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makers.
• "South Dakota for well over a decade has systematically violated the spirit and the letter of the Indian Child Welfare Act," the directors wrote in the report. "The state appears to have done this willfully, and it may have done so at least partly to bring federal tax dollars into the state. ... We ICWA directors request that Congress put pressure on the BIA to host the summit on Native American foster care in South Dakota immediately."
• A spokeswoman for the Interior Department's Office of Indian Affairs did not return phone and email messages seeking comment about the summit.
• The federal Indian Child Welfare Act directors' report found that while Native American children make up 13.8 percent of the child population in South Dakota, they make up on average 56.26 percent of youth in foster care in the state. The report also found that as of July 2011, there were 440 Native American children in family-run foster homes in South Dakota. Only 59 of those children were placed in Native American foster homes while 39 Native American foster homes sat empty.
• The report was prepared with the Lakota People's Law Project, a nonprofit law firm working to enforce the Indian Child Welfare Act in South Dakota.
• "The point of the report is to stand in for the BIA. The BIA was supposed to provide an explicit assessment on the reporting that happened last year. The BIA did not do that," said Daniel Paul Nelson, secretary-treasurer for the Lakota People's Law Project. He added that a summit would not solve all the problems but would be one step to finding a solution.
• The directors' report found that NPR's assertion that the state's motive for removing Native American children from their homes for financial gain is "complex." It found circumstantial evidence that state officials may take high numbers of Native American foster children in custody to stimulate South Dakota's economy because the state gets millions a year to subsidize foster care programs and receives additional money for every special needs child it adopts out.
• The report did not offer suggestions on how to fix what the directors see as a problem, Nelson said, because they want to get all the stakeholders together to discuss the issues.
• Tony Venhuizen, a spokesman for South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard, reiterated that the Department of Social Services had "deep concerns" with the NPR report and said the Department of Social Services could not comment on the Indian Child Welfare Act directors' report because the agency had not seen it.
• In the past, state officials acknowledged that a disproportionate number of Native American children are involved in the child welfare system, but said that is because

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