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213 chapter 7 The Indigenous Child Welfare Crisis in Australia and Transnational Activism Australian Aboriginal community activist Mollie Dyer had been working as a field officer with the Aboriginal Legal Service for a number of years in the 1970s in Fitzroy, an inner-city neighborhood of Melbourne where many Aboriginal people lived. She provided representation for Aboriginal defendants in court, offered general welfare advice and assistance, and assisted with the running of a hostel for Aboriginal people recently released from jail and for the temporarily homeless.¹ Through her work Dyer became acquainted with hundreds of Indigenous children who had been removed from their families. She responded at first in a personal way: by fostering dozens of children herself. As she wrote in 1975, “I have reared six children of my own, cared for 25 part-Aboriginal children on a fairly long term basis and many more on a short term basis. Aboriginal children are often placed with me by the Social Welfare Dep[artmen]t after they have been returned from non-Aboriginal foster-care to the care of the Department.”² Dyer got hold of an issue of Indian Family Defense, the periodical of the Association on American Indian Affairs, and in early 1976 she wrote to its editor, Steven Unger. He published a long letter from Dyer in the July 1976 issue in which Dyer described an Indigenous child welfare crisis in Australia mirroring that experienced by American Indians. “It has generally been assumed that the Aboriginal parents are not capable of caring adequately for their little ones,” Dyer explained, “so the children have been fostered out to white families, and in some cases even adopted without the consent of their mothers.” Dyer cited a 90 percent breakdown in these placements and noted that white families often returned the children to the care of the Social Welfare Department, which placed them in 214 | crisis in australia and transnational activism institutions. Dyer lamented that these children “have become ‘lost’ to us” in many cases. Her organization tried to help the children reunite with their families, but often the children could not relate to their Aboriginality after years of hearing disparagement of Aboriginal people in popular culture, schools, and from their foster or adoptive families. One girl told Dyer that “her foster mother kept a scrap book about all the terrible things that Aboriginal people do and would cut out extracts from the press and paste them in the book. She would have to read this book of cuttings at least once a month to make sure she realized ‘how lucky she was to have been given a chance to live in a white family and be saved.’”³ Dyer’s letter signaled that the American Indian child welfare crisis was not restricted to North America but was a phenomenon of global proportions. Dyer, aged forty-eight in 1975, had applied for an Aboriginal Overseas Study Award prior to the publication of her letter in Indian Family Defense. She wanted “to try and discover how to overcome the problem” of the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the child welfare system, and she wrote to Unger at the aaia “for guidance . . . in relation to courses and work situations I could be involved in during my stay in America if my application is successful.”⁴ Having won the award, Dyer traveled extensively in Canada and the United States in 1976. She attended a threeweek course at the newly minted Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in Prince Albert, the community that was reeling from the Doucette case. Later she spent a whirlwind day with Unger and Bert Hirsch in New York City and toured reservations and Indian communities in the United States that had developed their own Indian child welfare programs. Her most successful connection occurred on the last leg of her trip, when she stayed with Maxine Robbins, founder of the innovative Ku-Nak-We-Sha program on the Yakima Reservation. “After my long journey, it was here, at the end of it, that I would find the program that I had been searching for,” wrote Dyer.⁵ Dyer’s trans-Pacific correspondence and tour of Canada and the United States heralded the beginning of a significant transnational movement regarding Indigenous child welfare. Dyer invited Robbins to attend a conference in Melbourne in October 1978 to help push for greater Aboriginal control over Aboriginal child welfare. She brought both Robbins and Unger to speak at a special Aboriginal child welfare seminar in...

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