A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World

Abstract

Book Reviews 200 I hesitated, and then decided to go ahead and offer a few comments. The collective efforts that I chronicle find an echo in my drawings and maps. If I imagined, researched, and sketched them, that was just the beginning. These drawings were revised, improved, and polished over the 20 years that it took to make A City for Children into a richly illustrated book. Students, colleagues, and even members of my immediate family chipped in to help with conceptualization and delineation as I realized that pen-and-ink drawings needed to be turned into digital files and as I uncovered new information. Some of the new evidence came from talking to elderly men and women who used places in the charitable landscape as children. To make the plans of the New Century Club (p. 189), I relied on information offered by Arthur Patterson, and for plans of the Children’s Home (p. 280), I turned to Mollie Fisher and Belva Cooley. I should have made my debt to Arthur, Mollie, and Belva clearer in the text. That leads me to my next comment, which is in response to finding and interpreting children’s voices. Agreed, this is so important, and I so admire the historians who’ve found stunning examples in the archives of middle- and upper-class children writing about, drawing, and even creating physical spaces. Annmarie Adams and Karen Sánchez-Eppler come to mind. Yet this evidence is so rare, so challenging to find for the children who lived in and used institutions in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Oakland. I found all sorts of adults—journalists, reformers, matrons, patrons—who spoke for working-class children in the city, kids who lived in the West Oakland Home and attended the West Oakland Free Kindergarten and the New Century Club. Yet, and alas, no one recorded their voices or kept track of their drawings and diaries. This absence in the archive is troubling—how do we recover lives lost to the historical record? I hoped to begin to mitigate it by thinking about children and their everyday lives in material and spatial terms. Here’s another point that perhaps I could have made clearer: while we may not be able to recover children’s words, we can recuperate them through their spaces. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World Margaret D. Jacobs (2014) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 360 pages. $29.95 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-8032-5536-4. Margaret D. Jacobs’ A Generation Removed tells a postwar story of Indigenous child removal that continues to structure questions of sovereignty, child welfare, and adoption policy today. In June of 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl, which pitted non-Indigenous adoptive parents against baby Veronica’s biological father, a citizen of the Cherokee nation. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the adoptive parents, Book Reviews 201 dealing a swift blow to the legal safeguards for Indigenous families enshrined in the Indian Child Welfare Act (IWCA). Jacobs, a Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, begins her study well before the 1978 passage of ICWA. Devised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1958, the Indian Adoption Project (IAP) helmed a national program of Indigenous foster care and adoption that greatly undermined Indigenous claims to land, sovereignty, and family across the nation. By the late 1960s, an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. In 1976 alone—two years before the passage of ICWA—the per capita foster care rate for Indian children in South Dakota was 22 times higher than for non-Indian children. A Generation Removed finds that a toxic combination of factors contributed to this postwar crisis in Indian child welfare. Government officials eager to cut Indigenous social and legal services welcomed the idea of placing Indian children with middleclass white families. Compounding these cost-cutting measures were prevailing ethnocentric beliefs in both the primacy of the nuclear family and the degraded socio-economic status of Native Americans. Many Indigenous...