In
1958 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) created the Indian Adoption
Project. Its clear goal was to take Native kids away from their
biological parents.
That's according to Melissa Olson, a legal advocate for Native children.
"This
was not an accident of history, it was a government program designed to
save the government money and dismantle tribes. All under the guise of
integrating Native children more fully into American society," Olson
said in a documentary she produced exploring the cultural and historical
impacts of forced adoption, titled "Stolen Childhoods."
When
the BIA started the project it enlisted social workers to visit
reservations and convince parents to sign away their parental rights. It
was a way to assimilate these children into "civilization," Olson said.
The government believed adoption was the best option for dealing with
the Native children "problem."
"When you removed a child and put
them in a non-Indian family, they wouldn't be getting to know other
Indian people as they would in a boarding school, they would hopefully
be raised in a middle-class family. And so the idea was that they would
be fully assimilated, and at no cost to the government," said Margaret
Jacobs, author of "A Generation Removed," a book on forced adoption.
The
adoption project sold their idea to white families using advertisements
asserting that to not adopt would be choosing to leave children with no
chance of survival — as in their own families would not be able to
provide and care for them so it was up to these white families to help,
Jacobs said.
By the 1960s about one in four Native children were
living apart from their families. During this era, social workers found
more dubious ways of taking children from their mothers.
"One of
the things I found that really shocked me was a form that the Bureau of
Indian Affairs developed. It was called 'authorization for discharge of
an infant,' something like to a person who's not a family member. So it
doesn't say authorization to adopt, or anything like that. It says
nothing about losing one's child, or giving up rights to one's child, or
putting a child up for adoption," Jacobs said. "It's all this sort of
legalistic language that I didn't understand either when I was reading
it."
Many of these adopted children, now adults, struggle with
memories from traumatic childhoods in abusive homes, while trying to
figure out where they fit in as Natives in white communities. Olson
followed a few of these people's stories in "Stolen Childhoods."
The documentary was produced at KFAI by Melissa Olson and Ryan Katz and edited by Todd Melby.
To listen to the documentary, click the link above.
we will update as we publish at AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES WEBSITE - some issues with blogger are preventing this
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Stolen Generations: Cultural impact of the Indian Adoption Project still felt today
Labels:
Melissa Olson,
Stolen Childhoods,
stolen generations
Adoptee, Author, Mosaic Artist, Blogger, wildly curious
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