Indian Adoption Project.

The Indian Adoption Project was a US government-funded effort to place Native American children in homes with White families. Between 1958 and 1967, the project resulted in the placement of hundreds of Indigenous American children from the Midwest with non-Indigenous families, mostly in Eastern states. While those who operated the program and many others viewed the project as beneficial to the children, Indigenous Americans saw the process as theft of their children and an attempt to extinguish their culture and heritage. Although the project came to an end in 1967, Indigenous children continued to be placed in White foster and adoptive homes regularly until the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which puts strict limits on the situations in which Indigenous children can be placed in non-Indigenous homes.