Editor’s note • The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.
For several months last year, Utah sent reports of suspected child abuse and neglect on the Navajo Nation to outdated email addresses.
The communication gap went on for four to five months before anyone noticed, state officials acknowledged, raising questions about accountability and safeguards and sparking changes in the agencies’ procedures.
When the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) receives reports of suspected abuse and neglect involving children on the Navajo Nation, it usually refers the reports via email to the relevant district office of the Navajo Nation Division of Social Services (NNDSS).
But DCFS said it wasn’t notified — until an in-person meeting in late May 2023 — of a Navajo Nation email change implemented in January of that year, when newly elected President Buu Nygren took office.
Because it was unclear to DCFS what emails had and had not been received, the division said it conducted an audit in June 2023 of reports sent over the preceding five months and resent over 20 reports.
None of the referrals examined in the audit appeared to require emergency intervention, the division said, adding that in urgent cases, DCFS workers’ practice is to call their tribal counterparts.
The Navajo Nation’s account is a bit different. Eric Gale, department manager III, initially said staff that predated him in the Division of Social Services did notify Utah of the email address change, perhaps verbally since he couldn’t find record of it. He later acknowledged that prior management did not notify Utah DCFS and said that notice was provided a couple of weeks after he came on board in April 2023.
“Going forward, we did meet with Utah, and we do recognize the need that when there is an administration change, that notification needs to be sent out to all of our state partners,” Gale said, adding that his team investigated the communication gap following an email inquiry from The Utah Investigative Journalism Project.
“Those reports that Utah DCFS had sent to our Shiprock office and to our Kayenta office, although we did not see them in our new email accounts, we had them in our old email accounts, and the staff were still accessing the old email accounts,” he said.
“So after much research, our Kayenta office has all of the intake scanned reports sent to them accounted for, and we have records of those cases being assigned according to our internal policy procedures. It took a little more research for our Shiprock office, but we did confirm that we did receive those emails — those scanned reports — and those reports were also assigned accordingly.”
The Utah Investigative Journalism Project asked whether the cases were assigned to tribal staff immediately after the state’s emails arrived in the old accounts, or later, when the tribe investigated what had happened. Gale did not respond to this and other follow-up questions.
When pressed as to why tribal employees were monitoring the old emails for months without letting Utah officials know about the new ones, Gale could not provide a clear answer.
“What it comes down to [is] I’m not sure what the circumstances were at the time under former management,” he said. “Going forward, we are making efforts to improve our communication and relationship with Utah DCFS.”
Utah referrals make up a small portion of the overall reports the tribe’s social services division receives, according to Gale. Of the 388 referrals the division received during the 2023 fiscal year, for instance, only 4% came from Utah. When asked why that number is less than the number of reports Utah said it sent during half of that fiscal year, Gale did not provide further clarification.
DCFS also added that many of the calls to its hotline don’t meet the statutory definition of abuse and neglect necessary for an investigation or they don’t include enough information about how to locate the child. Many of those calls are instead referred to community resources, like a food bank or a crisis nursery. During fiscal year 2023, for example, about 48% of the 47,000 hotline calls were accepted for an investigation.
‘You’d want … a couple fail-safes’
Emails between DCFS and tribal social services between October 2022 and October 2023 show that communication confirming the receipt of referrals or other follow-up beyond the initial email sent by DCFS was rare.
The emails, which were obtained by the UIJP through a records request, are mostly redacted, as are many of their subject lines. However, metadata — such as the date and time they were sent, as well as the senders and recipients — show NNDSS responded to DCFS emails only a handful of times during that year.
During that period, the two agencies exchanged nearly 100 emails, including some duplicates due to referrals being resent to the new email addresses.
Of those, only eight were from NNDSS employees to the state. And just six of those appear to be responses or possible confirmations of receiving referrals, based on the fact that they used “RE:” in the subject line. One was an out-of-the-office auto reply and another, sent in May 2023, was to advise DCFS of an updated email address.
Utah DCFS Director Tonya Myrup said her agency doesn’t follow up on the status of cases outside its jurisdiction.
But, Gale said, employees of the two agencies met in person this summer in Moab and discussed communication and other issues. As a result of that July conversation, he said, he has directed his staff to send confirmation when they receive child abuse or neglect referrals from Utah.
Also, in response to the confusion in 2023, Myrup said, DCFS has implemented a policy to check in with each tribe every six months to get an update on any contact changes.
Kathryn Fort, who runs the Indian Law Clinic at Michigan State University, said what happened here seems like a classic communication breakdown between two large bureaucracies. The clinic has helped dozens of tribes, including the Navajo Nation, with issues relating to child welfare.
“The goal always is that there is open and regular communication regarding Native children between the state and the tribe,” Fort said. “As a best practice, obviously, you would — especially when it comes to reporting on child neglect reports — you’d want to have a couple fail-safes in place.”
“Generally speaking, one would hope that if you suddenly stopped receiving referrals that you had been receiving, rather than assuming that suddenly we had fixed the child welfare system, that … someone would follow up somewhere,” she continued. “And I would say that this [communication gap] is absolutely on the state as well.… Does the state, even before this, just send referrals into the ether via email and never receive a confirmation that it was received?”
Fort added that although she can’t comment specifically on the consequences of this case, a lack of clear policies and procedures is generally detrimental to children and families and delays their receiving services.
Navigating jurisdictions
Understanding and respecting jurisdiction and tribal sovereignty is key to handling child welfare cases involving Native American children, said Heather Tanana, an Indian law expert and citizen of the Navajo Nation. She added that ideally, people making child abuse reports should contact the agency that has jurisdiction.
“Utah shouldn’t really be in the business of handling referrals in these calls when it’s a clear Navajo Nation jurisdiction matter,” Tanana said. “And so to some extent, that’s on the person who calls in.” She continued: “Like here in Utah, you’re not going to go call Idaho police to help you out; they don’t have jurisdiction.”
Such cases involving Native American children are largely governed by the Indian Child Welfare Act, often referred to as ICWA. It aims to keep Native children with their families and gives tribes exclusive jurisdiction over children residing on a reservation.
The law was passed in 1978 in response to the widespread and often unwarranted removal of Native children from their families and tribes. Before it went into effect, surveys by the Association of American Indian Affairs indicated that 25% to 35% of all Native children were separated from their families and placed in foster homes, adoptive homes or institutions.
“Utah cannot go on to the Navajo reservation and act on one of those reports,” Fort explained. “So Utah’s only response to [someone] sending those kinds of reports to Utah, if the child lives on reservation land, is going to be that they have to send it to [the] Navajo Nation.”
Anyone reporting abuse or neglect of Navajo children who live on the reservation should send reports directly to the Navajo Nation, DCFS’s Myrup agreed. However, that doesn’t always happen in practice.
“I think sometimes in those areas, someone may not know the exact jurisdiction,” she said. “And so they may call Utah DCFS just because we advertise a lot and they’ve got that [hotline] number.”
In such cases, Myrup added, a DCFS intake worker will collect enough information to determine if a child resides on tribal lands. If the worker determines the case is out of the state’s jurisdiction, they will refer the report to the appropriate tribe via email.
’We are improving’
To help outline procedures in other cases or for issues not explicitly covered in ICWA, states and tribes can enter into intergovernmental agreements. The UIJP obtained a copy of such an agreement that Utah DCFS and the NNDSS signed in 2019. It does not contain a clause about notifying each other of contact information changes.
There is still a disproportionate removal of Native kids from their families in Utah, Tanana said, even though, in her opinion, the state has done better than many others in establishing agreements with tribes and infrastructure to better comply with ICWA. One example, she said, is the fact that the Utah Department of Health and Human Services has an Indian Child Welfare Administrator on the Navajo Nation.
“I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying that I’m surprised to hear DCFS didn’t know about the email change because usually they’re in pretty good communication with one another,” she said. “Certainly, Navajo [Nation] should have informed DCFS.”
Tanana said she sees the communication gap as more reflective of the challenges of the child welfare system in general than the relationship between Utah and the Navajo Nation.
“Their caseloads are so high, they have a lot on their plate, and so this was something that was overlooked on both ends in my opinion,” she said. “I don’t think it was intentional.”
The Utah-Navajo agreement says that a coordination committee of representatives from both agencies should meet “quarterly or as needed” to address issues like coordination and communication.
Myrup, who has been in her position less than two years, said she believed such in-person meetings became more infrequent during the pandemic. The May 2023 meeting, she added, was the first in-person meeting between the two agencies in about a year. Local offices and individual case workers, however, meet and communicate much more regularly, she said.
Fort added that best practices for child welfare go beyond just having an agreement in place between a tribe and state — and it’s up to individuals to follow procedures.
“If you don’t have people trained on that agreement and or those policies and what they’re supposed to be doing, then it’s just a document that sits on a shelf,” she said. “Nothing happens with it.”
Attorney and policy consultant Andrea Wilkins, who wrote “Fostering State-Tribal Collaboration: An Indian Law Primer,” suggested the tribe and the state regularly review shared practices and agreements and check in often to identify issues before they build into larger problems. Spelling out specific communication and follow-up policies would, she added, also be beneficial and wouldn’t infringe on a tribe’s sovereignty.
“Formally capturing the communication process and expectations also helps to institutionalize it,” she said, “so that you don’t have to essentially start over every time there is new staff or new leadership.”
The tribe and DCFS, Gale said, are “trying to maintain and uphold the communication agreements in that [intergovernmental] agreement where we meet quarterly.” He was “much obliged,” he said, to learn that the two agencies had scheduled meetings when he recently came back from paternity leave. “So we are improving the way that we communicate.”
Mryup said she has “really appreciated the willingness” of the Navajo Nation work through communication challenges. “We have that same shared goal of safe children,” she said, “and really working to ensure that parents have the resources and support they need to safely care for their kids.”
