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(2017) International adoption in North American literature and culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
From the sixties scoop to baby Veronica
transracial adoption of indigenous children in the USA and Canada
Roger L. Nichols
pp. 3-26
Since the 1960s, Native people in the United States and Canada have experienced both widely differing and highly similar governmental policies regarding child welfare, education, and transracial adoption. During the past fifty years public policies related to those issues have changed dramatically in both societies. Considering childrearing practices among reserve dwellers inadequate, between the 1960s and 1980s, Canadian welfare officials seized babies of First Nations women and placed them for adoption in the homes of Canadian and American non-Native families. Critics labeled these efforts the "Sixties Scoop." In the United States a more limited transracial program operated until the late 1960s. The one major exception of a Cherokee girl being adopted by a South Carolina family led to the 2013 Supreme Court ruling Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (the Baby Veronica case). This chapter compares and contrasts how these programs functioned in the two nations, and how opponents persuaded each government to halt the transracial adoption programs.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_1
Full citation:
Nichols, R. L. (2017)., From the sixties scoop to baby Veronica: transracial adoption of indigenous children in the USA and Canada, in M. Shackleton (ed.), International adoption in North American literature and culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3-26.
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