RATHDRUM - Dee Dee's things are as she left them.

Dress-up clothes spill out of a cardboard playhouse in one room. Toys and baby dolls and all things pink are scattered on the floor of her bedroom, where Disney princesses are tattooed on the walls.

For the past 4 1/2 years, Dee Dee's home has been in Rathdrum with Andy Butler, a Post Falls elementary teacher and foster parent. Butler said Dee Dee, now 5, was taken without warning on March 21 to be placed with biological relatives under the Indian Child Welfare Act.

The federal law, passed in 1978, requires social workers in cases involving Native American children to involve the child's family and Indian tribe in making decisions, and place the children with Native American relatives when possible.

Now, Dee Dee is moving into the home of her maternal uncle, Joe Tavares, and his wife, Marla. The Tavareses already have custody of Dee Dee's younger brother.

While one family is being reunited, Butler is suffering a heartbreaking loss.

The walls in her quieted home are covered in pictures of Dee Dee. The girl's drawings - dozens of portraits she did of Butler - hang from clothespins in a room set aside for art and play.

While she was with Butler, Dee Dee learned to dance, swim and ice skate.

"I'm not sure how a 5-year-old losing her entire world is in her best interest," Butler said.

Together with her friends and family, Butler has launched a social media campaign and a website - www.bringingdeehome.com - to raise awareness about Dee Dee's case. At best, she said, she hopes for Dee Dee to come back to her home.

"We've been told it's a long shot in the dark," Butler said.

At the least, Butler said she hopes to educate the public on what she sees as injustices in the foster care system and under the Indian Child Welfare Act. Cases like Dee Dee's are sealed from public view and Health and Welfare won't comment on specifics.

"They operate under that confidentiality cloak," Butler said. "They can do whatever they want to do."

According to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, it is rare for children to be in a foster home as long as Dee Dee was before being placed in a permanent home. Only 3 percent of Idaho children who left foster care last year had been with a foster family for more than 4 1/2 years.

"There are many reasons this could happen," Health and Welfare Spokeswoman Niki Forbing-Orr said, "including a foster family being unable to meet a child's special needs or preserve their cultural heritage, changes in the foster family's circumstances, finding a fit and willing relative."

At one point, Butler was in the process of adopting Dee Dee. Everything appeared to be going smoothly, she said, until the department questioned whether they were violating the Indian Child Welfare Act by not placing Dee Dee with a Native American family, she said.

As the debate over whether Health and Welfare must abide by the Indian Child Welfare Act continued, the Tavareses came forward wanting to adopt Dee Dee.

Marla Tavares said she and her husband were willing to do whatever they needed to keep the family intact and "provide Dee Dee and her brother with love, family history and cultural knowledge."

Tavares said her great-grandparents lived through "a history of cultural genocide" and were removed from their families and placed in boarding schools and not allowed to speak their native language.

Butler said an attorney she hired to help her fight for Dee Dee conducted background checks on the Tavares family and discovered arrests and convictions that caused her concern.

"We have passed all requirements to be a licensed foster and adoptive home," Tavares said, "which include comprehensive criminal history and background checks. ... Dee Dee and her brother are safe with us."

Butler worries about the emotional damage the separation after so many years could have on Dee Dee.

Dee Dee became part of her family, she said, and was removed without even getting to say goodbye to the people who had become her grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends.

Butler didn't know if she was going to get a chance to say goodbye, but on Saturday she was allowed a 2-hour and 45-minute "goodbye visit" with Dee Dee.

"She hadn't seen me in a week," Butler said. "She was thrilled until she found out I was not staying and I'm not at liberty to give her any answer."

"She said, 'I'll see you Monday,' I said, 'No, baby. You won't.'"

Tavares said Dee Dee seems to be adjusting well and has her own bedroom "full of books, butterflies and babies."

Dee Dee walks up and down the staircase at their home, she said, looking at family pictures on the wall and asking questions.

"She now knows she was named after her grandmother," Tavares said.

Tavares said she believes it's important for Butler and Dee Dee to maintain their relationship. Dee Dee's brother, she said, still visits his former foster family.

"When she is ready," she said, "I would love for Andrea to be a part of this family as well."

Staff writer Brian Walker contributed to this story.