Journey to the Spirit of Icwa
| Publication year | 2017 |
| Pages | 62 |
THE SIDEBAR
By LEEAH LECHUGA AND MEEGAN MILOUD.
When Denver Juvenile District Court Judge Donna Schmal-berger heard, in passing, about an Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) court in Los Angeles, California, she assumed specialized courts designed to protect Native American children’s cultural ties were located throughout the United States. She assumed that Denver Juvenile Court, which had no such court, had some catching up to do.
Judge Schmalberger was wrong: As of 2016, there were only two ICWA courts in existence.[1] Her next steps would put Denver in the position of innovative leader. On January 30, 2017, Denver Juvenile Court convened the third ICWA court in the nation—and the first ICWA court in a relocation city.
Nearly six months later, Judge Schmalberger spearheaded another “first” when she led a team of dependency and neglect stakeholders into tribal territory for the first ever ICWA court road trip. The six-day trip was an opportunity for stakeholders in Denver Juvenile Court’s ICWA court and the 17th Judicial District ICWA court to meet tribal leaders, tribal judges, and ICWA coordinators with whom they frequently interact. It was also an opportunity to delve deeper than the letter of the law. The group came face-to-face with the spirit of ICWA.
History of Relocation Cities
ICWA is federal legislation requiring county departments of human services to make active efforts to reunite families when children are enrolled or eligible for enrollment in a tribe and those children are removed from families of origin based on safety concerns.[2] Cases involving non-Indian children require reasonable efforts. ICWA also mandates that the tribe is notified and has the opportunity to participate in the court-involved child welfare case.
Enacted in 1978 (with new regulations promulgated in 2016), ICWA was passed in an effort to rectify decades of government-directed injustice against Native Americans and their children. There were massacres like the one at Wounded Knee, a site the group visited. There was the formation of boarding schools where Indian children were indiscriminately taken from their families to be stripped of Indian language and culture through the late 19th and early 20th centuries; half of them died. There was the Indian Relocation Act of 1956,[3] which sent young adults to faraway cities for assimilation. And there was the Indian Adoption Project, a federal program that actively sought to have Indian children adopted by non-Indian...
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