Adoption Of Indigenous Children Research Articles

A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs

Reviewed by: A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs Catherine E. Rymph A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. By Margaret D. Jacobs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xxxv + 360 pp. Cloth $29.95. The story of indigenous child removal is a devastating one. The well-known Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century United States separated children from their families, communities, language, and culture and thus served as a radical assimilation project. Less familiar may be the ongoing removal of native children from their families deep into the twentieth century. In this fascinating book, Jacobs shows how post–World War II policy changes that scaled back governments’ existing obligations to indigenous peoples coincided with “purportedly color-blind liberalism” in the United States, Canada, and Australia to make indigenous placement in nonindigenous homes seem not only a practical but a humane way to promote the welfare of indigenous children (259). The book’s first two sections focus on Indian child removal in the United States and the grassroots activism that would come to oppose it. The third [End Page 347] section explores parallel histories in Canada and Australia. Although the particular legal and jurisdictional contexts were somewhat different in each country, there were remarkably similar patterns of reform and reaction in what Jacobs identifies as a global phenomenon. In the United States, beginning in the late 1950s, the Indian Adoption Project sought white parents to adopt Indian children and worked to persuade Indian mothers to relinquish newborns. The IAP was intended to address a host of perceived problems. For Jacobs, many of the “problems” that the experts were trying to solve through foster care and adoption were in fact “invented” by those same experts. By constructing children as “unwanted” and their families and communities as hopelessly impoverished and deviant, they helped create a powerful desire among liberal Americans to “rescue” these children as a way to address the “plight” of the Indian (39). Bureaucrats, Jacobs argues, too often turned to draconian solutions like child removal because they could not see the strengths that already existed in Indian families and because they were unable to imagine solutions for Indian children that involved shoring up Indian families and promoting economic and educational opportunity close to home. Native American activists, often initially motivated by the pain of their own experiences of child removal, argued that Indian children were not just members of nuclear families, but also of “extended families, clans, and tribes” (77). Thus the placement of a child outside the tribe affected the collective interests of a much larger group than just the child’s parents and could be seen as a form of cultural genocide. Jacobs details the remarkable stories of Native American activists (mostly women) and their white allies as they struggled to convey the harm done by the IAP. Their efforts culminated in the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which aimed to curb the placement of Indian children outside of tribal communities by giving tribes sovereignty over child welfare. In the third section, Jacobs turns to the strikingly similar stories of Canada and Australia. The transnational approach allows us to see that Indigenous child welfare crises were “part of a pattern among settler colonial nations” (248). The grassroots movements against such policies were also international ones, strengthened by personal connections between activists in different countries that were stimulated by travel, speaking engagements, correspondence, and sharing of resources. Although indigenous child removal is indeed unique, there are also a number of fascinating parallels in the broader history of race, nationality, and poverty within adoption and foster care, which Jacobs might have done more [End Page 348] to acknowledge and address. That her book invites such comparisons, however, is a tribute to her thorough and complex treatment of a challenging subject. Scholars from a variety of fields will welcome this work. Catherine E. Rymph University of Missouri Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

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

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...

Interracial Adoption: One Family’s Journey

A crucial concern regarding the adoption of Indigenous children into “white” families is the separation of the child from her/his Indigenous community and the struggles for the children involved. This paper examines the struggles faced by one Anishinawbe child and his family, the Lees, to come to terms with this dynamic when they adopted him in the early 70s. After the adoption they came to understand themselves as a family that was no longer “white”, one that faced unique challenges as well as opportunities. The initial strategy of the parents was to maintain his contact with the Indigenous community and culture. However, it became apparent that they had to find a way to Indigenize themselves as well. This was accomplished with the assistance of the Indigenous community. This story, unfortunately, does not reflect the majority of transracial adoptions. It is a hopeful one but also raises questions for the role of Indigenous communities, adoptive parents and in particular for policy makers.

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

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

Review: A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs

Review: A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs

Margaret D. Jacobs.A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World.

Margaret D. Jacobs.<i>A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World</i>.

A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. By Margaret D. Jacobs . ( Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press , 2014 . xxxvii + 360 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 , CAN$30.95 , £15.99 .)

<b><i>A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World</i></b>. By Margaret D. Jacobs . ( Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press , 2014 . xxxvii + 360 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 , CAN$30.95 , £15.99 .)

A generation removed: the fostering and adoption of indigenous children in the postwar world

A generation removed: the fostering and adoption of indigenous children in the postwar world

A GENERATION REMOVED: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs (review)

A GENERATION REMOVED: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World by Margaret D. Jacobs (review)