Native American Children & Youth

Serving Native American Children and Youth: Tribal CASA Collaboration Introduction.

California Tribal Statistics:

California is home to 107 federally recognized Tribes. 1

More Native Americans live in California than in any other state. 2

Furthermore, the majority of the Native Americans living in California are from tribes located outside of California. 3

This creates a unique and diverse Native American Community in California that unfortunately remains invisible to most non-Indian people.

Disproportionality of Native American Children in Care:

Today, in California, Native American children are still vastly over-represented in the California child welfare system compared to other populations.  Native American children are the second highest over-represented population in the system. 4 In fact, African American children and Native American Children are the only two populations that are over-represented in the child welfare system in California. 

According to the CWS/CMS data for 2008, while .65% of the total population of children in California is “in care” in the child welfare system, 2.11% of the Native American population of children in California is in care.  Native American children comprise 1.5% of all the children in care in California and only comprise .47% of California’s total population of children.

In 2009 CalCASA partnered with specific tribal CASA programs and local/county CASA programs through a project funded by CalEMA titled: The Tribal County CASA Collaboration Project.  This Project was an effort to improve CASA advocacy for Native American Children statewide. To read the findings of this project click on the image below. To learn more about advocating for Native American Children and Youth click the buttons at the right.

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Footnotes:

1. Indian Entities Recognized and Elligible To Recieve Services From the United States Bureau of indian Affairs, 73 Fed.Reg. 18553, 18553-18556 (April 2008).
2. U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census - 2000 (2000) <http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html> [as of July 27, 2009].
3. Ibid.
4. Needell, B., Webster, D., Armijo, M., Lee, S., Dawson, W., Magruder, J., Exel, M., Glasser, T., Williams, D., Zimmerman, K., Simon, V., Putnam-Hornstein, E., Frerer, K., Cuccaro-Alamin, S., Winn, A., Lou, C., Peng, C. & Holmes, A., Child Welfare Services Reports for California: 2008 Disparity Indices by Ethnicity (2009) University of California at Berkeley Center for Social Services Research <http://cssr.berkeley.edu/CWSCMSreports> [as of July 27, 2009].