Court Opinion

ID: 9797102
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:13:28.908169+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:52:33.581054
License: Public Domain

BRYNER, Chief Justice,
concurring.
I disagree with the opinion’s reasoning and its conclusion that ICWA § 1915(d) applies only to the intra-tribal portions of § 1915(a)’s placement requirements. In my view, § 1915(d) required the superior court to use the Indian community’s cultural and social values in deciding whether good cause existed for the children’s adoptive placement in Matilda W.’s home. I would nonetheless reject the broad meaning of that provision advocated by the tribe. I do not read § 1915(d) to mean that courts considering non-preferred placements must recognize and enforce tribal values that disqualify anyone but an Indian custodian from adopting an Indian child; nor do I read § 1915(d) as saying that courts are bound by expert testimony telling them how an Indian community’s values should be applied to a given case. Because my review of the record persuades me that the superior court correctly applied ICWA’s placement preference requirements as I understand them, did not clearly err in its factual findings, and did not abuse its discretion in finding good cause for a non-preferred placement,' I concur in affirming the judgment.
ICWA’s preference requirements are spelled out in § 1915(a). This provision describes three levels of “preference” and requires state courts to apply these preferences “[i]n any adoptive placement of an Indian child under State law” unless the court finds “good cause to the contrary”:
In any adoptive placement of an Indian child under State law, a preference shall be given, in the absence of good cause to the contrary, to a placement with (1) a member of the child’s extended family; (2) other members of the Indian child’s tribe; or (3) other Indian families.™
ICWA § 1915(d) then commands that, “in meeting the preference requirements of [§ 1915],” courts must use “the prevailing social and cultural standards of the Indian community in which the parent or extended family resides.”2 Today’s opinion would read this command as being limited to adoptive placements in Indian homes. In my view this reading is untenable. On its face, § 1915(d) applies to .all “preference requirements” set out in § 1915(a), including that subsection’s unequivocal requirement that a good-cause determination be made before deviating from a preferred placement.
Today’s opinion advances no sound basis in the text or congressional history of § 1915 for reading § 1915(d)’s phrase “preference requirements” as excluding the good-cause requirement set out in § 1915(a). The opinion finds its reading implicit in § 1915(d)’s *1034language specifying that an Indian community’s standards must be used “in meeting the preference requirements” of subsection (a). Because this wording does not authorize Indian standards to “override” the preference requirements, the opinion reasons, subsection (d) only requires Indian standards to be used for selecting a placement “within a preference tier.”3 But this reasoning is circular because it posits its own conclusion: it assumes at the outset that § 1915(a)’s good-cause requirement fails to qualify as one of § 1915(a)’s “preference requirements.” If we start from the textually more plausible assumption that the good-cause determination is an integral part of subsection (a)’s “preference requirements,” then applying the good-cause test to override an otherwise available preferred placement would result in “meeting the preference requirements.”
The opinion similarly posits that § 1915(d) applies only to Indian placements because the language of that provision explicitly refers to “preference requirements” but not to the requirement of “good cause.” 4 The opinion views this supposed omission as suggesting that Congress “did not intend the standards to apply to the good cause inquiry.”5 But again, the opinion is circular because it starts from the flawed premise that § 1915(a)’s good-cause requirement is not part of that provision’s preference requirements. The premise is flawed because § 1915(a) explicitly extends to “any adoptive placement,” and the good-cause component of that provision is an integral part of its requirements in “any adoptive placement” involving a non-Indian home.
The opinion tries to distance § 1915(a)’s good-cause inquiry from its preference requirements by describing the good-cause inquiry as merely “part of a common statutory scheme.”6 Yet the link is far closer than that: the preferred placements and good-cause requirement are joined in a single sentence in § 1915(a); and, as described there, they function as inseparable, mutually dependent requirements for any adoptive placements. By making its three listed preferences mandatory unless the court finds good cause to the contrary, § 1915(a)’s plain language integrates the good-cause inquiry into any placement decision involving potential custodians from more than one preference tier.
The opinion also suggests that § 1915(a) suffers from textual ambiguity because it lists three “preferred placements,” all of which are Indian placements, while omitting any reference to a fourth category for placements in a non-Indian home.7 But this suggestion is unfounded. The word “preference” necessarily describes a choice between two possibilities, one of which is better than the other. Thus, in listing three placement “preferences,” § 1915(a) describes three preferred choices in descending order of priority. Because each listed placement is a “preference,” each necessarily implies the existence of a less desirable choice. And in context, the implied least-desirable alternative for the lowest listed statutory “preference” — the preference for “other Indian families” — is obviously non-Indian families, which could not have been listed as a “preferred placement,” because it is a non-preferred, default placement.
Hence, § 1915(a) does all that it sets out to do: it lists all of ICWA’s preferred placements. And its opening phrase makes the comprehensive scope of its preference requirements unmistakably clear by emphasizing that the listed preferences must be obeyed “[i]n any adoptive placement of an Indian child under State law”8 — not just in a preferred placement to an Indian home. Thus, the statute’s list of “preferences” excludes no “placements.” The plain language of § 1915(a) unambiguously requires good cause to be found whenever a court chooses between placement in an “other Indian fatn-il[y],” under § 1915(a)(3), and a non-Indian family. In specifying what “preference[s] shall be given,” Congress omitted nothing *1035from § 1915(a)’s text suggesting that issues of good cause should be decided differently when they involve potential placements with non-Indian families.9 Given the absence of textual ambiguity, I see no justification for departing from § 1915’s plain meaning; for as the court itself acknowledges, our powers of statutory interpretation do not “permit reliance on ambiguities that do not exist.”10
The court’s reliance on ICWA’s congressional history strikes me as equally unpersuasive. It seems anomalous to venture that a Congress concerned with stopping an exodus of Indian children to non-Indian homes would seek to cure the problem by adopting a good-cause provision that allowed Indian values to govern Indian-home placements but left states free to continue using non-Indian values in deciding when to move Indian children into non-Indian homes. The interpretation of § 1915 adopted in today’s opinion defeats Congress’s goal by openly inviting courts to trump Indian community norms with “white, middle-class” norms whenever a non-Indian placement can be found.
The opinion attempts to repair this flaw in its own theory by shaping § 1915’s straightforward language into an elaborate yet ill-defined construct: the opinion posits that ICWA contemplates a distinction between preferred-placement decisions and good-cause determinations. Preferred-placement decisions would consider only Indian placements and would require courts to use Indian community values in determining the “suitability” of potential Indian custodians; by contrast, good-cause decisions would consider only non-Indian placements occasioned by the lack of a suitable preferred Indian placement and would require courts to use white middle-class values in determining whether a child’s “special needs” justified deviating from the preferred-placement requirements by making a non-Indian placement. The opinion declares that this interpretation accurately reflects “an implied judgment that while the suitability of a Native household must be viewed in light of the prevailing social and cultural standards of the Indian community, courts are not compelled to analyze a child’s special needs according to those standards.”11
The opinion nonetheless concedes that, if literally applied, this interpretation “would create a loophole[ ] eviscerating the protections of ICWA.”12 As the court itself admits,
Applying “white, middle-class” standards to the suitability inquiry as an aspect of the good cause determination could effectively read the preference requirements and the prevailing social and cultural standards of the Indian community out of the statute. This would occur if courts, while determining whether there is good cause for deviating from the statutorily preferred placements, could apply white, middle-class standards to examine or reexamine the suitability of a Native or relative placement deemed suitable under prevailing Indian social and cultural standards. This is the very problem ICWA was enacted to eliminate.[13]
To prevent Indian children from the very dangers that led Congress to enact ICWA, the opinion declares an exception to its own rule: after broadly professing that “[t]he existence of a suitable preferred placement precludes any consideration of a non-preferred placement unless good cause exists;”14 it insists that “in determining whether good cause exists, ‘white, middle-class’ standards may not be applied to reassess the suitability of a preferred placement.”15
*1036As far as I can see, there appears to be no textual or contextual support for this approach. In fact, it appears that before today’s opinion no legislative body or legal authority ever conceived of giving ICWA § 1915 such a roundabout reading. To be sure, as the court notes, the congressional record does suggest that ICWA’s drafters were concerned about the difficulty Indian couples encountered in attempting to qualify as foster and adoptive parents.16 But this hardly supports the conclusion that these difficulties were ICWA’s sole, or even its primary, concern. It surely does not justify reading § 1915(a)’s plain language requiring placement preferences to be honored “[i]n any adoptive placement of an Indian child”17 as having been meant to cover only preliminary placement determinations involving licensing and basic qualifications. And it certainly cannot justify ignoring the far broader purposes set out in ICWA § 190, the Act’s introductory statement of Congressional findings. Among other things, these findings state
that there is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children and that the United States has a direct interest, as trustee, in protecting Indian children who are members of or are eligible for membership in an Indian tribe;
... that an alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions; and
... that the States, exercising their recognized jurisdiction over Indian child custody proceedings through administrative and judicial bodies, have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families.[18]
It is true that the BIA Guidelines do mention the need to consider issues of “special needs” in making good-cause decisions;19 but nothing in the Guidelines suggests that “suitability” and “special needs” issues should be treated as mutually exclusive considerations relating to different kinds of placement decisions. To the contrary, the Guidelines mention both special needs and the availability of suitable Indian homes as factors to consider in making good-cause determinations. By referring to both criteria in discussing the determination of good cause, the Guidelines plainly indicate that both suitability and special needs play an integral role in determining the existence of good cause.20 Conversely, ICWA § 1915 describes both suitability and special needs as factors to consider in selecting preferred placements.21 Indeed, § 1915(b) makes special needs a mandatory criterion for certain preferred-placement determinations involving the suitability of foster care and preadop-tive placements.22 Read together, then, § 1915 and the BIA Guidelines establish that suitability and special needs both are legitimate factors to be considered in making decisions concerning placement preferences and good cause.
Common sense, if nothing else, dictates the same conclusion. As a practical matter, a child’s special needs are an indispensable component of any decision concerning a potential custodian’s suitability for a specific adoptive placement. For purposes of establishing suitability, a proposed adoptive parent’s abilities and the adoptive child’s needs *1037are flip sides of the same coin: though not identical, they fit together, are inseparable, and must correspond. By reading ICWA as commanding suitability decisions for preferred placements that completely ignore special needs, today’s opinion demands an artificially narrow suitability finding that could only examine a potential placement’s abstract ability to care for a hypothetical child. The opinion is equally unrealistic in assuming that special needs can be considered as part of the good-cause determination without redeciding a previous determination of the preferred custodian’s suitability.
Here, for example, it would seem utterly unrealistic to imagine that a meaningful evaluation of Frank and Tonya B.’s suitability to become adoptive parents for Sara, Morris, and Joel could be prepared without carefully examining the children’s needs; and it seems equally unimaginable that a good-cause inquiry could avoid redetermining issues concerning Frank and Tonya B.’s suitability to become adoptive parents of these children if the inquiry ultimately concluded, as it did here, that Matilda was the only availablé adoptive custodian who was capable of meeting their needs.
Today’s opinion confirms this point. The superior court’s decision in this case understandably took a different approach to good cause than the one newly announced in today’s opinion. The trial court viewed the basic question before it as being “whether [Matilda] is the best candidate — among the families deserving to be the children’s adoptive family — to provide for the emotional and educational needs of the children.” In other words, the superior court saw the good-cause inquiry as requiring it to find the most suitable parents. Yet in affirming the trial court’s ruling, today’s opinion does not fault that court for deciding good cause by comparing the suitability of all the available adoptive placements. To the contrary, despite its repeated references to “special needs,” what the opinion basically holds is that Matilda appears to be the only suitable parent for Sara, Morris, and Joel.
The opinion’s unrealistic dichotomy between suitability and special needs is not its only practical problem. Its approach is also troubling because it will invite courts to completely bypass Indian community values in any adoptive placement decision involving a non-preferred placement. Using the opinion’s approach, courts in such eases could routinely assume that all proposed Indian placements would be “suitable” in the abstract sense; courts could then move directly to the good-cause determination and, applying white-middle class values, find the non-Indian custodian to be the only adoptive placement actually suitable for the specific children at issue. After all, if suitability for parenting hypothetical children can be determined without considering special needs, then specific children will always have “special needs.”
This is not what ICWA requires. Section 1915(a) applies to adoptive placements, not preadoptive placements or licensing decisions for future adoptive placements; it contemplates ' custodian-specific and child-specific consideration of suitability and special needs in making all preferred-placement decisions as well as in making all good-cause determinations. I would read § 1915(d) as applying to all aspects of adoptive placement decisions required under § 1915(a), including good-cause findings justifying a non-preferred placement. To this extent, I agree with the tribe’s position on the meaning of § 1915(d)’s reference to § 1915(a)’s “preference requirements.”
But I nevertheless disagree with the tribe as to the meaning of § 1915(d)’s reference to “prevailing social and cultural standards.” Determining the meaning of this phrase poses a difficult problem: Congress undeniably enacted the preference requirements to ensure that Indian children could remain in the Indian community whenever community placement would serve their best interests, as viewed by that community’s standards; but, at the same time, Congress also expressly recognized that these requirements are “not to be read as precluding the placement of an Indian child with a non-Indian family.” 23
*1038As the opinion rightly points out, “[t]here was evidence here that Yup’ik standards dictate that Yup’ik children should invariably be raised by Yup’ik people.” 24 ■ In pressing this evidence, the tribe appears to assume that § 1915(d)’s reference to using the Indian community’s values requires courts to accept an Indian community’s conclusions dictating how its traditional values should apply to a particular placement — including its traditional view that its values always require a preferred placement.
I disagree with the tribe’s assumption. So does today’s opinion, of course. But unlike the opinion, I think that the problem can best be resolved by reading § 1915(d)’s reference to Indian community values to mean what Congress intended. Specifically, I would decline to read § 1915(d)’s reference to “prevailing social and cultural standards” as including community views that flatly preclude non-Native placements. As I read § 1915(d)’s directive, it requires courts to apply the everyday norms and values that the Indian community applies in raising its own children within its community; but it does not command blind acceptance of Indian community views that categorically disqualify all potential non-preferred placements. This interpretation comports with the context and purpose of ICWA, and seems reasonably necessary to avoid absurd and unintended consequences. For if individual Indian communities could automatically block non-preferred placements on the ground that community values categorically preclude cross-cultural placements, then § 1915(a)’s placement preferences would effectively become placement mandates.
Here, the tribe’s nearly exclusive reliance on evidence suggesting that Yup’ik standards would always require a Yup’ik placement reflects a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of § 1915(d)’s directive to use the “prevailing social and cultural standards of the Indian community” when applying § 1915(a)’s preference requirements. The broad reading of § 1915(d) advocated by the tribe in this case conflicts with congressional intent to allow non-Native placement where good cause exists. More important, it also conflicts with the express language of § 1915(a), which uses preference requirements not as substitutes for the application of state law but as a way of assisting states in deciding upon the “placement of an Indian child under State law.”25
As I see it, § 1915(d) seeks to take a pragmatic approach to the universal pitfalls of cultural bias. It does not substitute the Indian community’s norms for the substantive requirements of state law.; it does not override the judge’s usual duty to independently decide issues of suitability, good cause, and best interests according to state law’s substantive standards; and it does not bind the court to accept expert testimony telling it how to apply a community’s standards to a particular case. Instead, the provision simply directs the court to take a hard look at issues of suitability and good cause through the lens of the Indian community’s basic values- — -not so the community can override the court’s choice of suitable placements, but simply to balance the scales more fairly toward Indian custody by ensuring that judges applying state law will use the Indian community’s perspective instead of their own to realistically assess all issues relating to the child’s — not the community’s — best interests.
In this case, compelling evidence was presented to support a finding of good cause to deviate from the placement preference. The superior court also heard abundant evidence, including both lay and expert testimony, concerning prevailing Yup’ik cultural and social standards. In considering this evidence, the court rejected testimony that simply refused to accept any possibility that a non-preferred adoptive placement would ever be suitable under prevailing Yup’ik norms. The court also rejected' the case-specific conclusions reached by the tribe’s main expert witness, Dr. Samuel Roll; it declined to credit them because Dr. Roll had never actually worked in Alaska Native villages or with Alaska Native children and because the court found his conclusions unpersuasive in light of other testimony presented at trial and the court’s own accumulated experience. But despite *1039rejecting Dr. Roll’s case-specific views, the court accepted and considered other important aspects of his testimony, emphasizing that it found Dr. Roll’s theories and information to be generally credible, and only disagreed with his application of his knowledge to the case at hand.
The court also carefully considered and balanced all of the other evidence bearing on the issue of Yup’ik social and cultural standards. And with this evidence in mind, in a thoughtful and comprehensive decision spanning forty pages, the court thoroughly evaluated all relevant aspects of good cause, including the suitability of Frank and Tonya B. to become the children’s adoptive parents, the availability of other suitable preferred placements, Matilda’s suitability as an adoptive parent for the children, her ability to meet the children’s special needs, and her ability to meet their Yup’ik cultural needs. The court ultimately found good cause to deviate from the placement preferences and concluded that a non-preferred placement would serve the children’s best interests. The court essentially concluded that Matilda was the only available placement capable of providing a home for the children without subjecting them to a risk of serious physical and emotional harm; in stating its conclusion, it specifically found that the risk of harm from any other placement would be clearly unacceptable “in either the Western or Yup’ik tradition.”
Based on my own understanding of ICWA’s placement preference requirements, as explained above, I would conclude that the superior court’s decision relied on a correct understanding of the applicable law. I agree with today’s opinion in concluding that, on appeal, the tribe has not shown that any of the trial court’s central factual findings are clearly erroneous or that the conclusions the trial court reached from those findings amount to an abuse of discretion. On this basis, despite disagreeing with the opinion’s view of the law, I concur in affirming the superior court’s judgment.

. 25 U.S.C. § 1915(d).

. Op. at 1022.

. Op. at 1022-23.

. Id. at 1023.

. Id. at 1022.

. Id. at 1022-23.

. 25 U.S.C. § 1915(a) (emphasis added).

. Indeed, if extra-tribal placements were excluded from subsection (a)’s "preference requirements," there would be no textual basis in ICWA for concluding that the good-cause requirement in § 1915(a) would apply to any non-Indian placement, regardless of whether or not the court used prevailing Indian community standards under § 1915(d).

. Op. at 1023 (quoting South Carolina v. Catawba Indian Tribe, Inc., 476 U.S. 498, 506, 106 S.Ct. 2039, 90 L.Ed.2d 490 (1986)).

. Op. at 1027.

. Id. at 1025.

. Id. at 1027.

. Id. at 1028.

. Id. at 1025.

. See Op. at 1024 & n. 29.

. 25 U.S.C. § 1915(a) (emphasis added).

. 25 U.S.C. § 1901(3)-(5).

. Guidelines for State Courts; Indian Child Custody Proceedings, 44 Fed.Reg. 67,584 (Bureau of Indian Affairs Nov. 26, 1979) at 67,594 (relevant provisions set out verbatim in Op. at 1027).

. Id.

. See § 1915(b) (establishing preferred-placement requirements for foster and pre-adoptive placements) (set out in full, Op. at 1019, n. 2).

. See § 1915(b)(iv).

. See Op. at 1024 & n. 32.

. Id. at 1024.

. 25 U.S.C. § 1915(a) (emphasis added).