October 27, 2021
Laura Briggs, an expert in international child welfare policy and author of "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (University of California Press, 2021), gives a lecture at the College of the Holy Cross that demonstrates a pattern of family separation policies across centuries in the United States that precedes our current crisis at the Mexican border. She details the legacy of the Pratt system of Indian education—taking children from indigenous communities to put in boarding schools in order to "Americanize" them—as well as the widespread incarceration of native women who drank alcohol while pregnant or nursing, taking away their children and putting them in foster care.
Briggs is professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.