Original manuscript & recording released:

January 31, 2026

Foster Care in the United States: Roots in Indigenous Child Removal

Andrew DeGroat, N.D.

The modern U.S. foster care system did not emerge in a vacuum. While it drew from multiple nineteenth and twentieth-century social reforms, its legal, administrative, and ideological foundations were significantly shaped by the systematic removal of Indigenous children from their families and nations. 

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From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, U.S. federal and state policies deliberately targeted Native children as a tool of assimilation. Children were forcibly removed and placed in boarding schools, missions, and non-Native homes, often without findings of abuse or neglect and frequently without parental consent (Adams 1995; Lomawaima and McCarty 2006). These practices normalized the idea that the state could intervene in families on the basis of culture, poverty, or non-Western child-rearing practices.

By the mid-1900s, child welfare agencies applied similar standards in family courts. Indigenous parenting was routinely deemed “unfit,” communal caregiving structures were labeled neglectful, and the effects of land dispossession and poverty were mischaracterized as parental failure (Cross 2014). These standards, particularly the doctrine of the “best interests of the child” became central to the developing foster care system and were later expanded to other marginalized communities (Roberts 2002).  Before the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978, studies found that between 25 and 35 percent of all Native children had been removed from their homes, with the majority placed in non-Native foster or adoptive homes (U.S. Department of the Interior 1976). This scale of removal functioned as a proving ground for modern child welfare practices, including case management, placement hierarchies, and court-sanctioned family separation. Importantly, foster care in the United States also has other historical roots such as orphan trains, Progressive-era social work, and responses to urban poverty. However, Indigenous child removal provided a model for how state systems could surveil, judge, and dismantle families under the guise of child protection.

The passage of ICWA represents a rare congressional acknowledgment of this harm. The law affirms tribal sovereignty, establishes higher standards for removal, and recognizes that child welfare systems were actively endangering Indigenous families rather than protecting them (Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978). Understanding the origins of foster care requires confronting this history directly. Child removal was not an unintended consequence of benevolent policy; it was a deliberate strategy of colonization whose legacy continues to shape family court systems today.

References 

Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Cross, Terry L. 2014. “The Indian Child Welfare Act: A Cultural Preservation Law.” Child Welfare 92 (3): 49–64.

Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. 25 U.S.C. §§ 1901–1963.

Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, and Teresa L. McCarty. 2006. “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Roberts, Dorothy. 2002. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. New York: Basic Books.

U.S. Department of the Interior. 1976. Indian Child Welfare Program: Final Report to Congress. Washington, DC.