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Tagged: brackeen

Haaland v. Brackeen, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Ethics of Care

By Dana Lloyd. On June 15, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Haaland v. Brackeen. In this case, non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents argued that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which gives preference to Indigenous parents in fostering and adopting Indigenous children, is unconstitutional. They said the law discriminated against them on the basis of race. In a 7–2 ruling, the court rejected all of the petitioners’ challenges to ICWA, some on the merits of the case and others for lack of standing. In this essay, Lloyd reads the Brackeen case against the background of two hundred years of federal Indian law and assimilation policy and proposes two notions of care as a framework for thinking about the case: the first, associated with U.S. assimilation policy, sees care as charitable, but it is actually coercive and harmful; the second is based on solidarity and is at the heart of Indigenous sovereignty.