image

Safeguard Native Children

Let’s keep Native children in Native care. Together, we can create places of safety and aid the preservation of families, culture, and tradition.

Protect Native Children at the State Level!

In an enormous victory for tribal children, families, and sovereignty, the Supreme Court has rendered a decision fully preserving the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA)! Still, let's tell our representatives to codify ICWA’s protections at the state level. Never again should any Native child anywhere be in danger of removal from their family and culture.

image

Our Impact Together

image

Supreme Court Upholds ICWA

In an enormous victory for tribal families, culture, and sovereignty, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act. The Lakota Law team sincerely thanks every one of you who took action to protect Native children and self-determination.
image

Native children thrive when raised by Native guardians

We’ve worked for decades to keep families together and stop the taking of Lakota children by South Dakota.
image

A place to call home

Our Native-run kinship home on Standing Rock Nation is keeping some of the most at-risk kids on the reservation safe and sound.
16
children

have been cared for in Lakota Law's Native-run kinship home Rock on Standing in 2020

image

ICWA Summit, 2013

Lakota Law helped organize a summit to confront and solve the stealing of Native children by the state of South Dakota.
3,500
hours

of free technical assistance to Lakota families challenging ICWA violations

40
people

bussed from Standing Rock to Rapid City to testify at the ICWA summit in 2013

20M
listeners

heard NPR’s Peabody Award-winning series of reports exposing the state of South Dakota's Indian Child Welfare Act violations

image
Posted: October 25, 2011

Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families

National Public Radio

These are all the different people who had their kids taken away from their entire families," explains Sheehan, who works for the Lakota People's Law Project. "Not one of them has had their children left with a relative of any kind."

image
Posted: May 14, 2013

ICWA summit seeks more tribal authority in Native American child removal, placement

Rapid City Journal

A spokesman for the Lakota People's Law Project in Rapid City said the summit also will push for more federal funding to help Native tribes develop and expand social programs and help tribal courts to handle placement of tribal children.

image
Posted: February 07, 2013

Tribal report targets South Dakota for violations of ICWA

Indianz.com

The report, which the officials wrote with the help of the nonprofit Lakota People's Law Project, concludes that in many instances the state does not have the authority to remove native children from tribal land. When the state does have that authority, through a tribal court order or tribal council agreement, the report says the state is failing to place the majority of those children according to the law.

Join Our Movement

Follow Us