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.

The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project seeks an ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant in the amount of $98,327 for an 18-month project titled, “Honoring Indigenous Community Knowledge: Expanding the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project Beyond the Government Archive.” To date, the Genoa Project has published nearly 3,000 government records, with work underway to publish several thousand additional documents. Building from this work, we request funding to begin a next major phase of our work, supporting descendant communities in telling more complete stories of Genoa through the development of a digital oral history and community knowledge program.