Native Survivors Of Foster Care Return Home

Dwayne Stenstrom and his wife, Rose, live on South Dakota's Rosebud reservation, where they raised six children. Also pictured is their granddaughter.

Stenstrom liked his foster parents. He says they treated him well, but he does not refer to them as his own mother or father.

"I learned to appreciate that family," he says. "I stayed with them until both of them passed away. When the mother passed, I went back to her funeral and one of her kids asked, 'Why's he here?' "

After that, something snapped. And like more than half of children who leave foster care, he got in trouble with the law and drank too much.

"The only thing I had going for me was my memory," he says. "I looked in four directions and there was nobody."

That's when he returned to the reservation, he says, to see what he had missed and find his identity. He says it saved him.

Finding Tiospaye

On the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, former foster care children walk into Juanita Scherich's office every week. They want to be saved too. Scherich knows the feeling. She was taken from her parents when she was 9.

* Each year, South Dakota removes an average of 700 Native American children from their homes. Indian children are less than 15 percent of the state's child population but make up more than half the children in foster care.

* Despite the Indian Child Welfare Act, which says Native American children must be placed with their family members, relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans, native children are more than twice as likely to be sent to foster care as are children of other races, even in similar circumstances.

* Nearly 90 percent of Native American children sent to foster care in South Dakota are placed in nonnative homes or group care.

* Fewer than 12 percent of Native American children in South Dakota foster care had been physically or sexually abused in their homes, below the national average. The state says parents have "neglected" their children, a subjective term. But tribe leaders tell NPR what social workers call neglect is often poverty, and sometimes native tradition.

* A close review of South Dakota's budget shows that it receives almost $100 million a year to subsidize its foster care program.

Scherich says like those who visit her, she lost her language and her sense of tiospaye — tribal family.

"A lot of times it's real painful for me to think about it because my brother and I went through a lot," she says. "I have never forgotten it. I think that's why I work so hard in this job."

Scherich is now the tribe's social worker. The most difficult mornings are when young children are waiting at her door. They're runaways from foster care.

Asked what she does with them, she says: "I don't give them back to the state of South Dakota, that's for damn sure."

That feeling is common on South Dakota's reservations. Officials from three separate tribes said they are actively hiding children from state caseworkers.

Scherich says she finds a relative to take them in — something she says the state should have done in the first place.

"They are so happy to see Grandma," she says. "They just cry. It makes you cry. Those are the times it's all worth it."

After Stenstrom found his way home, he says he connected with the spirit of his grandfather and made peace with the years he spent in foster care. Eventually he even found his mother. She told him she had searched for him for years. He spent six months with her before she died of cancer.

"That was my mom," he says. "That meant the world to me."

'They'll Always Come Home'

Not too long ago a boy, about 6 years old, found his way to the pay phone at the minimart on the Cheyenne River reservation.

"He ran away from a foster home in Lemmon," says Diane Garreau, the tribe's social worker. "He was looking through the phone book because he had remembered names of his family.

"They try to come home," she says. "They'll always come home.They should have never left here."

Garreau and dozens of other tribal officials say the only difference between running away and running home is whether or not you're running in the direction you belong.