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Book Review
Indian Orphanages. By Marilyn Irvin Holt. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. x + 326 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.)
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The author, formerly the publications director for the Kansas State Historical Society and the author of Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, 1992) as well as Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman (Albuquerque, 1995) does an able job of examining what on the surface is a simple topic, but under closer scrutiny is far more complex. The entire topic of the unwanted child is one wholly alien to traditional American Indian culture with its web of kinship ties. Indian orphans were a stark remnant of the wreckage that federal and frontier policies brought to Native cultures. The abandoned children were a part of what was left behind in the wake of warfare, economic poverty, land loss, and cultural devastation. Since the federal government defined every American Indian as a dependent ward, it was a small step to place Native children in orphan asylums. Among the many examples of the abrogation of federal guardianship and state encroachments were the American Indian wards/waifs who ended up in foster placements or were adopted, helping to feed the impulse for reform that gradually led to the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. |
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