American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Despite widespread concern within American Indian communities, the world of research has paid scant attention to how Indian parenting traditions have been undermined by institutions such as boarding schools, urban relocation, and foster care. My goal in this paper is to begin to address some of these questions by documenting, both statistically and with case studies, the ways in which placements outside of Indian families and communities have often compromised the ability of Indian people to parent their children. I will focus specifically on the predicaments of former foster children, for these are people who have often vowed to be good parents, but have frequently been unable to live up to their expectations for themselves as all too often they have seen their children taken by the very foster care system they so hoped to avoid. While the dynamics I will be describing here are to be found throughout Indian country, there is reason to believe that they are especially common in urban Indian communities. In the course of my work in Minneapolis, I met many people who had come to the city after childhoods spent far from their natal communities. These were people who had been largely cut off from the communities into which they were born when they were placed in the homes of foster parents. And, while they now found themselves in the urban environment associating freely with Indian people, their childhood experiences continued to color their adult lives, especially their relationships with their children. The stories of these individuals speak powerfully to us about the predicaments of an as yet undetermined, but no doubt significant, number of urban Indian people.