State, Tribes Share Mutual Interest - Kids Child Welfare Conference Promotes Healthy Families

When Randy’L He-dow Teton looks at the image that will grace the new Sacajawea coin, she doesn’t see herself.

The young Idaho woman who was the model for the coin sees an image of a Native American mother who carries her baby on her back with strength, dignity and pride. Teton learned that from her mother, she said, and hopes to pass it on to her children - just as Indian families throughout Idaho hope to raise their children in accordance with their culture.

At a two-day Indian child welfare conference in Boise that started Tuesday, more than 200 state, tribal and private child-welfare workers joined to learn how to promote healthy families on Idaho’s Indian reservations and how to provide services in ways that work with tribal cultures.

Teton, 23, was among an array of speakers including national experts and state and tribal officials.

“They’re part of our state, and we’re part of theirs,” said Karl Kurtz, state health and welfare director. “We have one mutual interest, and that’s the health and well-being of children.”

For many decades, the government’s approach to dealing with Indian children was to remove them from their families to try to assimilate them into non-Indian society. As recently as the 1970s, large numbers of Indian children were taken away from the extended families that are key to their cultural child-raising traditions, and placed in non-Indian boarding schools or foster homes.

Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 to reverse that, launching a long process of learning for child-welfare officials seeking to find better ways to help Indian families.

“I think the biggest issue is trying to keep the family intact,” Kurtz said.

That’s also the biggest issue in child welfare for the general population of the state, he said. But the task is hardest for poor families, who struggle to provide for their children. Idaho’s Indian children are more than twice as likely as white children to live in poverty, according to the “Idaho Kids Count” report.

“It’s just more evident on the reservations in the state of Idaho, because of our lack of economic development,” Nez Perce Tribal Secretary Julia Davis said.

The conference is sponsored jointly by Health and Welfare and Idaho’s Indian tribes.

On Tuesday, participants attended workshops on tribal domestic violence programs, tribal social services and juvenile justice programs, and state and tribal programs that work together. They examined tribal court and legal systems, and studied how the effects of traumatic historical events are passed down through generations.

Keynote speaker Terry Cross, director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, told the group that social service workers must be aware of cultural differences and knowledgeable about their clients’ cultures.

For example, he said, a client’s failure to make eye contact may have specific meaning in his culture, or one community may have certain expectations for home visits that the worker must know to make them successful.

“Make a conscious effort to understand the meaning of a client’s behavior within his or her cultural context,” he said.

An intertribal powwow was scheduled Tuesday night, and programs today will include a speech on identifying and using family strengths as a basis for providing services to the family.

“This approach builds on traditional Native American values and is much more likely to result in positive outcomes for children,” said speaker Dixie Jordan, a Minneapolis expert on emotionally disturbed children and coordinator of the American Indian Project.

Josephine Halfhide, the Indian child welfare program specialist for Health and Welfare, put together the conference, the first Idaho has had since 1994. She said state and tribal services and approaches can’t conflict - they must mesh. “We need to do that, and the timing is good for it,” she said.

For Teton, a senior majoring in art history with a minor in Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, the topic could not be more important. Born and raised on the Fort Hall Reservation in southern Idaho, she said her family and heritage are what inspired her to seek education. This spring, she will become the first in her family to graduate from college.

As she began her talk, Teton said she would introduce herself. Then, in accordance with long tradition, she named her parents and grandparents, and where each was from.

Posing for the Sacajawea image on the coin was an unexpected honor, Teton said. “But in some aspects, I see myself in Sacajawea - her ability in continually striving in search of something. I’m striving for my future.

“This is something I got from my parents,” she said. “They were always striving - to take care of the children.”

Thrust into the historic Lewis and Clark expedition as the only woman, and the only interpreter able to help the exploring party navigate its way through the West, the teenage Sacajawea nevertheless took devoted care of her infant son throughout the rigors of the journey.

The next U.S. dollar coin, due out in March, pays tribute to her feat.

“The image carries motherhood, pride and perseverance,” Teton said. `This is something I see in her that I respect and hope I will carry on to my own children. It’s something my mother showed me.”