This work interweaves Indian history, educational history, family history, and child welfare policy to tell the story of Indian orphanages within the larger context of the orphan asylum in America. It relates the history of these orphanages and the cultural factors that produced and sustained them.

With their deep tradition of tribal and kinship ties, Native Americans had lived for centuries with little use for the concept of an unwanted child. But besieged by reservation life and boarding school acculturation, many tribes—with the encouragement of whites—came to accept the need for orphanages. The first book to focus exclusively on this subject, Marilyn Holt's study interweaves Indian history, educational history, family history, and child welfare policy to tell the story of Indian orphanages within the larger context of the orphan asylum in America. She relates the history of these orphanages and the cultural factors that produced and sustained them, shows how orphans became a part of native experience after Euro-American contact, and explores the manner in which Indian societies have addressed the issue of child dependency. Holt examines in depth a number of orphanages from the 1850s to1940s--particularly among the "Five Civilized Tribes" in Oklahoma, as well as among the Seneca in New York and the Ojibway and Sioux in South Dakota. She shows how such factors as disease, federal policies during the Civil War, and economic depression contributed to their establishment and tells how white social workers and educational reformers helped undermine native culture by supporting such institutions. She also explains how orphanages differed from boarding schools by being either tribally supported or funded by religious groups, and how they fit into social welfare programs established by federal and state policies. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 overturned years of acculturation policy by allowing Native Americans to finally reclaim their children, and Holt helps readers to better understand the importance of that legislation in the wake of one of the more unfortunate episodes in the clash of white and Indian cultures.

Seven-year-old Chellamuthu's life--and his destiny--is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in Southern India and sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. His family is desperate to find him, and Chellamuthu anxiously tells th

In 1938, noting that the bulk of the Indian population formed a "e;landless proletariat"e; and despairing of the ability of the factionalized Indian community to unite in pursuit of common objectives, activist K.A. Neelakanda Ayer forecast that the fate of Indians in Malaya would be to become "e;Tragic orphans"e; of whom India has forgotten and Malaya looks down upon with contempt"e;. Ayer's words continue to resonate; as a minority group in a nation dominated politically by colonially derived narratives of "e;race"e; and ethnicity and riven by the imperatives of religion, the general trajectory of the economically and politically impotent Indian community has been one of increasing irrelevance. This book explores the history of the modern Indian presence in Malaysia, and traces the vital role played by the Indian community in the construction of contemporary Malaysia. In this comprehensive new study, Carl Vadivella Belle offers fresh insights on the Indian experience spanning the period from the colonial recruitment of Indian labour to the post-Merdeka political, economic and social marginalization of Indians. While recent Indian challenges to the political status quo - a regime described as that of "e;benign neglect"e; - promoted Indian hopes of reform, change and uplift, the author concludes that the dictates of political discourse permeated by the ideologies of communalism offer limited prospects for meaningful change.

For centuries American Indians and the Irish experienced assaults by powerful, expanding states, along with massive land loss and population collapse. In the early nineteenth century the U.S. government, acting through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), began a systematic campaign to assimilate Indians.