Who is an Indian Child? Sovereignty, Institutional Context, and Race-Making in Fragmented States

• In Event: 3131 - Intersectional Approaches to Citizenship and the State

Abstract

Despite growing interest in states as race-makers, it remains unknown how race-making obtains across a complex and diversified state. To address this gap, I examine a novel case of state de-racialization: the Indian Child Welfare Act. Passed in 1978, ICWA sought to end generations of U.S. policy that denied the sovereign status of tribes and incentivized the forced removal of Native children from their homes. Although the U.S. state had long treated “Indian” as a race, ICWA redefined it as a legal citizenship category, extending the law’s protections to children who are citizens of or eligible for citizenship in a federally recognized tribe. I draw on 40 years of archival materials from the primary government agencies charged with ICWA implementation to examine how a diverse array of state agents responded to this racial rupture. I find that administrative and juridical authorities have eschewed the Congressional mandate to treat Indian as a citizenship category, instead re-defining Indian as a race and reconsolidating the racial order. Yet these processes vary by three elements of administrative context: decision-makings visibility, evidentiary standards, and jurisdiction. These institutional characteristics influence the cognitive, ideological, and group formation elements of state race-making. Broader institutional incentive structures further shape whether and when state agents select racial over citizenship metrics. If administrative scaffolding is a prerequisite for the accumulation of symbolic power, these findings suggest that the structure of specific administrative institutions affects how states exercise symbolic violence across a complex and fragmented state apparatus.

Author

• Hana Brown, Wake Forest University