The
Indian Child Interest
 -of the-
Indian Child Welfare Act

Angel Smith is a seventh-generation post-removal Cherokee citizen with direct family lines running out of the Delaware and Tahlequah Districts, and though not a citizen herself, family lines also extended into citizenship in the Muscogee Nation. She was born in 1978, the year Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act. Angel spent approximately ten years as a child in the center of two ICWA cases. She was the child at the heart of a legal matter regarding the application of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act. Her case went on writ to the Supreme Court of Oklahoma twice between approximately 1980 and 1987. As a teenager, she was at the center of a second ICWA kinship foster care placement proceeding with her grandparents. Previously, she served as an Assistant Attorney General, Program Director, and Justice for various tribes. Today, she dedicates her professional and personal work to advocacy and efforts for Indian children and continues to represent tribes, families, and children legally. In the last decade, Angel learned her biological father was a citizen of another country outside the boundary of the United States. She knows firsthand the impact and journey of being a native child in care, raising native children from care as a foster/adoptive parent, and representing native children. Angel dedicates her expertise to ensuring the human life impacted at the end of each case is seen and heard- the Indian child.  

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“For centuries, our children's voices were silenced - by death, by force, by removal, by assimilation- but at this point in history, our children -really of all generations- can be heard.   It is why I, and others, speak of the experiences as much and as often as possible- so their story is known and the life impact understood.  This really is my life work and passion.” 

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Angel is married with children of her own.