Efforts to eliminate indigenous populations were prominent aspects of policies affecting native peoples, particularly in Canada, the United States and Australia from the mid-nineteenth through much of the twentieth century. As awareness of the injustice of these policies grew, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, many of these policies were abandoned or reversed, although the damage to the social structure of indigenous communities had been substantial. Although the extent to which indigenous communities had been marginalized in virtually every nation was well known, no substantial movement to protect indigenous communities emerged until the 1970s, as human rights activists often assumed that human rights instruments prohibiting race, language and religious discrimination provided adequate protection for those groups. This chapter very briefly examines the history of the removal of indigenous children from their families in the US, Canada and Australia, before turning to the emergence of a discourse of international human rights around the care and placement of children in both the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2007 Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.