The Children Belong to the Tribe
The Indian Child Welfare Act and the Battle for Native Sovereignty

About this book:

For over a century, the United States waged a quiet war on Native nations by targeting their most vulnerable citizens: their children. From the brutal assimilation of Carlisle boarding schools to the mass foster-care removals of the 1970s, *The Children Belong to the Tribe* exposes the calculated policy that saw one in three Indigenous children torn from their homes. This is the definitive account of how Native mothers, tribal attorneys, and grassroots organizers fought back to pass the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA)—a law recognized worldwide as the "gold standard" of child welfare—and why that victory has faced forty years of relentless legal siege.

Moving from the smoke-filled rooms of congressional hearings to the steps of the Supreme Court, this book traces the high-stakes constitutional showdowns—*Holyfield*, *Baby Veronica*, and the landmark *Haaland v. Brackeen*—that placed tribal sovereignty itself on trial. With razor-sharp legal analysis and devastating historical clarity, it reveals how opponents of ICWA weaponized "colorblind" rhetoric to dismantle the political status of Native nations, and why the defense of this single statute became the frontline for the survival of Indigenous self-determination.

More than a legal history, this is a story of resistance, memory, and the fierce love that binds a people to their future. When a tribe loses its children, it loses its language keepers, its governors, its ancestors-in-waiting. *The Children Belong to the Tribe* is an urgent, essential chronicle of the battle to ensure that the Seventh Generation will not be stolen, but raised in the embrace of their own nations.