The Supreme Court of the United States is interested on Wednesday in the fate of indigenous children orphaned or removed from their parents, a delicate case likely to have serious repercussions for their tribes.
As in Canada, the United States has massively removed these children from their biological parents for decades to place them in boarding schools or non-Indigenous families, cutting them off from their culture and their roots.
In 1978 Congress put an end to these forced assimilation policies with the “Indian Child Welfare Act”. This law sets standards for removing Aboriginal children from their parents and provides for their placement or adoption, as a priority, with families of their tribes.
The conservative state of Texas and families barred from adopting some of these children have gone to court on behalf of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits lawmakers from differentiating between citizens on the basis of race.
The law “classifies children based on their genes and ancestry and potential adoptive parents based on their race,” the Texas representative wrote in court documents.
Several Indigenous tribes, with the support of the Democratic government of Joe Biden or the powerful civil rights organization ACLU, have retorted that the law is not based on racial criteria, but political, of belonging to sovereign entities.
Indigenous tribes have a special status in American law with their own powers and authorities.
After mixed court decisions, the Supreme Court agreed to intervene in the case. She will hear arguments from both parties on Wednesday and make her decision next spring.
In the past, many of its nine Elders have expressed skepticism about the law, but one of its conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch, is known to support Indigenous rights with progressives.
The court’s decision will be closely scrutinized because, beyond the children, it could have “revolutionary consequences” for the Native tribes, according to Joseph Singer, professor of law at Harvard.
“Hundreds of treaties with Indian tribes are still in force,” he noted on his university’s website. “If you can’t treat Indian tribes as sovereign entities, does that make these treaties unconstitutional? »