01991nam a22001577a 4500 516243 516243 210220b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Brown, Hana E. 24276 Who Is an Indian child: Institutional context, tribal sovereignty, and race-making in fragmented states American Sociological Review 85(5), Oct, 2020: p.776-805 Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA’s protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child’s Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize “Indian” as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization. - Reproduced Race, Racism, American Indians, states, Policy 22707 American Sociological Review RACISM AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 390335 IIPA IIPA 2021-02-20 85(5), Oct, 2020: p.776-805 AR124339 2021-02-20 AR