South Dakota announced a 44 percent increase in licensed Native American foster homes. The number went from 93 to 134 between July 2025 and February 2026. The state calls this progress.

Here is the other number: 69 percent of South Dakota’s 1,719 foster children are Native American. Native people are 9 percent of the state’s population. That ratio — 9 percent of the people, 69 percent of the removed children — is worse than what NPR reported in 2011, when the number was above 50 percent.

The improvement is real. The foundation it sits on is worse.

In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act because 25 to 35 percent of all Native children nationwide were being removed from their families. Eighty-five percent were placed outside their communities — even when fit and willing relatives were available. ICWA established a clear placement preference: extended family first, then the child’s tribe, then other Native families. Active efforts — not just reasonable efforts — to keep families together before any removal.

That was 48 years ago.

In 2011, NPR’s three-part investigation found South Dakota was removing roughly 700 Native children per year. More than eight out of ten were placed with white families. The state received substantial federal reimbursement for each placement. The financial structure rewarded removal.

In 2013, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, and three Indian parents. What they found in Pennington County was this: 48-hour hearings that lasted 60 seconds. Parents not assigned counsel. Parents not given copies of the petitions against them. No opportunity to present evidence or cross-examine witnesses. No state employee called to testify. Sixty seconds to lose your children.

In 2015, Chief Judge Jeffrey Viken ruled the state was violating both ICWA and the Fourteenth Amendment. In 2016, he issued a 27-page decision finding that state officials “continue to disregard his prior rulings” and ordered an immediate halt.

In 2018, the Eighth Circuit vacated the ruling and dismissed the case.

No successful federal enforcement of ICWA compliance in South Dakota has survived appeal.

In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld ICWA’s constitutionality 7-2 in Haaland v. Brackeen. But it did not reach the equal protection question — whether ICWA’s placement preferences constitute racial classification or political classification based on tribal membership. That question remains open. The door the Court left ajar is the one critics will walk through next.

So when South Dakota announces kinship care rule changes in 2025 — lowering the foster parent age to 19, removing training and health screening barriers, paying kinship families at the same rate as non-kinship families — the question is not whether it’s working. The 44 percent increase says it is. The question is what took 48 years.

ICWA’s first placement preference is extended family. That was the law in 1978. South Dakota is announcing, in 2026, that it has begun making it easier for family members to care for their relatives’ children. The mechanism that would have produced this outcome — a federal judge ordering compliance — was reversed by the Eighth Circuit. The law that requires it has been on the books for nearly half a century. The state arrived here on its own timeline.

Between 2017 and 2021, more than 700 Native children in South Dakota — approximately one in every 40 Native children in the state — experienced termination of their parents’ rights. One of the highest rates in the country.

Before the foster care pipeline, there were the boarding schools. The Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative identified 417 institutions across 37 states. The government spent $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1871 and 1969 on a system whose explicit purpose was the elimination of Native culture, language, and family structure. The Washington Post found 3,104 student deaths — more than three times the Interior Department’s own count.

The boarding schools removed children to destroy families. The foster system removed children and called it protection. ICWA was written to stop the second pattern. South Dakota is 48 years into compliance.

Forty-one new homes. That’s the 44 percent. Ninety-three to 134. Each one is a child staying with family instead of strangers. Each one is what the law intended. I don’t want to diminish 41 families who stepped forward and a state that finally reduced the barriers to let them.

But 69 percent. Nine percent of the population. The number that was above 50 in 2011 is approaching 70 in 2026. The removal rate grew while the kinship infrastructure didn’t exist. The pipeline that ICWA was written to interrupt kept running for decades after the law passed, through a state that fought a federal judge to keep it running, through a circuit court that let them.

Forty-one homes is a start. It is also what 1978 sounds like arriving 48 years late.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: ICT News, South Dakota Searchlight, NPR, ACLU, NICWA, ProPublica, Department of the Interior, Washington Post