ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the treatment of extra-tribal adoption in two important novels published in the 1990s: Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven. First, people look briefly at several historical cases of captivity, adoption, and transculturation in order to underscore the context in which extra-tribal adoptions developed. The chapter considers how the Native American tribalism as codified in the Indian Council of world Affairs (ICWA) specifically challenges dominant conceptions of kinship grounded in Euro-American ideologies of possessive individualism and the nuclear family. The ICWA takes the sovereign status of Indian tribes as its point of departure and strengthening sovereignty as one of its main goals. The legal status of Indian tribes as "domestic dependent nations" brings the issues involved in extra-tribal adoption closer to those encountered in transnational adoption than those found in the transracial adoption.
