The Indian Adoption Project
How a Federal Program Separated Native Families and Forced a Reckoning

About this book:

They called it rescue. It was erasure. Between 1958 and 1978, a federal partnership between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Child Welfare League of America quietly dismantled Native families at an industrial scale—placing thousands of children into white homes, sealing their records, and rewriting their identities. By the 1970s, one in four Native children had been taken. In some states, removal rates were twenty times higher than for white children. *The Indian Adoption Project* exposes the machinery behind this catastrophe: the manufactured poverty cited as neglect, the altered birth certificates, the "rescue" narratives sold to the public, and the quiet courtrooms where sovereignty was severed child by child.

But this is not only a chronicle of loss. It is the story of the mothers who refused to disappear—the grandmothers who stormed welfare offices, the organizers who forced Senate hearings, the lawyers who reframed Native children not as adoptable resources but as citizens of sovereign nations. Their resistance forged the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, a landmark law that reclaimed tribal jurisdiction and halted the hemorrhage. Drawing on sealed archives, congressional testimony, and the voices of adoptees who spent decades finding their way home, this book traces the full arc from assimilation's darkest experiment to the legislative triumph that stopped it.

Today, as the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of ICWA and the foster care system still disproportionately targets Native families, this history is not past tense—it is urgent precedent. *The Indian Adoption Project* is the definitive account of how a nation tried to disappear its Indigenous future by stealing its children, and how Indigenous kinship proved unbreakable. Essential reading for anyone who believes child welfare should protect families, not dismantle them.