Obama Preempts Sleeping South Dakota GOP over Lakota Foster Care

People like to simplify political opposition by exaggerating negatives while ignoring everything that puts opponents in a good light.  The vanquished leaders of World War II, for example, are seen as 100% evil, while ours are fully noble.  The Obama administration, however, has recently scooped the sleeping South Dakota GOP over the issue of Indian foster care.

        Then again, Republicans today aren’t necessarily advocates when it comes to culture, family, and other heritage values–though “monetary” conservatism is much touted.  Top-heavy, trickle down schemes of “creating jobs” and “boosting the economy” are at the top of campaign pledges with both parties.  Investing in already rich people and businesses once was the winning strategy of the GOP, while the Democrats used to create jobs and grow the economy  through big government programs.  Now the parties hardly distinguish themselves.  Both want power for career politicians.

        As reported yesterday in the local newspaper, “Feds pledge to help tribes with enforcement of Indian Child Welfare Act“, the President and his Attorney General “are working to actively identify state-court cases where the United States can file briefs opposing the unnecessary and illegal removal of Indian children from their families and their tribal communities.”

      Though largely federally guided (through taxes), the South Dakota state government and its welfare-distribution and foster-care agencies are being told to turn more to the political right: “The announcement is unprecedented, Rapid City attorney Dana Hanna said. Hanna represents the Oglala and Rosebud Sioux tribes and Native American parents who last year filed a federal lawsuit challenging child welfare practices of the South Dakota Department of Social Services and the Seventh Circuit Court.”

       Meanwhile, across the globe and everywhere in the Middle East and Balkans, blood and religion have become the political identity key of choice among citizens.  One-world “melting” themes still adorn party platforms, but many people just prefer to be with their own.  The Sioux and other Indians are no different.  Cultural identity need not be violently terminated because children must be placed into foster care–or put up for adoption.

      Native Korean Tobias Hubinette saw himself as a cultural victim when he was wrenched from his people and transported to the alien world of Sweden, as the article “Do Interracial Adoptions Based on Faith Selfishly Overlook Cultural Biases of Superiority?” suggests.

        White, even Christian, foster care “providers” may be well-meaning, according to Hubinette, but the cultural damage can be irreversible.  Lifelong suffering comes from feeling always out of place, for him.  Better yet are programs for making adoptions and foster care work within the child’s own culture.

       Likewise, orphaned and unwanted Lakota children should stay with their own people, as the article “Other Indian Tribes, Not Feds Can Fill Perceived Foster Care Void” argues (yes, the “feds” have jumped on the more conservative bandwagon).   Though the welfare-dependency nexus  points to the opposite, Indian people have  historically been strong and self-reliant.  If more child-care services are needed, they can teach each other how to care for their own orphans without outsourcing to alien providers.

Disclosure:  Brad Ford is (and hopes to always be) a Brythonic Aborigine, whose once “primitive” ancestors occupied the same wilderness landscape for millennia, far into the dim past.