Earlier this month, I overheard a conversation during a trip to Florida. A woman on vacation from Ohio was complaining that the Cleveland baseball team changed its name from the Indians to the Guardians. She stated, without any sense of irony, that "natives did not want to change the name." Of course she was referring to baseball fans in Cleveland, who did favored the Indians name–that is, the "native" people in Ohio. I do not think she realized that the people who favored the name change were, quite literally, natives! That is, Native Americans who objected to the Indian name and logo. And, to be precise, there were natives in present-day Ohio before there were white settlers. Still, the people who had the closest connection with the baseball team objected to intermeddling by tribes who cared little for the team's history, but instead, were promoting non-baseball goals that were important to the tribes.
This conversation neatly sums up the dispute between Justice Gorsuch and Justice Alito in Brackeen. (I swear, this conversation actually happened–I couldn't make it up if I tried.)
Let's start with Justice Alito, who is, after all, a big baseball fan. (I do not know if Justice Gorsuch is celebrating the Nuggets' victory.) His dissent states, clearly, that ICWA "subordinat[es] what family-court judges—and often biological parents—determine to be in the best interest of a child to what Congress believed is in the best interest of a tribe." Alito discusses in heart-string-tugging detail the cases of the poor children who were plucked from their loving adoptive families by the meddling tribes. Indeed, one of the children was placed with a maternal grandmother, "who had lost her foster license due to a criminal conviction." Alito is clearly on the side of the adopted parents, and not the tribes. And, for good measure, Justice Alito jabs the tribes in Footnote 1:
