Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-376_7l48.pdf
Page Number: 49.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

7 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

until every Indian child was in a white home.”  D. Otis, The 
Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands 68 (1973).  In 
some respects, outing-system advocates were ahead of their 
time.  The  program  they  devised  laid  the  groundwork  for 
the system of mass adoption that, as we shall see, eventu-
ally moved Congress to enact ICWA many decades later. 

In 1928, the Meriam Report, prepared by the Brookings
Institution,  examined  conditions  in  the  Indian  boarding
schools.  It  found,  “frankly  and  unequivocally,”  that  “the
provisions for the care of the Indian children . . . are grossly
inadequate.”  Meriam Report 11.  It recommended that the 
federal  government  “accelerat[e]”  the  “mov[e]  away  from
the boarding school” system in favor of “day school or public
school facilities.”  Id., at 35.  That transition would be slow 
to  materialize,  though.  As  late  as  1971,  federal  boarding 
schools  continued  to  house  “more  than  17  per  cent  of  the 
Indian school-age population.”  W. Byler, The Destruction
of American Indian Families 1 (S. Unger ed. 1977) (AAIA 
Report). 

B 

The  transition  away  from  boarding  schools  was  not  the 
end of efforts to remove Indian children from their families 
and  Tribes;  more  nearly,  it  was  the  end  of  the  beginning. 
As  federal  boarding  schools  closed  their  doors  and  Indian
children  returned  to  the  reservations,  States  with  signifi-
cant Native American populations found themselves facing 
significant  new  educational  and  welfare  responsibilities. 
Historians  Brief  13–18.  Around  this  time,  as  fate  would 
have  it,  “shifting  racial  ideologies  and  changing  gender
norms  [had]  led  to  an  increased  demand  for  Indian  chil-
dren”  by  adoptive  couples.    M.  Jacobs,  Remembering  the
“Forgotten Child”:  The American Indian Child Welfare Cri-
sis  of  the  1960s  and  1970s,  37  Am.  Indian  Q.  136,  141 
(2013).  Certain  States  saw  in  this  shift  an  opportunity.
They could “save . . . money” by “promoting the adoption of