“But right now, Alaska, I would say, is not doing so well,” she said. “The state of Alaska has not followed the spirit or the letter of the law.” -- Judge Debra O'Gara on the Indian Child Welfare Act
Judge Debra O’Gara pictured in 2020. She has spent over a decade working on Indian child welfare cases and directing trainings on ICWA for guardians, case workers and lawyers, in the state and Tribal court systems.
“In one of the suburban, predominantly white neighborhoods that we lived in, there was twice in my childhood where [Child Protective Services] was called in and an investigation was conducted,” she said. “There were assumptions that we weren’t taken care of because my mom wasn’t home at night. In fact, we actually were taken care of and had somebody staying there with us. We were doing just fine.”
O’Gara said that many of these children are eventually adopted by non-Native families and often even removed from Alaska, despite the passage of ICWA. For instance, part of many Native cultures is having many relatives living under one roof. But for the state, a house with three or four times more people living in it than if it was a non-Native or white house is considered overcrowded.“And that’s as that’s actually as strong as a blood relation, sometimes stronger,” O’Gara said.
“There was a great outcry in the 60s and 70s about the continued removal of children,” O’Gara said. “At the same time that this was happening, there were also children being removed from their communities and forced to go into boarding schools, which we in the Native community all know about.” “It also recognized that the Tribe had a legal interest in protecting the Tribe’s children,” she said.“The other thing that ICWA did is to mandate placement preferences,” O’Gara said. “And the placement preferences, I have always argued, should be universally applied to not just Native children, but to all children who find themselves in the child welfare system.”
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