George glanced around the restaurant. It was cavernous, with the tables empty and set far apart from each other. Otherwise, it looked like any old diner, except that it still had telephones without dialers in the booths.
So begins Truck Stop, a fictional narrative by Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, forthcoming in the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review. Fletcher explains its purpose in this abstract:
Every American Indian person - repeat, every American Indian person - is related to or knows someone or is someone who has been adopted out of or removed from their reservation family. A significant percentage of each recent generation of American Indian people has grown up among strangers, either adopted by non-reservation families or force-fed through a state foster care system. This is, of course, one of the fundamental issues Congress hoped to address when it enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. This fictional narrative is my take on what it means for an Indian person to lose their family - and to regain it much, much later.
