In his article, Bill John Baker the Principal Chief Leader for the Cherokee People, speaks to his native tribes stressing the importance of Indian children remaining within their tribe to keep their Native American Heritage. Baker informs his readers that these children are supposed to be protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) that were put into place in 1978, but those outside adoption agencies are not upholding this law and manipulating it for their benefit. He also shares with his readers that outside agencies want the law abolished altogether, so the Native American children can be adopted by anyone within the United States. Baker uses exigency that the law needs to be upheld by urging the importance for the ICWA to stay in effect. According to Baker, children have been ripped from their tribal families and put into open adoption for extortion. He appeals to his audience by referring that children need to stay within their tribal heritage, which keeps it alive. He felt outside adoption agencies offering open adoption for monetary gain was unjust and left the children vulnerable, while losing the importance of understanding where they come from. In his argument about why …show more content…
According to the ABA Journal, which backs up the claims for the original reasoning ICWA was put into law, was the harshness inflicted upon Native American tribes in late 1800s. Stated “for many great-grandparents of today's Indian children, arbitrary removal by nontribal governments were the norm, a practice dating back to the first Indian boarding schools in the late 1800s. The schools where designed by the federal government to assimilate the children into mainstream American Societies” (ABA Journal, A Painful History