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

ISBN-13: 9781496235435

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Nebraska

Publication Date: 08-01-2023

Pages: 398

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Margaret D. Jacobs, Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, is the author of the Bancroft Prize–winning White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Nebraska, 2009) and Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Nebraska, 1999).

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A Generation Removed

The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

The Bureaucracy of Caring for Indian Children

Adam Fortunate Eagle was five years old when his father died, leaving eight young children without his financial support during the Great Depression. Adam's mother sent the six oldest children, including Adam, from their home on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota to Pipestone Indian Boarding School in the southwestern part of the state. She later married a Sisseton-Wahpeton man from the Lake Traverse Reservation and moved to South Dakota. Adam came home nearly every summer to Red Lake, where he and his siblings stayed with various Chippewa relatives until his teen years, when he went to live with his mother, by now living in Oregon. Adam later discovered that many other children at Pipestone had similar experiences; one or more parents had died, desperate financial hardship haunted their families, and sometimes a rupture had occurred in family relationships.

Pipestone was but one of dozens of boarding schools that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had originally set up in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century to solve the so-called Indian problem through assimilation. Their champions posited that by intervening in Indian family life and removing Indian children to institutions, the government could transform Indian dependents into self-sufficient members of American society. Thousands of Indian children up to the 1930s experienced removal—often coercive—from their families and communities and endured institutionalization in one of the dozens of boarding schools for at least a portion of their childhood.

The boarding schools failed miserably in their goal of ending the "Indian problem." Instead the schools triggered many unforeseen consequences. For one, Indian families like that of Adam Fortunate Eagle had come to use boarding schools as a means to supplement the family care of children. Some indigent families sent their children to the schools to make sure they received adequate meals, shelter, and clothing. By the mid-twentieth century the BIA believed the boarding schools had become just one more aspect of the government's largesse that sustained rather than ended Indian dependence.

The federal government readily sought to shed its responsibility for the care of Indian children like Adam by the early 1950s, and many states seized the chance to have greater control over the affairs of Indian people within their borders. The BIA closed Pipestone Boarding School in 1953, and the state of Minnesota took over child welfare services for Indian children. By 1957 the state was providing assistance to 1,919 Indian children. The Minnesota Indian population accounted for just 0.5 percent of the total state population, but Indian children made up 9.2 percent of the caseload of child welfare services. Of these cases, just under half still lived with their parents, while the state had placed the other children in foster homes or institutions.

The question of who should care for Indian children, how they should do so, and more importantly, who should pay for this care, remained a murky and contested jurisdictional issue. The state of Minnesota found itself in a quandary. Suddenly they needed to fund services to Indian children that had been borne by the federal government through the BIA's boarding schools or its Social Services program. The BIA contracted with the state of Minnesota to provide child welfare services for Indian children, but state legislators asked Congress and the Department of Interior to appropriate more funds to the state to provide "a necessary and valuable service to Indian children in need." From the 1950s on, state and federal bureaucrats wrangled over who should bear the cost for Indian children who came under state care.

The BIA devised a solution in 1958 that appealed to both federal cost cutters and cash-strapped state agencies: the Indian Adoption Project. This project promoted the placement of Indian children in non-Indian adoptive families; it looked to the ultimate private sector to take over the expense of raising Indian children and assimilating them once and for all. Reducing the costs of care for Indian children served as their priority, but BIA and state bureaucrats justified the Indian Adoption Project as a caring program that would rescue supposedly forgotten Indian children and find them permanent homes.

Disturbingly, most bureaucrats by the late 1950s rarely imagined a solution to the care of Indian children that involved strengthening Indian families and keeping Indian children within their homes. Most government officials deemed Indian families inherently and irreparably unfit, and so they ignored the proposition of funding preventative and rehabilitative services to Indian families. Ultimately they regarded this path as too costly and out of step with the overarching policy goals of the period: to terminate Indian tribes and de-Indigenize Indian people. Policymakers now used new terms and strategies, but the primary settler colonial goal of eliminating American Indian people remained unchanged. Indian children and Indian families suffered as a result.

By all socioeconomic indicators, Indians in the post–World War II era endured the most extreme hardship of any American minority. They had the highest rates of unemployment and suicide and the lowest incomes and life expectancies. The infant mortality rate, a sensitive indicator of overall socioeconomic status, was nearly three times as high among Indians as in the general population in 1957. In some regions the rate was much higher: Arizona and New Mexico had the highest infant Indian death rates: 127 and 121 per 1,000 live births, compared to 28 for the United States overall. For Indian infants 28 days to one year old, the death rate was almost six times as high as for the general population. These dire economic conditions on reservations led many Indian families to depend on public assistance. From the vantage point of federal authorities and legislators, little had changed since the late nineteenth century; Indian people were still hopelessly reliant on government programs. The "Indian problem," as defined by non-Indian bureaucrats, was alive and well.

Many such government officials lay the blame at the feet of commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, believing that his halting steps toward Indian self-determination in the 1930s and 1940s and his support for the persistence of Indian languages and cultures had kept Indians back. They insisted that what was needed instead was an aggressive drive toward assimilation. These legislators and administrators gained ascendancy after World War II, and they shaped a new federal policy that called for a termination of Indians' unique tribal status vis-à-vis the federal government, the increased relocation of Indians to urban areas as a means to promote their employment, and the transfer of some responsibilities for Indian affairs to the states. The new orientation toward the care of Indian children emerged as both a consequence and a manifestation of these new government policies.

Congress officially legislated their intent to terminate Indian tribal status in 1953 with House Concurrent Resolution 108. The bill called for the termination over the next few years of five specific tribes—the Klamaths, Flatheads, Menominees, Pottawatomies, and the Turtle Mountain Chippewas—and all tribes in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah was the primary proponent of termination. He claimed that it would free Indians from their status as government wards and that it was as revolutionary as the Emancipation Proclamation. As historian Paul Rosier points out, "the discourse of termination was that of the Cold War—the avowed goal was to 'liberate' the enslaved peoples of the world, who, according to American cold warriors, included Indians 'confined' in 'concentration camps' or 'socialistic environments.'" The bill ended federal supervision and dissolved federal control over thirteen tribes.

Congress enacted several other bills to eliminate additional tribes following this resolution's passage. In all, of about two hundred tribes that were officially recognized in the 1950s, Congress slated 109 for termination. Legislators left it to the BIA to carry out termination, which sometimes took up to seven years. Officials stipulated that tribes designated for termination had to dispose of all tribal properties, either through organizing into a corporation for continued management under a trustee of their choice or through selling all properties and assets with proceeds to be distributed among tribal members.

Termination proved an unmitigated disaster from the point of view of both tribes and the federal government. As scholar Charles Wilkinson describes it, "every terminated tribe floundered. Members of the smaller tribes ... got a few hundred dollars apiece for their sold-off land and migrated to the cities or lived in shantytowns near their former reservations." Termination did not free Indians or promote their self-sufficiency; instead, Wilkinson notes, most terminated Indians "found themselves poorer, bereft of health care, and suffering a painful psychological loss of community, homeland, and self-identity." Bureaucrats quietly discarded the policy by the late 1960s, and the government formally abandoned it in the 1970s. The shortsighted and hastily enacted policy, however, had already had devastating consequences for Indian people.

Alongside termination, the government proposed moving Indians from rural reservations and communities to urban centers. The BIA's Operation Relocation, begun in 1952 and extended through the early 1960s, mounted a major public relations campaign to encourage Indians to leave their reservations, move to urban areas, and ostensibly acquire job training and regular employment. The BIA footed the moving bill, paid the relocated families' first month's rent, and promised vocational education. Lured by visions of full employment and greater opportunity, more than thirty-five thousand Indians relocated to urban areas through the BIA's program, and many others moved on their own. In 1950 just 20 percent of American Indians lived in urban areas, but by 1980, 55 percent did. Major destinations included Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Chicago. BIA bureaucrats touted relocation as a means of integrating Indians into American life, but financial concerns underwrote this policy. Once Indians had been relocated to an urban area for a defined period, usually six months, they ceased to be wards of the federal government. If they required public assistance, the states and local municipalities would then bear the cost.

In addition to termination and relocation, Congress passed Public Law 83–280 (commonly known as Public Law 280 or PL-280) in 1953, which transferred some jurisdiction over Indian affairs from the federal government to some states. Congress initially reassigned criminal and some civil jurisdiction over tribal lands to California, Minnesota (except the Red Lake Chippewa Reservation), Nebraska, Oregon (excluding the Warm Springs Reservation), Wisconsin, and Alaska (upon statehood) and later allowed other states to gain partial jurisdiction over Indian tribes in their states. Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nevada, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington all later became PL-280 states.

Tribal officials had neither requested nor consented to this transfer of responsibilities, and they were overwhelmingly opposed to it. Nevertheless, Congress imposed PL-280 on Indian communities to "relieve federal financial obligations and to address perceived 'lawlessness' on reservations." Congress amended the act in 1968 to require tribal consent, but this provision did not apply retroactively. Ironically, PL-280 actually led to increased lawlessness on reservations, since it defunded tribal justice systems. PL-280 did not just affect the resolution of disputes on reservation lands; now states were to assume the same responsibility for education, welfare, and the health care of needy Indians as they did for needy non-Indians, but without being given additional federal funds to carry out these services. Ultimately tribes in PL-280 states were at a decided disadvantage compared with other tribes; they suffered from lower levels of federal support and an absence of compensating state support. PL-280 thus increased the power of state welfare agencies over Indian people at the same time as it clouded the jurisdictional responsibility for and authority over Indian people.

As Congress slated tribe after tribe for termination in the 1950s, the BIA discovered a need for new welfare services for Indians. The BIA had been administering a form of welfare since the late nineteenth century through its distribution of rations on reservations. Missionaries, field matrons, and then public health nurses, almost all of them white women, had also been carrying out welfare work in Indian communities. In 1931 the BIA began to hire social workers, a relatively new profession that attracted large numbers of white women, and it organized a separate Welfare Branch in 1941. In 1944 it converted its rations program into monthly cash payments for needy families who were "ineligible for assistance under any other county, state, or Federal welfare program."

The BIA's Welfare Branch took on increased importance in the termination era. In 1946 it had just two employees in its national office and twenty-three social workers in the field, but by 1955 it supported a staff of five in the national office plus sixty-three field social work positions. The branch also created eight "area social worker" positions in the early 1950s. Its budget expanded from $488,910 in 1946 to $3,413,405 in 1955, a sevenfold increase in less than a decade. In 1955 the Welfare Branch became a separate entity in the BIA that coordinated with the branches of Education, Health, Relocation, Law and Order, and Tribal Affairs and was responsible to the assistant commissioner for community services.

Administrators tasked the Welfare Branch with providing transitional support as the BIA terminated tribes and relocated individuals to cities. The BIA established an additional social worker position for the Klamath tribe in 1955, for example, as they embarked on what the chief of the Welfare Branch called their "readjustment program." The branch held a conference later that same year to clarify their objectives and goals and make a plan of action, and one administrator suggested that "a statement of our overall objectives should include plans for administering social services so that termination will be taking place 365 days a year; that termination should be considered to be a constructive and beneficial program and that the thought of termination services should not be a program of denial." Paradoxically then, just at a time when the BIA was phasing out its trust responsibilities for Indian tribes, its bureaucracy was growing immensely more complex. And through social workers, the Welfare Branch had become a key manager of Indian peoples, especially in regard to child welfare.

The branch's senior staff of five surely must have been the most multicultural team working in all of the United States in the 1950s. A chief of welfare, first Robert Beasley and then Charles Rovin, headed the branch, and an administrative assistant supported it. Three women formed the core of the branch: Aleta Brownlee, Lucile Ahnawake Hastings, and Vinita Lewis. Brownlee, a white woman, had pursued a distinguished international career in child welfare before taking up her post as child welfare consultant with the BIA in 1952. In 1945 she had worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) as a welfare specialist on the Yugoslavian Mission. Later that year she transferred to Vienna and became the director of child welfare in Austria. She worked with displaced children both with UNRRA and its successor, the International Refugee Organization, until 1950. Brownlee held her position as child welfare consultant with the BIA for eight years until she retired in 1960.

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Excerpted from A Generation Removed by Margaret D. Jacobs. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

A Note on Terms xvii

Abbreviations xix

Simon Ortiz's Question xxi

Introduction xxiii

Prologue xxxi

Part 1 Taking Care of American Indian Children

Modern Indian Life 3

Chapter 1 The Bureaucracy of Caring for Indian Children 5

Dana's Story 33

Chapter 2 Caring about Indian Children in a Liberal Age 37

Part 2 The Indian Child Welfare Crisis in Indian Country

John's Staff 67

Chapter 3 Losing Children 69

Meeting Steven Unger 95

Chapter 4 Reclaiming Care 97

Interviewing Bert Hirsch and Evelyn Blanchard 125

Chapter 5 The Campaign for the Indian Child Welfare Act 127

Part 3 The Indian Child Welfare Crisis in a Global Context

Tracking Down the Doucette Family 165

Chapter 6 The Indigenous Child Welfare Crisis in Canada 169

Meeting Aunty Di 211

Chapter 7 The Indigenous Child Welfare Crisis in Australia and Transnational Activism 213

Finding Russell Moore 251

Chapter 8 Historical Reckoning with Indigenous Child Removal in Settler Colonial Nations 253

Afterword 273

Notes 277

Bibliography 327

Index 343