Published on Investigative News Network affiliate 100Reporters.com in December 2012; an excerpt published in Huffington Post in January 2013. See my additional ICWA stories here, here and here.
In
a basement interrogation room in South Dakota, agents of the state’s Department
of Criminal Investigation were on the firing line. A group of Native American
children were claiming sexual and physical abuse by their white adoptive parents,
with whom they’d first been placed as foster kids.
South
Dakota was already under Congressional scrutiny for the high number of Native
children it takes from their homes and tribes then places, for the most part,
with white foster families or in white-run group homes—seemingly to claim a higher
share of federal foster care funding. Though Native children make up about 13
percent of South Dakota’s child population, they are typically more than 50
percent of those in care, according to federal figures. A new tribal report confirms
that few Native foster children are placed with relatives, in so-called kinship
care. The tribes prefer this, but it captures no federal foster care dollars, so
South Dakota avoids it, says the report.
The
state’s response to the Native children’s abuse accusations offers a rare look
into its foster-care system. The response also raises questions about South
Dakota’s willingness to protect Native American children housed with white
families, particularly when homes that are presented as safe havens turn into places
of abuse.
Startlingly,
the agents who summoned the children to the interrogation that day in November
2011 were working hard to get the kids to recant their abuse claims. Sheriff’s deputies had taken the children out of school, court
records show, and brought them to the basement room, with its table, chairs,
one-way mirror, and recording equipment. One by one, the children faced Agent
Mark Black of the Department of Criminal Investigations and a partner. The
children were each alone, without an adult present on their behalf.
While being
questioned by the agents, the children became fearful and wept, according to
someone familiar with the case who asked not to be identified for fear of
retribution. The youngsters were apparently not told they were being recorded.
While left alone for a time, one explored the room, discovered the camera
equipment behind a peephole, and began to cry.
The
DCI video of the interrogation is now a court document. In a four-minute
excerpt that can be seen on YouTube,
the agents are taking a break. They’re off-camera, apparently unaware that the
microphone is still picking up their voices as they plan their strategy. One
agent says the children “have been f---ing with us.” The men talk about
questioning the therapist to whom the children described the sexual assaults.
Agent Black says, “I guarantee we put [her] in here. Put the f---ing hot screws
in her. Bitch you’re in f---ing deep shit. You better start talking.” Later
Black says, “At least we f--- with Brandon.”
Brandon
Taliaferro was the deputy state’s attorney who brought charges against the
adoptive parents in 2010, following a police investigation of the children’s
abuse allegations. The charges included nearly three dozen felonies, including
rape, sexual exploitation and cruelty occurring over a decade. Shirley Schwab,
the children’s court-appointed special advocate, supported Taliaferro’s action.
Local news media followed the case avidly as it developed.
Since
the interrogation, Agent Black has testified multiple times that he was trying
to get the children to recant their abuse claims and to say that Taliaferro and
Schwab had encouraged them to lie about the abuse, but the youngsters never
did. Nevertheless, the state moved on the two whistleblowers, raiding their
homes and offices and hitting them with felony and misdemeanor charges related
to persuading the children to lie. Later testimony would indicate that
investigators had turned up no evidence of this.
In May 2012, Michael Moore, the
state’s attorney prosecuting the case against the adoptive parents, dismissed
all charges against the mother. The state returned the children to her and gave
the father a deal. He admitted to one count of raping a child younger than 10
and was ordered to serve 15 years in prison. He will reportedly be eligible
for parole after seven and one half years.
Frank LaMere (shown right) is a
prominent Indian-child-welfare advocate and head of Four Directions
Community Center, a Native nonprofit in Sioux City, Iowa. He called for a federal investigation into South
Dakota’s foster care system and predicted that this latest situation may become South Dakota’s Penn State. “This is a
scandal of the highest order,” said LaMere.
A very bad year
Late 2011 was a difficult
time for South Dakota’s foster care system. In
addition to facing this latest abuse case, the state was figuring out a
financial settlement in the so-called Jane Doe lawsuit. It had been brought on
behalf of a 9-year-old foster child who was reportedly sexually abused over a
period of two years in a group home. Schwab was one of the whistleblowers for
that case as well, she said.
Then, days before Black’s interrogation of the Native
children and the searches of Taliaferro’s and Schwab’s premises, National
Public Radio broadcast a scathing report, charging South Dakota with rampant
taking of American Indian children into foster care. The network said the state
receives $100 million dollars annually in federal funds on behalf of foster
children of all races, giving it an incentive to keep the numbers of children
in care high. Alarmed, six House members had asked the federal Bureau of Indian
Affairs to look into possible violations of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act,
intended to keep Native children within their Indian families and communities.
Last
month, things got even worse for South Dakota. A tribal report (cover shown left) accused the
state of “willfully” and “systematically” violating the Indian Child Welfare
Act and taking Indian children “at least partly to bring federal dollars into
the state.” The document came from a committee of ICWA directors
of South Dakota tribes (shown below). They are tribal child-welfare officials tasked with
enforcement of the act.
On December 7, Congressmen
Ed Markey (D.-MA) and Ben Ray Lujan (D.-NM) reacted to the tribal report by
sending a strongly worded letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Markey is the
top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction
over Indian affairs, and Luhan is ranking member of the subcommittee on Indian
and Alaska Native affairs. Citing the tribal report, the
congressmen called for a House investigation of South Dakota for possible “misappropriation of federal
dollars to state coffers.”
“This has
gone on long enough,” said Markey. He and Lujan also
reminded the Bureau of Indian Affairs that 14 months ago House members asked
the agency to hold a “summit” on the situation. Congressman Tom Cole (R.-OK)
and three others had gone even further.
In a move reminiscent of Robert Kennedy sending federal marshals to
enforce civil rights in Mississippi in 1962, they proposed in late 2011 sending
federal attorneys to South Dakota tribes to help them enforce the Indian Child
Welfare Act. At that time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced it was looking
into these suggestions, but took no action.
The bureau has been closely following events in South Dakota,
said spokeswoman Nedra Darling. “The BIA supports
the ongoing tribal efforts to resolve this matter, and we stand ready to
participate in future forums.”
South
Dakota is not the only state that removes Native American children from their
families and tribes in disproportionate numbers, but its numbers are among the
most skewed, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association. The federal dollars South
Dakota receives on behalf of all children—Native and non-Native—are
considerable. They flow onward to state agencies, foster and adoptive parents,
and group homes, as well as to any employees and suppliers. This movement of
money has “a measurable effect” on a state’s economy, according to the
healthcare consumer group Families USA.
Department
of Social Services spokeswoman Kristin Kellar said the agency complies fully with
the Indian Child Welfare Act and does not take children to attract federal dollars. Removing
a child from the home harms society economically, she said, no matter what
“paltry amount of funding the federal government expends to support foster
care.” She challenged NPR’s
$100-million figure, saying the agency would like to see the numbers on which
it is based.
Attorney
Daniel Sheehan, general counsel of the Lakota People’s Law Project, an advocacy
group, disputed the “paltry” characterization and noted the importance of federal
funding to South Dakota. An analysis from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research
group, reveals that South Dakota is third in the nation for dependence on the federal
government, with 45.6 percent of its total expenditures covered by the federal subsidies.
Sheehan
pointed to the state’s 2012 budget, which reveals that Washington’s share of
South Dakota social services skews even higher, to about two-thirds of the
total—$660 million in federal funding, out of the $1 billion in total state
spending on all social services. That means Native foster children, who are
more than half of all kids in care in the state, could be responsible for
significant portions of several federal funding streams, according to Sheehan.
“They
would bring the state chunks of the $30 million in federal money for child
protective services; the $67 million for nutrition, health, and other economic
assistance; the $37 million for behavioral health; and the $19 million for
Department of Social Services administrative costs,” said Sheehan. “We could be
looking at substantial federal funding captured by Native children once they are
in the custody of a state that relies heavily on it.”
Orders from above
As the most recent South Dakota
child-abuse case unfolded, top state officials appear to have been closely involved.
While raiding Schwab’s premises and seizing computers and other items, DCI
Agent Black told Schawb that his orders came from the highest echelons of state
government.
“The attorney general
himself has told me to work on this until I am done with it,” Black can be
heard saying in an audiotape he made, which has now been turned over to the
courts. “This is my priority case right now. Short of a homicide happening.”
Along the way, Taliaferro
lost his job as deputy state’s attorney. His former boss told local media
multiple times that the firing was done “with the support of the attorney
general.”
The South Dakota attorney
general’s office referred a request for a comment to the Department of Social
Services.
The
head of that agency was apparently directly involved as well. In a preliminary
hearing for Taliaferro and Schwab’s case, the presiding judge interrupted Black’s testimony to ask him a question: “It just popped into my mind. How did
you get the kids out of school?” Black responded that the social services department’s
director had given permission.
Kellar said the social services agency “cannot comment on
specific abuse and neglect cases, due to confidentiality reasons.”
Schwab and Taliaferro say
they fear for their safety. Said Schwab: “Knowing Pierre [South Dakota’s
capitol] is calling the shots on this is terrifying. We have no one to turn
to.” Their trial is set for January 7, 2013.
State’s attorney
Moore is also prosecuting the Taliaferro-Schwab case; he said he could not talk
about a pending lawsuit, but that the case against the lawyer and child
advocate would be made clear in court next month. In addition, Moore insisted
that in the parents’ case, the only abuse charge against them that stuck—the
single count of rape—is the one that should have.
Moore conceded that
Black and his fellow officers were “unprofessional” during the break in
questioning. However, Moore said, they had behaved differently during the
questioning itself: “The interviews weren’t in any way consistent with what was
on camera. If you’ve been around law enforcement, you know they swear a lot,
they make statements they may regret.” Moore also said that
children who are being questioned do not need to be accompanied by an attorney
or guardian when they are witnesses, not defendants.
O.J. Semans, the
former chief public defender for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, took a different view. “Ordinarily, children are interviewed alone when
there’s an indication that they were victims of a family member who should not
know of the interview. If the interview is to determine whether the children
provided false statements, which is a crime, they should have representation.”
Semans went on to
say, “And,
by the way, any law enforcement officer knows the difference between
an interrogation, with tough questioning in an intentionally stressful
environment, and an interview, which elicits a narrative. Because children can
be easily influenced, the latter more accurately reflects a child’s perception
of a situation.”
Sara Rabern, spokeswoman for the Department of Criminal
Investigation, said the agency could not comment on an ongoing prosecution. Neither
the agency nor Black responded to requests for an interview with him; however, Black
has testified that he made the recorded statements attributed to him here.
Bad outcomes rising
The
recent tribal report described another disturbing trend. For the first decade
of the 21st century, figures from the federal Administration for
Children and Families show a fivefold increase in the percentage of Native
foster children in South Dakota whom the system failed. During that period, the
percentage of children who were transferred to correctional or mental health
facilities, or who died or ran away, soared to 36 percent in 2010 from 6.9
percent in 1999. During the same period, reunifications with family dropped.
The percentage of white children leaving under the same circumstances grew much
more slowly during those years, from 6.3 percent to 11.4 percent; and the share
reunified with their families increased. The tribal report concluded,
“Native American foster children are becoming an increasingly important
attractor of federal corrections dollars to South Dakota.”
“Our Native children feed
the system. They always have,” said LaMere, a member of the Winnebago Tribe of
Nebraska. He added that tribes share responsibility for the exodus of Native
children into care. “Many of our tribal
leaders have been lax in protecting our greatest resource—our children.”
The tribal child-welfare
officials’ report also confirmed that last year almost all Indian children in
state foster care were in non-Native homes and white-run group facilities.
That’s despite the availability of Native foster homes, some of which sit empty
on reservations, and kinship placements, the directors said.
The Indian Child Welfare Act
encourages kinship care, which involves placing children who have been
neglected or abused at home with relatives. Tribes favor it, because it
preserves the children’s culture and maintains the community. “In our families,
there’s always room for one more,” said Terry Yellow Fat, ICWA director for the
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which straddles South and North Dakota. He is
co-chair of the committee of ICWA directors that produced the tribal report.
But tribal members have
testified at a 2005 hearing before state lawmakers that social workers for the
state routinely rebuffed them when they offered to house young relatives who
were being taken into care. One Native American woman asked why she was never
considered as a candidate to care for her sister’s children.
Another, whose family had
not been allowed to keep a cousin’s children, said the state Department of
Social Services, which manages this process, was overwhelming to parents, who
generally did not understand the often-changing requirements in child-care plans.
A DSS representative at the hearing said that these decisions are made,
sometimes quickly, to ensure the safety of the child.
Disappearing into the system
Congress passed Indian Child
Welfare Act in 1978 to stop the massive removals of Indian children that had
taken place over the preceding century, first to notoriously violent boarding
schools, then to foster care and adoption in white homes and group settings. During the mid-20th century, as
many as 35 percent of Native children were taken from tribes nationwide under
federal-, state- and church-run programs, according to testimony Congress
gathered while considering the legislation. Sheehan called this “the
intentional disassembling of Native American communities through the seizure of
their children.”
In
South Dakota, Native children are often taken for “neglect,” according to
Yellow Fat. “The prevailing attitude on the part of the state is that poverty
is a crime,” he said.
“A federal law is being
flouted—and frankly, it’s happening in courts all over our state,” said Diane Garreau,
ICWA director for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, in
South Dakota, and a member of the committee that wrote the report.
The result can be devastating
for parents and children, according to attorney Brett Lee Shelton. “Frequently, the kids have already undergone a lot of
trauma. Then, when things they don’t understand happen to them, it only adds to
their pain,” said Shelton, a member of the Oglala Sioux, another South Dakota
tribe, and principal of the Colorado law firm Smith Shelton Ragona.
When tribal youngsters are being
removed, time is of the essence, according to Garreau: “If we are not watching,
if we don’t start hustling as soon as we hear there’s a problem, if we don’t
fight for every single child, they’re lost to us forever. Can you imagine how
frightened they must be?”
LaMere
charged that the Indian children’s terrifying odyssey through the foster care
system as it unfolded in the most recent South Dakota abuse case is not an anomaly. “As outrageous as it
is, it is the sad reality for Native children in South Dakota and around the
country,” said LaMere. “That father will walk free long before these Indian
kids begin to think about recovery.”
c. Stephanie Woodard; image courtesy Lakota People’
s Law Project. For the outcome of the prosecution of child-welfare advocates Taliaferro and Schwab, go to my story in Indian Country Today.
Published in Indian Country Today in January 2013. For more photographs, go here.
Seven-member
Soaring Eagle, the first of two groups to run through their paces that day,
adjusted their headdresses and other regalia. Meanwhile, Tammy Weebothee, a dancer and organizer of the
rehearsal, pointed out a tall spire, nearly the height of the mesa and just
south of it (to its right in the photographs here). It appeared to represent
two figures, one taller than the other, wrapped in a blanket. “They’re a
brother and sister who died to save the community when flood waters rose.” She noted
pale striations across the russet face of Corn Mountain—traces left behind by
the foaming waters, she said.
Soaring
Eagle performs social dances, as opposed to religious ones, said group leader
and musician Arlen Quetawki, Jr. They’re traditional pieces, but they’re also creative,
he said. “Working within the Zuni tradition, we compose our own steps, hand
gestures and songs. The lyrics have to do with rain, plentiful crops, good
health and longevity. We don’t perform for ourselves but to bring the audience
good feelings. If anyone is ill or down on their luck, we want to give them a
bit of enjoyment.” 
Anshe:kwe’s women were
wearing dance dresses they’d finished the night before (“hot off the sewing
machines,” said Weebothee) in preparation for their next appearance, in Hopi,
Arizona. The troupe performs almost every week, for private events like wedding
receptions and graduation parties, as well as for public ones. Anshe:kwe is 27-strong
at its largest, and when it travels, accompanying family members swell the size
of the entourage to several times that number. The group recently appeared at
the Grand Canyon, and younger troupe members joked about jumping on the glass-bottomed
Skywalk (“You could feel it shake!”).
Zuni
dance is about more than steps, according to Weebothee. “For us, it’s an
heirloom, and we dance to maintain our traditions. Through it, dancers learn respect,
responsibility and cultural awareness. They develop proficiency at positive
social interaction. And they learn to dress themselves in traditional attire.” 
To learn when and where Zuni dance troupes are appearing, at the pueblo or outside it, contact Zuni Visitor Center (505-782-7238; www.zunitourism.com).
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