The American Indian Adoption Project

     As part of Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum's Second Sunday Speaker Series, author Trace DeMeyer spoke February 13 about the Indian Adoption Project, and its lasting effects.  Trace is the author of One Small Sacrifice, in which she relates her own experiences as a Native American child who was adopted by a non-native family.
     The Indian Adoption Project operated from 1958 through 1967 under the administration of the Child Welfare League and funded by a federal contract from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Children's Bureau.  During its brief existence the Project oversaw the adoption of 395 Native American Children from 16 western states by white families in Illinois, Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, Missouri, and other states in the East and Midwest.  Fourteen children were placed with Southern white families, and one child was adopted by a family in Puerto Rico.
     This project was the first national effort to arrange for the adoption of an entire child population across cultural and racial lines.  It was seen as an example of an enlightened adoption practice that would help the nation overcome the racial prejudices that had formerly discouraged the adoption of Native American children.
     When the Indian Adoption Project ended in 1967, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA) continued its work.  ARENA arranged for the placement of native children with white adoptive parents into the early 1970s.
     The practice of inter-racial adoptions began to be challenged by Native Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  From the Native American perspective, the Indian Adoption Project and ARENA were yet further examples of a long line of genocidal government policies to which Native Americans had been subjected for hundred of years, designed to tear apart or destroy native communities and cultures.

     Spurred by these concerns, Native American rights advocates worked hard for the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act.  The Act was finally passed in 1978.  It made it the adoption of Native American children by non-native families extremely difficult.

     In June 2001, Child Welfare League Executive Director Shay Bilchik formally apologized for the Indian Adoption Project at a meeting of the National Indian Child Welfare Association. He put the Child Welfare League of America on record in support of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
     “No matter how well intentioned and how squarely in the mainstream this was at the time,” he said, “it was wrong; it was hurtful; and it reflected a kind of bias that surfaces feelings of shame.”