Abstract
The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) sought to end the forced removal of Native children from their tribes. Decades later, American Indian children are still placed in foster and adoptive care at disproportionately high rates. Drawing on forty years of archival data, this study examines the role of administrative burden in reproducing these inequalities and the system of domination from which they arise: settler colonialism. Focusing on three arenas—notice, meeting and hearing involvement, and foster family certification—this article illuminates the burdens imposed on tribal governments that serve as mediating institutions in ICWA implementation. Findings suggest that burdens have particularly strong consequences for inequality when they fall on third-party organizations. They also demonstrate how administrative burden operates as a mechanism for the reproduction of settler-colonial domination.
- © 2023 Russell Sage Foundation. Brown, Hana E. 2023. “Administrative Burden and the Reproduction of Settler Colonialism: A Case Study of the Indian Child Welfare Act.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 9(5): 232–51. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.5.10. The author thanks Katie Alexander, Chris Cates, Taylor Dow, Alice Romanov, Jeannie Smith, Christian Suglia, and Katie Zeng for their research assistance. Direct correspondence to: Hana E. Brown, at brownhe{at}wfu.edu, 1834 Wake Forest Rd, Winston-Salem, NC 27106, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.