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.
More You Can Do
Our Impact Together
Supreme Court Upholds ICWA
Native children thrive when raised by Native guardians
A place to call home
have been cared for in Lakota Law's Native-run kinship home Rock on Standing in 2020
ICWA Summit, 2013
of free technical assistance to Lakota families challenging ICWA violations
bussed from Standing Rock to Rapid City to testify at the ICWA summit in 2013
heard NPR’s Peabody Award-winning series of reports exposing the state of South Dakota's Indian Child Welfare Act violations
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."
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.
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.