ICWA and Legal Precedents
Something that a few people noticed, but didn't really get into the weeds about, was SCOTUS's ruling on abortion last year and how it cross-applies to the Indian Child Welfare Act. Specifically Alito's draft where he used the phrase "domestic supply of infants" in footnote 46 on page 34.
As someone who was very publicly pilloried for even suggesting Indian Boarding School apologism really is a Nazi talking point: "Domestic Supply of Infants" is not a weird phrase from one justice. It's a key concept in US and Canadian Law, and has been for centuries.
The US is a country where the very specific ICWA had to be passed to force adoption agencies to stop removing brown kids from brown families to stick them with white parents. An act the Supreme Court then overrode in the Baby Veronica case, and that is now considering overturning completely because an adoption agency wanted to make sure a Native child was placed with a non-Native family.
The US and Canada are countries where the bodies of children have been excavated from Boarding School front yards while fake journalists gain thousands of followers denying it ever happened. They've even tried to normalize it. Because doesn't everybody go to a grade school with a graveyard out front...?
They will deny 50yrs of archaeological research, they'll deny centuries of legal docs, they'll even deny the first-person reports of the people who ran the Schools. They'll justify the literal industrial processing of kids. Then they'll write "Domestic Supply of Infants" in a study about women who want to adopt and the agencies are hunting around for the cheapest pool to grab from.
Like this guy, Jeff Fynn-Paul, and his new book. Some of the more reprehensible lines he's used were in an interview he gave in The Spectator back on 26 Sep, 2020: "What else were Europeans supposed to even do with the New World?" ..."Besides, only a few [Natives] remained wild enough to be placed on reservations." This guy is just an unrepentant bigot. Yet, he managed to get not only published but Simon & Schuster are his distributor:
Imagine loudly proclaiming that concentration camps are good actually... It's grotesque. Canada still has "Birth Alerts", where any random hospital staff can just decide they don't think a Native is a fit parent. The kid gets shipped off before the parent's anesthetic has even worn off. "Domestic Supply of Infants"...
The US literally grabbed kids from the border and threw back the parents. And a non-zero number those kids still have not been reunited with their families. Spend half a day learning about immigration law, settler colonialism, rates of fraudulent CPS calls on Black families, and you learn one very simple fact: He said "Domestic Supply of Infants" not because the mask slipped, but because "Blood for the Blood God" is too on-the-nose.
It reminds me of something a lot of people have completely forgotten about World War 2: The Lebensborn program was created by the SS in late 1935 in order to promote the growth of the "Aryan" population. Part of it was kidnapping 'good white children' to be raised in special SS group homes. That should sound familiar.
And it isn't ancient history, one of the singers for ABBA was Lebensborn. It's how Anni-Frid Lyngstad ended up in Sweden in the first place, she was born in Norway but they were not nearly as sympathetic to Lebensborn children. She had a half-brother she didn't even know about until she was an adult. But she at least knew who her parents were eventually. Over 85% percent of the Lebensborn children never found out.
The Lebensborn program, created by the SS in late 1935, was intended to promote population growth among those whom Nazi authorities deemed â
"A program brochure explained that single women must obtain permission from the Lebensborn central office before they could take their newborns home." Sounds remarkably similar to those Birth Alerts Canada is still so fond of. In reality it's not all that odd a Supreme Ct Justice would mention a study on the necessity of adopting from normally foreign communities, in a case about abortion, given that historical context.
Frankly, I'm deeply suspicious of a lot of the politically savvy and otherwise seemingly well-informed and historically literate people responding to this sentence, buried in a SCOTUS draft, with either surprise or indifference. It's not because I think they're preternaturally racist, necessarily. I'm just baffled anyone could be so ignorant of so much fully unintentionally. This isn't a history that slowly trickled out of public consciousness, it's a history that isn't history yet, that's being deliberately erased.
So, call it out. If your local bookstore is selling this tripe tell them to stop. Go on GoodReads and share some of their best work in the comments. Make these people uncomfortable by knowing more and better than they do and refusing to let them put a fresh coat of paint over the blood stains. Don't let "domestic supply of infants..." be just some weird sentence fragment buried in a footnote.
Oh, and just so we're clear, EuroCentrists and lefties acting like Europe 'got past this' or whatever? Some vocab: Windrush, Haitian Debt, the Basque, the SĂĄmi, the Romani, the Travelers, the Armenians... Now is really not the time to fingerwag about how only one's own excrement stinketh not. This is what colonial powers do, they have to. It's one of the reasons colonialism is bad in the first place. It's quite literally why the term "genocide" was invented.
