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

On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl, which pitted adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco against baby Veronica's biological father, Dusten Brown, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Veronica's biological mother had relinquished her for adoption to the Capobiancos without Brown's consent. Although Brown regained custody of his daughter using the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Capobiancos, rejecting the purpose of the ICWA and ignoring the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families. In A Generation Removed, a powerful blend of history and family stories, award-winning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post-World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. Jacobs also reveals the global dimensions of the phenomenon: These practices undermined Indigenous families and their communities in Canada and Australia as well. Jacobs recounts both the trauma and resilience of Indigenous families as they struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.

Author: Margaret D. Jacobs
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 09/01/2014
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.63lbs
Size: 9.43h x 6.38w x 1.31d
ISBN: 9780803255364


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2014
Choice 02/01/2015 pg. 1018

About the Author
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).