Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families

The dirt roads on the Crow Creek Indian reservation in South Dakota blow dust on the window frames of simple houses.

The people who live here are poor — in a way few Americans are poor. There are no grocery stores or restaurants. There's only electricity when it's possible to pay the bill.

This is where Janice Howe grew up, on a barren stretch of land that has belonged to the Dakota people for more than 100 years.

"I'm the eldest of nine kids," she explains, settling into a chair in the kitchen. "I went to college and I got my bachelor's degree in nursing."

Her sister lives across the street. Her parents live across the road. Her daughter lives two doors down with her four grandchildren — two young granddaughters and two twin babies.

And then one evening two years ago, Howe's phone rang.

It was a social worker from the Department of Social Services. She said her daughter Erin Yellow Robe was going to be arrested for drugs.

Howe couldn't believe it. She had never seen any sign of drugs or any other problems.

And then the social worker changed Howe's life. She said she was coming to take Howe's grandchildren away.

The next morning, a car pulled up outside Yellow Robe's house. Howe's daughter wouldn't let go of her one-year-old twin babies. She kept saying she hadn't done anything wrong.

The social worker buckled the babies into car seats.

"They were sitting in the cars," Howe says, choking up. "They were just looking at me. Because you know most babies don't cry if they're raised in a secure environment. So I went out there and took their diaper bags. And they left."

But as Howe watched the car pull around the bend, she realized the social worker took the two babies, but allowed Howe to keep her two granddaughters, 5-year-old Rashauna and 6-year-old Antoinette.

"I thought that was weird," Howe says. "I just thought, why can't I keep them all?"

A Mandate To Keep Children Connected

Howe, other relatives and other members of the tribe all wanted the children. And federal law says they should have gotten them. The Indian Child Welfare Act mandates that, except in the rarest circumstances, Indian children must be placed with relatives, a tribal member or at the very least, another Native American. It also says the state must make every effort to first keep a family together with services and programs.

The law was passed in 1978 in response to a century-long practice of forcing Native American children into harsh and often abusive boarding schools where they lost contact with their culture, traditions, language and families.

Except now a generation of children is once again losing its connection to its culture. This time it's through state-run foster care.

In South Dakota, Native American children make up only 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half the children in foster care. An NPR News investigation has found that the state is removing 700 native children every year, sometimes in questionable circumstances. According to a review of state records, it is also largely failing to place native children with their relatives or tribes.

According to state records, almost 90 percent of the kids in family foster care are in non-native homes or group care.

State officials say they're doing everything they can to keep native families together. Poverty, crime and alcoholism are all real problems on South Dakota's reservations and in the state's poorest areas. But, state records show there's another powerful force at work — money. The federal government sends the state thousands of dollars for every child it takes.

Howe's twin grandbabies were taken to a white foster home about 100 miles away.

On the day they were taken, Howe says she and her daughter sat on the steps and cried as they waited for the police to come to take her daughter to jail.

Several hours went by and no one came. A week went by, a month, and then summer turned into fall, and still no one came.

To this day, Howe's daughter has never been arrested for drugs — or anything else. Department of Social Service officials told NPR they can't talk about individual cases or confirm the details of Howe's account.

But one source who has reviewed the department's file said the social worker believed Yellow Robe was abusing her prescription pills. But the same source also says the file notes the case was based on a rumor — from a woman who, the source says, didn't like the Howe family.

And yet not only did they take the two babies, two months later, Howe waited at the school bus stop. But when the bus came, the girls weren't on it. A social worker had taken them from school.

"They didn't even call and tell me. Nothing," Howe says.

The social worker in this case, like many the department employs, hadn't been on the job long and quit a short time later. She told Howe that the older girls had had too much contact with their mother - a woman who had never been charged with anything. And then Antoinette and Rashauna, they too were gone.

"It enrages me," says Crow Creek tribal council member Peter Lengkeek. "We're very tight-knit families and cousins are disappearing. Family members are disappearing."

The Crow Creek tribe has lost more than 33 children in recent years. The reservation only has 1,400 people. Last year Lengkeek asked social service officials to tell him where the children were and who they were placed with.

Seven months later, he received a list. Lengkeek says every single child was placed in a white foster home.

He says if the state had its way, "we'd still be playing cowboys and Indians. I couldn't imagine what they tell these kids about where they come from and who they are."

"It's kidnapping," he says. "That's how we see it."

Navigating State Policies

Virgena Wieseler, who runs a division of South Dakota's department of social services, says the department believes in the Indian Child Welfare Act and does its best to find relatives or tribal member placements for Indian children.

"We come from a stance of safety," she says. "That's our overarching goal with all children. If they can be returned to their parent or returned to a relative and be safe and that safety can be managed then that's our goal."

Department Secretary Kim Malsam-Rysdon says they're dealing with abject poverty and substance abuse and have to do what's best for the kids, which sometimes means driving onto a reservation and taking a child.

"Of course we think it's legal or we wouldn't be doing it," she says.

Malsam-Rysdon cited two laws. One is a federal statute that only pertains to emergency situations. The other is a state law that allows the state to remove children in danger.

But two South Dakota judges, two lawyers and a dozen tribal advocates told NPR that state law doesn't apply. Federal law says tribes are sovereign. The experts say a state official can't drive off with an Indian child from Crow Creek any more than a Crow Creek official could drive off with a child from Rapid City.

Some tribes have agreements with the state, which allows social services to operate on their reservations. Crow Creek, however, does not.

But the state has never been challenged in court on this specific issue, so Howe was stuck in a strange — but common — legal limbo.

Because she lives on a reservation, state courts don't apply to her. But especially on poor reservations like hers, tribal courts can be over-run, underfunded and operated only part time.

Howe didn't know how to get a hearing. She didn't know any judges or lawyers. She certainly couldn't afford one.

And social services told her they couldn't tell her anything. Letters to the state and governor went unanswered.

But even here in a place with few resources or computers, she thought there must be something she could do. And then she thought of one more person to call: a man named Dave Valandra.

Valandra's the tribe's Indian Child Welfare Act director. He's a federal employee, who is charged with making sure the law is being followed, namely that children removed by the state are placed with relatives or tribal members.

But when she called him, Howe says he told her: "'There's nothing I can do.' - that's what he said to me" she says.

Dave Valandra works in a square, gray building for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Valandra's official job is to help members who live off the reservation with their cases in state court. Many can't afford South Dakota's public defenders.

But Valandra can also help tribal members who are on the reservation. He can push for a tribal court hearing.

He doesn't do that very often, however, because he says he trusts the state to do what's best for native families.

"I get along real good with the state and I have a good rapport with them," he says. "I'm satisfied."

Tribal officials say they are not satisfied. They say he won't show up at their council meetings to answer their questions. Valandra says he doesn't need to appear because the Indian Child Welfare Act is being followed.

"The state does have Native American foster homes, so under the [Indian Child Welfare Act], they are following the law by placing the child in a Native American environment," he says. "So yeah, it's working."

But state records show only 13 percent of native kids in foster care are placed in native homes. In fact, Valandra admits that not one of the children in his almost three dozen cases is placed with a Native American family.

Asked if he's concerned these children may have been let down a bit, he seemed at a loss for words.

"Of my cases right now, I think they're all...right now, the placement of the children right now are...boy that's, huh," he said.

Tribal Foster Homes Remain Empty

With Valandra a dead end, Janice Howe asked the social worker to move the children to a native home where they could participate in cultural activities such as going to sweats and sundance. But nothing changed.

Social Service's Wieseler said they would like all native children to be in native homes. But she says they've only got a few and they don't have room.

"We are constantly recruiting," she says, "constantly recruiting in all of our offices for all kinds of foster families and we are always trying to recruit them because we need more."

That comes as a surprise to Marcella Dion. She's a native foster home provider on the Crow Creek reservation and has lots of room.

Her home's been empty for six years.

"I was like, 'Whoa, what's going on,'" she says. "I got my [Indian Child Welfare license]. No kids."

Then there's Suzanne Crow, also from Crow Creek.

"I've been a foster parent here for over a year," she said. "They've never called me for any Indian kids."

In that year, hundreds of native children in South Dakota were placed in white foster homes. Officials on the Pine Ridge reservation, several hours away, also say they have 20 empty homes.

A few months ago, Crow asked a social worker why she hadn't received any native foster children.

"He said well there's a long process this and that," Crow remembers. "And I said, 'You know what? The long process is there's no road from you to Indian people. That's the long process.'"

Howe and her daughter waited months just to see the kids. She missed braiding their long hair. They follow Dakota tradition that you don't cut hair unless there's a death in the family.

When they were finally granted a visit in December 2009, Howe says she burst into tears. Their hair was cut to their shoulders.

The girls also looked thin and had holes in their socks, Howe says. They begged Howe and their mother to take them home.

She recalls Rashauna telling her that she knew how to get to the river and said she was going to try to swim home.

"I just kept saying, pray," Howe says she told the children, tearing up at the memory. "Pray hard. Grandma's going to get you back. I don't know how but grandma's going to get you back. When you start feeling bad pray or look outside because we're both looking at the same sky. Ok? Ok, they said. And they left."

She wouldn't see them again for another year.

An Increasing Case Load

In downtown Rapid City, Danny Sheehan was digging around in a closet down the hall from his office pulling open file cabinets and taking out files.

"These are all the different people who had their kids taken away from their entire families," explains Sheehan, who works for the Lakota People's Law Project. "Not one of them has had their children left with a relative of any kind."

There are about 150 case files in all.

He hopes one day he can sue. He's been involved in cases like this in the past, including fighting Three Mile Island, the Ku Klux Klan - even representing a group that wants access to UFO records. But he says these cases are expensive, time consuming and fraught with legal hurdles.

"Maybe if we devoted all our resources to a particular case and said, look, we're going to land on you like a ton of bricks [social services] and make you give this one kid back and sue you and do everything else, they would probably just turn the kid loose," he says. "But it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't stop them from doing it a hundred times again."

There are children in South Dakota who need to be removed from their families. But according to state figures, less than 12 percent of the children in foster care in South Dakota have been actually physically or sexually abused in their homes. That's less than the national average.

And yet South Dakota is removing children at almost three times the rate of other states, according to data from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

Culture, Poverty or Neglect?

There's one word that makes it possible for the state to remove Janice Howe's grandchildren and more than 700 other native kids every year: Neglect. The state says parents have neglected their children.

The problem, says Bob Walters, a council representative from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, is that neglect is subjective.

Walters, along with officials from seven other South Dakota tribes NPR interviewed, say what social workers call neglect, is often poverty — and sometimes native tradition.

"The standards are set too high for our people," Walters says. "We're family people. If there is 30 people in my home, that's fine. [When] I was raised, there was my mom, my dad and 12 kids. And I'm very thankful I grew up that way."

He says social workers are often young and there's constant turnover. He says many seem to have never set foot on a reservation before.

Walters says the workers don't understand that most tribal members don't have money to buy gas for a parenting class two hours away or that food is often shared among families.

State officials acknowledge that only 11 of their 183 case workers are Native American. But officials say they do yearly training to teach workers native practices.

Federal Financial Incentives For Removing Children

Sometimes, though, it's not just cultural differences. Jolene Abourezk worked for the department for seven years. She says when she worked there, removing kids was expected.

Department officials told her, "It's good, you are doing a good job for taking more kids," Abourezk says. "It's just the norm here. It happens so often people don't question it. So you know if something happens all the time the same way, people don't question it anymore. It's just how it's done.

Abourezk now works for her tribe, the Oglala Sioux, and reviews every case to help get kids back.

"When I look at the cases and read the police reports," she said, "it just seems like a lot of them are just minor offenses."

Few social workers would wish for more cases. A close review of South Dakota's budget shows there's a financial incentive for the department as a whole to remove more children.

Every time a state puts a child in foster care, the federal government sends money. Because South Dakota is poor, it receives even more money than other states - almost a hundred million dollars a year.

Bill Napoli was on the state Senate Appropriations Committee until he retired three years ago. He says he remembers when the state first saw the large amounts of money the federal government was sending the Department of Social Services in the late 1990s.

"When that money came down the pike, it was huge," Napoli says. "That's when we saw a real influx of kids being taken out of families."

He said there was little lawmakers could do to rein in the department. This was federal money, and it went straight to social services.

"I'm sure they were trying to answer a public perception of a problem," he said. "And then slowly it grew to a point where they had so much power that no one — no one — could question what they were doing. Is that a recipe for a bureaucracy that's totally out of control? I would say so."

In an interview with NPR, department officials Wieseler and Kim Malsam-Rysdon say they strongly disagree, and that money has never influenced the department's decisions to remove a child.

"The state doesn't financially benefit from kids being in care," Malsam-Rysdon says. "The state is always paying some part of it."

She says it's true the department gets more money the more children it takes. But she says, "it's still state general dollars that have to match all those dollars that come in."

Except it's not exactly a match. According to state records, last year, the federal government reimbursed the state for almost three quarters of the money it spent on foster care.

Then there's the bonus money. Take for example something the federal government calls the "adoption incentive bonus." States receive money if they move kids out of foster care and into adoption — about $4,000 a child. But according to federal records, if the child has "special needs," a state can get as much as $12,000.

A decade ago, South Dakota designated all Native American children "special needs," which means Native American children who are permanently removed from their homes are worth more financially to the state than other children.

In 10 years, this adoption bonus program has brought South Dakota almost a million dollars.

Malsam-Rysdon says that money stays in the department and is used to help children.

"The key to that funding is that those dollars are to be used to support adoptive placements," she says. "So the state does not gain monetarily from placing kids in adoption."

But that money and a hundred million dollars more funnels into the state economy every year. The department employs a thousand workers. It supports almost 700 foster families who receive as much as $9,000 a year per child and 1,400 families who receive thousands in adoption subsidies. Dozens of independent group homes also receive millions of dollars in contracts to take care of children.

Governor Bill Janklow ran the state in the 1990s. Asked how important the federal money that goes to social services is to the state he said: "Incredibly important."

"I mean look, we're a poor state," he says. "We're not a high income state. We're like North Dakota without oil. We're like Nebraska without Omaha and Lincoln. We don't have resources. We don't have wealth. We don't have high income jobs. We don't have factories opening here hiring people in high wage jobs."

The federal government gave South Dakota at least $15,000 for Howe's grandchildren while they were in foster care. More than half of that money went to the department's administrative costs, according to federal records.

But even now as the money filters in, the federal government asks few questions about whether states are complying with the Indian Child Welfare Act. A 2005 government audit found at least 32 states are failing in one way or another to abide by it.

George Sheldon, who recently took over the federal Administration for Children and Families, is the man in Washington sending the money. He says the federal government needs to make complying with the law a priority for the states.

"I think we've got to do better and frankly to the extent we can provide some leadership I'd like to see us do that," Sheldon says. "When you have a financing system that pays states to keep kids in care, what's the incentive to keep kids out of care?"

A Conclusion For Janice Howe

Howe's grandchildren had been gone a year and a half. There was so much frustration. The family seemed to be falling apart.

Howe made one last desperate move. She went to her tribe's council meeting and told her entire story. She told them how the state was now about to put the children up for adoption. Many on the council nodded with familiarity.

And then they did something they had never done before. They passed a resolution warning the state that if it did not return the Yellow Robe Children, it would be charged with kidnapping and prosecuted.

Nobody thought it would work.

But a few weeks later, a car pulled up outside of Howe's house with Antoinette, Rashauna and the two twins, who were now 2 1/2 years old.

"Antoinette came in and said 'Grandma, Grandma. We get to stay! We get to stay!'" Howe says.

The state offered no explanation or apology. The social worker warned that this was a trial run and the state could take them back at anytime.

Howe thinks the babies were treated well. But Rashauna and Antoinette left a size 10 and came back a size smaller. Howe says they hoard food under their pillows and hide under the bed when a car pulls up.

"I feel like they were traumatized so much," Howe says.

The children don't remember their native dance, something Howe says is especially important for Antoinette, the oldest.

"We go to sweats," Howe says. "We have ceremonies at certain times a year. She's got to be getting ready to learn these things that she has to do in order to become a young lady. They took a year and a half away from us. How are we going to get that back?"

Howe now runs a support group in a church for families who have lost children to foster care.

On this day, 48 people showed up, and Antoinette and Rashauna played in the front room. Howe says they usually hide from outsiders and explained that like their mother, they are especially afraid of white people and do not want to talk to them.

Later, Howe asked Rashauna: "What was it like in foster care?"

"I thought we were going to stay there forever," Rashauna says.

And then suddenly Antoinette blurts out a story about how Rashauna wet her pants and the foster parents made her wear the underwear on her head.

Howe looked away, so they wouldn't see her eyes fill with tears. As the singing started, they slowly swayed, knowing that even now, social services can come back. Even now, at anytime, they can take the children.

Tribes Question Foster Group's Power And Influence

On a small crest deep in South Dakota's Black Hills, a dozen children jumped on sleds and floated across the snow. They are wards of the state, and this is their home: the western campus of the Children's Home Society.

There are rolling hills, a babbling brook — even a new school.

Children's Home Director Bill Colson says it's a place to help children who can't make it in regular foster homes.

"We want to solve the problems, and sometimes it just seems like you're beating your head against the wall," he says. "But the reality is we are making progress, and I feel great about it, and our agency feels good about it."

State officials say Children's Home and other organizations like it are necessary. But Native American tribes say their children don't need to be there. Instead, they should be placed with their relatives or tribal members.

Federal law agrees. In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, to halt a century-long practice of forcing Native American children into boarding schools. It says that except in the most extreme circumstances, children must be placed with family or tribal members if they have to be removed from their homes.

But a 2005 government report found 32 states are failing to abide by the law in one way or another. And an NPR news investigation has found that in South Dakota, 90 percent of Native American children in foster care are placed in non-native homes or privately run group homes. It's a generation of children once again being taken from their native traditions and culture.

At Children's Home, which is the largest private foster care provider in the state, Colson says he's heard the tribe's complaints. But he says the organization's priority is to return Native American kids to their families.

"Our goal is to have kids be in a family and be successful," he says.

With multiple campuses and emergency centers, Children's Home provides services for up to 2,000 children a year. It's now one of the largest nonprofits in the state. But it wasn't always.

The Turnaround

Ten years ago, this group was in financial trouble. For several years, tax records show, it was losing money. Then in 2002, a former banker named Dennis Daugaard joined the team. He became the group's chief operating officer. A year later, he was promoted to executive director. And things began to change.

The money the group was getting from the state doubled under his leadership. Children's Home grew financially to seven times its size. It added two new facilities.

State records show it seized on a big opportunity. The state began outsourcing much of its work, such as training foster care parents and examining potential foster homes. Children's Home got almost every one of those contracts.

The group paid Daugaard $115,000 a year. But that wasn't his only job. He was also the state's lieutenant governor — and a rising star in state politics.

The seven years Daugaard spent at Children's Home — and his ability to turn the place around — were prominent features of his successful 2010 bid for governor.

Competition-Free Contracts

It could be that Children's Home was the best organization for the job, at the best price for all those contracts it got.

But it would be difficult for tax payers to know. In just about every case, the group did not compete for the contracts or bid against any other organization. For almost seven years, until this year, Daugaard's colleagues in state government just chose the organization and sent it money — more than $50 million in all.

"It's a massive conflict of interest," says Melanie Sloan, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, adding that any organization run by a state's top elected official would have undue power in that state.

"When you're lieutenant governor, people are anxious to curry favor with you," she says.

Daugaard declined NPR's repeated requests for an interview. In a statement, his office said Children's Home was the only viable organization that could have done the work, and that Daugaard never used his influence as lieutenant governor to secure contracts for the organization.

Tribal leaders, though, say the unusual relationship provides a window into the role money and politics play in South Dakota's foster care system. They say the dominance of Children's Home in this area is but one example of the interests of the state trumping the interests of native children.

"They make a living off of our children," says Juanita Sherick, the tribal social worker on South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation.

She says the state pushes aggressively in her cases to place kids in Children's Home who, she says, should be placed with their grandmothers, aunts and uncles — family members who are often desperate to take them in.

"Give the children back to their relatives, because the creator gave those children to those families," Sherick says. "Who has any right to take them away from those families?"

Tribes Want Alternatives

In recent years, critics say Children's Home has become a virtual powerhouse. It not only examines all the potential foster families and homes, it houses the most children. It trains the state's case workers and holds all of the state's training classes for foster parents. It does all of the state's examinations of children who may have been abused.

For all of this work, Children's Home is paid tens of millions of dollars every year.

On the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, tribal social worker Rose Mendoza finds that ridiculous. Children's Home got the state's only contract to examine potential foster homes, called kinship home studies, even on the reservations.

"Why send a private agency onto our reservation?" she said. "[Children's Home] is not calling us to request permission to come onto the reservation to do these home studies."

Mendoza says her agency would do the work for free. They know the families, they know the homes.

In a state where the majority of foster children are native, Mendoza and many of their tribal officials say home studies, social worker training and family placements should be done by people who know and understand the children's culture.

"Everybody says cultural differences," Mendoza said. "But it's really understanding what that means. It's a way of life. Our way of life is different."

Tribes weren't the only ones left out. Troy Hoppes ran a group similar to Children's Home named Canyon Hills Center. He says he didn't know about many of the contracts until after they were given to Children's Home.

"I just remember in the news there [were] some grants that were awarded, and obviously I was envious," he says. "We wanted to get some grants for ourselves, as well."

Hoppes says his organization would have jumped at the chance to take on the additional work.

"Facilities love the opportunity to branch out with things like that and give their staff opportunities to advance their skills," he says.

Gov. Daugaard's Response

In its statement, Daugaard's office said that any group home that has a license to care for children can be placed on the state providers' list and given children.

But Hoppes says that they were on this list, yet the home struggled to fill its beds. At the same time, Children's Home had a waiting list.

In his statement, Daugaard also emphasizes that the job of lieutenant governor was part time, and that he never supervised any of the people who approved the government contracts. State social services officials in their statement said Children's Home was never treated any differently from other organizations.

Children's Home has won many state accolades for its work with children. But that doesn't mean much to Suzanne Crow or her granddaughter Brianna, who spent three years there.

When Crow was a child, she was also taken from her family. She was sent to a boarding school.

"Every night me and my sister would meet at her bed and would say, 'Let's run away tomorrow,' " Crow remembers. "We used to make all our plans just to comfort ourselves that we're still there. This foster care system reminds me of that."

She didn't want Brianna to grow up like she did, not knowing who she was, not knowing that someone in the world loved her. It took a court order for the state to send Brianna home to her stepfather.

"I didn't care what it took," Crow says. "I battled with them."

State records show South Dakota paid Children's Home almost $50,000 over three years to care for Brianna.

But across the state, grandmothers, aunts and uncles, family and tribal members would have cared for Brianna — and hundreds of other Native American children like her. They would have done so for free, keeping them close to their tribes and culture like federal law intended.

Native Survivors Of Foster Care Return Home

Dwayne Stenstrom is a professor of American history. His office is lined with towers of obscure books and poetry on the walls. There's even a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a binder.

He teaches this document like many other professors, beginning with, "We hold these truths to be self evident." But he stops on another phrase — "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages."

"What [is] significant to me," Stenstrom says, "is the impact that it has on a lot of our Native American kids when it still regards Indians as merciless Indian savages."

Stenstrom teaches at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He grew up in a white foster care home, married his wife 31 years ago and raised six children. He's as passionate about history as he is his community.

Most social services departments would look at him and say he's a success story.

"The problem," Stenstrom says, "is that that's a fallacy."

He says he didn't make a life for himself "until I came back to the reservation."

Losing Native Traditions

The Indian Child Welfare Act says that except in the rarest of cases, Native American children who have to be removed from their homes must be placed with relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans. Yet 32 states are failing in some way to abide by the law, according to 2005 government audit. These children are also more likely to end up in foster care than other races, even in similar circumstances, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

The result is generations of children growing up without a connection to their culture, traditions and tribes — as Stenstrom did.

He grew up on the Nebraska plains, on the Winnebago Reservation. He and his brother spent the summers outside on the prairie with their grandfather.

But when he was 8 years old, in the spring of 1968, a van pulled up outside his house. The driver, a woman, told him he and his brother were going away for the summer. Stenstrom recalls his grandfather looking worried.

"He told me never to forget where I come from and to embrace it," Stenstrom remembers.

That was the last time he saw him.

Stenstrom spent the summer in several foster homes. One day the van took him to Ainsworth, Neb., to a house where an older couple lived. Their own children were grown and no longer living at home. There, he and his brother waited for fall so they could go home.

"I'm thinking when the summer's over, the little van [is] going to come and get me," Stenstrom says. "It still hasn't come and got me. I'm still sitting there emotionally waiting for the little van to come. And I don't expect it's coming."

Years later, he was told by a state worker that his mother drank too much. But he doesn't recall any bad memories. He knows she loved him. When he closed his eyes, he could see it in her face.

He says he doesn't understand why he wasn't sent to live with one of his relatives. He had hundreds of them. Instead he was sent to a white foster home.

"I grew up in a teepee, for Pete's sake," he says. "This isn't a cliche. Go to bed in a circular teepee tonight and wake up tomorrow morning with four walls. And when you open your eyes, you don't recognize anybody in the room. And sit there for 12 years. Because that's what I did."

Sometimes he dreamed about Native American ceremonies. But when he woke up, the details were gone. For a while, he hoped his two older brothers would come get him. But they had both been drafted and sent to Vietnam.

"I'm sitting here feeling sorry for me because I lost my mom," he says. "Imagine what she went through."

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 Sherick's office every week. They want to be saved too. Sherick knows the feeling. She was taken from her parents when she was 9.

Sherick 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."

Sherick 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.

Sherick 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.