(Washington) The Supreme Court of the United States is interested Wednesday in the fate of Native American children orphans or removed from their parents, a delicate file likely to have serious repercussions for their tribes.
Posted at 10:10 a.m.
As in Canada, the United States has massively taken these children away from their biological parents for decades to place them in boarding schools or non-Native American 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 Amerindian children from their parents and provides for them to be placed or adopted, as a priority, with families of their tribe.
The conservative State of Texas and families barred from adopting some of these children have taken legal action on behalf of the 14e amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits legislators from making distinctions between citizens on the basis of racial criteria.
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 Native American 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.
Native American tribes have a special status in American law with their own skills 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 Native American rights with progressives.
The court’s decision will be scrutinized because beyond the children, it could have “revolutionary consequences” for Native American tribes, according to Joseph Singer, professor of law at Harvard.
“Hundreds of treaties with Indian nations are still in force,” he noted on his university’s website. “If we cannot treat Indian nations as sovereign entities […] does that make these treaties unconstitutional? »