For months, a Twin Cities couple worked to keep their pregnancy a secret, never telling their friends and family, and most important, their tribes.
Minnesota law requires a tribe be notified of any adoption involving an American Indian child, but the couple feared that if their tribes learned of their plans to give the baby to a white couple, they would exercise their legal right to intervene and try to place the baby with Indian parents.
Now the couple are suing the Minnesota Department of Human Services, the Minnesota Attorney General and a commissioner with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe to allow the adoption to go forward. In a federal lawsuit filed last week, the couple, identified only as John and Jane Doe, argue that the requirement to tell the tribe about the baby violates their constitutional right to due process and equal protection.
Advocates for the law say the couple are putting their own interests above the rights of the child, who would be better served with an Indian family.
The lawsuit challenges federal and state laws enacted in the 1970s and 1980s that sought to keep Indian children in Indian families. The laws were an attempt to remedy the tradition of breaking up Indian families by sending their children into institutions or to non-Indian adoptive parents. The couple want the court to throw out the state's requirement to inform a tribe of an adoption.
"Indian parents are the only parents in the state that have that duty to notify," said one the couple's attorneys, Mark Fiddler. "In an adoption, all of that information is private and confidential. If you're Indian, that has to be surrendered to the tribe."
The couple chose a white family, Fiddler said, because "it's been my experience in these cases that most of the birthparents identify problems with family, alcoholism and other dysfunction, and they don't want kids placed in that kind of environment."
"It's a sad comment on the Indian community," said Fiddler, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota. "But the parents have the right to make these choices."