Browsing by Subject "American Indian Child Welfare"

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    Walking Together for American Indian Families and Children: Opinions of Tribal Relationships from the Viewpoint of Counties with Specialized American Indian Child Welfare Units
    (Spring 2024) Glesener, David
    Considering the disproportional overrepresentation of American Indian children in out of home placement and involvement with public child protection agencies, this research examines the opinions of American Indian child welfare staff of two county child protection agencies with specialized American Indian units regarding their working relationship with tribes. This qualitative exploratory study extended the lens of the Holding Space Framework from American Indian public health to child protection. It conducted 20 semi-structured interviews of social workers, supervisors, and program managers. Participants described their individual relationships, their unit’s relationships, and their agency’s relationships with tribes. They commented on the importance of the relationship, the relationships’ outcomes for American Indian families, and suggestions on building and maintenance of relationships with tribes. This study found the importance to those relationships and to social work practice of county staff’s commitment to American Indian families, as well as the benefit of staff with American Indian heritage or previous work experience at tribes especially in positions of authority. The study suggested positive relationships provided positive outcomes for American Indian families and that the HSF pillars of governance, trust, and culture fitted well for describing and probing tribal-public child welfare relationships. The Limitations to the study were that formal input from tribes was not available except through opinions of tribal members employed by county agencies, only two public agencies were included as only, and the participant sample consisted of volunteers and not randomly selected.