The Indian Adoption Project (IAP) was a federal initiative carried out between 1958 and 1967 that placed thousands of Native American children into non-Native homes, primarily with white, middle-class families. Promoted as a child welfare solution, the project is now widely understood as a program of forced assimilation whose consequences reshaped U.S. adoption law and Native sovereignty.
Though little known outside academic and tribal circles for decades, the Indian Adoption Project stands as one of the most consequential—and controversial—chapters in American adoption history.
A policy problem
By the mid-20th century, Native American families were under intense pressure from federal and state child welfare systems. Poverty, overcrowded housing, and cultural misunderstanding looked like neglect to social workers. At the same time, the federal government was pursuing a broader policy of “termination and relocation.” The goal was to close reservations, end treaty obligations, and assimilate Native people into mainstream American society.
House Concurrent Resolution 108 of 1953 defned termination as a way to “make Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.” The law ended Native ownership of tribal lands as well as much of the federal support the tribes relied on. The program was repudiated in the 1970s.
Within this context, Native children were increasingly viewed not as members of sovereign nations, but as wards of the state who could be “rescued” through adoption.
How the Indian Adoption Project worked
Launched as a collaboration among the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Child Welfare League of America, and state and private adoption agencies, the Indian Adoption Project’s goal was to remove Native children from tribal communities and place them in non-Native homes across the United States. Adoption was presented as permanent, humane, and forward-looking— providing the children with better homes.
It can be hard to understand the thinking of people in the past, but the organizers of the project didn’t believe that keeping the children with their families or in their tribal groups were important goals. Instead, the focus was on providing the children with better economic circumstances.
Some of the children grew up in loving homes and acknowledge receiving stability and opportunity. But others felt confused, isolated, and unhappy.
How did the project end?
Native leaders and families pushed back against the Indian Adoption Project almost from the start. They argued that tribes, not states, had authority over Native children and that poverty was being mistaken for neglect.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, legal challenges changed the reputation of the project. It became clear that the parents of the children had not consented to the adoptions. In 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in direct response to the Indian Adoption Project and similar practices.
Ongoing relevance and debate
The Indian Adoption Project is not just history—it continues to shape modern adoption debates. Contemporary legal challenges to ICWA often frame the law as discriminatory or outdated, while supporters argue it is essential to protecting tribal sovereignty and Native American families.
Like other events which have led to our modern adoption laws, the Indian Adoption Project was an important part of adoption history, leading to improvements in adoption law.