Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast · Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin

RELIGION & ADOPTION: ICWA with Dr. Courtney Lewis

·1 hr 8 min·2 clips

ICWA is not about good or bad parents; it reinforces a Native nation's right to decide how to raise its children.

1. Keeping It 101's "Religion & Adoption: ICWA with Dr. Courtney Lewis" examines the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act and the mid-20th-century removal of Native children into mostly white Christian homes. 2. Hosts Megan Goodwin (a scholar of American religions, race, gender, and politics) and Elise Morgenstein First (a historian of religion, Islam, and South Asia) are joined by Dr. Courtney Lewis, a Cherokee Nation citizen, Duke associate professor of cultural anthropology, and inaugural director of Duke's Native American Studies Initiative. 3. The hosts argue that this removal was genocide, quoting the 1948 UN Convention's Article II(e) on "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." 4. They trace the history from the late-1400s doctrine of discovery to Henry Pratt (1840–1924), who ran the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and whose approach is summarized as "kill the Indian to save the man." 5. They describe a 1950s and early-1960s adoption fad among white, often Mormon, Midwestern families, supported by magazine "puff pieces" and "marketing campaigns" presenting Native children as needing Christian homes. 6. Lewis details the Indian Adoption Project, which ran from 1958 to 1967 under a federal contract from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the US Children's Bureau, administered by the Child Welfare League of America, and sent social workers onto reservations to declare families unsafe. 7. She recounts that her father was the first American Indian to earn a PhD in social work, that he helped write ICWA, and that he received death threats while the bill was in Congress, including letters threatening her and her 12-year-old sister. 8. Lewis explains that ICWA gives tribal governments exclusive jurisdiction over children domiciled on reservations, prioritizes placement with immediate family, then extended family, then community, and passed in 1978 alongside the Indian Religious Freedom Act and Indian Civil Rights Act, five years after the second Wounded Knee. 9. She states that over 12,000 Native women were sterilized between 1973 and 1976 at Indian Health Services facilities, about 24% of Native women overall, and that Dr. Connie Ury's count of 48 sterilizations in July 1974 helped expose the practice. 10. Suited to listeners interested in Native history, adoption policy, and religion's role in it.

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