Part one of two | This story was originally published by The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice. It is a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
Patti Jo King’s life was just coming into focus in the spring of 1972. She was a young mother working her way through college in Riverside, California, and had joined the Red Power Movement — a nationwide uprising of Indigenous resistance that demanded self-determination, enforcement of treaty rights and an end to systemic oppression of Native Americans.
Thoughtful, precociously well-read and ambitious, the 20-year-old Cherokee Nation tribal member had dreams of becoming a writer, a teacher or maybe a doctor…