A Generation Removed - by Margaret D Jacobs

Book Synopsis

On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl, which pitted adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco against baby Veronica's biological father, Dusten Brown, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Veronica's biological mother had relinquished her for adoption to the Capobiancos without Brown's consent. Although Brown regained custody of his daughter using the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Capobiancos, rejecting the purpose of the ICWA and ignoring the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families. In A Generation Removed, a powerful blend of history and family stories, award-winning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post-World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. Jacobs also reveals the global dimensions of the phenomenon: These practices undermined Indigenous families and their communities in Canada and Australia as well. Jacobs recounts both the trauma and resilience of Indigenous families as they struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.

Review Quotes

"[Jacobs] effectively elucidates the complicated policies surrounding the Indigenous child welfare crisis in a mesmerizing narrative that highlights how it's not just an 'American Indian story . . . but a profoundly American one.'"--Elise Boxer, South Dakota History

"Illuminating. . . . Jacobs's history is essential and timely reading."--Beth H. Piatote, Journal of American History

"Margaret Jacobs once again demonstrates her genius for writing history that combines penetrating analysis with heart-wrenching stories. Beautifully written, deeply researched, this important and amazing book examines a subject largely unknown to the public at large but all too familiar to Indigenous peoples who have suffered the pain and indignity of child removal."--David Wallace Adams, author of Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928-- (3/6/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Jacobs brings deep scholarship to a topic of searing national and transnational importance. In a respectful, clear voice, she guides the reader on a journey into the most intimate corridors of settler colonialism. This is a complex and often heart-wrenching history that provides salutary lessons for the future."--Ann McGrath, director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at Australian National University and coauthor of How to Write History That People Want to Read-- (4/8/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Using compelling stories and weighty evidence, Jacobs has uncovered a modern and ongoing story of child-stealing in the United States. She lays out the shocking history of Native American adoption and the good liberal logic that enabled it in a page-turner of a book."--Anne F. Hyde, Bancroft Prize-winning author of Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860-- (4/10/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"A Generation Removed is a powerful eye opener, covering a piece of history we push under the carpet at our own peril."--Alan Porter, Saskatchewan History

"A Generation Removed is an important book that effectively researches and narrates a difficult and upsetting topic that has been all but ignored by mainstream American society for far too long."--Akim Reinhardt, Nebraska History

"A solid account that calls for "a full historical reckoning" of this devastating chapter in the treatment of Native Americans."--Kirkus-- (7/29/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"This is a moving, significant book. Justice, Jacobs explains, will come only when nonindigenous people acknowledge the damage done. A Generation Removed makes a major contribution toward bringing the story to light. It remains for the rest of us to read and teach it."--Sherry Smith, Western Historical Quarterly

About the Author

Margaret D. Jacobs, Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Nebraska, 2009) and Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (Nebraska, 1999).