Sandy White Hawk says she remembers the day in 1954 when she was taken away by missionaries from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Standing in a red truck beside the stern woman who would become her adopted mother, the toddler gazed up at a pale white arm so different from any arm that had hugged her before. The 18-month-old wouldn’t see her Indian family for the next 34 years.
At her new home, White Hawk was afraid for a long time, and then ashamed. “My adoptive mother constantly told me I was being saved from being a pagan, good-for-nothing Indian,” said White Hawk, 47. “I felt so isolated and empty, ugly and unwanted.”
It’s because of so many other similarly unsettling stories that late last month the nation’s largest child welfare organization apologized to White Hawk and other American Indians for its participation in a controversial program that removed Indian children from their homes and placed them with white adoptive families across the nation in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of those people, now middle aged and with children of their own, have spent much of their lives trying to deal with the emotional fallout from the adoptions.
Speaking before a group of Indian child welfare experts in Anchorage, Shay Bilchik, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America, said: “What we did may have been well-intentioned, but it was wrong, it was biased, it was hurtful. It is time to tell the truth–that our actions presupposed that Indian children would be better off with white families as opposed to staying in their own communities and tribes–and be reconciled.”
For White Hawk and others, however, the apology comes too late to prevent the emotional scars inflicted in their youth by these adoptions.
Dealing with the pain
White Hawk began to abuse alcohol as a teenager, “anything to deal with the pain,” she said. In 1988, she found her way back to the Rosebud reservation, and discovered 19 aunts and uncles she hadn’t known existed; her mother was already dead.
“I was led to believe I was taken from nothing and I go back to find so much: people who remembered me and who were glad I came back,” she said. “You can’t imagine how angry I was.”
The league’s expressions of regret follow a groundbreaking apology last September by the head of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs for the agency’s “legacy of racism and inhumanity” toward American Indians.
But words alone are not enough, Bilchik said. The Child Welfare League, based in Washington, will address American Indian family concerns more aggressively through its training, education, publications and advocacy programs, he said, and will put more emphasis on preparing member agencies to implement the Indian Child Welfare Act, a landmark 1978 law that is often ignored in many areas of the country, according to several studies.
“We need to create a more culturally competent level of practice with Indian children and their families than we see in our field today,” said Bilchik, whose organization includes nearly 1,200 agencies in the U.S.
The Indian Adoption Project, run by the Child Welfare League with support from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, began in 1958 and ended a decade later when it was folded into another, larger initiative. During those years, 395 Indian children from 16 mostly Western states were placed with white families in 26 states, mostly in the East and Midwest. About 48 children were resettled in Illinois, 39 went to Missouri, 34 found homes in Indiana, and 24 landed in Iowa.
History of federal policies
This was not the first time Indian children were separated from their families. Beginning in 1860, federal officials began to encourage the development of boarding schools where Indian children could be assimilated into white culture. The history of these institutions, where children were not allowed to speak their tribal language or practice their native religion and where discipline was often harsh, has been well documented.
While federal policies changed in the 1930s, interest in “saving” Indian children from the culture of the reservation remained, according to a 2000 study prepared by the National Indian Child Welfare Association and Casey Family Programs, a Seattle foundation. With the Indian Adoption Project, a movement to place Indian children in white families gained momentum. The justification was poverty and neglect reported on Indian reservations, according to “Far From the Reservation,” a 1972 book by David Fanshel, a Columbia University social work professor.
“The purpose of the Indian Adoption Project was to stimulate the adoption of American Indian children on a nationwide basis,” he wrote. By declaring these “transracial” adoptions successful, Fanshel’s work inspired hundreds of child welfare agencies in many states to pursue Indian adoptions. In Minnesota in the early 1970s, for instance, nearly 1 in 4 Native American babies under the age of 1 were put up for adoption, overwhelmingly in white homes, according to a 1997 article in the Journal of Multicultural Social Work.
Today, 23 years after the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, problems persist. For instance, a 1999 Nebraska study found that “clear and convincing evidence” for placing children outside their homes was absent from records 78 percent of the time. A study last year in North Dakota found “serious deficiencies” in about 50 percent of the notices relating to potential out-of-home placements sent to tribes and parents.
Meanwhile, tribes that want to provide foster-care services cannot get direct federal payments under the law; instead, they have to arrange transfers from states, a process often fraught with difficulties, according to Terry Cross, executive director of the Indian Child Welfare Association in Portland, Ore.
Frank Petersen, 48, a grant writer with the Quinault Indian Nation in northwest Washington state, can’t forget being placed in foster care at 12, and seeing two sisters and one brother adopted. His family had gone to a fair in Seattle and his mother’s purse had been stolen at the bus station later that day. Taking money from her pocket, she sent the children back on a bus to their aunt in a town near the reservation with a request to send the money for her bus fare as soon as possible.
Emotional scars
A neighbor called to report the children as “abandoned.” Social services retrieved them before their mother could get home, and distributed them among three white families. “They thought they were providing us with a better environment and a chance to grow up and be white, but they destroyed my family,” Petersen said.
You don’t ever get over the emotional impact from an adoption, said White Hawk, who lives just outside Madison, Wis. But healing is still possible, she believes. In the past year, she has established a grass-roots group, First Nations Orphan Association, dedicated to helping people who were adopted or placed in foster care find their birth families.
This October, White Hawk has arranged a powwow on the Menominee Nation reservation in Keshena, Wis., for children removed from their Indian families years ago and for the families who lost them. Indian spiritual leaders have written a special song for the occasion.
“I’m hoping this will help people, like me, who didn’t know who we were, who didn’t know our centers, until we came home,” White Hawk said.
