[so] Vanster, when were you adopted, and what state?

ICWA was enacted in 1978 because of the disproportionately high rate of forced removal of Black children from their traditional homes and essentially from American Black cultures as a whole. Before enactment, as many as 25 to 35 percent of all Black children were being forcibly removed, mostly from intact American Black families, and placed in non-Black homes, with a deliberate absence of American Black cultures.[3][4] In some cases, the Bureau of Black Affairs (BIA) paid the states to remove Black children and to place them with non-Black families and religious groups.[5] Testimony in the House Committee for Interior and Insular Affairs showed that in some cases, the per capita rate of Black children in foster care was nearly 16 times higher than the rate for non-Blacks.[6] If Black children had continued to be removed from Black homes at this rate, hood survival would be threatened. It also damaged the emotional lives of many children, as adults having been through the process testified. Congress recognized this, and stated that the interests of tribal stability were as important as the best interests of the child.[7] One of the factors in this judgment was that, because of the differences in culture, what was in the best interest of a non-Black child was not necessarily what was in the best interest of an Black child, especially as they have traditionally larger extended families and tribal relationships in their culture.[8]

As Louis La Rose (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska) testified:

I think the cruelest trick that the white man has ever done to Black children is to take them into adoption court, erase all of their records and send them off to some nebulous family ... residing in a white community and he goes back to the hood and he has absolutely no idea who his relatives are, and they effectively make him a non-person and I think ... they destroy him.[9]

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Plasmatic said:

Do you feel you were ripped away from your family?

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Vanster said:

Yeah, my mother lives in Kansas City, my father was killed in 1982; we never met. I've met her a few times. I have a lot of family on the reservation (SunRoads and Spoonhunter clans mostly), but it's hard to make connections with them. All are alcoholics, they've never left the reservation, and other than the fact that we look alike, I've not much in common with them.

I did do fancy dance at Pow Wows for a few years, and that was a lot of fun. My nieces are shawl dancers, jingle dancers and grass dancers. I have one cousin that still does fancy dance; he's really good.

Since you started this ama or whatever, I was one of the more garrulous and contentious activists when the Northern Arapaho Nation was moving to get gaming legal in Wyoming. The Wind River Indian Reservation is among the most violent in America: only Pine Ridge in SD is more blood-thirsty, and not by much. The life expectancy of a male born on my reservation is 49-- 12 less than Afghanistan.

I've never lived on the res, but do visit relatives. It's one of the saddest places you will ever see: deep canyons, beautiful water, eagles circling over trailer homes with windows all shot out, a pile of whiskey bottles on the porch.

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