political process. >> carly fiorina, thank you very much. >> thank you so much. thank you for having me. [applause] >> thank you so much. thank you so much. god bless you. enjoy the rest of the conference. thanks for having me. thank you. >> one more thing. we're going to take, we are going to take a break and now for 15 minutes. be back in 15 minutes. attendance will be taken. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on twitter. follow was to get publishing news schedule updates, author

information and to talk directly with authors during our live programs. twitter.com/booktv. >> during booktv's recent visit to lincoln, nebraska we visited margaret jacobs to discuss the creation of the indian child welfare act and her book on the subject "a generation removed"." >> in 2013 the supreme court decided a case called adopted couple versus baby go but which is known more popularly as the baby veronica case or in the case involves a mother who would give up her child for adoption to a white south carolina couple without really informing the father of the child and the father of the child learned of the surrender of his daughter for adoption about five days before he was to be deployed to iraq. and when he learned of it he

took steps to try to regain custody of his daughter. it turns out that eventually the south carolina court gave custody of veronica to her father, this deeply upset the south carolina couple and the reason the south carolina court gave custody to dust america with the adoptive couple was that is a number of the cherokee nation in the cherokee nation is covered by the indian child welfare act and they said everything that pretty -- custody at a veronica based this act. and that led to the supreme court actually sort of deliberating about the constitutionality of the indian child welfare act or the applicability of it to this particular case. and they ended up reversing the earlier court or the lower court decision, renamed into the lower court.

and the lower courts, they redesigned custody of veronica back to the adoptive couple. so this, i opened my book with this incident because the history i'm telling is still very fresh. it's still very current and relevant. it's not something that's in the distant past but it's very much affecting indian peoples lives. and this court case was real blow to indian people who have really revered the indian child welfare act as a tool for them to help reclaim the care of their children and to regain children have been lost to them. there is a long history of the u.s. government and eventually state governments to anything in the indian families. hybrid traces back to the late 19th century when the us government decided that it was the best policy to remove children from the environment

indian children from their time and place them in boarding schools. they thought this would be a way to assimilate children so they would no longer follow the dictates other cultures and that will become less depend on the federal government. so, but this policy was in place until around world war ii. and at that point the federal government kind of changed course. they still, they still thought it was beneficial to bring children away from the indian community, but they kind of lost faith in the boarding schools as a way to do this. to graduate i found in my research back in the '50s the federal government moved away from trying to help indian families regain their children and trying to sort of deep in rural children from the boarding school to put them back into

families. more and in the families. more and more but didn't bother promoting a fostering and adoption of children. this was an era when the federal government was transferring responsibilities in it for indian to the states. and so in the '50s and '60s it was encouraging the states to become responsible for indian children. and many of them are also promoting the fostering and adoption of children rather than a strengthening of indian families they really started to have a sort of the series of policies where they were removing indian children without good cause. often they would say it was because a child was being neglected, or they would it was because ending the woman had a child was unmarried and she'd given up her child freely. but i found in my research it was a lot of coercion young indian women who are having babies, social workers are often

put a lot of pressure on them. i also found that they were often removing indian children without true evidence of neglect or abuse often because the family was poor. they might not have indoor plumbing to a child might be taken care of by a grandmother instead of its nuclear family and especially there was a lot of pressure that this should be a mother and father taking care of their children not ends or uncles or grandparents. and so there was this long history that i am covered post-world war ii of many state authorities intervening in indian families to remove children. so much so that the around 1970 probably 25-35% of all indian children were living away from their family. well, it seems to me that a lot

of white middle-class families became very interested in adopting american indian children in the '50s and '60s. and some of those was because the popular culture of the time really talked a lot about how much need there was for indian children to be adopted, that they lived in great poverty have had a lot of problems in their communities. this is also an era of great sort of liberalism among some americans where they were really building towards, to them, a kind of colorblind society where race wouldn't matter. so i found it very interesting white couples were often very progressive christian couples who wanted to adopt american indian children as a gesture of goodwill and racial harmony and reconciliation. so there were two ways in which children might be adopted. one was that within their

states, some state governments were placing indian children with families that already live in that state. that was the easiest bylaw but a national program called the indian adoption project that the bureau of indian affairs started in the late '50s was promoting interstate adoption. they were promoting the taking of children, say from arizona and new mexico, colorado, and placing them with families on the east coast. they thought this would be best because the child would probably never reconnect with her family in their minds. and these authorities who thought it was the best way to assimilate indian children. if they never had any contact with their families, never had any contact with other indian people they thought they would become just like the rest of the population. and that sort of difficult indian problem as they called it for so many years would be resolved finally.

and the indian problem as the american government thought was indian people have become so dependent on the federal government and they couldn't make their own living. and they really wanted him to become independent. they didn't want them to be affiliated with the tribes anymore. they didn't want them to have these sort of claims on particular land or particular unique status with the federal government anymore. what i found in my book was there were many cases of indian women who have lost their children, primarily through social workers intervening and taking children away. and starting in the late '60s, many of these indian women start to fight back. and they found a very strong ally in an arbitration called the association on american indian affairs, and this organization develop a legal defense fund for indian

families. and assigned one of their staff members, an attorney, to defend indian families. and he defended hundreds of indian comes across the country. and a small number of other lawyers, primarily non-indian lawyers, got involved in this. and so finally there was a way for indian families especially indian women to have some recourse when their children were taken from them without just cause. and so they went to court and they challenged these things. but gradually those people who were involved in these cases, whether they were tribal, social service providers within indian communities or the association of american indians, they gradually begin to feel like wow, we can't just it's on a case-by-case basis. this is a systemic, epidemic problem. when you're 25-35% of all indian kids living apart from their

families, this is a crisis and we need to do something about it. so they started promoting the idea of legislation, and this eventually led to the passage of the indian child welfare act in 1978, the very act that dusten brown was trying to use to get back his daughter, veronica. and since event the department of justice has really shown itself to be interested in strengthening the indian child welfare act rather than decimating it or doing away with it. of the supreme court case was a setback but i don't see it as a sort of death knell of the indian child welfare act. i think it in some ways it mobilized indian communities to really want to defend the indian child welfare act come at it mobilized people like me as well who work on studying setting the history when this is going on. i thought wow come it's so

important for people to know about this history because there's kind of a notion oh adoption is great, isn't it nice when people who have financial means taking children difficult circumstances or neglected or abused. but i felt like there was an important history to be told here that there's more than meets the eye that sometimes the state was using the promotion of fostering and adoption as a tool to undermine indian people, and instead of providing the resources that indian communities needed to thrive and for indian families who are struggling to get back on their feet. over time it seemed like the government was really trying to just undermine these communities through removing the children. because if you remove children, especially up to a third of all

children, the tribes cannot persist as an entity, and the culture cannot persist. so this is this is such like a great issue for indian families and thinking people. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to lincoln and the many other cities visited by our local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/localcontent. ..