Alliance Webinar on the Deliberate Breakdown of Indigenous Families

The separation of Native children from their families was not accidental—it was policy. From boarding schools to forced sterilization to child welfare removals, the U.S. government implemented deliberate strategies to dismantle Indigenous family structures across generations.

In this latest installment of our Native learning webinar series, we moved beyond broad discussions of “colonization” to examine specific policies designed to break apart Native families—and their direct connections to contemporary early childhood, child welfare, and family services.

We also explored the deliberate rebuild—how Native communities are revitalizing ceremonies, reclaiming parenting practices, and shifting toward healing-centered engagement.

Key Takeaways

Tara McLain Manthey and Stephanie Cote shared a few of the critical policies that stripped away Native culture and familial institutions, leading to negative child and family well-being outcomes for generations of Native communities. A theme throughout was that some of the policies were passed with good intent, but their impact was devastating – a good lesson for policy advocates to remember today.

Civilization Fund Act (1819) allocated federal funding to religious organizations to educate and assimilate Native children.
Code of Indian Offenses (1883) was promulgated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assimilate Native children and families by banning and criminalizing cultural and religious practices.
A Century of Dishonor landmark report (1881) by Helen Hunt Jackson aimed to shift Americans’ thinking of Native people to that of humans with free will. The report spurred political change, but unfortunately the solutions looked more like assimilation than sovereignty. The report accelerated the allotment of communal Tribal lands into individual family parcels.
Federal Boarding School System (1819-1969) was 500+ boarding schools that forcibly removed Native children starting at age 5 from their families. Aimed at ending mass genocides of Native people, the goal was to strip away culture, language, and spirituality to fully assimilate Native children. The policy caused generational harm by removing children from their families, cutting their hair, forbidding their use of their Native languages and spiritual practices, and using child labor. Boarding schools were widespread – every Native family has a boarding school story.
Housing and community disruption (late 1800s-mid 1900s) through federal policy disrupted the communal living culture. The Dawes Act, for example, allotted parcels of land to individual families who were forced to spread out and farm their allotments. “Extra” land was given away to white settlers.
Indian Relocation Act (1956) encouraged Native families to leave the reservations, with government promises of employment and housing (ultimately undelivered), resulting in further severing of Tribal and kinship ties among Native communities. The result today is a large urban Native population that often falls outside both federal Indian programs and culturally responsive state services.
Indian Adoption Project (1958-1967) between BIA and Child Welfare League of America tried to address poverty and negative child wellbeing outcomes, but the solution was another crisis of child removal. Families stricken with poverty were charged with neglect, and Native children were placed in non-Native, mostly white, families.
Forced sterilization (1960s-70s) was another tool of family disruption, with thousands of Native women sterilized, often without informed consent and sometimes during childbirth or under coercive conditions. This caused multi-generational loss of trust in health care systems and therefore lack of needed health care services.
Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) developed out of urban Native advocacy organizations coming together. The law fundamentally recognized the sovereignty of Native Nations and ensured that Tribes have jurisdiction over the child welfare cases of children from their Tribe. Extended family, Tribal members, then other Native families are prioritized for child placement. ICWA is one of the most litigated laws in American history, challenged repeatedly by organizations who are trying to undermine Tribal sovereignty in order to steal the Tribes’ remaining resources.
The breakdown continues (present day) with disproportionate representation of Native children in juvenile justice and child welfare systems, rampant (justified) Native mistrust of government systems, a school-to-prison pipeline for Native children, and poverty still being mislabeled as neglect.

Dr Emma Elliott (Cowichan Tribes, Vancouver Island), from the College of Education at the University of Washington in Seattle shared her unique legal and sociological lens on these policies and their impact on families. A few highlights:

So many Native families and communities are touched by suicide because of the impact of colonization – the breakdown and restructuring of relationships with land, food, languages, etc. that have, since time immemorial, ensured Native peoples’ survival.

Jurisdictional trauma is the condition of settler law recursively embedding harm (trauma and dispossession) into the legal system. It is the disruption of Indigenous jurisdiction over children and families, kinship governance, and Indigenous authority of territory – stolen land, child removal/family disruption, political subordination, and systemic extraction of resources and removal of economic decision-making from Tribes.

There are developmental consequences of this destabilization: children’s attachment reorganized, language/ceremonies discontinued, intergenerational patterns fractured, identity formation destabilized, and land-based belonging severed.

Repair requires structural transformation at the scale of the harm – the restoring of relational infrastructures and sovereignty.

Dr Elliott and her colleague created six pillars to advance Indigenous Relationality among children, in response to the US Surgeon General’s six pillar National Strategy to Advance Social Connection. Here’s an example of each:

The deliberate restructuring of Indigenous families was organized through law. Repair must also be organized through law. Indigenous nations are already leading this work. The question is whether policy systems will follow.

Olga Gonzalez (Otomi and Yaqui) is a mother, an activist, a protector of Madre Tierra, and Executive Director of Cultivando, a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating the leadership of the Latinx community to advance health equity. She joined us to help attendees process our emotions after this difficult content. She held up her rebozo (shawl) from her Indigenous Mexican roots as a metaphor for the weaving together of Indigenous People, histories, and cultures across the US and the world. She said, “There are things we share in common, regardless of where on Turtle Island our people originate from.” She spoke to intergenerational trauma as well as strength and resilience –“The body heals when it feels held. The body carries history and it also carries medicine… We are still here. We are still speaking, we are still weaving, we are still birthing. We are still singing.”

She encouraged us to take care of ourselves and each other, using the Mayan concept of In Lak’ech — “you are my other me” or “I am another yourself.”

She finished with the importance of leaning into our joy, which is what our ancestors wanted for us, and what we want for our descendants. “One day you will be a picture on the (Dia de los Muertos) altar of your descendants. How do you want to be remembered? Looked back on with pride? We have a duty to heal ourselves in ways our ancestors could not.”

Resources shared in the chat:

Identify the Original Inhabitants of the Land You Live on, Native Land Digital

The Deliberate Breakdown of American Indian Families Presentation Slides, Returning Light Consulting

National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, Mary Annette Pember

Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange

Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works, Laura Cornelius Kellogg

American Genocide Podcast, Illuminative

Boarding School and Western Education-Related Trauma, Stephanie Cote

Little Bird, PBS

National Indian Child Welfare Association