A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World

Abbreviations

xix abbreviations aacp American Academy of Child Psychiatry aaia Association on American Indian Affairs aal Australian Aborigines’ League acca Aboriginal Child Care Agency (Australia) acpa Aboriginal Child Placement Agency (Australia) adc Aid to Dependent Children (United States) afsc American Friends Service Committee aicca Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agency (Australia) aicpdp American Indian Child Placement Development Program aim Adopt Indian Métis program (Saskatchewan, Canada) aim American Indian Movement (United States) arena Adoption Resource Exchange of North America awb Aborigines Welfare Board (New South Wales, Australia) bia Bureau of Indian Affairs (United States) car Council for Aboriginal Rights (Australia) cas Children’s Aid Society (Canada) cwla Child Welfare League of America daa Department of Aboriginal Affairs (Australia) dia Department of Indian Affairs (Canada) fsi Federation of Saskatchewan Indians fsin Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations gao General Accounting Office (United States) hew Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (United States) iap Indian Adoption Project (United States) icwa Indian Child Welfare Act (United States) iec Indian and Eskimo Association (Canada) ihs Indian Health Service (United States) ispp Indian Student Placement Program (United States) xx | abbreviations lds Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints naiwa North American Indian Women’s Association ncai National Congress of American Indians nsw New South Wales oeo Office of Economic Opportunity (United States) pl-280 Public Law 83–280 (United States) reach Resources for Adoption of Children (Saskatchewan, Canada) snaicc Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (Australia) snwm Saskatchewan Native Women’s Movement trc Truth and Reconciliation Commission vacca Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (Victoria, Australia) vista Volunteers in Service to America xxi simon ortiz’s question Little did I know when I traveled to Minneapolis in May 2009 to attend the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference that my life would take an unplanned turn. I had come to participate in a panel about the history of American Indian boarding schools, Canadian Indian residential schools, and Homes for Australian Aboriginal children. When I began my presentation, I noticed in the audience an older man with silver hair and thick bangs. I caught my breath. He was Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer. I had read much of his poetry, and I used to attend his readings when I lived in New Mexico. I had never met him in person; nor did I share his Native American ancestry. But I had long felt a particular connection to him. Both he and my Uncle Stanley had been patients at Fort Lyon Veterans Hospital near Las Animas, Colorado. I remember the long car ride there as a child with my mother and grandmother, the scenery getting bleaker and bleaker as we sped farther east out onto the plains from the Rocky Mountains. Ortiz wrote from Sand Creek based on his stint at Fort Lyon. It had been the staging post from which Colonel John Chivington and the Colorado Territory Militia had carried out a massacre of up to 163 Cheyennes and Arapahoes at their peaceful encampment on Sand Creek, just about forty miles away. Two-thirds of the victims were women and children. Ortiz’s book of poems linked the 1864 massacre to the struggles he and other Native American veterans experienced in the hospital and its surrounding community a hundred years later. Even though I grew up in Colorado, I never learned of this massacre until after I moved away. These thoughts gusted through my mind as I prepared to deliver my presentation . What was this esteemed writer doing here at my panel? And what xxii would he think of my paper? I took a deep breath and plunged into my presentation . After my co-panelists delivered their papers, Ortiz immediately lifted his hand. We called on him first. He said, “I’ve published nineteen books, and yet I’ve never written about my boarding school experience. Why is it that we American Indians have not come to terms with this?” Other Indigenous members of the audience piped up. We all puzzled over why both Australia and Canada had launched inquiries into and delivered formal apologies for their nations’ forced removal of Indigenous children but the United States had not. When I attended this conference, I thought I was done writing about Indigenous child removal. I had recently published White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American...