

How many of us wash our dishes?

Well, I do.

I wash my dishes every night.

But, that's because I have trauma around my dishes.

(Sandy laughs) But, so what?

It doesn't have to be that way.

You don't have to sweep your floor every day.

You don't have to vacuum every day.

You don't have to do all of that to be a good parent and everyone has different levels of things but we are still looking at that.

We are still coming in and judging a house by how it looks.

There's so much bias that's unconscious bias and our social work units have no governance over the workers in terms of looking at their reports and looking for biased language.

There's no place for individuals to really report and say, "This social worker is either scaring me or threatening me, not listening to me."

We don't have anything in place like that, which would be one way to resolve some of that and it would also be a way to help a social worker fine tune their skills to help 'cause most social workers do want to help.

But I think a lot of people don't know how to help.

- And our system is built on deficits.

It's built on identifying the flaws and the faults and the problems.

So, when a parent walks into a courtroom, for example, the first thing the judge goes through is, "Tell me what's not working?"

And by the time the parent has a chance to even respond, they're defensive and they think everybody in the system is against them.

There's very little chance to engage positively.

So, part of it is to back up and say, "You have a problem or an issue, but you also have lots of strengths and people around you with strengths.

How do we harness those and get past this problem?"

As opposed to, "How do we cut you off from your child and pretend that they got found in a cabbage patch?"

- Right, well, and the myth of safety, right?

The kids are safer in a stranger's home.

And so, research shows that kids who are in out-of-home placements are not any safer than they are with their birth families and I think that's why the research that Sandy engaged in was really important to show the level of abuse in out-of-home placement, whether it's foster care or adoption, and a lot of adoption, I think, I want to say it's around 20% of all adoptions fail.

- Actually, I think, Priscilla, it depends on which study you look at.

But, there are some out of Great Britain that suggest it's 50%.

But, again, there are more studies that suggest that kids are safer in unlicensed kin care than they are in licensed stranger care.

So, even if purely safety was your concern, you would want to place them with family rather than with strangers.

- Yep, and we haven't even mentioned how foster youth are, I forget the percentage, in danger of trafficking.

One of the, we haven't even mentioned that.

- Absolutely, the key recruiting ground for sexually exploited children are group homes.

- Yeah, exactly.

- That's the waiting list to get exploited.

- Yes.

- So, can we move to the next slide?

- Yep.

- Because I think, well, no, 'cause I think we're talking about this.

So, currently we have systems that are on the left side of the column are trauma-reactive and trauma-inducing.

And when Bill says science caught up to what we know, removing children from their family and their extended family and their community and their schools and all of that causes trauma and so you better make darn sure that, if you're removing a child from their family, where they're going is better and, otherwise, you'd better do everything you can and that's where active efforts come in to keep that child at home.

- And not just better.

Better is not enough.

- Right!

- Even Dr. Felitti, who was the original principal investigator for the ACEs Project, says that removing children into foster care is the equivalent of creating a new ACE, a new adverse childhood experience for that child.

So, you had better know, not just that it's better, but that it's much more harmful to leave the child where they are than it is to move them to foster care because foster care is a new ACE, a new adverse experience.

So, you're going to have to then balance and say, not just that pretend foster care is better or a safe neutral.

Knowing it's harmful, is it still worse to leave them where they are?

And there will only be, in my opinion, a handful of cases where that's the case where you can't create a safety plan and put it in place to support the family to take care of their kids safely.

- And that's the key, right?

Is good, meaningful safety planning with supports.

We're not saying that families don't need interventions, but families need assistance and sometimes that's concrete resources.

There are children that are still removed for homelessness.

That is not okay.

It's not supposed to happen, but it does.

And so, the middle column looks at trauma-informed care, which is kind of the bridge between trauma-inducing and trauma-reducing, but we really need to develop systems of healing and they have to be integrated and relationship-based and tribes have a lot of that going in tribal programming.

- And Priscilla is correct in that there are fewer systems that remove kids for homelessness, but virtually every system refuses to return kids if the family is homeless.

So, if you happen to get into the system, being homeless prevents you from getting the kids back and it shouldn't be that way.

We either fix that homeless problem or recognize that there are things we can do to keep kids safe because, I hate to say it this way, homelessness is not the end of the world.

- Exactly.

- Living without your family feels like it's the end of the world.

- Yeah.

- And there are some programs, Native Connections in Arizona.

I think the Lummi Tribe in Washington State have developed kind of one-stop shops.

So, they're housing developments with significant supports.

And so, they have elders and residents.

Usually they have cultural activities.

But, they're also doing financial, helping people think about finances, help people plan and develop job skills and respite care that's built in.

So, there are different ways of thinking about interventions that really help families move out of being so vulnerable.

- Yeah, the system has been built around a federal funding system that pours $9 billion to support the states after they have removed children from the federal government.

But, the federal government gives the state almost nothing to keep families together and prevent removal.

So, we need to reorient the practice so we don't follow the dollar.

We instead recognize the inherent value of families and do what's necessary to help them.

- Yeah, and I think Minneapolis and St. Paul both are looking at basic guaranteed income for families for a period of time to stabilize them and other places have been successful in that and found that, at the end of that stabilization, family incomes go up.

They're able to get better jobs and to be more financially secure.

It's incredibly stressful to be poor and to be on the verge of losing housing or having to choose about if you can eat or do something else.

And so, we have to be more compassionate in how we're looking at families and understand the historical impact of racism that was built into our systems.

- Exactly.

- The plans that we typically give families in response to a crisis, a parenting plan, is usually so broad and so over-inclusive that even I, who had a job that I could leave whatever I needed, I had private transportation.

I had graduate school education.

I would have a hard time accomplishing all of those things, much less somebody who is challenged as a problem solver, who is stressed by trying to make sure their kids stay alive and who are responded to a world they view as hostile.

If we can help them, that's our human obligation.

- I'm so glad that you said it the way you did Priscilla, when you said being poor is really stressful.

It's beyond stressful.

So, I don't know if anyone on here has started watching this series on Netflix called "Maid" and at first I didn't want to watch it 'cause I've been a house cleaner.

It was the way I was able to leave my abusive marriage.

I wasn't working at home and, when I moved out, I had enough housecleaning jobs to provide rent and what I needed.

However, I became ill and had to go on disability and to be on disability or welfare, you can't earn money, except that I only qualified for $16 worth of food stamps and, prior to that, for a year and a half, I couldn't get food stamps 'cause my car was too new.

So, even though I was really sick and couldn't really be employed for real, I would have worked if I could, trust me, but I could clean a couple of houses.

Women took pity on me and said, "You can lay down when you need to on the couch.

Take your time."

And I felt guilty!

That makes me more mad than anything.

I didn't mind that I had to clean houses to feed my children.

I'd do that in a heartbeat, right?

But, the fact that I felt guilty that I took this cash payment when I was on disability to support my children so we could eat because the little bit of money I got, barely covered my existence.

So, if you want to see what women do to survive, check out this "Maids."

I was really kind of surprised.

I didn't think I'd like it.

But, it's very realistic of what is not in place for women or probably men too, who are trying to leave a situation that's unhealthy.

But, the part that, yeah, it just brought back a lot of emotional, me feeling guilty that I was doing this because I like to follow the rules, but, good Lord, they're not designed for survival at all and this was back in eighties, '88, '89.

So, anyway, yeah, that was intense.

- And I want to address one of the questions that was in the chat about social workers.

Please understand.

We're not saying that the individual social worker is the source of the problem.

The system has created a process where workers, I mean, you didn't get into the job because of the high pay or the prestige or the respect that you got.

You got into help.

But, then the system comes through and basically beats out of social workers who want to help any notion they have of doing things contrary, as Sandy said, to the rules of helping.

So, what we want to do is reorient the system so it supports workers who support the families.

That has to be part of the solution.

It's one thing to say, pie in the sky, "We need to help the families."

But, we have to put the people who are charged with helping in a position where they can do it and be supported, rather than say, "Well, I have spent all my time on writing these reports and, well, maybe once a month, I get to see their family."

Social work ought not be assembly line work.

It ought to be you establishing a relationship and then you help somebody.

But, we have gone a way to where now we have workers for intake, workers for investigation, workers for adoption, workers for unification, and the family doesn't know who to trust because they keep gettin' handed off to somebody else.

I hate to be old school.

But, I think we need to go back to the idea of a worker who can follow a family, create a relationship, be supported as they support the families.

- Yes, and I want to reiterate, I should have said this from the beginning.

If there are any adoptive parents out there and what we are sharing doesn't ring true to you, then this is not about you.

If, for the social workers who are here, who have worked their butts off and go to bed and the last thing you hear is a child crying and you're not getting paid and compensated for the kind of work you do, this isn't about you either.

We understand that.

We know that.

We're thankful for that.

But, we need to discuss what is not working.

We need to discuss this system that is not working.

And I'm sorry, for real, that people do not understand and know that there are social workers out there who deserve that honor and deserve that.

We know you're there.

But, we need to talk about this.

We need to change things.

You who work really hard to try to make this an honest and helpful system within your own world that you're able to do, you know what you're working against.

That's what we're trying to change.

So, we're not talking about you.

You need to know that.

And part of the reason I think, oh, and then if there's any adoptee out here who, you're hearing what I'm saying, I'm not attacking your adoptive parents if you are feeling that way.

I am talking about the truth that has been told to me, the truth that I have lived, and we need to talk about that.

This isn't a space to say, "But, there's this other side."

We know that this other side exists.

We've been working against this truth not coming out for so long.

So, we're not on that.

But, I appreciate you bringing that up because it reminds me to speak to that directly and know that this is about the truth.

- Yeah, and we need to be careful not to get into being adversarial because we need everybody to help us think through how to do this differently.

- [Bill] And the families need everybody.

- Absolutely, well, and we need to listen to people with lived experience who can really be our best teachers.

I'll just share with you a short story.

So, when I was working at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, as a faculty, we were doing some training, actually for the state of Minnesota, called "Bridging Our Understanding: American Indian Family Preservation."

And we were out at Fond du Lac and we always did that training in a tribal location.

And so, the tribe was our host and then county workers would be invited.

And so, we were having this great discussion.

It's a three-day training and I think we're on day two and we talk about ICWA and frame in terms of historical context and all that and so she was listening to the tribe talk about the way they work with families and she looked really thoughtful.

She didn't say anything and she was probably, I wanna say, she couldn't have been 30.

Young, White woman who worked at a local county and so she came back the third day and she said, "I just have to tell you what I did."

And so she went to visit a Native mom who was in jail.

And she said, "I approached her as if she were my relative," because that's what a lot of tribes are doing is these are our relatives.

And how would you work with your relative who was struggling with something?

And so she said, "I took time with her."

She said, "I really listened to her.

We made a plan of what we wanted to happen" and then she said, "And I said, 'What if,'" she said, "I'm gonna help you as much as I can.

I'll help provide you resources and for what you want to do.

But, if that doesn't work, who would you like your children to live with if you need to go away for awhile."

And so they talked about that for a while and she said, when she left the jail, she said, "That mother hugged me."

She said, "I have never had a client hug me after we've made a case plan together."

Because usually she went in there with her client case plan and said, "Here's what you're going to do."

And so she said, I mean, it transformed the way she was going to work from then on and so those are the kinds of things that, at the individual worker level, people really need to think about and there really aren't good supports in the system.

But, individual workers can do that kind of work and it makes a huge difference.

- One of the questions in the chat box was: "How come tribes aren't willing to step up for their families and the children and how come tribes don't exercise the rights that they could claim under ICWA?"

You need to understand that the states, for example, get 80 cents on the dollar reimbursement from the federal government that they spend in child welfare.

Tribes get about 15 cents reimbursed.

So, they're trying to do their child welfare services with a fraction of the budget and then they don't have a geographic area that they're limited to.

They're looking at helping their tribal members all over the country.

So, you're doing less, excuse me, you're doing more in a greater area on a small fraction of what the states have.

If tribes had the resources that the states have, hopefully they would do better.

But, if the restrictions are simply, you only get federal money after removal, then they get tied too, and, unfortunately, tribes are like anybody else.

If you follow the dollar, you go down the path of removal instead of doing what you need to to keep families together.

So, one of the things is to get people who are in a position of authority or knowledge to say, "We need to reorient our spending.

We need to focus on what we say is important."

Everybody says families are important.

Everybody says the government ought not tell families what to do.

But then, we don't honor families.

We instead pay for the breakup of families.

We need to reverse that.

- I mean, I appreciate the question and the lack of equity around resources is stunning if you, we're aware of that.

So, there's actually some legislation that tribes are looking to pass.

I think it's called the Tribal Fairness Act and it's really to have more equity around federal dollars and I really think our state needs to look at that, too.

So, even our tribes in Minnesota get less funding than counties get to provide the same services.

And a lot of those funding streams are very Western and colonized in the way they're set up and so, if you don't meet those requirements, and this was true for adoption in Safe Families Act when it first came out, tribes had to agree to termination of parental rights and they're like, "No, we're not going to do that."

And so they had to go back in and get that legislation changed.

And so, there are a lot of system barriers to tribes because they don't have databases.

They do not have the same level of infrastructure that states and counties have.

- Well, I think we've solved that problem.

- Don't beat it to death.

- We have another, we do have another slide left.

- We've solved.

We've beat.

We've solved.

We've beat.

(Sandy laughs) We know what to do.

- So, I mean, one of the things that Sandy and I, and Sandy started it, I kinda was a latecomer.

But, really, it's what we think about is community activated healing and these are traditions that have always been part of our communities.

And so, it's not just going to therapy and healing as an individual.

That has its place.

But, there's something incredibly powerful about being in community and having that kind of trauma recognized and have you experienced a process of healing in community.

So, Sandy, I'll let you talk about that.

- Yes, in 2007, the White Earth Tribe and Jeri Jasken, who was the director of the ICWA department at White Earth, asked me if I would help them welcome their relatives back who'd been separated through adoption and foster care and I was so excited because I had been speaking for some time trying to motivate tribes to do this, what you saw in the film.

Provide a forum, a day or two.

It's typically two days of coming together and then welcoming them back into the community, in the arena, and I didn't even think about it, but I actually have, my husband did a really great film and what I'll do is I'll put it on Facebook when we get done and you guys can go on Facebook and check it out, post it again.

It was the first, so whoever's online that is a White Earth tribal member, you should be feeling really, really proud because White Earth Tribe was the first tribe to do this in the nation, even though I'd been traveling nationally asking tribes to do this and, until 2015, when, well, I think our tribe started it.

Maybe that was the first one, 2015, our first welcome home for our relatives who are separated through adoption and foster care.

And then, Priscilla, who I'd been work, she'd asked me to work with her on the Summer Institute that they plan and have in Leech Lake every year.

Man, I miss that Priscilla!

That is an awesome time to gather for tribal social workers to relax and get just really high caliber information from language speakers and other teachers and just to be relaxed and be with ourselves, be with other Indians.

Anyway, one year Priscilla said, "Why can't we have a welcome home after our institute?"

And I'm like, "Yeah, you can have a welcome home any time.

Let's do that!"

So, she spoke to their big drum, their family.

So, she went to Paul Day, who is the headman of that and gave him tobacco and the big drum came and through all of those that are in part of that, set that up of a actual welcoming, bringing them back in the circle, through the way they set it up, the way that they would do it if they were in the lodge, which was really beautiful.

So, we gave Paul tobacco and it was just incredible.

What happened the first year, there was a, I got to tell a quick story of just how our relatives that have been separated are everywhere.

But, they're not going to necessarily say, "Hi, my name's Sandy.

I was adopted.

Or I grew up in foster care."

But, the first year that we did this, Dawn Eckdal, who works with us at the time, was standing at the table, a young woman who was working for security at the Leech Lake Casino, which is where we would have this summer institute said, "What are you doing?"

And her and Don started talking.

And Don told her about the ceremony that we were going to be doing for our relatives.

And she says, "Oh, wow.

I grew up in foster care."

And so Don came and told me and Priscilla and I said, "Let's go find her supervisor and ask the supervisor if she can have off for a few hours in the afternoon so she could participate in this ceremony."

And he said, "Yes."

And so, she got to come in, be part of that ceremony, meet some of the other adoptees and those who grew up in foster care it was just an amazing connection for her.

And so, we just never know and that was proof to me that, yes, let's do this every year.

By about the third year of doing this, so many people were coming from the community, so many women coming in wanting to help and be part of the ceremony, which really spoke to us and we were so happy for that, that they wanted to be welcoming their community members back and being helpful in that way was just beautiful.

So, what is happening here is the individual is being, healing is happening there, the family and the community all at once and it's community building and community healing.

It's just beautiful.

My vision was and is every tribe could do this at their annual event every year and I can help somewhat.

But, everybody knows how to do this.

You just gotta do it.

But, anyway, so that's one of the things and I can't wait till we can gather again in person, so that we can offer these kinds of healings for our communities.

- Yeah, there's so much going on all across the country and there's opportunities for everybody to get involved and we have real needs that impact all of us and I think about climate change and the role of indigenous people in holding firm against oil companies and trying to repatriate lands so that they aren't further eroded.

There's just so much.

There's a lot of legal stuff that's going on with the Indian Child Welfare Act that really needs advocacy and support.

So, raise the issues with your legislators, with anybody you can get to listen, educate yourself.

Somebody put the National Indian Child Welfare Association website up earlier; I think that came from Heather.

That's a fabulous resource, but there are so many others.

The Capacity Building Center for Tribes through the Children's Bureau, there just are lots and lots of opportunity to get involved whether you live in Minnesota or not.

- And there are things you can do in your own community, that the lack of funding by the feds doesn't have to stop or prevent you from doing.

You had funding to do it, it would be easier.

It'd be easier to spread it.

But, there's a group in Southern California, seven small tribes, 15 years ago, they had 487 kids in foster care.

Two weeks ago, they had three and they did it by engaging the community, by mainstreaming the families that are at risk, not by segregating them and stigmatizing them, but by making sure they were included in the events with all the other families so that they could see what a healthy family looked like.

They could partner and make friends.

They could build their own support system and that's how you break that intergenerational aspect of foster care because the foster care system, one of the biggest correlates for ending up in foster care, is you had a relative who was there.

We need to break that so that we can then go forward and have healthy families all around us.

- [Sandy] Yes.

- Are there some questions that we haven't addressed that people have?

We're trying to keep up on the chat, but we may not, things might go by.

Or comments or reflections on the film for those of you who watched it?

- While you're thinking, I wanted to just say a couple of things about the film.

I'd like to tell you how the film came to be.

I was laughing last night and I started it by saying, "Yes, I just woke up one morning and I said, 'I would love a camera crew to follow me around for eight years because I'm just that special.'"

But, no, that's not how it happened.

In fact, I'm really surprised that I come across fairly decent 'cause I hate cameras and I hate that and if you ever see pictures of me just smiling, it's because I like the person I'm standing next to and I can visualize that.

But, I hate cameras and I hate my picture.

So, it's interesting that that even happened.

But, the filmmaker had just graduated from film school in Pittsburgh and was sitting in a coffee shop with his friends he graduated with and they were all talking about what kinds of films they were going to make to change the world and a woman overheard them.

She walked over to the table and said, "I hear you guys are filmmakers.

I have an idea for a film for you."

And she gave them an idea and they did not, somebody said, "How long did it take?"

Eight years.

They didn't like her first.

The first thing they said, "Well, we just can't help you with that."

But, the second one was she said, "I have a story that I don't believe has been told and there's a woman who is leading this movement of bringing our relatives back."

So, she told them about me.

But, she also told them of her story, that she was an adoptee from Red Lake here in Minnesota, who was adopted out and raised out east and it just so happened that there she was at the coffee shop.

She gave Drew the information.

He called me.

I said, "I'm not going to talk to you.

I don't know who you are, young White boy from the east who is just graduated college.

No, thank you."

And I said, but then I did say, "If you are interested, you could come to our pow-wow that we're having for our children and returning adoptee pow-wow and see what this is about."

So, he did.

I was impressed that he made it there and he stayed, Bill, from the very beginning to the very end and the next day I offered him an interview and the first thing he said was, "I want to know, first off," he said, "How come I don't know any of this?

I'm a college graduate and I don't know.

I just didn't even know there were Indians really."

And so, we started a relationship at that point and the film started being made and it did take about eight years.

So, that's how it came together.

One of the things I want to share with you, we've been talking about removal and the trauma that removal brings.

So, in that opening scene, I still don't think it's conveyed in the best, in the most clear way.

But, here's what it is is I recall being lifted and put in a truck and then, as I said, "Everything is hypersensitive, visual recall, the smells, the everything."

But, really, all of a sudden, I'm watching this little brown girl sit between these two White people from the truck bed looking through that back window.

Well, what that means is I disassociated at 18 months old because this was not my family.

I was so embarrassed to report, when this came through.

This all came in a group therapy session.

I was embarrassed to say, "I don't know.

There's this White arm and it has circles on it."

And, as a child, you wouldn't know those are pores, but I was intrigued by that because my brown arms that were holding me prior didn't have that.

Skin texture was different.

Everything was different.

So, that was my first trauma, was being removed, and I remember it in that way and I left my body on and off until I was 11 years old.

So, I disassociated as a way to protect myself.

So, anyway, when I hear about removals, I always think that.

Yeah, they remember.

They remember.

Other than that, oh, and just kind of a funny story.

So, the opening of that film of me walking down that road, I did not want to walk down that road.

I remember Drew and Megan calling me on and said, "Come on.

Meet us on this side road."

And I'm like, "Oh, okay."

So, we go over there.

And he goes, "Sandy, I'm thinking about the opening and how I'd like you to walk down this road."

And I'm like, "No, not walking down a road.

And he goes, "Why?"

And I go, "Do you see anybody else walking out here?

Nobody just walks down a gravel road.

They walk by a house maybe, by the community.

But, no, I'm not going to do that."

And back and forth and George was going like this on my head.

He goes, "Come on, it's okay.

Just walk down there."

And my daughter's trying to say, "Just let him see if it'll work."

And I felt so self-conscious, I think that's what it was.

And plus, yeah, and I remember teasing him and saying, "If you put flute music to this, I will beat the (muted) outta you."

(Sandy and Bill laugh) Anyway, so, it ended up being a nice opening and my friend Denise Lajeau Demore, I can't say her name, messaged me when she first saw the film and said, "Oh my gosh, Sandy!

That opening was beautiful."

So, I went through all of that frustration and anger and it's pretty, but what do I know about that?

So, I just wanted to let you know that little bit about the film and, other than that, Priscilla, what are we getting in the chat?

- Oh, lots of questions.

- Woo-hoo!

- So, I think from Facebook, there was a question about what can you do to support families and I think we've talked a little bit about that.

But, really, concrete resources and I also think we really need to change.

There was a lot of propaganda about welfare queens and people taking advantage of the system and that may have happened, but it wasn't the majority of people and so this whole thing about how we have to switch everything 'cause people are taking advantage is really judgmental and it does not take into account the legacy of genocide in this country and so, when your communities, your families and communities, have been disrupted repeatedly and moved to places that weren't your homelands and you had to leave behind all that mattered to you, sometimes very quickly and oftentimes under harsh conditions, there's a long legacy of embedded trauma in our communities and, again, some of the recent research shows that that lasts in our DNA up to seven generations and beyond and that research came out of the Holocaust.

So, those same kinds of things are true for the African-American community and the Native community and other communities that have been disrupted and then we turn around and blame families for being dysfunctional, even though those systems cause that dysfunction and then we don't have adequate resources and ways of dealing with them and we blame them for the dilemma they find themselves in, even though the systems created the vulnerabilities and so, as a country, we have not reckoned with that.

Other places have looked at their treatment of indigenous people and said, "We have to tell the truth about this and we have to engage in some healing and then we can talk about reconciliation.

But, we're not at reconciliation."

So, anything you can do to learn about that history.

I like to use Terry Cross's, he was a founder of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, take an Indian to lunch.

Get to know somebody, a Native person, because most providers only see people in their greatest need and they don't see the strengths in our community and the resilience in our community.

So, those are all things individuals can do and then look for opportunities to be helpful and the more time you engage with tribal communities, the more of those opportunities will emerge.

- And your opportunities are not limited to just what ICWA sets out.

Let me give you an example.

I have a friend who I think was Onondaga, but I'm not sure.

His tribe comes from New York State.

He has two adopted children and they came to him through a pathway that ICWA set up but did not require and that's that the mother gave birth in the hospital; the child was born drug addicted.

But, rather than instituting criminal proceedings immediately against the mom, the hospital actually reached out to the tribe and what the tribe did was they sent a shift of grandmothers to hold that baby.

So, for the next three weeks, that baby was never put down except to change.

There were grandmothers who held the baby, rocked the baby, talked to the baby, and then the tribe reached out to tribal members to see if somebody was available for a placement.

My friend was across the country from them, but still a tribal member.

They reached out.

He and his wife did not have kids.

They wanted some.

They flew back on a regular basis to establish a relationship with those babies and then they adopted.

But, that hospital did not have to reach out to the tribe.

The tribe did not have to send those shifts of grandmothers.

They did not have to go and look for members to take those children.

But, that's in the spirit of what ICWA, the framework it's set up.

So, it's more than just the legal requirements.

It's how do we honor the families and the communities and give them a chance to take care of their own?

It can look different ways, but once you walk away, then you're talking about repairing all that harm that you saw in this movie.

It's so much better to prevent that harm and that trauma from happening or to minimize it and that means, when you have the opportunity, do what you can.

Don't do it simply because the law requires it.

But, it's the framework of ICWA that works for the tribal situations and I'm convinced it works in the non-Indian situations as well about engaging family, giving family a priority, doing active efforts, rather than this statutory minimum, helping heal.

That's what this is about.

First, prevent the harm and, if the harm of removal has happened, help heal that harm.

- So, I know we're coming to the end of our time together.

I really appreciate the robust conversation and hope that you find this helpful and please continue to learn and to reach out and to find ways to engage with tribes.

In this era, there's just so much good stuff available from reputable resources and more and more research that shows the efficacy of ICWA and that it could work for all families.

So, thank you.

- [Sandy] This has been really amazing that everyone, like Priscilla said, all the comments and everything, and I want to thank my good friends, Priscilla and Bill, because they both have very full days and no matter how many times I've asked them to come and do this, they have come and given everything they have to all this information that you've gotten.

You've really had a treat, y'all, to hear from them.

Their expertise and perceptions on this are right on.

So, thank you, my friends, for coming and helping me as you always, always do.

I would hope that the creator return that to you fourfold what you've been giving me.

So, thank you everyone who's been on here.

You can always reach me on Facebook, anyway.

Priscilla is on Facebook and if you had any other questions or thoughts or you want us to come to a presentation at your agency and/or event, so let us know.

Bill and Priscilla, any last comment, too?

- Thank you everyone.

- Thanks, Maribel and thanks TPT for hosting this.

- Yes, thank you.

- Thank you very, very much.

- [Maribel] It was an honor to have you all.

Thank you so much everybody.

Have a great night.

We're going to sign off.