teenvogue:

This Documentary Shows How the U.S. Government Took Indigenous Children From Their Homes

Dawn Adams was only a child when her mother’s parental rights were terminated by the United States government; two years later, her adoption process began. Then, at age 15, Adams, a child of the Wabanaki community in Maine, was taken from her home and placed in foster care. Like other Indigenous children throughout the U.S., Adams, who was named Neptune prior to her adoption, was led to believe that her people didn’t want her, and was placed with a white family to live out the remainder of her childhood.

The Maine resident is just one of the many Indigenous people profiled in the new documentary film Dawnland, which puts a spotlight on the United States government’s history of systematically taking Native American children from their homes and placing them with white families. The film, directed by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip, was produced by the Upstander Project, a Boston-based educational collaborative founded in 2009 that aims to raise awareness about social injustice, turning “bystanders” into “upstanders.” Dawnland, which airs on PBS at 10 P.M. EST on November 5, centers around the United States’ first government-sanctioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Maine, which gathered testimony from Wabanaki families who were affected by this practice.

Mazo was initially drawn to the film’s topic when he first learned of the TRC from a 2013 NPR broadcast. At the time, his team was promoting their documentary film Coexist, about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. “We would often say at workshops, ‘We’re teaching about genocide in a far away place, but we also want to acknowledge genocide in this country’s history,’” Mazo told Teen Vogue. “We were actively wondering how we could teach more about genocide in this country’s history when we heard about the commission.”

The specific instances of devastation and loss highlighted in Dawnland are reflective of the way the U.S. government has historically treated Indigenous families. According to the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), by the 1970s, approximately 25-35% of all Native children in the U.S. were being removed from their homes, and 85% of those children were placed with families outside of their community. In 1978, the U.S. government passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which established standards for the placement of Indigenous children in foster homes, and required courts to involve the child’s tribe and community in all decision-making. However, these issues are not a thing of the past; the NICWA notes that even today, Native families are four times more likely to have their children removed from their home than white families. Additionally, Native children are overrepresented in the U.S. foster care system, which, according to the NICWA, “has increased trauma” to Indigenous families.

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📸: Ben Pender-Cudlip, Upstander Project