Assimilation Tool or a Blessing? Inside the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program

This article was originally written by Alysa Landry for Indian Country Today Media Network. The following is an excerpt. 

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series about the Indian Student Placement Program, a foster-care and education program for Native youths administered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints between 1947 and 2000.

At age 14, Cal Nez was at a crossroads.

Behind him was a past marked by tragedy. In front of him was an uncertain future on the country’s largest American Indian reservation.

Nez, born in 1958 in the small Navajo community of Tocito, New Mexico, was a teen on the cusp of an early adulthood. Mistreated as an infant, he was raised by his paternal grandparents, who had little material wealth but showered him with gifts of culture and tradition.

By the time he was 8, Nez had already survived his parents’ neglect and the abuses of boarding school. Then came an unthinkable trauma: the day before Nez turned 9, his father, in a drunken rage, murdered his mother.

With their father in prison, Nez’s three younger siblings moved in with their grandparents. Although finally united, the children added a financial burden to an already struggling household. Five years later, faced with the reality that she could not provide for her son’s children, Nez’s grandmother approached him with a suggestion.

“She told me she wanted to give me a fighting chance in life,” Nez says. “She told me she had nothing to offer me in her home or lifestyle and that I had a destiny I needed to explore.”

Read the full article at indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com.