ABSTRACT
The separation of children from tribal nations in Canada, Australia, and the US and the legacies of slavery and child separation were contested and debated through the transnational abolitionist movements and Indian policy reform movements in the Americas from the nineteenth century through the twentieth. The history of child separation follows these broad contours, where an overt racial definition of state allows for the genocidal separation of children, and a civic nationalism often demands a fig leaf to cover its racism, and so requires that racialized child separation look humanitarian. President Herbert Hoover immediately and publicly increased allocation to boarding schools for food and clothing for children. Within a few years, a leader of the reform campaign, John Collier, was heading up the Bureau of Indian Affairs and introduced significant changes designed to recognize tribal organization and Native religion and culture, halt the reduction of the land base of Indian country, and close boarding schools in favor of day schools.
