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A Generation Removed

The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World

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1 of 1 copy available
On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl, which pitted adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco against baby Veronica's biological father, Dusten Brown, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Veronica's biological mother had relinquished her for adoption to the Capobiancos without Brown's consent. Although Brown regained custody of his daughter using the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Capobiancos, rejecting the purpose of the ICWA and ignoring the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families. In A Generation Removed, a powerful blend of history and family stories, award-winning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post–World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. Jacobs also reveals the global dimensions of the phenomenon: These practices undermined Indigenous families and their communities in Canada and Australia as well. Jacobs recounts both the trauma and resilience of Indigenous families as they struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.
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    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2014
      Little-known story of the forcible removal of American Indian children in the 1960s and '70s. In this nuanced, scholarly work, Bancroft Prize winner Jacobs (History/Univ. of Nebraska; White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, 2009, etc.) describes how government authorities took thousands of American Indian children away from their families, acting on the prevalent notion that Indian families were unfit to raise children. With no evidence of neglect required, the children were institutionalized, fostered or adopted in non-Indian homes. Officials claimed to be acting in "the best interests of the child," while critics charged that social workers and court officials were using "ethnocentric and middle-class criteria" to remove children unnecessarily. In fact, writes the author, the removals were acts of cost-cutting disguised as caring: Neither federal nor state governments had to fund the care of American Indian children once private families adopted them. For officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, private adoptive homes solved "the Indian problem of persistent dependence on the federal government." For Indian families, the results were devastating and traumatic. Moreover, extended Indian families customarily helped care for tribal children, including those of unwed mothers. Jacobs recounts the thinking of bureaucrats, the polarizing debates among psychologists and social workers, and earlier federal attempts to assimilate Native American children, most notably by sending them to boarding schools known for their corporal punishment. Child removal ended with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which affirmed tribes' sovereignty over most such matters. In Canada and Australia, similar treatment of indigenous children triggered public discussion and government apologies, while the U.S. government has ignored the issue. A solid account that calls for "a full historical reckoning" of this devastating chapter in the treatment of Native Americans.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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