At the peak of this era, there were over 350 government-funded, and often Church-run, native American boarding schools throughout the United States.

Schools were not just instruments of cultural genocide. They were also a way to separate native children from their land. In the same era that thousands of children were sent away, the U.S. encroached on tribal lands through war, broken treaties, and new policies.

As years of indigenous activism led the U.S. to begin phasing out schools, the government found a new way to assimilate native American children: adoption. Native children were sent to the child welfare system. And programs like the little-known government “Indian adoption project” deliberately placed them with white foster families.

In our latest episode of the missing Chapter, we explore this long legacy of forced assimilation of native American children. And how native families still struggle against the consequences today. 

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