By Roxanna Asgarian, Photo by Shuran Huang, The Texas Tribune, November 10, 2022
Jennifer and Chad Brackeen, an anesthesiologist and a stay-at-home dad, already had two biological children when they decided to foster a child. “God started to speak to our hearts about opening our home for more,” Jennifer explained in a now-defunct blog.
The Evangelical Christian couple in Fort Worth began caring for a 10-month-old boy in 2016, and the next year, decided they wanted to adopt him.
But the boy was of Navajo and Cherokee descent, and attempting to add him to their family brought the Brackeens up against the fraught legal, cultural and emotional dynamics of adopting Native American children in a country with a long history of victimizing and destroying American Indian families.
Under the 1978 federal Indian Child Welfare Act, preference had to be given to the boy’s family, and then his tribe, before a white family like the Brackeens could adopt him. The law aims to preserve Native communities and Native children’s sense of belonging to them.
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