The dirt roads on the Crow Creek Indian reservation in South Dakota blow dust on the window frames of simple houses.
The people who live here are poor — in a way few Americans are poor. There are no grocery stores or restaurants. There’s only electricity when it’s possible to pay the bill. This is where Janice Howe grew up, on a barren stretch of land that has belonged to the Dakota people for more than 100 years.
“I’m the eldest of nine kids,” she explains, settling into a chair in the kitchen. “I went to college and I got my bachelor’s degree in nursing.”
Her sister lives across the street. Her parents live across the road. Her daughter lives two doors down with her four grandchildren — two young granddaughters and two twin babies. And then one evening two years ago, Howe’s phone rang. It was a social worker from the Department of Social Services. She said her daughter Erin Yellow Robe was going to be arrested for drugs..
Howe couldn’t believe it. She had never seen any sign of drugs or any other problems.
And then the social worker changed Howe’s life. She said she was coming to take Howe’s grandchildren away.
The next morning, a car pulled up outside Yellow Robe’s house. Howe’s daughter wouldn’t let go of her one-year-old twin babies. She kept saying she hadn’t done anything wrong.
The social worker buckled the babies into car seats.
“They were sitting in the cars,” Howe says, choking up. “They were just looking at me. Because you know most babies don’t cry if they’re raised in a secure environment. So I went out there and took their diaper bags. And they left.”
But as Howe watched the car pull around the bend, she realized the social worker took the two babies, but allowed Howe to keep her two granddaughters, 5-year-old Rashauna and 6-year-old Antoinette.
According to state records, almost 90 percent of the kids in family foster care are in non-native homes or group care.
State officials say they’re doing everything they can to keep native families together. Poverty, crime and alcoholism are all real problems on South Dakota’s reservations and in the state’s poorest areas. But, state records show there’s another powerful force at work — money. The federal government sends the state thousands of dollars for every child it takes.
Federal Financial Incentives For Removing Children
Every time a state puts a child in foster care, the federal government sends money. Because South Dakota is poor, it receives even more money than other states – almost a hundred million dollars a year.
Bill Napoli was on the state Senate Appropriations Committee until he retired. He says he remembers when the state first saw the large amounts of money the federal government was sending the Department of Social Services in the late 1990s.
“When that money came down the pike, it was huge,” Napoli says. “That’s when we saw a real influx of kids being taken out of families.”
He said there was little lawmakers could do to rein in the department. This was federal money, and it went straight to social services.
“I’m sure they were trying to answer a public perception of a problem,” he said. “And then slowly it grew to a point where they had so much power that no one — no one — could question what they were doing. Is that a recipe for a bureaucracy that’s totally out of control? I would say so.”
Read the complete report from NPR / LAURA SULLIVAN and AMY WALTERS :…Click here.
Janice Howe fought the state of South Dakota for a year and a half to bring her grandchildren back home after they were placed in foster care.
The Crow Creek Sioux Reservation is located in the central portion of South Dakota, 26 miles northwest of Chamberlain, South Dakota, which is on Interstate 90. The reservation boundaries on the west and south include Lakes Sharpe and Francis Case – the large reservoirs formed by mainstream dams, Fort Randall and Big Bend dams, on the Missouri River.
The reservation covers an area of about 400 square miles within Hughes, Hyde and Buffalo counties. Of this area, about 35 square miles are covered by major reservoirs and about 201 square miles are owned by the Tribe and Tribal members.
The terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 placed the Lakota on one large reservation that spanned parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and four other states. After the defeat of the Indian tribes in the Indian Wars of the 1870s, the United States broke the original reservation into smaller ones. Not only did the U.S. government reduce the Indians’ acreage, but it also splintered the Tribe.
In 1889, the United States reclaimed 7.7 million acres of the Sioux’s sacred Black Hills and randomly assigned Sioux families to live on the Crow Creek Reservation, splitting up many extended families. The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe consists of the members of the Isanti and Ihanktowan divisions of the Great Sioux Nation.
