Wisconsin ICWA: best outcomes? #flipthescript #adoptees #lostbirds

By Trace

 

This always gets me: "improve outcomes" or "best outcomes." What does that mean - that First Nations and American Indian children who are put into a non-Indian home, who lose language, culture, contact with their elders, do they mean improve that? How?  Do academics and social workers embrace an adoptee's tremendous loss of culture and contact? Do they work for family preservation and eradicate poverty that still plagues many reservations? Hardly. 

The best outcome: a child is never taken from their first parents and their tribes. Period.

 

Scholarship on the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act

by Matthew L.M. Fletcher on Turtle Talk

Loa Porter (Department of Children and Families, State of Wisconsin), Patina Park Zink, Angela R. Gebhardt (University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Center on Children, Families, and the Law), Mark Ells (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Michelle I. Graef, Ph.D. (University of Nebraska at Lincoln - Center on Children, Families, and the Law) have posted "Best Outcomes for Indian Children" on SSRN. It was previously published in Child Welfare.

Here is the abstract:

The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Midwest Child Welfare Implementation Center are collaborating with Wisconsin’s tribes and county child welfare agencies to improve outcomes for Indian children by systemically implementing the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act (WICWA). This groundbreaking collaboration will increase practitioners’ understanding of the requirements of WICWA and the need for those requirements, enhance communication and coordination between all stakeholders responsible for the welfare of Indian children in Wisconsin; it is designed to effect the systemic integration of the philosophical underpinnings of WICWA.