How the US stole thousands of Native American children

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The long and brutal history of the US trying to “kill the Indian and save the man”.

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Toward the end of the 19th century, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools, stripping them of their cultures and languages. Yet decades later as the US phased out the schools, following years of indigenous activism, it found a new way to assimilate Native American children: promoting their adoption into white families. Watch the episode to find out how these two distinct eras in US history have had lasting impacts on Native American families.

In the Vox series Missing Chapter, Vox Senior Producer Ranjani Chakraborty revisits underreported and often overlooked moments from the past to give context to the present. Join her as she covers the histories that are often left out of our textbooks. Our first season tackles stories of racial injustice, political conflicts, even the hidden history of US medical experimentation.

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And to learn more, check out some of our sources below:

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition https://boardingschoolhealing.org/ and their primer on American Indian and
Alaska Native Boarding Schools in the US: https://engagement.umn.edu/sites/engagement.umn.edu/files/NABS%20Healing%20Voices_Vol%201_FINAL_Spreads%20for%20web.pdf

A Generation Removed by Margaret D. Jacobs:

Book Page

The National Indian Child Welfare Association’s background on the Indian Child Welfare Act:

About ICWA

Maps: 
1776 – 1880 here: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~238678~5511614:Indian-Land-Cessions-
1930 here: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~248302~5516048

First Nations Repatriation Institute: http://wearecominghome.com

An in-depth documentary about Native American child separation: https://upstanderproject.org/dawnland

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38 COMMENTS

  5. The backstory is worse. Spain and mexico put us on Missions in order to "save" them, by forced labor. Then America took over and most were left with no land or culture.

  7. The Sixties Scoop, also known as The Scoop,[1] was a period in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families.[2] Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.

  8. USA gives free funding to terrorist state like Pakistan but no money to save Native Americans and their culture 😮😮😮😮. And calling them i dians instead of Native Aericans is also stripping them of their identity.

  11. My Navajo/Hopi friends dad went across the entire reservation visiting thousands of homes and convinced them to give up their children so that they could be “educated” in schools run by white educators. This was prior to and after WW2. Imagine giving up your children.

  17. Late but this broke my heart. My great grandparents were native americans and fled their tribes and had to rename themselves to flee. Unfortunately, we never found their actual names, not even my grandfather or his siblings know. It's horrifying to think had they not fled, renamed themselves, and tried to be quiet, would my grandfather and his siblings be taken?

  18. The Americans invaded America, killed most of the Native Americans, took their land by force, and kicked the rest of them into the desolate places where nobody wants to be, and they have the cheek to talk about democracy, freedom, and human rights.

  21. Omg why keep talking about native time to speak on the indigenous culture they try to call black americans thats who the indigenous people is the so called black americans

  23. I'm proudly Anishinaabe and have lived in Wiikwemkoong for most of my life. Hearing these stories makes me realize just how lucky I am to be here right now, and the massive amount of respect and gratitude I have for my family to survive these brutal American and Canadian policies. This part of our history deserves to be widely spoken about, and widely taught, no matter how hard it is to learn. We're still here, and we deserve respect.
    I'd love to speak with Daniel/Nelson, and thank him for his involvement in these interviews. Honestly I've probably seen him at Andy's a couple times before actually, or when I was going to school haha

  31. Interesting….. sounds just like what Ronald Regan did with Guatemala children as well….. look it up there’s 300,000 of Guatemalan adoptees who were also stolen and sold to America to be adopted …. I am one of them… found out I was sold….. I don’t know who my birth family is….. I believe i was stolen from a hospital…. The women who claimed she was my birth mom lied! She was NEVER MY BIRTH MOTHER!!!! Look it up!!!!

  38. Let us not forget the role that religion, in particular, Christianity played in this horror, indeed, cultural assimilation and conversion to Christianity were effectively synonymous concepts—the point was the erasure of Indigenous culture and with it, any resistance to territorial dispossession. The 1908 Supreme Court case Quick Bear v. Leupp effectively ruled that the Federal government could freely use funds from Tribal treaty or trust fund accounts to compel children to attend boarding schools operated by religious organizations. In other words, “the Court held that the prohibition on the Federal Government to spend funds on religious schools did not apply to Indian treaty funds… and to forbid such expenditures would violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.” Religious institutions are omnipresent actors throughout the report, specifically Christian organizations and denominations.

    The historical role of Christianity in Federal Indian boarding schools is thus one in which the “separation of church and state” simply didn’t apply. The United States at times paid religious institutions and organizations on a per capita basis for Indian children to enter Federal Indian boarding schools operated by religious institutions or organizations. The US Government provided many of these religious groups with tracts of Indian reservation lands and accepted the recommendations of these religious bodies for presidential appointed government posts—all in what the Department deemed “an unprecedented delegation of power by the Federal Government to church bodies.” Notably, this delegation of power was undertaken without any centralized, interdenominational oversight of these religious organizations.

    Many religious organizations still refuse to admit their full role in this disgusting cultural genocide, or the deaths of a great many children, including the American Missionary Association of the Congregational Church, the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, the Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, and the Protestant Episcopal Church, just to name a few. There’s now a pressing need for denominations and religious organizations across the US to conduct a transparent examination of their histories and share key records with the Initiative—particularly since such transparency can aid in the further identification of children at these schools.

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