I also don't understand how the ICWA helped her here. I guess because the family she is going to includes her half sister, who is presumably Native American?
ICWA didn't help or hurt overall, since she was being placed with family, which is precedence in the foster care system in CA. ICWA DID help in that her placement was prioritized and the tribe had a (significant) say in where she was being placed - with a tribal member/extended family (her sister would be the family member; the whatever convoluted relationship of the adoptive parents would be extended family by relationship of being her sister's parents/caregivers). It also gave Lexi protections in that the fosters should have known that as a Native American child she would be placed elsewhere (with a tribal family member - her sister) and was not free for adoption by them (absent an absolute miracle).
ETA: (sorry hopecounts, I hope this doesn't change the like. lol.) The most infuriating part is that the Pages knew from the outset that she wasn't free. The fact that they dragged this out, over years, to keep her from the family that she was intended for, her biological family, when she could have transitioned so much more easily at a young age, and certainly in a much less traumatic fashion than this shitshow now that she's older, absolutely enrages me. And this is why I keep harping on the "foster" differentiation. Stuff like this keeps so many good people who would be potentially amazing foster parents from even considering it. And this is why there is a shortage of foster parents to care for the children who are most in need. I obviously reached the "pissed at the fosters" stage long ago, once I started actually reading the history of the case.
Post by cookiemdough on Mar 23, 2016 17:21:11 GMT -5
So why didn't they forcibly remove her from the P family at the point they were violating their terms? Even if they wanted to dispute the removal why not place her with the R family while it makes it through the courts?
So why didn't they forcibly remove her from the P family at the point they were violating their terms? Even if they wanted to dispute the removal why not place her with the R family while it makes it through the courts?
Because CA had jurisdiction if she was removed to Utah it would complicate jurisdiction as CA wouldn't be able to enforce the ruling directly. It's why during ICPC you must remain in the state of current residence, and why foster kids can only leave the state with permission.
They took her away from non-Native Americans and put her in new home with non-Native Americans. Make that make sense for me because I was already side-eyeing this and this took it to a new level
I'm just now seeing this thread so not sure if this has been mentioned. The foster mother actually is native American. Like, they attended pow-wows before Lexi ever came into the picture.
Also the family's attorney is the same attorney who argued and won the case of baby Veronica at the SCOTUS.
Post by imobviouslystaying on Mar 23, 2016 23:02:35 GMT -5
From everything I've read, the foster family is a bunch of grade A attention whores who through their own actions have contributed to making this so goddamned awful on this child.
All that shrieking and carrying on only makes the shit worse. By all means, fight it in court. Go to the bitter end. But do NOT force these people to pry that child out of your arms while you screech and flail about and your other children sob and cry for the goddamned cameras.
It's hard letting your children go. But these parents know that regardless of who has the legal right, whether she's Indian or not, or if they will ultimately prevail or lose, they know that in the mean time, this little girl will be cared for and loved by the people who are going to care for her for now. And they should send her off feeling comfortable and calm, assured that everything is going to be okay.
And I know it's not the same thing but it is rather similar to all of the times I had to send my child off to her douchebag father. You kiss them. You bundle them up with their lovie, their blanket, their favorite backpack. And no matter how much it hurts, you tell them and their siblings that it's okay. That you will see them soon and that they will be fine.
All this camping out, flailing out in the middle of the street, watching your family tear their clothing like sackcloth at a funeral is just out of goddamned order and contributes to the psychological damage.
I do not like these people.
And I despise them for perpetuating the lie that this kid is going with strangers. We can debate all day which laws should be in force, the time line, etc but at the end of the day, most articles make it clear that these are not uncaring strangers she's never seen but people who have a relationship with this child, people who are raising one of her siblings and live down the street from the other. I am horrified by all of the ways the foster family has made this worse.
Do I think that means they deserve to lose the child? No. Of course not. But their behavior borders on unstable and it's definitely damaging.
The ICWA is made to forceably keep a tribal nation intact. It overrides women's rights. It overrides child welfare. It overrides human rights and welfare. It is ONLY to gather and retain members by force for the sake of these nation's own existence and business goals.
This is straight emotion at play.
The ICWA flawed as it may be seeks to protect human rights, the rights of certain races/ethnicities to protect themselves from extinction. Those also play into women's rights and child welfare.
There is/should be a better way of doing this. But it is wrong headed and dare I saw white privilege to insist that a protective mechanism such as this is absent human and/or women's rights.
The continued existence of a minority culture IS a human right.
Her therapist addressed this specifically back in 2012, and still recommended that she be placed with her relatives out of state. He also laid out a transition plan that would have minimized the trauma during the transition. Had the P. family followed the plan, she wouldn't have been "pulled away from a family where she had been able to finally overcome her trauma". She would have been placed with the R. family in 2013, and would have had continuing contact with the P. family, with them being considered her extended family. The P. family did not follow that plan. They are the ones that caused the unnecessary trauma, not the R. family.
2013 is still a year after she had come to the Ps though, so unless they had just ignored her attachment issues and not helped her bond with them, she still would have been leaving behind yet another set of parents and caregivers for more new ones. How do you explain to a 3 year old that sorry, I'm not your mommy anymore?
I don't know. I just don't see any situation in which moving this child to ANOTHER new family wouldn't be traumatic, and I don't understand what the benefit to her is in doing so. Is the trauma and risk to her stability really outweighed entirely by her being with a biological sibling? Are biological siblings that much inherently superior to adopted siblings so that a stranger who shares your DNA is much better and more important than a sibling you've grown up with but don't share DNA with?
From your standpoint then, as long as you've had a child long enough you get to keep them?
I was sent to live with my greatgrandmother for two years when I was a little girl. The agreement was that my mom would help pay for our upkeep while my mother achieved high enough rank in the military that she was eligible for housing and could care for us.
By all that you've written here, the court should have sided with my greatgrandmother if my mom did all that and my GGma said, well nevermind?
Like it or not, at the end of the day, the best interests of the child is still subject to who has standing in that child's life and in what order. If that were not the case, people with money could snatch up the children of people with less money and win in court. A parents with means would automatically get custody over the other parent with less means. Absentee grandparents could assume custody from a chosen single aunt or uncle. Reunification would never be an option.
In some cases, it fucking sucks. But what would suck worse would be a system where ideal households would always overcome less than ideal ones. The losers would be those of lower incomes, non-traditional families like single parents, gay parents, etc.
All that shrieking and carrying on only makes the shit worse. By all means, fight it in court. Go to the bitter end. But do NOT force these people to pry that child out of your arms while you screech and flail about and your other children sob and cry for the goddamned cameras.
Yes, this is what bugs me the most. When even Veronica's bio-dad handled the situation better than you, you know you did poorly.
Kids feed off our emotions and our reactions. This was not the right way to handle this (very difficult) situation.
The ICWA is made to forceably keep a tribal nation intact. It overrides women's rights. It overrides child welfare. It overrides human rights and welfare. It is ONLY to gather and retain members by force for the sake of these nation's own existence and business goals.
This is straight emotion at play.
The ICWA flawed as it may be seeks to protect human rights, the rights of certain races/ethnicities to protect themselves from extinction. Those also play into women's rights and child welfare.
There is/should be a better way of doing this. But it is wrong headed and dare I saw white privilege to insist that a protective mechanism such as this is absent human and/or women's rights.
The continued existence of a minority culture IS a human right.
Native American women fight ICWA everyday to have their choice vs. their tribes. ICWA is anti-best interest. It's as simple as that. Keeping children with their abusers, a common action of ICWA, is not in line with human rights. Assuming that's the only way to maintain a culture, or that this girl will in any way be more involved in Cocktaw culture with these people is insane. Call me all the names you like. It doesn't change the way these laws are written or how they are being implemented.
If being with brother is best interest, or foster family is best- whatever. The ICWA doesn't need to be involved. I am curious to know why these siblings were separated with so many miles between them in the first place, but that's another story.
So I have been asking friends who are more involved with this case about this (I was pretty involved with the Veronica case, same people), because I know people who are totally saying this is wrong wrong wrong (like lawyers who argued in V's case) and can't imagine they'd be saying this if there was not more to it. I am being told that the Rs were not in the picture when the Pages first took Lexi in. They were under the impression that she was reuniting with her father, nothing about another family wanting her if that did not happen. I am also being told that the R family has not consistently been around and for a while did not want to adopt her. I guess when it was made known to Lexi that the family in UT intended to adopt her she acted out - not that this makes it any better. I don't know what to think or believe, just passing along info I am reading. Either way that poor girl is suffering, not sure who is most to blame but what a mess
escrow the court documents state otherwise. And you're hearing from one not impartial side. I'm sure if I asked people I know who were also involved in the Baby Veronica case I would hear another story as well. (One I know who was intimately involved in Veronica, after summarizing the case, simply said "In cases like this, nobody wins.") It's a case, imo, of three (or more) sides to every story: his, hers and the truth somewhere in the middle of it all.
This foster parent said it better than I ever could my feelings on the subject, and why I differentiate so strongly about a foster relationship. It was posted by my foster support group FB page.
I watched the whole thing with my hand clamped over my mouth, the computer screen blurring in and out of focus through my tears. I was watching a video hundreds of thousands of others have watched since it first aired on Monday. The video of 6-year-old Lexi being taken from her foster family’s home in Santa Clarita, California. The video is a heartbreaking reminder for me that the trauma endured by foster children can become so much worse when we don’t take care in how we allow such transitions to occur.
The video showed Lexi being moved from California back to live with her extended family in Utah. She’d lived with her foster parents, Rusty and Summer Page, since she was a toddler. For those unfamiliar with the story, the Pages have been Lexi’s foster parents for four years. According to a 2014 report published in Indian Country Today, Lexi’s biological mother disappeared shortly after her birth in 2009. When she was just 1 year old, her biological father was arrested for grand theft auto. Because Lexi is considered a Choctaw child under the Indian Child Welfare Act (her dad is a member of the Choctaw Nation), the tribe agreed to place Lexi in a non-Indian foster home as a means, according to published in-court documents obtained by CNN, “to facilitate efforts to reunify the girl with her father.”
The Pages’ pain over losing Lexi is raw and heart-wrenching. It’s a pain for which I am empathetic, because it’s a pain I’ve also experienced. Just two weeks ago, I said a final goodbye to my own foster son, a 4-year-old boy I cared for over the past year. A boy I love as if he were my own son.
As I watched the video, I cried not for the Pages’ loss. I cried not for the grief their three other biological children are experiencing. I cried not for Rusty’s sober refrain, "As a matter of simple human decency we implore the county not to prematurely take Lexi from her home,” as cameras gathered around him. I cried for the fact that this moment — quite possibly the scariest moment of Lexi’s young life — was being filmed. Her name and her image and her pain — all of it, filmed.
I cried because every second of her fear — that long walk from the front door of the only home she’d ever really known to the car of the stranger who was driving her away — was broadcast for a live audience. I cried at the way the (likely well-meaning) demonstrators screamed things like, “They want you, Lexi! They fought for you! The Pages love you! It’s the county that’s doing this!” I cried at the way a man pounded on her car window, sobbing and bellowing his love for her.
When we agree to be foster parents, we agree to do something that is extraordinarily difficult but also absolutely critical for these innocent kids: We agree to care for them like they are our own children. We agree to love them with everything we have while also accepting that we might have to one day say goodbye. We agree to do our best to manage an incredibly flawed system. We agree to be their safe haven in the midst of trauma. We agree to be their strength.
An abrupt move of this kind can be unbelievably scary for kids, and rather than being surrounded by as much calm and reassurance as possible, Lexi was surrounded by cameras and strangers and voices shrieking at her.
My husband, Mike, and I chose to become foster parents so that we could ultimately add to our family through adoption. But we also went in knowing that most cases end in the child’s reunification with either biological parents or other extended family. When we accepted our foster son into our home, we accepted the responsibility of supporting a goal of reunification while also acknowledging our willingness to adopt should his case ever reach that point.
Courtesy of Meghan Moravcik Walbert The afternoon I said goodbye to my foster son was one of the hardest days of my life. He, too, was going home to live with extended family members who live far away from our home. He, too, was leaving a family with which he was bonded to join relatives he had had very little contact with in his life. He, too, was leaving behind someone — my 5-year-old biological son — whom he considers to be a brother.
On the day we said goodbye to our foster son, I looked him directly in his wide, scared eyes and told him that love lives in your heart, and that means that he can always carry our love with him wherever he goes.
In our case, we had 24 hours from the moment the judge’s gavel smacked against the wood to the moment we slammed shut the trunk of my car, which was full of my foster son’s belongings. One day to pack and prepare him and our biological son for the changes ahead. We had known for months that such a move was likely, but we thought we’d get a little more time once the final decision had been made to help ease his transition to his new home. But every case and every judge is different, and this was the hand we were dealt. So we simply did our best.
On the day we said goodbye to our foster son, I looked him directly in his wide, scared eyes and told him that love lives in your heart, and that means that he can always carry our love with him wherever he goes. I told him how I’d heard his relatives had a lot of land at their home, a huge, open space for him to roam and play. Mike told him whenever he felt scared or missed us at night, to look up at the stars and know that we were looking up at those same stars and loving him and missing him right back.
On that day, Mike shook the hand of our foster son’s biological father, a man who thanked us in those final moments for caring for his child when he couldn’t. On that day, I explained to the relative who will raise my foster son that I tucked a letter in his preschool backpack with any information I thought might help her in those first few days and weeks — lists of his favorite foods, his regular nap time, and how to administer a newly prescribed medication.
I am not sure I agree with the court’s decision in my foster son’s case, the details of which I am legally obligated to keep private. But when I became a foster parent, I agreed to support the court’s decision whether I personally agreed or not. I pledged to do everything I possibly could on my end to ease my foster son’s transition, to ease his fear. And it would be unfair for me to speculate on the court’s decision in Lexi’s case, as well. The details of such cases are complicated. Deciding what is in a child’s long-term “best interests” is so incredibly difficult and subjective. But what I do believe deeply is this: The scene outside Lexi’s home on Monday made this experience all the more traumatic for her. An abrupt move of this kind can be unbelievably scary for kids, and rather than being surrounded by as much calm and reassurance as possible, Lexi was surrounded by cameras and strangers and voices shrieking at her.
As foster parents, we have an inside look into the ways our foster care system is damaged. Because of that, we should advocate for positive change. But there are ways to advocate and fight for a better process without inviting or allowing for a child’s pain and fear to be publicized.
I hope Lexi — and my foster son — will take the love they received in their foster homes with them forever. No matter the outcome, I hope the bonds they built with us will make it all the more possible and likely that they can and will bond with the extended family members who will raise them after us.