Each year, Pound Pup Legacy holds their annual Demons of Adoption Awards. This year’s ballot can be found here.

In the nomination process in the run up to the actual ballot, I wrote about my nominees and reasoning behind such:

“Others have already made these nominations, but I wanted to write to them specifically as the full ramifications of their actions this year haven’t been elaborated on here from quite the angle I wanted to cover.

For me, this year’s nominees really come down to Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Roberts along with everyone, from the marketers, to the agency, the lawyers, and the adoptive couple involved in Veronica’s and the other cases slowly coming to light.

I’ve been writing about Nightlight, as but one example, since 2006, but they along with others in this industry have been unleashed in new and horrific ways this year by the Supreme Court’s decision.

While all who have been part of this process, including the other Justices who supported this outcome are among those I consider part of this nomination, both Justices Thomas and Roberts stand out for their conflict of interest, their refusal to recuse themselves, and their cynical use of the high court towards this evisceration of ICWA. The ramifications of this decision for all First Nations families, far beyond the details of Veronica’s case itself represents almost sea change in terms of how the United States stands in relation to Native kids and families.

ICWA, in 1978 represented an initial acknowledgement of the wrongdoing in how the U.S. had essentially strip mined Native communities for their children, as if plundering any other “natural resource.” ICWA was designed to prevent such abuses from taking place again. In practice, ICWA was far from strong enough, not going anywhere far enough, and still Native children were removed at rates that can only be described as an institutionalized form of cultural genocide, draining tribes of their kids one case at a time.

Instead of recognizing ICWA’s inadequacies and how Native children were still being commandeered, the high court shredded what little was left, leaving us in a landscape of a new open season on Tribes and their children.

Justices Roberts and Thomas due to their particular relation to adoption as an institution, that of adoptive parents had a special responsibility to step back from this case. (Roberts in particular, by focusing upon and embracing the eugenic concept of “blood quantum”/”blood politics” echoed the long and despicable racist history of how so many First Nations peoples have been objectified, dehumanized, and moved about as little more than livestock in this nation’s long sad history.)

Their refusal to acknowledge their conflict of interest makes them prime candidates as nominees as they represent at the highest court in the land the tragic situation Bastards and families face every day when we interact at all levels of the system with various clerks, judges, social workers, lawyers, etc.- those with all too often hidden or hidden in plain sight motivations due to their own status as a adopters.

We are reduced to begging for justice from those who have their own stake and interest due to their own position on the adoption pentagon.

Roberts and Thomas (along with the full chain of others involved in these cases) deserve this year’s nomination for two simple reasons:

1. The fact that two adoptive parents on the high court, who refused to recuse themselves, just opened the floodgates yet again to the next major boom of sovereign First Nations tribal peoples having their children sold off one by one by an industry desperate for new sources of children.

& 2. They personify the conflicts of interest inherent to the system itself that all of us must turn to, and how their presence, and the all too often hidden presence of such conflicts subverts the ability to receive an unbiased hearing at so many levels for all of us.

The hollowing out of ICWA, far beyond any specific case this year is one of the most important places to place attention, because what happened to Veronica is but the beginning. The roles of individuals in how that decision came to be, and their inherent conflicts of interest speaks t the industry and justice system as a whole, and that too, deserves tremendous attention.”

You can read other nominations and people’s reasons for nominating them here on the nomination page and comment thread.