The United States Supreme Court agreed last week to hear a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law that has protected American Indian and Alaska Native children, their families and their communities for nearly 50 years. In the interests of vulnerable children — and in light of the cruel history that this law was written to redress — it is vital that the Indian Child Welfare Act be protected and strengthened, not taken apart.
The law, commonly known as ICWA, was passed in the 1970s to prevent the separation of Native children and families, which has been a plague on this continent for centuries. It was a long-overdue reckoning with this country's grim history of taking children from their homes and sequestering them in boarding schools in a brutal attempt to raise them as white people.