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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John DeLin and I'll have to admit it's been a while since I've done one of these interviews.

If for those of you who are Facebook friends with me, you'll know that the past few months I have been immersed in two main things.

One is applying for internship, which is the final stage in getting your PhD as a psychologist and I'm happy to report that I just matched and I'll be attending the Utah State University Counseling and Psychological Services, counseling USU students starting in August from August to July 2014-2015.

I'm super excited to be able to stay home and not have to leave Cash Valley for now and to be able to continue trying to help the types of people I went to get my PhD for.

That's super good news but I apologize to my listeners for how long I've been away.

In addition, I also defended my dissertation and that's a huge step. It was successfully defended. All three of the papers from my dissertation are either published or soon to be published.

I should say accepted for publication and will soon be published. And I'm just thrilled. So I've got time to do interviews again and so I want to thank all of you for your patience in waiting me out.

I hope that I'm a lot more productive in the future. So with that, I want to welcome my guest to Mormon Stories. His name is Matthew Garrett. Hi, Matthew. Hello.

Matthew, I'll do a little introduction real quick. Today's topic is on what I'll call the LDS Indian placement program.

So basically we're going to get in a depth on it. Some of you may know a little bit about it. But basically early in the...

Let's just say somewhere in the 1900s we'll explore it. The church decided that they wanted to help as I understand it, the layman acts blossom like a rose.

And so they... Matthew, you can correct me later, but they went to reservations and found children who were willing and able to relocate.

And they had kind of a foster care program where the children were relocated into sort of, I'll just say Caucasian or white, LDS family homes and raised in those homes with the idea of helping them flourish.

And we'll talk a lot more about it, but I'll introduce Matthew. That's just kind of the teaser. It's... I should say it was a very controversial program. And we'll talk about that too. But Matthew is currently an associate professor of history at Bakersfield College in California.

He teaches California, Native American Indian history courses along with the United States history. He got his bachelor's in history from... from BYU.

He got his master's in history from University of Nebraska. And his doctorate in... in history as well, American history at Arizona State University. His field of interest is Native American history.

So this is his area of expertise. And his dissertation was specifically on the Indian placement program. So this is certainly, if not one of the guys or gals on this topic, maybe the guy on the Indian placement program.

Just as a side note, he lists that he is a devoted husband and a father of three adorable little girls. And for those who care, he mentioned that he is currently an active Mormon.

So Matthew Garrett, welcome to Mormon Stories.

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