How the US stole thousands of Native American children

I was adopted by a white missionary couple I was adopted immediately placed for adoption I was in foster care with one family for 18 years they were white my parents loved us and I understand that but at the same time they took the idea that they were saving me saving us from ourselves being saved and I should be grateful for the life that I've been given because any child on the reservation would give anything to live as I was living they took us away from our mom they came marching right in and literally took us and thousands of other children from their home it's a way to right eradicate us and to go to a nation's children is one of the sure ways to do that [Music] the US has a long and brutal legacy of attempting to eradicate Native Americans for centuries they colonized Native American lands and murdered their populations they forced them west and pushed them into small confined patches of land but Native Americans resisted a Board of Indian Commissioners report said instead of dying out under the light and contact of civilization the Indian population is steadily increasing and that was an obstacle to total American expansion so the u.s. found a new solution to absorb and assimilate them it all started with an experiment and a man named Richard Henry Pratt he had in his charge some prisoners of war and he taught these men how to speak English how to read and write and how to do labor he dressed them in military uniforms and basically ran an assimilation experiment and then he took his results to the federal government and said they're capable of being civilized so he was able to get this project funded in 1879 the government funded Pratt's project the first-ever off-reservation boarding school for Native American children his motto was to kill the Indian and save the man what started there at the Carlisle Indian industrial school was nothing short of genocide disguised as American education children were forcibly taken from reservations and placed into the school hundreds even thousands of miles away from their families they were stripped of their traditional clothing their hair was cut short they were given new names and forbidden from speaking their native languages to take our children and to indoctrinate them into Western society to take away their identity as indigenous peoples their tribal identity I think it's one of the most effective and insidious ways that the u.s. did do harm to indigenous peoples here because it targeted our children our most vulnerable and they tried to make us ashamed for being Indian and they tried to make us something other than Indian there are also accounts of mental physical and sexual abuse of forced manual labor neglect starvation and death my great grandfather went to Carlisle and nobody in my family ever talked about it so if you google Indian boarding schools the majority of the pictures that you will see will be actually from Carlisle Colonel Pratt created propaganda he hired a photographer to create those before-and-after photos to show that his experiment was working so he it was you know intentional propaganda and it worked the Carlisle model of Education swept the country and led to the creation of over 350 boarding schools to assimilate Native American children to these boys and girls have ever seen a white man yet through the agencies of the government they are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization in 1900 there were about 20,000 Native American children in these schools by 1925 that number more than tripled families that refused to send their kids to these schools faced consequences like incarceration at Alcatraz or the withholding of food rations some parents who did lose their children to these schools even camped outside to be close to them many students ran away some found ways to hold on to their languages and cultures others though could no longer communicate with family members and some never returned home at all by stripping the children of their Native American identities the US government had found a way to disconnect them from their lands and that was part of the u.s. strategy during the same era in which thousands of children were sent away to boarding schools a number of US policies infringed on their tribal lands back home in less than five decades two-thirds of Native American lands had been taken away the whole thing was purposeful and the fact that it has been buried in the history books and not acknowledged is also intentional and in fact the same tactics were used in New Zealand Australia Canada all of these countries have acknowledged apologized or reconciled in some way except for the United States over time the brutality of boarding schools started to surface and after a 1928 report detailed the horrific conditions at some schools many began to close in the 1960s indigenous activism rose alongside the civil rights movement and by the 1970s that activism forced more schools to shut down the government handed over control of the remaining boarding schools to tribes to be run in partnership with the Bureau of Indian Affairs but just as the boarding school era started fading another assimilation project took shape adoption [Music] the main goal of this pilot project was to stimulate the adoption of American Indian children to primarily non-indian adoptive homes they claimed it was to promote the adoption of the Forgotten child but it was essentially a continuation of the boarding school assimilation tactics and the strategy came with a financial advantage for the government to adoption was cheaper than running boarding schools but first adoption officials had to sell white America on the idea of adopting Native American children feature stories like this one in Good Housekeeping marketed them to white families they were described as unwanted and adoption gave them a chance at new lives in the end their media campaign worked white families wanted Indian adoption but the problem was many of these children were not orphans that nobody wanted they were kids often ripped apart from families that wanted to keep them you still will hear stories today of people you know my age older saying I remember as a child the social worker was coming and people would hide their children on reservations social workers used catch-all phrases like child neglect or unfit parenting as evidence for removal but their criteria was often questionable some accounts describe children being taken away for living with too many family members in the same household an extended family is a big thing for Native people and that means being judged for being in a house that's overcrowded so it's always whiteness is the standard for success and everything else is judged by that standard by the 1960s about one in four Native children were living apart from their families the official Indian adoption project placed 395 Native American children into mostly white homes but it was just one of many in an era of Native American adoptions other state agencies and private religious organizations began increasingly making placements for Native American children - my mother giving me up was a white person telling her if she didn't she would never see her other kids again and one of the documents I have it's addressed to my biological father Victor Fox that he was trying to look us up to get a hold of us but Hennepin County wrote Daniel and Douglas are adapting very well and their new family just was totally it was a false statement when you're adopted you know you're missing something I think I've likened it to having like when someone has like a 500 piece puzzle and they have all the pieces to make this pretty picture except one my adoptive mother was not well verbally physically and sexually and spiritually abusive so by the by the time I was 14 I started drinking 15 drugs are added and I became an addict to numb I didn't realize I was numbing pain I had tried suicide tried to slice in my wrists one time children were taken and believe like I believed for a long time there was something wrong with me versus something wrong with the system the Indian adoption project was considered a success by the people who set it in motion officials claimed generally speaking we believe the Indian people have accepted the adoption of their children by Caucasian families and have been pleased to learn the protection afforded these children but the truth was unsettling these hearings on Indian children's welfare is now in session I was pregnant with Bobby and the welfare kept coming over there and asked me if I gave him up for adoption before he was even born yeah they picked up my children and placed him in a foster home and I think that they were abused in a foster home for years after Native people organized in this Senate hearing Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act known as equi it gives tribes a place at the table in court states would be required to provide services to families to prevent removal of an Indian child and in case removal was necessary they would have to try to keep the child with extended family or another Native American family without our relatives we cease to exist so with Native people part of our wealth is in our family it's in who we're connected to but the legacy of family separation in Native communities has been difficult to fully undo today Native American children are four times more likely to be placed in foster care than white children even when their families have similar presenting problems in these cases equi is often the best legal protection they have and it's been under attack repeatedly a young girl ripped from her foster family because of the Indian children welfare act white adoptive families intent on keeping Native American children have tried to do away with the act and they're often backed by conservative organizations the Indian Child Welfare Act was dealt a blow earlier this month the subject of a lawsuit issued on Tuesday by the Goldwater Institute arguing that preferences given to American Indian families to adopt Indian children is unconstitutional and discriminates based on race it's a way for these industries these very powerful industries to try to attack what Indian identity is wanting to overturn nikla is connected to everything about who we are as a nation so if we don't have any protections for our families and if we don't have protections for our treaties then we have no more Indians we've been under attack we're going to continue to be under attack and we have to keep just keep fighting it's in our DNA to survive we are nations that pre-exists European contact and we are still here [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Vox

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Keywords: native american, missing chapter, boarding schools, adoption, Indian Child Welfare Act, American Indian, child welfare, assimilation, colonization, Colonialism, school, education, genocide, cultural genocide, Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, social work, Native history, Indigenous Peoples Day, indigenous, vox, native american history, native american people, native americans, native american adoption, native, american indian, indian boarding schools

Id: UGqWRyBCHhw

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019