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) , Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Nebraska, 1999), and A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Nebraska, 2014).

It was a surreal moment when I read the recent decision of the Supreme Court in the Haaland v. Brackeen case, which affirmed the constitutionality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. Justice Gorsuch, who supported the Court’s opinion, added a separate 38-page decision to “add some historical context.” In it, he cited my article, “Remembering the Forgotten Child,” which became the basis for A Generation Removed. It thrilled me to think that my historical research might have played some small role in preserving ICWA. 

ICWA is a key piece of legislation that promotes American Indian self-determination and sovereignty. The Act sought to reverse a century of Indigenous child removal, policies and practices that the U.S. government and states used to separate American Indian children from their families. Indigenous child removal started in earnest with the federal Indian boarding school system in the late nineteenth century.  I researched and wrote about the boarding schools in White Mother to a Dark Race, which compared them to institutions for Aboriginal children in Australia. When I completed that book, I knew that I had not finished the story of Indigenous child removal. This abusive practice continued up until the passage of ICWA, and still persists in some states.

I spent several more years researching what happened after most of the boarding schools closed after World War II. It was disheartening to learn that the government continued to remove Indigenous children from their families. Now, however, the United States as well as two other settler colonial nations, Canada and Australia, turned to placing Indigenous children in foster care or adoptive placements with non-Indigenous families. Authorities routinely removed children not for reasons of abuse, but because children were living in crowded, impoverished households. Social workers cited lack of indoor plumbing or children sharing beds as reasons to remove children from their homes. I was shocked to learn during my research that up to 35% of all American Indian children were living apart from their families by the late 1960s. Rates were similar in Canada and Australia. I didn’t think that most Americans knew anything about this history, and I wanted to document it in A Generation Removed.

I also wanted to understand how government authorities and policymakers could support the unwarranted separation of Indigenous children from their families, one of the most egregious human rights abuses imaginable. I was sickened to learn that most government authorities as well as social workers, cloaked this practice in humanitarian rhetoric. They claimed they were taking Indigenous children from their families and communities out of regard for “the best interests of the child.” 

Such rhetoric relied on implicitly and explicitly demonizing American Indian families as hopelessly dysfunctional and their communities as unfit places to raise children. In one pro-adoption article I discuss in A Generation Removed, the director of the U.S. government’s Indian Adoption Project captions a photo of an adorable Native toddler, “Dead End or a Chance?” He asks readers whether Indian children should remain in so-called “dead end” reservations or be given a “chance” through adoption by a non-Native family. Today, opponents of ICWA, like the Goldwater Institute, which has funded many court cases against ICWA, continue to peddle these stereotypes. They published an anti-ICWA pamphlet in 2015 titled “Death on a Reservation.” It includes banner headlines such as “No Happy Endings” and “No Way Out.”

A Generation Removed is a sobering account of the lengths to which the United States government, as well as Canada and Australia, have gone to eliminate Indigenous people, their distinctive cultures, their sovereign governments, and their claims to the land. But it is also an inspiring story of the Indigenous women activists who worked within their own communities and in concert with national advocacy organizations to challenge Indigenous child removal. I learned while researching the book that Indigenous women formed international alliances in defense of their families. Their hard work led to the passage of ICWA, which still stands as a model for Indigenous activists in Canada and Australia. For now, ICWA is still the law of the land.