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Relevant_Quantity_49 t1_jeh5egw wrote

Sadly that is as American as apple pie.

>In the 1950s and ’60s, as the American Indian boarding schools fell out of favor, a new wave of assimilation policy went into effect: adoption of Native children into white homes. The Indian Adoption Project, which ran from 1958-67, was a partnership between the federal government and the Child Welfare League of America and churches around the country whose stated goal was the adoption of Native children by white families. At the time, “matching” of adoptive children with their adoptive parents was a common practice, meant to allow adoptive parents to pass their children off as biologically related. “One little, two little, three little Indians — and 206 more — are brightening the homes and lives of 172 American families, mostly non-Indians, who have taken the Indian waifs as their own,” a 1966 Bureau of Indian Affairs press release boasted. > >By the 1970s, the removal of Native children to white families was so widespread that, when the BIA commissioned a federal task force to research the phenomenon, it found that 25% to 35% of Native children around the country were removed from their homes, and 85% of those children were adopted by white families. ICWA was created in response to the report, and Congress passed the law in 1978.

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