American Indian children were forcibly re-racialized as white by removal and assimilation

Evidence

Similarly, US officials, most notably between the 1880s and 1930s, tore American Indian children from their rural reservation environments where they were likely to learn indigenous custom and rebellious habits, shipping them off over the plaintive and painful protests of their parents for adoption by white families and assimilation into white schools.’ Stripped of family and culture, in a sense deracialized, they could be recreated, racially reconfigured — as white. Out of indigenous context not only did they look white but they were “reinvented” as white in terms of custom, habit, culture, practice, It could be said that official American disposition towards “the racial question” from the later 1880s to the aftermath of World War Il was a mix of naturalist assumptions concerning “negro” segregation and historicist commitments concerning Indian assimilation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 2421

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to boarding-school eradication of native cultures as a colonial infrastructure of identity erasure, resonating with how institutions strip identity in the reader’s knowledge base. — connects to: U.S. treatment of Native Americans constituted genocide through varied means including education — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1191
• SEED: The phrase ‘recreated, racially reconfigured — as white’ grounds an essay on how colonial assimilation programs treated race as a mutable environment-dependent category rather than a fixed biological fact.