Margaret D. Jacobs

Beginning in the late 1950s, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, state agencies, and private adoption organizations promoted the widespread fostering and adoption of American Indian children within non-Indian families. As a result, by 1969, in many states with large American Indian populations, 25-35% of Indian children had been removed from their families and either institutionalized, fostered, or placed for adoption in non-Indian families. At the same time, indigenous children in other British settler colonial nations also experienced elevated levels of fostering and adoption outside their communities. This project uses a historical comparative lens to examine why there were such high rates of separation of indigenous children from their families in the second half of the twentieth century.