Veronica Krupnick’s advocacy has taken her from college counseling to Indian Child Welfare Act preservation work and even a state Senate candidacy.
An Indigenous child adopted into a white family, Veronica Krupnick grew up safe and cared for. But there was always that longing. Something was missing. There was the emptiness of being extricated from her past and people.
Krupnick, a 28-year-old resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, did not just sit on those feelings of loss. As an adult, she has worked to ensure that the pain she experienced growing up outside her community isn’t repeated. Earlier this year, Krupnick became the youngest candidate to run for New Mexico’s state Senate, and she has spoken publicly of her past and efforts to overhaul the child welfare system.
“I don’t share my story to blame people, I share it so we can all learn and then we just do better,” Krupnick said. “We do better by the next family, the next youth, the next child, so they don’t have to go through this unnecessary pain.”
Today Krupnick is a leadership analyst for state Majority Leader Rep. Gail Chasey. Between 2018 and 2023, she worked with the Court Appointed Special Advocate program through the First Judicial District as a foster youth advocate, and now serves as vice president of the local CASA’s board of directors.
She has testified in favor of her state’s version of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, which bolsters protections for Native American families. And she is part of a statewide team working to establish New Mexico’s second ICWA court, a judicial program that seeks better outcomes for tribal children and parents in the foster care system.
Krupnick’s Senate campaign raised more than $15,000, and garnered more than 15% of votes in the district. In the June 4 primary election, she lost to former Rep. Linda Trujillo, an attorney with a background in education and public administration who received 62% of the vote in a three-way race for the Senate seat.
“I kind of knew that was going to be an uphill-slash-losing battle when I entered,” Krupnick said. “I‘m 28, Native, I identify as a queer person, there’s a lot of things at play that just weren’t potentially going to work in my favor.”
Krupnick said she felt she should campaign anyway, because she hadn’t heard any voices like hers in New Mexico’s Senate.
“I was able to gain some healing for myself through helping other people heal.”
— Veronica Krupnick
And the loss didn’t stop her. She continues to push for keeping Indigenous children and families together whenever and wherever she can. Her current job in the statehouse involves advising on child welfare issues, vetting legislation, and answering constituents’ questions. In other roles, she facilitates meetings to ensure ICWA compliance across New Mexico.
“She is a true inspiration,” said Donalyn Lorenzo Sarracino, director of the Office of Tribal Affairs for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department. “I know she will make a positive impact on the lives of New Mexico’s children, youth, families, and tribal communities.”
It began with butterflies
Krupnick was born in Tuba City, Arizona, to a Hopi father and a Jemez Pueblo mother. They were teenagers who got caught up in the juvenile justice system at a young age, she said, and coped through the not-uncommon path of addiction.
Krupnick was 4 when she and her mother moved to Albuquerque to be closer to her mother’s relatives on the Jemez Pueblo reservation. There are good memories from those times.
In a photo of her at age 4 that she received as a young adult, Krupnick sits in a white wicker chair wearing a patterned sundress splashed with eggshell-colored carnations and red roses. Reflecting on the photo in an interview, she said it reveals how well she was cared for before being taken into foster care. The image also “kept the door open for my family back home,” Krupnick said.
But at age 6, her mother fell into drug use again, and child protection workers accused her of maltreatment. That sent the kindergartner through the first of seven different foster care placements, mostly outside of her tribal community.
Krupnick said she now realizes she found ways to create a sense of calm for herself as she learned to cope with the difficult transitions she endured as a child. She loved to catch butterflies with a net from the Dollar Store. She would collect them in a Mason jar and release dozens of beating wings into her bedroom. Fitting, she said, since she later discovered she was of the Butterfly Clan in the Hopi Tribe.
One year after she entered foster care, her sister was born.
But while Krupnick’s foster care case involved her tribe and the extra protections afforded to tribal members under the nation’s 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, her sister’s case did not. That’s because while their mother has Jemez relatives, she is not an enrolled member of her tribe. Krupnick’s father is Hopi, granting her ICWA rights. Her sister’s father is not Indigenous.
“I came with a tribal card,” Krupnick said, but her sister, who she remains close to, did not.
Although Krupnick had the right to a tribal placement under ICWA provisions, social workers with the Hopi Tribe wanted to keep the siblings together. So when Krupnick was 9, the two girls were placed with a white adoptive family in Albuquerque. They were adopted when Krupnick was 10.
The children were loved and cared for, she said. But cracks started to surface in their young lives. Krupnick said she and her sister — who is Black and Indigenous — both faced difficulty fitting into white and Indigenous communities at times, a childhood experience she called “truly heartbreaking.” They grew up knowing little of their mother’s tribal heritage.
At 14, Krupnick says, she landed on juvenile probation for petty crimes. And two years later, she was sent to a residential treatment facility. After a 10-month stint she moved to a transitional living program.
Her next move of note? Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where she arrived in 2014 “with two suitcases and that’s about it,” she told the Navajo-Hopi Observer.
Krupnick worked at night as a pharmacy technician and during the day as a student ambassador, later earning a bachelor’s degree in public health with a minor in psychology. College life afforded her an early opportunity for advocacy. Throughout her four years, Krupnick worked as a “wellness peer” educator focused on suicide and sexual assault prevention on campus — experiences she survived in her youth.
“I form really great relationships with younger people and I found the connection actually came from being transparent and authentic,” Krupnick said. “I was able to gain some healing for myself through helping other people heal.”
“We’re going to have you sign a cultural contract that’s going to outline who, when, and how you are going to nurture this young child’s Native identity.”
— Veronica Krupnick
After graduating and taking a job with CASA, Krupnick has testified before lawmakers about the need for New Mexico’s Indian Family Protection Act, which strengthens ICWA and was signed into law in 2022. Of note is a provision that includes legally binding adoption agreements that require parents to commit to nurturing children’s Native identity. The state law, one of 16 nationwide, is also noteworthy for its requirements that court proceedings include an Indigenous language interpreter when needed.
“Our state-based law says we’re going to have you sign a cultural contract that’s going to outline who, when, and how you are going to nurture this young child’s Native identity — and this is part of your legal binding adoption agreement,” Krupnick said, calling the law “a supermodel, platinum standard law no one else has, which solely came from lived experience.”
As a result, she added: “Parents aren’t losing their rights, kids are getting to stay with their families, and we’re not seeing them again.”
For her part, although foster care disconnected her from family and tribe during her childhood in an adoptive home, roughly five years ago Krupnick reconnected with her relatives. Last April, she celebrated her great-great grandmother’s 91st birthday on the Jemez Pueblo reservation alongside other family members. Rejoicing at the news that Krupnick had decided to run for Senate, her elder hugged her with tear-filled eyes.
Although she did not win her first election, Krupnick said she plans to return to politics some day.
That’s something that her supporters would like to see, among them Takkeem Leon Morgan of Indiana, a former foster youth who contributed to her campaign. In an online statement on her leadership, Morgan said Krupnick had a “profound impact” on the state legislators who attended a public event he participated in.
“The rapt attention and clear shift in perspective across the aisle were testaments to Veronica’s leadership and vision,” he wrote.
