Courtsystem Stories

Imagine that just as your marriage is breaking up ... your seven year old son is diagnosed as having a malignant brain tumour. Now imagine that the doctors in charge of your son's treatment want him to have a risky and antiquated form of radiation treatment...rather than a more advanced and safer alternative. This was the situation that faced Sally Roberts in 2012 This is the compelling story of a child's cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery against the odds, and his mother's courage as an advocate for her son - and for better treatment for children with cancer.

Imagine being assigned an Amendment, and you have to find a current event article that deals with your amendment in some way, shape, or form.

Elena Redbird has spent her entire life caught between two worlds. Taken from an Arizona reservation at only two years old and adopted by a loving white couple in suburban Ohio, Elena grows up surrounded by warmth, opportunity, and stability-yet haunted by memories she cannot fully grasp. The scent of cedar smoke. A woman's voice singing in another language. Red desert earth beneath a blazing sun. Fragments of a life that was taken from her before she was old enough to understand it. Now twenty-eight, Elena has built her life around protecting others. Armed with master's degrees in social work and public defense advocacy, she works within the Ohio court system helping vulnerable families navigate custody battles and child welfare cases. But when a Native American child is placed into foster care during a routine hearing, Elena is forced to confront the uncomfortable truth beneath the system she serves: the same laws meant to protect children once separated her from her own people. As she begins searching for sealed adoption records and the family she lost, Elena is drawn back toward the Arizona reservation where she was born. There she discovers a world both familiar and foreign-a culture she aches to belong to, yet fears she may never fully reclaim. While reconnecting with her birth mother and the tribal community that never forgot her, Elena uncovers the painful legacy of Native children being removed from their homes under the guise of protection, assimilation, and "better opportunity." Torn between gratitude for the parents who raised her and grief for the identity stolen from her, Elena must navigate the complicated intersection of family, law, race, and belonging. As old anger slowly gives way to understanding, she begins to realize that identity is not something divided neatly between two worlds. It is something carried.