LINK
An excerpt:
Margaret Jacobs’s new book,
A Generation Removed, provides a
thoroughly documented and heart wrenching account of good intentions
gone wrong, both in education and in child welfare. Jacobs’s
specialization is women’s history, particularly the interactions between
Indigenous and white women in settler nations such as the United
States, Canada, and Australia. I appreciate Jacobs’ stance as a scholar
all the more because she is a white feminist historian who is able to
cast a critical eye on the contradictory roles often played by women of
European descent. It was from reading Jacobs’s earlier work that I first
encountered the Maternalism movement: the proto-feminist reformers of
their day who asserted female authority and expertise (before American
women could vote or hold elected office) into the public spheres usually
reserved for male leadership.
Jacobs’s previous work,
White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler
Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the
American West and Australia, 1880-1940, is a massive scholarly tome.
I drew on this work for my keynote remarks to the 2013 KAAN (Korean
American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network) conference and at AAC
(American Adoption Congress) 2014.
White Mother to a Dark Race is
a valuable resource, particularly for researchers with an interest in
the origins of public school teaching and the social work profession.
Having said that,
White Mother is quite weighty and not nearly as accessible to lay readers as her latest book,
A Generation Removed.
Jacobs’s new book provides highly personal accounts that help readers
to make sense of the social reform experiments in Indian child welfare
and education from the perspective of the Native women who lost their
children in the process.
Those of us wondering what can be done in contemporary times to halt
the widespread practice of family disruption still perpetuated by the
adoption industry will gain inspiration from the chapter explaining how
the Indian Child Welfare Act came into existence in the 1970s. This
largely untold story may also inspire activists who want to interrupt
the vulture-like “baby lifts” in impoverished communities around the
globe that search for “orphans” for the marketplace of adoption. Readers
will learn not only the faulty reasoning that leads popular
opinion-shapers such as television’s Dr. Phil (who sympathized with the
Capobiancos, the adoptive parents in the Baby Veronica case) to
characterize ICWA as a racist law. Readers will also learn how the
valiant efforts of a committed group of researchers, child welfare
practitioners, and first/birthmothers combined to create an effective
coalition to get ICWA passed in order to protect Indian families.
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| John Raible |
Key to that process, as Jacobs documents meticulously through
archival records and interviews with key players, was the construction
of a counter narrative that challenged the public perceptions of Indian
mothers as unfit parents and drunk welfare dependents who didn’t love
their children. While not denying the problems plaguing many Native
communities, such as alcohol addiction, child neglect and abuse, and
poverty, Jacobs offers a more nuanced and complete portrait of
Indigenous families and their struggles to raise children by maintaining
extended family ties, drawing on the cultural traditions that had been
systematically attacked dating back to the Great Indian Wars. The
struggle for extended family integrity is all the more remarkable and
poignant, given the subsequent onslaught of well-meaning educators in
the boarding schools that for a lengthy period preached the inferiority
of Native ways and tried to replace them with superior Euro-American,
Christian ways.
Another way of putting it is this: There is no “post-adoption” until we
have ended adoption, once and for all. Just as the boarding school
experiment for Native American children has been discredited as
genocidal, just as the Indian Adoption Program has been disbanded (you
can read about its rise and fall in A Generation Removed), so
too, I anticipate that the transracial and transnational adoption
experiments will be replaced by a much more just and humane practice
that is less about the business of selling children (and in the process,
disrupting extended families of color), and more about ensuring justice
and care for the most needy and vulnerable—namely, poor women of color
and their children around the world.
John Raible has written a breathtaking article on how "child removal" affects us adoptees both past and present...It is true Margaret Jacobs has broken new ground in history with her new book A GENERATION REMOVED, and I am still reading it. It takes time to digest. After editing and writing three books on this topic myself, we have made HUGE STEPS in creating awareness of the Indian Adoption Projects and Programs that were genocidal in intent and purpose... We are living proof as American Indian Adoptees that we are resilient....Trace
