Abstract
Haaland v. Brackeen rejected federalism-based challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) but signaled receptivity to future challenges based on individual rights. The adult-focused rights claims presented in Haaland, however, miss the mark of what is truly problematic about ICWA. This Article presents an in-depth, children’s-rights based critique of the Act, explaining how it violates a fundamental right against state exertion of power over central aspects of persons’ private lives to their detriment for illicit purposes. In fact, the Act’s defenders are complicit in the same sort of government violence that motivated ICWA’s enactment—erasing aspects of children’s heritage and experience incompatible with a state-preferred identity and destroying children’s relationships and worlds in order to transform them in service to ideological and political aims, under the guise of child saving.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2024
Publication Information
69 Villanova Law Review 1-53 (2024)
Repository Citation
Dwyer, James G., "The Real Wrongs of ICWA" (2024). Faculty Publications. 2164.
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/2164