Mid-point Reflection

This summer I have been interning with the ICWA Law Center, a non-profit in Minneapolis, Minnesota, my hometown. ICWA stands for the Indian Child Welfare Act, a piece of legislation passed in 1978 in response to the alarmingly high rates of out-of-home placement of Native children in the United States. In fact, Minnesota was highlighted as an example of the atrocities of the previous system that warranted ICWA’s adoption. The ICWA Law Center provides free legal services to Native families in the child protection system.

I began this summer familiarizing myself with the history of ICWA and, in particular, Minnesota’s Native child protection history. I then developed a specific project, investigating prenatal exposure cases that have opened since January 2019. Prenatal exposure cases are child protection cases that open with the allegation of prenatal exposure of a controlled substance by a mother to their newborn child. I combined analysis of closed cases with actively following open ones to both understand the types of outcomes and observe the Law Center’s attorneys in action as they advocated for their clients. I recently finished up my data collection, after combing through over 100 cases. Now as I begin my data analysis and report completion, I feel a little hesitant about whether my results will really add much to the law center’s knowledge of these types of cases. Each case is so individual and there are so many different factors that it feels that whatever conclusions I am able to reach will only tell a small portion of the story.