| This article was published in Indian Affairs, Volume 194, Spring/Summer 2024 Journal. By: Kim Mettler Native Country has had a devastating history with adoption. For almost ten years between 1958 and 1967, the Child Welfare League of America contracted with the federal government to operate the Indian Adoption Project, which was described as a program to “stimulate on a nation-wide basis the adoption of homeless American Indian children by Caucasian families.”(1) By 1967, more than five thousand families had been referred by the Project to adoption agencies across the United States.(2) By 1977, the year the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs held legislative hearings on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the Indian Adoption Project and its successor, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, had placed almost 800 Native American children for adoption.(3) |  |
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