How Foster Care Has Stripped Native American Children of Their Own Culture

Fostered or Forgotten is a Teen Vogue series about the foster care system in the United States, produced in partnership with Juvenile Law Center and published throughout National Foster Care Month. In this op-ed, writer Ruth Hopkins explains how the foster care system in South Dakota fails Native youth.

For Natives, foster care is a sensitive subject, and with good reason.

Removing Native children from their families and tribes of origin was once federal government policy in the United States. As the Indian Wars drew to a close in the late 1800s, punctuated by massacres and the establishment of the prisoner-of-war camps that would become known as reservations, the assimilation era began.