A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided
In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.\xa0
He describes going to the tribe\u2019s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe\u2019s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child.
That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes\u2019 care in favor of non-Native families. \xa0
This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby\u2019s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.\xa0
This episode was produced in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism.
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