Lest one think the White Savior Industrial Complex is a recent development, Christians have been rescuing Navajo babies from their families for centuries. And the Supreme Court is considering it again.

The Catholics

It started with the Spaniards, but continued thru Mexican independence and the US conquest of New Mexico. They called them rescates, rescues. Like puppies at the pound, only they raided villages. The first known reference is from 1705, though the practice surely started up to a hundred years earlier. Spain always wanted a “fresh supply of infidels”. Historians track the abducted Navajo children by church baptismal records, because the captured were baptized, sometimes before they were put up for sale in the Santa Fe market, sometimes later by the family who bought them.

In peace negotiations between the Navajo and the Spaniards, the children were never included in prisoner exchanges, because they were baptized. The Spaniards considered them Christians and would not abandon them to heathens.

In 1776, “an Indian girl from twelve to twenty years old” fetched the highest price, two good horses. Wealthy New Mexican men, before marriage, would go on “bachelor party” raids to capture Navajo women and children to serve as domestic servants, gifts for their new brides.

In 1823, New Mexican Governor José Antonio Vizcarra explained, the slave raids were necessary “in order to attain this goal that the faith of Jesus Christ be propagated and that we complete with the perfect attribute of Christians the reduction of an infidel nation to the fold of the Catholic Church.”

This fits perfectly subpart e of the Geneva Convention definition of genocide: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: … e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

In 1852, just a few years after the American annexation of the Southwest, an American in Santa Fe reported, “I have frequently seen little children eighteen months to six years of age led around the country like beasts by a Mexican who had probably stolen them from their mother not more than a week [before] and offered for sale from forty to one hundred and twenty dollars.” The practice of keeping indigenous children as slaves continued in New Mexico even after the Civil War.

The Mormons

It wasn’t just Catholics. Mormons got into the act as early as 1847. They organized slave raids. Brigham Young endorsed the purchase of Native children to “civilize” them. He defended the practice to the Office of Indian Affairs, stating that “very many children are taken into families and have all the usual facilities for education afforded other children.” He thought that makes abducting children okay. He had a Shoshone-Bannock slave, though he never taught her to read or write.

Tactics changed from violent slave raids to bureaucratic and legal maneuvers to separate Navajo children from their parents via foster care and adoption.

Important backstory: the Mormons considered Native Americans to be Lamanites, the barbarians who killed all but the last Mound Builder. In 1960, Mormon leader Spencer Kimball spoke of the adopted Native children among them, “The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised (2 Nephi 30:6). The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.”

Racial fantasies aside, the predominant argument, of course, was that the children were better off in a white Christian home than in a Navajo home.

The Evangelicals

In addition to generations of child abduction to forced labor and re-education camps (i.e. boarding schools) and forced sterilization (up to 25% of Native women in the 1970s), too many Native families have stories of social workers pulling up to the house, their children running to hide. In 1978, when it was learned that a third of all Indigenous children in the US had been removed from their homes and placed with white families, the US Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). This made Native relatives and foster parents a priority placement for Native children.

But this hasn’t stopped white evangelicals.

As described by Rebecca Nagle in Season Two, Episode Four (Supply and Demand) of her podcast, This Land, one judge in Arizona, who personally disagrees with ICWA, will sign papers allowing Native children to be adopted by white parents. The podcast describes an illegal Arizona-to-New Hampshire Native baby pipeline occurring right now, with lawyers in both states, as well as adoption agencies, deliberately violating ICWA.

The Supreme Court

In just a few days, November 9, 2022, the Supreme Court will hear the case that puts ICWA on trial. As described in Season Two of This Land, all Native sovereignty is also on the line.

UPDATE: See this post for what happened at the hearing, especially Justice Alito’s question.

Samuel Alito has already written about the “domestic supply of infants”. Amy Comey Barrett, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas have five adopted children between them. The White Savior Industrial Complex is in motion.

They just want to rescue babies.