Preserving Native Families
Chapter 7: Preserving Native Families, Preserving Native Cultures
Native families in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have historically faced policies aimed at eradicating Indigenous cultures through assimilation, genocide, and displacement.
Large-scale removal of Native children from families and communities was facilitated through residential schools and adoptions to non-Native families. These actions aimed to weaken Native cultures by disrupting family cohesion and intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge.
Many Native groups now emphasize the importance of cultural connections for young people, including ties to family, clan, tribe, community, and cultural values.
Strong cultural connections and healthy families are recognized as essential for building strong Native nations and exercising sovereignty.
Cultural preservation is directly linked to children’s cultural connectedness, which depends on preserving Native families.
The child welfare system in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has historically weakened Native children’s bonds.
Social Issues in Contemporary Native America
Discriminatory attitudes of administrators have led to disproportionate numbers of Native children growing up in non-Native homes, impacting families and tribes.
Tribal and urban Native communities are developing community-based family preservation programs that incorporate cultural knowledge to address child removals and maintain cultural connectedness.
Family preservation, as seen by Native groups, differs from the public child welfare system's view, which often treats it as an intervention for remediating family issues.
The chapter aims to explore American Indian perspectives on family preservation and provide examples in tribal and urban communities.
The chapter provides a history of public child welfare policies and practices, discussing the disproportionate representation of American Indian children in the system. Approaches to community-based family preservation practice in tribal and urban communities in the United States are highlighted.
The content is relevant to Aboriginal/Indigenous Peoples in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who share histories of colonialism and efforts to resist assimilation.
The terms “American Indian” and “Native” are used to refer collectively to peoples of tribal groups in the United States, including Alaska.
American Indian Perspectives on Family Preservation
The traditional Anglo-American family structure consists of spouses and biological children, with minimal extended family involvement.
In contrast, American Indian families are seen as kinship networks that include extended family, clan relations, and individuals with traditional relationships.
Members of these networks interact frequently, make decisions across boundaries, and share child-rearing tasks.
Interdependence is stressed within the family network, differing from the independence sought in Eurocentric nuclear families.
Even in urban Indian communities, families often maintain traditional attitudes toward family composition.
Traditional tribal families may include non-Native members as part of the family system. Families are the foundation of Native cultures.
Great value is placed on children, who are seen as vital for transmitting cultural knowledge and practices from older generations.
Keeping children connected to kinship networks and communities ensures the tribal group’s integrity and continuity. Growing up in Native families allows children to assume their roles within these systems.
Social workers often view family preservation as formal child welfare interventions to maintain a child in the family while addressing challenges.
Native people associate family preservation with the preservation of the tribal group and culture, making it more than a child welfare intervention.
Current Native family preservation efforts maintain children’s connections and play a critical role in cultural preservation.
Although official US policies have supported American Indian culture since the 1970s, family preservation services have not been the first choice intervention.
Child welfare systems have been reluctant to acknowledge the need to maintain children’s cultural connections due to institutional and individual racism.
CPS departments in areas with large Native populations treat American Indian children and families in discriminatory ways.
Native children may become involved with various child welfare systems based on domicile, location of concern, and tribal enrollment status.
Children within tribal boundaries fall under tribal court jurisdiction and can often retain their bonds.
Native children outside tribal boundaries fall under state/county CPS jurisdiction. If they are tribal members or eligible, they are covered under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA).
An increasing number of children are ineligible for tribal enrollment, leading to the unique cultural needs of these young people potentially not being addressed because they fail to meet the legal definition of an Indian child under the ICWA.
A lack of understanding of tribal enrollment complexities can lead to the mistaken consideration that these individuals are no longer culturally Indian.
Unless their families are preserved, these children are often at great risk of losing not only family connections, but connections to their communities and culture, as well.
Native children have been placed in out-of-home care at disproportionately high rates, despite efforts and laws for alternatives.
The ICWA aimed to prevent the breakup of Indian families and provide remedial services.
CPS departments often do not see the ICWA as calling for family preservation efforts.
History and Perspectives on Family Preservation in Child Protective Services
White children were served by child rescue societies, who placed children determined to be maltreated with foster families or in group homes.
During the Progressive Era, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children began to look into why families needed rescue and to provide social services.
The passage of the federal Mother’s Pension Law (1910) allowed poor women to provide a home for their children.
Child welfare services were handled at the state and local levels, assisted by private organizations such as the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and the American Humane Association (AHA).
In the early 1970s, national attention to the problem of the “battered child” led to federal legislation.
The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA) created national standards for responding to child abuse and neglect, federal funding for states, and federal support for data collection and research.
Supportive services were called for in the cases of families where caseworkers determined that with further education, resources, support, and case management, parents could solve the issues that had led to a child maltreatment report. Out-of-home care was indicated in cases where workers felt a child was at imminent risk of harm or where there was a real risk that maltreatment would continue in the home unless the children were removed.
CPS workers could work with the courts to terminate parents’ rights and free children for adoption, but were supposed to work toward reunification of the children with their parents whenever possible.
This ideal was not always met, particularly for children of color, and many children stayed in foster care for years (often called foster care drift) only to “age out” of the system at age 18.
Increased calls for more supportive services to preserve families, family preservation cases are defined by the child welfare system as those where CPS has determined that children can remain safely in their own home.
Intensive services are provided to the parents to assist them to remedy the conditions that brought the child and family to the attention of the child welfare department.
Family preservation, in the sense of preventing removal of children by providing social services, has been a goal of American child welfare since the era of the settlement houses.
Intensive family preservation was formally introduced in the 1970s as a Tacoma, Washington-based program called Homebuilders, and encouraged as an example of “reasonable efforts” to keep a family intact, as called for by the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (AACW).
The Act increased funding for family support services while still authorizing out-of-home placement for serious cases.
Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) were implemented on a large scale during the 1980s and 1990s; CPS was operating under the policies and requirements of both CAPTA and AACW.
Controversy arose around the Homebuilders model, and later evaluation and further study, its use and that of other IFPS models were abandoned by many CPS departments.
The reasons for the controversy impact the funding, availability, and CPS attitudes toward family preservation as a philosophy, and so require some brief exploration.
The Homebuilders model called for work with families with children at “imminent risk of placement” and this proved to be a concept that was hard to define.
Services would last only 90 days, would require that a caseworker have a very low caseload (2 to 5 families at a time rather than the hundreds some caseworkers normally carried), spend several hours with the family each week, and be available 24/7 by phone.
The measure of successful preservation was initially defined as avoiding the out-of-home placement of any children in the family.
Early program evaluations of just IFPS families, without a control group, showed that the great majority of them were preserved.
However, later program evaluations found that when these results were compared with families who were either given services as usual, or put on a wait list, many of these families avoided out-of-home placement as well, suggesting that the treatment and control groups were not at equal risk.
This called into question the value of this type of resource-intensive model.
Media and children’s legal advocacy groups called for stricter rules for families.
Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) calls for short timelines and focuses on moving children quickly through the system.
Reunification cases utilize “concurrent planning,” exploring adoption alongside reunification services.
Shortened timelines and budgetary constraints have reduced the use of family preservation services.
Pelton (1997) argued family preservation was a myth, often a guise for expanding child welfare involvement.
White and Native children have been treated differently in US child welfare.
Native children were not recipients of Mother’s Pensions or progressive social services.
Native children were subjects of assimilation efforts via boarding schools.
Thousands of Native children were adopted into White families, accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s.
By the 1970s, one third of all American Indian children born after 1900 had been adopted by non-Indian families.
This destruction of Native families led to the 1978 ICWA passage.
Family preservation services appear to have never been the intervention of choice when American Indian families become involved with CPS.
There is an extensive body of literature about the differential treatment of minority families in the child welfare system.
In 2009, American Indian/Alaska Native children were the highest proportion of children in foster care; placement rates were 13 per 1,000 for Native children, 12 per 1,000 for African American children, and 4 per 1,000 for White children, creating a disparity ratio for American Indian children of 3.17 compared to White children (Farrow et al. 2010).
Data from Washington State in 2008 showed American Indian children were almost three times more likely to be referred to CPS, and once in foster care, were less likely to be reunified within two years.
Longitudinal data from California showed significantly higher rates of both substantiation of maltreatment and placement of American Indian and African American children.
Researchers in Minnesota found that even controlling for variables thought to influence child maltreatment rates (factors such as poverty, substance abuse, and domestic violence), American Indian children were still 1.7 times more likely to be removed from their families than White children.
Data from Colorado covering 1995–2000 showed that once American Indian children were removed, they were less likely to have reunification listed as a goal, and they remained in foster care significantly longer than all other children.
Out-of-home placement and long lengths of time away from the home for Native children have been found to be intimately tied to the socioeconomic context of many Native families and communities.
National data from Child Maltreatment 2007 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2008) document that neglect was the most frequent type of maltreatment among American Indian families (67 percent of all cases), higher than the neglect rate for any other group and higher than the overall average rate of neglect (59 percent).
Analysis of reported child abuse and neglect in Canada confirmed a similar pattern for Native families in Ontario, where rates of physical and sexual abuse were actually the lowest of any racial/ethnic group.
Child welfare workers may overemphasize a parent’s presumed pathology and fail to consider the influence of years of racism, economic discrimination, forced relocation, and lost opportunities for creating a living.
Dettlaff et al. (2011) suggest that this tendency is due to a “fundamental attribution error”, and that it is one of the causes of racial disparity in child protection case substantiation rates.
Family preservation services continue to be offered by some CPS departments, and the practice of differential response is another, newer, method of helping families before the child welfare concerns become serious.
One county in Iowa hired an American Indian liaison to work with Native families, resulting in reduced disproportionality and higher satisfaction on the part of the families.
A specific family preservation intervention offered in Oklahoma in the homes of Native families had significantly better outcomes, and increased satisfaction, compared to treatment as usual.
Kirk and Griffith (2008) found that intensive family preservation services in North Carolina reduced out-of-home placement for all children of color, including American Indians.
Hutchinson and Sudia (2002) have noted, “families exist only on the margins of United States child welfare policies—never achieving much prominence and with only a shadow presence in the minds of those whose focus is on service to children”.
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Chapter 7: Preserving Native Families, Preserving Native Cultures
Native families in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have historically faced policies designed to dismantle Indigenous cultures through assimilation, genocide, and displacement. These policies included forced removal of children, suppression of cultural practices, and undermining of traditional family structures.
The large-scale removal of Native children from their families and communities was carried out through residential schools, often run by religious organizations, and adoptions into non-Native families. These actions sought to weaken Native cultures by disrupting family cohesion and preventing intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge, languages, and traditions.
Many Native groups now emphasize the critical importance of cultural connections for young people, encompassing ties to family, clan, tribe, community, and cultural values. These connections are seen as vital for fostering identity, resilience, and well-being.
Strong cultural connections and healthy families are recognized as essential for building strong Native nations and exercising sovereignty. Cultural preservation is viewed as a fundamental aspect of self-determination and community development.
Cultural preservation is directly linked to children’s cultural connectedness, which relies on preserving Native families and ensuring that children have opportunities to learn and practice their culture.
The child welfare system in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has historically weakened Native children’s bonds with their families and communities by removing them from their homes at disproportionately high rates due to biased practices and policies.
Social Issues in Contemporary Native America
Discriminatory attitudes and practices of administrators within child welfare agencies have resulted in disproportionately high numbers of Native children growing up in non-Native homes, which has significant negative impacts on families and tribal communities.
Tribal and urban Native communities are actively developing community-based family preservation programs that integrate cultural knowledge and practices to address child removals and maintain cultural connectedness. These programs aim to strengthen families and promote cultural identity.
Family preservation, as understood by Native groups, differs significantly from the public child welfare system's view. Native groups see it as a holistic approach that supports the well-being of the entire family and community and sustains cultural continuity, rather than simply an intervention for remediating individual or family issues.
The chapter aims to explore American Indian perspectives on family preservation, provide examples in tribal and urban communities, and advocate for culturally responsive child welfare practices that respect and support Native families and cultures.
The chapter provides a history of public child welfare policies and practices, highlighting the disproportionate representation of American Indian children in the system. It also discusses approaches to community-based family preservation practice in tribal and urban communities in the United States.
The content is relevant to Aboriginal/Indigenous Peoples in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who share histories of colonialism and ongoing efforts to resist assimilation and reclaim their cultural heritage.
The terms “American Indian” and “Native” are used to refer collectively to peoples of tribal groups in the United States, including Alaska.
American Indian Perspectives on Family Preservation
The traditional Anglo-American family structure typically consists of spouses and their biological children, often with minimal involvement from extended family members.
In contrast, American Indian families are often seen as kinship networks that extend beyond the nuclear family to include extended family members, clan relations, and individuals with traditional relationships. These networks play a vital role in providing support, guidance, and cultural transmission.
Members of these networks interact frequently, make important decisions across boundaries, and share responsibilities for child-rearing and caregiving.
Interdependence is highly valued within the family network, which contrasts with the emphasis on independence often found in Eurocentric nuclear families. Interdependence fosters a sense of belonging, mutual support, and collective responsibility.
Even in urban Indian communities, families frequently maintain traditional attitudes toward family composition and kinship ties.
Traditional tribal families may include non-Native members as part of the family system, reflecting the inclusive and adaptable nature of Native cultures. Families are considered the foundation of Native cultures, serving as the primary vehicle for transmitting cultural values, traditions, and languages.
Great value is placed on children, who are seen as vital for transmitting cultural knowledge and practices from older generations to younger ones. Children ensure the continuity of Native cultures and traditions.
Keeping children connected to kinship networks and communities ensures the tribal group’s integrity and continuity. Growing up in Native families allows children to assume their roles and responsibilities within these systems.
Social workers often view family preservation as formal child welfare interventions aimed at maintaining a child in their family while addressing specific challenges or risks.
Native people associate family preservation with preserving the entire tribal group and culture, viewing it as much more than a child welfare intervention. It is about protecting cultural identity, community well-being, and tribal sovereignty.
Current Native family preservation efforts focus on maintaining children’s connections to their families, communities, and cultures, which is essential for cultural preservation.
Although official US policies have expressed support for American Indian culture since the 1970s, family preservation services have not consistently been the first choice intervention in child welfare cases involving Native families.
Child welfare systems have often been reluctant to acknowledge the critical need to maintain children’s cultural connections due to institutional and individual racism, as well as a lack of understanding of Native cultures and values.
CPS (Child Protective Services) departments in areas with large Native populations often treat American Indian children and families in discriminatory ways, reflecting systemic biases and cultural misunderstandings.
Native children may become involved with various child welfare systems based on their domicile, the location of concern, and their tribal enrollment status. This can create jurisdictional complexities and challenges in ensuring appropriate services.
Children within tribal boundaries fall under tribal court jurisdiction, which often supports the preservation of their bonds with their families and communities.
Native children outside tribal boundaries typically fall under state/county CPS jurisdiction. However, if they are tribal members or eligible for membership, they are covered under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), which provides certain protections and requires consideration of tribal customs and values.
An increasing number of children are ineligible for tribal enrollment due to various factors, such as blood quantum requirements or intermarriage. As a result, the unique cultural needs of these young people may not be adequately addressed because they do not meet the legal definition of an Indian child under the ICWA.
A lack of understanding of tribal enrollment complexities can lead to the mistaken assumption that these individuals are no longer culturally Indian, overlooking their continued connection to their heritage and community.
Unless their families are preserved, these children are at great risk of losing not only family connections but also connections to their communities and culture. This loss can have profound and lasting impacts on their identity and well-being.
Native children have been placed in out-of-home care at disproportionately high rates compared to other groups, despite the existence of laws and efforts aimed at promoting alternatives.
The ICWA aimed to prevent the breakup of Indian families and ensure that Indian children are placed with relatives or other Indian families whenever possible. It also mandates the provision of remedial services to help families address the issues that led to child welfare involvement.
Despite the ICWA, CPS departments often do not fully embrace its intent as calling for proactive and comprehensive family preservation efforts.
History and Perspectives on Family Preservation in Child Protective Services
In the past, White children were served by child rescue societies, which placed children deemed to be maltreated with foster families or in group homes. These societies focused on removing children from harmful situations but often lacked a broader focus on family support.
During the Progressive Era, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children began to investigate the underlying causes of family distress and to provide social services to help families address their challenges.
The passage of the federal Mother’s Pension Law in 1910 allowed poor women, particularly widows, to receive financial assistance to enable them to provide a home for their children.
Child welfare services were primarily handled at the state and local levels, often with the assistance of private organizations such as the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and the American Humane Association (AHA).
In the early 1970s, national attention to the problem of the “battered child” led to the enactment of federal legislation aimed at addressing child abuse and neglect.
The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA) established national standards for responding to child abuse and neglect, provided federal funding to states for child protection services, and supported data collection and research on child maltreatment.
Supportive services were recommended in cases where caseworkers believed that parents could resolve the issues that led to a child maltreatment report with additional education, resources, support, and case management. Out-of-home care was typically reserved for cases where workers believed that a child was at imminent risk of harm or that maltreatment would continue in the home unless the children were removed.
CPS workers had the authority to work with the courts to terminate parents’ rights and free children for adoption but were ideally supposed to work toward the reunification of children with their parents whenever possible.
This ideal was not always achieved, especially for children of color, and many children remained in foster care for extended periods (often referred to as foster care drift), only to “age out” of the system at age 18 without achieving permanency.
As concerns grew about the number of children lingering in foster care, there were increased calls for more supportive services to preserve families. In the child welfare system, family preservation cases are generally defined as those in which CPS has determined that children can remain safely in their own home while receiving intensive services to address the issues that led to child welfare involvement.
Intensive services are typically provided to the parents to help them address the conditions that brought the child and family to the attention of the child welfare department. These services may include counseling, parenting education, substance abuse treatment, and other forms of support.
Family preservation, in the sense of preventing the removal of children from their homes by providing social services and support, has been a goal of American child welfare since the era of the settlement houses.
Intensive family preservation was formally introduced in the 1970s as a Tacoma, Washington-based program called Homebuilders. It was promoted as an example of “reasonable efforts” to keep a family intact, as called for by the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (AACW).
The Act increased funding for family support services while still authorizing out-of-home placement for serious cases, reflecting a dual focus on both family preservation and child safety.
Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) were implemented on a large scale during the 1980s and 1990s, with CPS agencies operating under the policies and requirements of both CAPTA and AACW.
Controversy arose around the Homebuilders model, and after later evaluations and further study, its use, as well as the use of other IFPS models, was abandoned by many CPS departments.
The reasons for the controversy had an impact on the funding, availability, and CPS attitudes toward family preservation as a philosophy. Therefore, a brief exploration of the issues is warranted.
The Homebuilders model called for work with families with children at “imminent risk of placement,” but this proved to be a concept that was difficult to define and measure consistently.
Services were typically time-limited, lasting only 90 days. Additionally, the model required that a caseworker have a very low caseload (2 to 5 families at a time rather than the hundreds some caseworkers normally carried), spend several hours with the family each week, and be available 24/7 by phone.
The initial measure of successful preservation was defined as avoiding the out-of-home placement of any children in the family.
Early program evaluations of just IFPS families, without a control group, revealed that the great majority of them were preserved, leading to initial enthusiasm for the model.
However, subsequent program evaluations found that when these results were compared with families who were either given services as usual or placed on a waitlist, many of these families avoided out-of-home placement as well. This suggested that the treatment and control groups were not at equal risk, casting doubt on the effectiveness of the resource-intensive IFPS model.
Media outlets and children’s legal advocacy groups called for stricter rules and greater accountability for families involved with the child welfare system.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) calls for short timelines in child welfare cases and emphasizes the importance of moving children quickly through the system to achieve permanency.
Reunification cases often utilize “concurrent planning,” which involves exploring adoption options alongside reunification services., recognizing that reunification may not always be possible.
Shortened timelines and budgetary constraints have contributed to a reduction in the use of family preservation services in many jurisdictions.
Pelton (1997) argued that family preservation was often a myth, serving as a guise for expanding child welfare involvement and potentially leading to unnecessary intrusion into families’ lives.
Historically, White and Native children have experienced vastly different treatment within the US child welfare system.
Native children were largely excluded from the benefits of Mother’s Pensions and progressive social services, reflecting systemic inequities.
Instead, Native children were often subjected to assimilation efforts, including forced attendance at boarding schools designed to eradicate their culture and language.
Thousands of Native children were adopted into White families, with these adoptions accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a deliberate policy to remove Native children from their families and communities.
By the 1970s, it was estimated that one-third of all American Indian children born after 1900 had been adopted by non-Indian families, representing a significant loss of cultural heritage and family connections.
This destruction of Native families led to the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), which aimed to protect Native families and ensure that Native children are placed with relatives or other Indian families whenever possible.
Family preservation services appear to have never been the intervention of choice when American Indian families become involved with CPS, reflecting a historical bias toward removing Native children from their homes rather than supporting their families.
There is an extensive body of literature documenting the differential treatment of minority families in the child welfare system, highlighting the disparities in rates of removal, reunification, and access to services.
In 2009, American Indian/Alaska Native children constituted the highest proportion of children in foster care, with placement rates of 13 per 1,000 for Native children, 12 per 1,000 for African American children, and 4 per 1,000 for White children. This resulted in a disparity ratio for American Indian children of 3.17 compared to White children (Farrow et al. 2010).
Data from Washington State in 2008 indicated that American Indian children were almost three times more likely to be referred to CPS and, once in foster care, were less likely to be reunified with their families within two years.
Longitudinal data from California revealed significantly higher rates of both substantiation of maltreatment and placement of American Indian and African American children compared to White children.
Researchers in Minnesota found that even after controlling for variables thought to influence child maltreatment rates (such as poverty, substance abuse, and domestic violence), American Indian children were still 1.7 times more likely to be removed from their families than White children.
Data from Colorado covering the period from 1995 to 2000 showed that once American Indian children were removed from their homes, they were less likely to have reunification listed as a goal and remained in foster care significantly longer than all other children.
Out-of-home placement and extended periods away from home for Native children have been found to be closely linked to the socioeconomic challenges faced by many Native families and communities, including poverty, unemployment, and lack of access to resources.
National data from Child Maltreatment 2007 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2008) revealed that neglect was the most frequent type of maltreatment among American Indian families (67 percent of all cases), which was higher than the neglect rate for any other group and higher than the overall average rate of neglect (59 percent).
An analysis of reported child abuse and neglect in Canada confirmed a similar pattern for Native families in Ontario, where rates of physical and sexual abuse were actually the lowest of any racial/ethnic group. This finding highlights the importance of considering the broader social and economic context in understanding child welfare disparities.
Child welfare workers may place excessive emphasis on a parent’s presumed pathology while failing to adequately consider the influence of years of racism, economic discrimination, forced relocation, and limited opportunities for creating a sustainable living.
Dettlaff et al. (2011) suggest that this tendency is due to a “fundamental attribution error” and that it represents one of the causes of racial disparity in child protection case substantiation rates.
Family preservation services continue to be offered by some CPS departments, and the practice of differential response is another, newer method of helping families before the child welfare concerns become serious.
In one county in Iowa, the hiring of an American Indian liaison to work with Native families resulted in reduced disproportionality in child welfare cases and higher satisfaction among the families served.
A specific family preservation intervention offered in Oklahoma in the homes of Native families demonstrated significantly better outcomes and increased satisfaction compared to the usual treatment approach.
Kirk and Griffith (2008) found that intensive family preservation services in North Carolina reduced out-of-home placement for all children of color, including American Indians.
Hutchinson and Sudia (2002) have observed that “families exist only on the margins of United States child welfare policies—never achieving much prominence and with only a shadow presence in the minds of those whose focus is on service to children” This observation highlights the need for a greater emphasis on family-centered approaches in child welfare policy and practice.