Who Is an Indian Child? Institutional Context, Tribal Sovereignty, and Race-Making in Fragmented States

Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American sociological review 2020-10, Vol.85 (5), p.776-805
Main Author: Brown, Hana E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child Advocacy
Child welfare
Children
Citizenship
Classification
Courts
Decision makers
Drama
Enforcement
Governance
Government agencies
Ideology
Indigenous peoples
Race
Racialization
Racism
Sovereignty
State courts
Tribal Sovereignty
Tribes and tribal systems
Welfare state
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Summary:Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA’s protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child’s Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize “Indian” as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization.
ISSN:0003-1224
1939-8271
DOI:10.1177/0003122420944165