The Land Beneath the Story

Written By Dachtler Therapy, PLLC

Indigenous Peoples Day, Adoption, and Grand Forks

A note before we begin: This post discusses the historical removal of Native children from their families, including boarding schools, and references the Indian Child Welfare Act. It's a hard history, and we tell it here with good intention and care, not for shock value, and we acknowledge that we too are learners who do not own our collective history.

Grand Forks takes its name from "Les Grandes Fourches," what French fur traders called the meeting point of the Red River and the Red Lake River. It's a tidy, geographic name, the kind that shows up on maps and city seals without much controversy. But that confluence was a gathering place for Ojibwe and Dakota peoples for countless generations before any European trader arrived to rename it, and it was used for fishing, trade, ceremony, and community long before "Grand Forks" existed as a word.

Indigenous Peoples Day asks us to hold that history accurately, and not just acknowledge it in passing. This year, we want to hold it alongside history that sits closer to our practice’s clinical work than people might expect: the history of Native children being removed from their families in the name of child welfare, and what it took (still takes) to correct that.

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The Land This City Sits On

Grand Forks sits on the ancestral and treaty lands of the Pembina and Red Lake Bands of Ojibwe and the Dakota Oyate, including community members within Red Lake, Turtle Mountain, White Earth Bands, and Dakota Tribes of Minnesota and North Dakota. Living nations, with living governments, living culture, and living communities that continue to call this region home today; communities that have survived forced removal, broken treaties, and policies specifically designed to erase them, and are still here. Indigenous Peoples Day exists to center that survival and that sovereignty, a day for honoring resilience and living culture and peoples, as much as it is for reckoning honestly with the why and what resilience had to withstand.

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A History Most Adoption Conversations Leave Out

As an agency whose clinical practice centers adoptees and their experiences, we often think about how this country has historically decided which families get to stay intact and which ones don't. An uncomfortable history, to say the least, and it's rarely part of the broader cultural conversation about adoption, but it belongs as a subset in Indigenous Peoples Day, because it happened, disproportionately, to Native families, and it happened here in North Dakota specifically.

Fort Totten, on the Spirit Lake Reservation

From 1891 until 1959, Fort Totten, a former military post on what is now the Spirit Lake Reservation, less than two hours from Grand Forks, operated as a Native American boarding school. Dakota children were its first students, later joined by Chippewa children from the Turtle Mountain Reservation and beyond. At its height, the school enrolled as many as 400 children, kidnapped from their families and communities to be Whitewashed into a culture that was not their own; as a systematic act of cultural genocide, they were forbidden to speak their languages, practice their traditions, or maintain ties to their families. Fort Totten was one of dozens of similar institutions across the country. Too many of these children never returned home.

By the mid-20th century, the mechanism of removal shifted from boarding schools to something that looked, on paper, more like ordinary child welfare and adoption practice, but functioned according to the same underlying logic. Between 1958 and 1967, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs partnered with the Child Welfare League of America on the Indian Adoption Project, a program explicitly designed to place Native children with white families (Kansas Native American Affairs, n.d.). By the early 1970s, the scale of this practice had become staggering: in Minnesota alone, 13% of all Native children were living in adoptive homes, and 90% of those placements were with non-Native families — even when relatives or tribal members were available and willing to care for them (Indian Child Welfare Law Center, n.d.).

Nationally, an estimated 25% to 35% of Native children were being removed from their families and communities during this era, with roughly 85% of those children placed outside their families entirely (National Indian Child Welfare Association, n.d.). Congress itself would later describe this as "the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life" of the time (H.R. Rep. No. 95-1386, 1978, as cited in Kansas Native American Affairs, n.d.).

This wasn't the byproduct of a broken system. It was the system working exactly as designed: the design was whitewashed assimilation, a form of cultural genocide.

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The Indian Child Welfare Act and Why It Still Matters

In 1978, in direct response to this crisis, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law establishing minimum standards for the removal and placement of Native children, and affirming tribal jurisdiction over child welfare cases involving their own citizens (National Indian Child Welfare Association, n.d.). ICWA wasn’t created by some abstract policy debate but emerged because Native families, tribal leaders, and communities fought for decades to have their children's removal recognized as the crisis it was.

ICWA remains one of the most important pieces of child welfare legislation in this country's history, and it remains under active legal challenge today. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Haaland v. Brackeen, a case brought by non-Native adoptive parents and the state of Texas challenging ICWA's constitutionality. In a 7–2 decision, the Court upheld the law, affirming Congress's authority to enact it and rejecting the challenges (Haaland v. Brackeen, 2023). Securing this victory for tribal sovereignty shouldn’t have taken 50 years after ICWA was enacted, or a staggering century and a half after institutions like Fort Totten first initiated the very practices the law was designed to end.

Why this matters for adoption-humble practice: Understanding this history is a foundational requirement for anyone working in or touched by adoption. Native families continue to be disproportionately involved in child welfare systems today, and Indigenous adoptees carry a distinct history of identity disruption that deserves to be understood on its own terms, separate from, though not entirely unrelated to, the experience of transracial and/or transnational adoption more broadly.

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What This Means to This Practice From Our Founder

I am a transnational transracial adoptee, and my own adoption story is not the same story as the one just described. It’s important to me that distinction be clear. And I also acknowledge that there is a thread that runs underneath both experiences: the belief, held by systems and institutions for far too long, that a child's connection to their family, culture, and community was something that could be substituted, redirected, or overridden in service of what someone else decided was "better." A belief that caused and continues to cause profound harm. It still shapes how adoption is practiced, discussed, and experienced today, and it's part of why adoption-humble, culturally responsive therapy has to be more than well-intentioned — it has to be historically informed. On Indigenous Peoples Day, and every day this practice operates in Grand Forks, I want to hold that history with the weight it deserves, not as background noise to a feel-good observance, but as part of the actual, specific ground this work stands on.

-Katherine

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Honoring the Day Accurately

Indigenous Peoples Day isn't served well by a routine Land Acknowledgment or passing annual mention. It's served by honest accuracy about the land this city sits on, about the history this country has with Native families and Native children, and about the ongoing work of protecting what ICWA was built to protect. If you are Native, if you are an adoptee, or if you are simply someone trying to understand this history more fully, we hope this was worth your time today and we remain open to learning alongside you.

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For Further Learning

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References

Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. 255 (2023).

Indian Child Welfare Law Center. (n.d.). Understanding the ICWA. https://www.icwlc.org/education-hub/understanding-the-icwa/

Kansas Native American Affairs. (n.d.). Indian Child Welfare Act. https://www.knaa.ks.gov/resources/indian-child-welfare-act

National Indian Child Welfare Association. (n.d.). What is ICWA? https://www.nicwa.org/what-is-icwa/

State Historical Society of North Dakota. (n.d.). Fort Totten State Historic Site. https://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/totten/

Dachtler Therapy, PLLC https://www.dachtlertherapy.com
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